Living the good life on a magical island
A POTTER’S TALE by Dion Alexander (Birlinn, £9.99)
THE Forties were the golden age of British cinema and the film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were its kings. Of all their masterpieces, from A Matter of Life and Death to The Red Shoes, perhaps the most haunting, evocative and romantic is a now almost forgotten piece called I Know Where I’m Going.
It stars Wendy Hiller as a headstrong young woman determined to make it to the Hebridean island of Kiloran, where she believes happiness might lie in marriage to its wealthy laird. The fictional Kiloran is based on the real-life Colonsay, an outcrop of rock just ust eight miles by threee, , pitched two hours sailingng away from the mainland,d, via the t r e a c h e r o uu ss Corryveckan Whirlpool.l
In I Know Where I’m Going the attraction off Kiloran/Colonsay forr our heroine is blatant — marriage in to money. Why else venture out to o the uttermost west andd make for a stormbattered island at the end of the line unless there’s a pot of gold to find there? But as she journeys further away from London, so our heroine travels further into her heart, and it is love not gold she finds in the Hebrides in Powell and Pressburger’s movie.
For anyone who wonders what could possibly be alluring or romantic about life on a rain-drenched slice of Scotland flung casually into the Atlantic, Dion Alexander’s book provides a persuasive answer. In a word — community.
He knew where he was going when he took his young wife and baby son, Danny, to Colonsay in the Seventies — a community without mains electricity or social housing, let alone wi-fi or 4G. He wawas pursuing his owown version of The Good Life, a ccoommunion with natnature and a chance to ggrow a free-range family.fam
Dion combined his rejection of the rat race with an embrace of enterprise on what he thought were his own terms. He set up a small pottery business on the island, with a generous loan from the old Highlands and Islands Development Board and no obligation to pay back any time soon. Thus established, with beard, kiln and chickens in the garden, he seemed set for what we would think of today as a classic hipster lifestyle.
But just as Hiller has to adjust the plan she has made for herself in Powell and Pressburger’s film, as the Hebrides works its magic, so the Alexanders, more subtly but just as happily, found themselves changed by life on Colonsay. The slow, dry humour of the island’s inhabitants, their willingness to share all they had and help anyone in distress at a moment’s notice, the gentle ritual of weekly, seasonal and annual get-togethers, all create a richness and depth of what we would now call social capital which makes island life truly rewarding.
Alexander has a wonderful gift for catching the rolling cadences of the island’s Gaelic speakers and capturing their mischievous wit. He also has a deep sympathy with, and respect for the sometimes hard and difficult lives led by men who relied entirely on the land and the sea for their livelihood, who snared the rabbits and caught the lobsters which were both their principal diet and their only income.
As a regular visitor myself to Colonsay I can also attest to how wonderfully the author has captured the amazing natural beauty of the island. Kiloran Bay to the north of the island is as beautiful as any Caribbean beach and within its tiny dimensions Colonsay has purple hills and cobalt-blue lochs, beautiful gardens and seabirdthronged cliffs, remnants of past civilisations and one of the best hotel bars in the world.
Of course, no idyll can last forever and while the Colonsay of today is as beautiful as it ever was, and the community there as welcoming as ever, Gaelic is spoken less than in the Seventies and local employment is now more oriented to distilling craft gin than snaring rabbits by night. And for the Alexanders, while life on Colonsay was very special, they had to move on.
Danny, the little baby who grew up
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. running wild in the Hebrides travelled to the mainland, and to secondary school in Lochaber, with his family. And from there he knew where he was going — into politics, into the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and into the history books as one of the most influential Liberal politicians of the past 100 years.
Having know Danny in Government as a good listener, a patient questioner, a drily witty observer of the world and a hard worker with a determination to do right by others, I can understand from reading this book how the child was the father of the man. The virtues Dion Alexander saw in Colonsay life are also those exhibited in his son’s career. It is an enchanting, funny, moving and thoughtful book displaying a keen insight into character and a love of Scotland that will entrance.