POETRY OF ISLAND LIFE
Alexander McCall Smith waxes lyrical on a sailing trip to the Small Isles
We slipped out of Loch Sunart with the wind behind us and with a favourable tide to carry us past Ardnamurchan Head. Of course, when you have a marine diesel thudding away in the engine room, no mast, and therefore no sails to bother about, the wind is less of an issue. But it is still useful to get a bit of help from a following wind and you can easily add a knot or two to your speed that way.
As you round the tip of Ardnamurchan, the sea to the north opens up and affords you one of Scotland’s most breathtaking panoramas. There they are in the distance, the Small Isles – Muck, Eigg and Rum, with Canna, our destination, tucked away on the horizon. And if conditions are right, the Cuillins will be visible, with their jagged peaks, shapes of attenuated blue, like the delicate wash employed in a Chinese watercolour.
I had been to Canna before, and had anchored in the harbour overnight, but that was some years ago, and island harbours can so easily merge into one. I remembered, though, that I found Canna one of the most charming of the Scottish islands – blessed, as it is, by a lovely little kirk, a white-washed shrine, neat pastures, and a beach of white sand.
We arrived after a five-hour voyage past Muck and the forbidding western shores of Rum. Canna was before us, and a welcoming mooring was there for the taking. Once moored, a short trip across the bay brings you to the jetty under an overlooking rock on which previous visitors, the crews of various working vessels, have painted their names and the dates of their visits. We walked along to the bridge that links Canna and Sanday, where you come across a small shrine, illuminated by a stained-glass Virgin and before which votive shells have been laid – sun-blanched, pink, tinged with green. All around are wild flowers in profusion: tormentil, birdsfoot trefoil, fox-gloves, dog roses. And on the air is the smell of seaweed and the sea itself.
Dinner was ashore, at the Canna Café, a small and friendly restaurant, with a few tables outside and a few within. From a tiny red fishing boat that chugs out to its pots, the catch is brought onto land to be laid out in the seafood platter served by a waitress who is a student of Russian and linguistics at Glasgow University. Everybody seems affected by the intimacy, the courtesy, and the beauty of this little gem of an island.
Conversations begin between strangers. We share a table and discover mutual friends, as you always do in Scotland. The noise of the city, the shrill arguments of politicians, are a world away.
Back on the boat, with the sun slowly sinking over the hill behind us, I find myself writing a poem about islands:
Yet real islands are different: / A real island should be small enough / To have its own words for household objects / And for hills; small enough, too, / For its people to remember why it is / Their neighbours behave as they do: / This one is resentful of an insult delivered / At a wedding celebration twenty years ago; / This one still remembers his field / Being invaded by another’s sheep / With insufficient apology, a petty row, / But small things are not forgotten on islands, / Are kept alive by the lack of anything larger, / By the dearth of strangers and of others / To blame for misfortune; this is the legacy / That makes an island – that, and water washing / On a windward shore, and music / Played on a battered fiddle, old airs all; / A small red fishing boat, bedecked in floats, / Setting off to check its optimistic creels, / And a one-room school of polite children / Known to wave to visitors and smile, / And take their turn without argument, / Who are innocent in all that they do, / Or at least only no more wicked / Than children everywhere else…
I was not necessarily thinking of Canna there, although the small red fishing boat was in my mind. I do not think Canna still has a one-room school – there is a primary school on Muck, I believe. Then I thought of how one comes across on islands, and elsewhere in the Western Highlands, signs of past inhabitation, and is reminded of the fact that the lovely note these small islands sound comes from a past that is slipping away, from a people who have gone away. Will our children, or grandchildren, see that life, or will they only look at sepia photographs of something that has gone forever? This led to:
On these sloping fields indifferent sheep / Cluster like comfortable stones, strands of wool / Snagged by the fence, tiny markers / Of intended limits, are made to move / Very slightly by the wind that comes / From the bay with its white sands, / Its bladderwrack, its stranded kelp, / At the edge of which a house / Once stood and is now a floorplan / Of tumbled stone; here a kitchen, / Here a room where the entire family / Must have slept: people lived together, / Six to a tiny room, perhaps more, / Generations huddled together / For warmth and survival. //
Work was all about you: / The boat drawn up above the tide, / The sheep, the rusting plough, / A living to be scratched, / A pittance to be set aside / Against the onset of winter; / When people left, the houses / Gave up, gradually allowed / Gravity and wind to do their work, / Hillock and house became indistinguishable, / Mounds, like any other, / But places, in this particular case, / Where people lived.
“The noise of the city, the shrill arguments of politicians, are a world away