Island life... how one GP heart of Orkney outpost
Malcolm was petrified by the weight of the responsibility on his shoulders, dreading going out on a call
I wouldn’t leave the house and then I wouldn’t go far in case there was an emergency and a patient couldn’t get hold of me.There were no mobiles and I was terrified of leaving the landline.”
He needn’t have worried. The Alexanders quickly realised the islanders knew exactly where they were at all times.
One day he received a assistant harbour master.
“A baby seal was stranded. Some boys spotted it and saw it was sick. There is a seal sanctuary on the mainland but, with one of the regular Orkney storms brewing, there is no chance of an animal rescue boat getting across.As I was the closest thing we had to a vet, the job fell to me.”
After managing to wrestle the seal into his car, Malcolm set off for home.
“There was such intense interest from everyone that I almost wished I’d brought my green flashing emergency light to add a call from the little drama,” he says. “But the most amazing thing was that, as I passed the primary school, all the children’s heads bobbed up at the windows. They knew about the rescue. How? Who told them? How did news on Eday reach everyone so quickly?”
On the instructions of a vet, Malcolm and Maggie fed the seal herring broth every four hours through the night.
“My chief memory of that night is standing over a hissing seal pup, in a shed, while a gale blows outside and my wife stares steadily at me with an eyebrow raised,” says Malcolm. “We reached silent agreement that we were completely bonkers and carried on.”
With the seal off to the rescue centre to make a full recovery, Malcolm’s gift with the animals became the talk of Eday.
“I got a phone call from a farmer the next day who wondered if I’d nip over and do a caesarean section on a cow. He was serious: calling the vet from the mainland might cost more than the combined value of the cow and her unborn calf. I understood his dilemma, but the answer was still ‘No’.”
The next “patient” was a dog with a fish hook in its nose. Could the good doctor help? “No,” says Malcolm, “I couldn’t – she had to go to Kirkwall for a general anaesthetic.”
His first home visit was to Nessie, who was born in 1919.
“I found her sitting by an electric fire in a high-backed chair, surrounded by great cones of wool of all colours. ‘I’m a linker,’ Nessie explained. ‘I put the garments together that Eileen up at Bu farm knits.
“I’ve been doing it since I was a girl, and the last doctor used to say that if only I’d quit, my asthma would get better. But how can I stop now?’
“As I prepared to leave, she asked if I had a Tilley lamp. ‘They’re better than candles. Look in the cupboard beside the door – the one without the mantle can be yours’.” Malcolm’s second patient, Ina Flaws, was even older than Nessie. Her father was the first Orkney man to die in the GreatWar.
“Stepping through the doorway was like walking through a wardrobe into Narnia,” he says. “The kitchen was virtually bare, peat burned in the grate, there was no fridge, no washing machine, no appliances of any kind because there was no electricity.”
HE FOUND Ina in bed behind a curtain next to the range, a tiny woman with her face and arms dyed oily brown from a lifetime of working with peat.
“I gave her some strong painkillers for her bad back and, noticing a Tilley lamp, remarked that I had just acquired one. ‘I know,’ retorted Ina. ‘It was Nessie’s father’s old one, and she had no use for it.’
“How did a bedridden woman who lived alone in a farmhouse surrounded by cows know that? I came to accept that on Eday, everybody knows everything as soon as it happens.”
Malcolm grew into the job. “It gave me a huge amount of confidence medically, I learned an enormous amount,” he says.
“It’s not unlike being a battlefield surgeon, alone in a tent facing whatever comes through the door.”
This extended one winter to leading the Sunday church service – on the basis that Malcolm attended regularly and was “educated and all that.”
When that went well, he was co-opted into the island’s primary school to teach the children religion studies.
Living on Eday was like stepping back in time.A system of barter covered prescription charges because some islanders found it difficult to pay, so Malcolm paid the fees for them.
“In return, plastic bags appeared, hanging on the kitchen door: three cabbages at the lower end of the scale, fresh lobster at the upper end.
“The system worked so well the boys soon expected lobster for tea,” he says.
The family left Eday in 1993 for Stromness, where Malcolm served as one of the GPs, before moving to the practice on Bute where he and Maggie, now 65, are retired.
Malcolm feels for all island communities during the Covid-19 pandemic and fears for the mental health of those facing financial ruin.
“We do need tourists,” he says. “Agriculture and tourism are very important. On the upside, I think people are understanding that islands and the remote countryside are great places to stay and they can now see that it’s possible to work from here as well, thanks to broadband.”
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