Left at Twatt Church

Jacky and I came to Orkney once before, in 1978. We had no children and were living in Camberwell. We drove up in Jacky’s black convertible Morris Minor and stayed for a few nights in Mrs. Hourston’s B & B in Stromness. Now that we have no children again, we thought another visit was in order, with thanks to the prompting of our friend Maureen Minchin, the potter
I looked up Orkney on the internet and discovered that routine tests in Scapa Flow had recently indicated disturbingly high levels of certain phytoplankta there. This affected bivalve molluscs around the Orkney islands in such a way that, if eaten by humans, they induce the shits. In technical terms, paralytic shellfish poisoning,or diarrhoetic shellfish poisoning, We’ll avoid moules marinieres.
On the “Today” programme the day we left, there was a report about a survey which ranked supermarkets according to how eco-friendly they were. They gave a Top Ten. The Co-Op came out best, Somerfields worst. Morrisons had plenty of room for improvement while Marks & Spencers and Tesco’s were not too bad.
We were going to stay at Loons Cottage, next to Loons RSPB reserve. The only photo we had been sent of the cottage looked like it had been taken by an estate agent, the left hand edge of the building cut off to exclude whatever was immediately adjacent. What might it be? A nuclear power station?
The day before we left, we got Bramfield Garage to fit a new CD player, a real treat. We’d always had tapes.


Po’ Girls and Patriots

We set off at around 9 a.m. on our journey to Berwick. We were half way up the Bungay Straight, five or six miles from home, before I noticed that our speedometer, and hence also mileometer, wasn’t working. We carried on for a little way wondering if we could spend the whole journey not knowing how fast we were going or how much ground we had covered. In Bungay I discovered that our indicators weren’t working, either. We had no choice but to return to Bramfield Garage.
Jacky phoned Chris at the garage to warn them that we were on our way, moderately pissed off at starting our holiday like this. Chris, who is a very nice guy, started to say things along the lines of “It can’t be anything to do with the CD player” and “Was it like that when you drove home from the garage yesterday?”, a sort of garage person’s immediate, default response to anything.
The moment we arrived back at the garage the young bloke who had installed the CD player came straight over and checked out the fuse box, immediately both identifying and fixing the problem. Within ten minutes we were on our way again. Oh no, nothing to do with the CD player, I don’t think.
‘Hand Car Wash’. A sign on the Bungay Straight. We noticed similar signs in other parts of the country.
Establishments where the Englishman is boss and the workers are recent immigrants from central and eastern Europe. The one on the Bungay Straight was set up by an ex-professional footballer called Joe something. I know this because I met him at EPS Transfers on the Halesworth industrial estate when he was having his ‘Hand Car Wash’ sign made. Paul and Liz of EPS were a but nervous about his ability to pay for the sign. Some members of Joe’s workforce were from Lithuania, a country written about by Amos Oz in his wonderful autobiography ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’, a great title. One of the countries where Jews were treated disgracefully.
We passed, during the day, several interesting roadside eating places, some displaying, patriotically, the flag of Saint George, others favouring the Union Flag. One was a white van with ‘Full Breakfast’ emblazoned in large black bold letters above a Union Jack, applied in coloured vinyl, which filled the whole side of the vehicle/cafe. It was a way of ensuring that your male clientele got on with each other. There were also, of course, the fixed, as oppose to the mobile, eating places. One Little Chef displayed a large poster showing a photograph of a faded full English breakfast, on top of which was printed “Free Range”. The “Free” was very big and the “Range” very small. Such sophisticated sales techniques. I also noted that several places are now called ‘Diners’ instead of ‘Cafes’, in line with the implications of the “Yo, Blair” comment. As luck would have it, the great peacemaker resigned as Prime Minister the day before we left. Gordon Brown went to see the queen, who has been in office for so long that she remembers Winston Churchill, dressed in frock-coat and top-hat, handing in his resignation after the war.
During the day’s drive we also encountered a fine selection of white vans driven two feet behind us by young men with completely bald heads and sunglasses, talking on their mobile phones. We noticed, too, that some Eddie Stobart lorries were sporting a new livery, achieved through inkjet printing onto vinyl. Another lorry overtook us to reveal, on its rear end, a photograph of a bad-tempered man carrying a UPVC window. From his head came a speech bubble that said, in large letters, ‘BOGOF’. Underneath it read “I said buy one and get one free”. Further up the A1, our main road of the day, we saw two men of 17 or 18 dressed in camouflage gear, khaki helmets and orange goggles, driving a tank. They were on the inside lane. Later we passed RAF Wittering, outside which stands a rather delapidated Harrier jump jet (I think), as deployed so heroically by Mrs. T in the Falklands War, which has recently celebrated its 25th birthday. We’ve seen some extremely unpleasant images of today’s Iron Lady, who is now even more grotesque (hair-do and voice) than when she was saving the Empire from those Argies.
We were also pleased to notice, on our journey, that the art of graffiti, albeit almost entirely text-based, is not completely dead. In a field somewhere in Cambridgeshire stands an odd brick building on which Bimbo has left his tag in large, rounded yellow letters. Further along, we appreciated a spectacular, white art deco building liberally covered with black and red graffiti. The striking colours of political opposition in the days before dissent died and “Big Brother” took over.
We enjoyed a pleasant lunch in the gateway to a rape field, just a stone’s throw from the A1, a few miles north of Doncaster. The rape smelt unpleasantly leguminous. Having done the compulsory pee in a hedge, Jacky and I tucked into our home-made sandwiches. I particularly savoured the goats cheese and rocket, although the tallegio and lettuce ran it a close second. Just a few scraps that needed to be used up, you know. I surmised that the locals might refer to us as something like “soft, middle-class, southern wankers” for not choosing those freezing cold cheese ploughmans that you get in petrol stations.
After lunch we sped northward to the punchy tones of the Indigo Girls “Difference” album and the mellow airs of Po’ Girls’ “Vagabond Lullabies”, all in clear digital sound, from our new CD player, the front of which can be removed by pressing a button. We passed signs for places like Quernhow, Londonderry and Sinderby, this last reminding us of J.L.Carr’s hilarious story of “How Steeple Sinderby Won The F.A. Cup”, We caught fleeting glimpses of the licquorice fields around Pontefract, although I was disappointed to have missed a view of the River Nidd. Before too long we entered Northumberland. We’d had a holiday there, at Ross near Holy Island, a few years ago. A lovely county but one of my clearest memories is of the vast difference in size between the farmhouses of the landowners and the minute scale of the labourers’ terraces.
Another thought going up the A1 in Northumberland was of the occasion when a couple of policemen were doing speedchecks just as a jet fighter from some air base flew nearby and was automatically attracted by the radar that PC Plod was pointing at motorists. Apparently, the plane’s missile system locked on to the coppers standing in a lay-by who narrowly avoided being vapourised.
At around tea-time we bowled into England’s most northerly town, Berwick-on-Tweed. Or, more accurately, we bowled into Tweedmouth, the second most northerly town. More accurately still, The Old Vicarage Guest House. We were let in by a pleasant man with a rather unusual facial expression. Maurice McNeely had just got back from hospital, having had a mole removed from beside his left nostril. He explained that his face was still numb, hence the odd expressions. In our room, I studied the contents of a leather bound folder, and found some information about our room. “This large luxurious room overlooks a small courtyard and the rooftops of neighbouring houses - with its own private rooftop terrace for that
relaxing evening drink”. Piss off, mate, I thought to myself. It’s a fire escape and, anyway, it’s pouring with rain. We were required to fill in a form which would communicate to our hosts what we wanted for breakfast. I figured that prunes, local smoked kippers with scrambled egg, wheaten bread and all the tea I could drink would see me through, on the morrow, from one end of Scotland to the other.
In spite of the rain and all-pervading greyness, we went out in high spirits to explore our new, if temporary, surroundings. First stop was the churchyard opposite where we were having fun reading the inscriptions on the gravestones that hadn’t been weathered into illegibility. I was peering at one such when a loud female voice rang out.”Are you looking for anything in particular?” Approaching me, in a proprietorial sort of way were two women, the younger, plumper one puffing on a filter-tipped cigarette. I replied “Yes, I’m looking for the secret of eternal youth. Do you know where I can find it?”. To my surprise, the woman siad she did. “Yes, it’s with Jesus Christ”. That shut me up. The women had come to do a run-through of a forthcoming family service. The younger one stubbed her fag out at the church door. She was carrying a large soft puppet of a Muppet. A bit passé now. Among the gravestones was an inscription about a boy who died in his ‘Non-age’ on January 3, 1700.
The curate with the loud voice gave us a leaflet about the church. From it we learnt that, in the village of Spittal, next to Tweedmouth, ther had been a hospital for lepers. Hence the name Spittal and, presumably, others like Spitalfields in London. We checked out Dock Road, strolling wetly past A & J Robertson (Granite) Ltd.’s open air showroom of headstones and cemetery statues. A rainy evening, no hanging around. Having crossed the old bridge we went into The Barrel Alehouse. Very nice proper pub, lots of stuff on the walls, a marlin fish hanging from the ceiling, an enamel sign from the Berwick Labour Exchange from the time of George the fifth, an African mask, photos of Irish pub fronts and a good hum of all-male
conversation. One of the regulars was sitting at the end of the bar on an old dentist’s chair. Another bloke, in a baseball cap and carrying four large carrier bags, in which may have been all that he owned, came in, ordered a half of cider and went to sit in the empty room next door.
Later, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at wine-bar type eating, we decided we weren’t hungry and didn’t want to spend £40 getting overfull, for fear of spoiling the breakfasts we had ordered. In one hotel, we chatted with the receptionist. He was African and Jacky asked “How did you end up in Berwick?”. He said he was from Kenya and had first come to work in a hotel in the Channel Islands. Then he’d tried Inverness, after which he thought he wanted to be “in the centre of the UK” so decided to come to Berwick. “I like this town very much”, he said.
In the end we had fish and chips from Foulis’ fish and chip shop. Jacky thought Foulis was not a very
appealing name. We ate standing in a doorway on Dock Road with our hoods up. Delicious. A fiver for two meals - can’t be bad.


The North Country Fair

The next morning saw the arrival of the aforesaid prunes. Ruth McNeely looked as if she’d enjoyed several of her own ample breakfasts. Maurice was having a lie-in after the mole removal. I didn’t experience the faintest feeling of hunger until well beyond Inverness.
It was a sunny morning as we set out, soon passing the interestingly named village of Conundrum. Before we knew it, we were in Scotland, sailing through wide-open countryside, wondering if Pentland Javelin potatoes came from the Pentland Hills of from the Pentland Firth in the frozen north. Big sky and a place where you can visit goats, with a sign proclaiming “You’ve Goat To Be Kidding”. Next we passed the Torness Power Station, a huge white cube with tiny lights on the outside like single lightbulbs without lampshades.
We managed to navigate our way round the Edinburgh by-pass and found the Forth Road Bridge. We looked across from the road bridge to the railway bridge which was, of course, being painted. After Edinburgh, we played the Rough Guide to Scottish Music, a highly recommended album. The highlights include Jack Beck singing “Fordell Ball”, Pete Clark playing “Coilsfield House” and Bob Hopkirk with the legendary Neil Gow’s “Lament for his Second Wife”.
Continuing northward, the only available direction, we passed the Scottish Licquer Centre and the Nae Limits Adventure Centre. As we approached Killiecrankie, crossing the River Garry, Alfie phoned to ask if he could use one of my boiler suits to dress up in for a friend’s party, the theme of which was ‘robo-chic’. Through Glen Garry we hit the Pass of Drumochter, sticks along each side of the road for when it’s deep in snow. Across to our left was a hill called the Sow of Atholl and a little further on, her partner, the Boar of Badenoch.
We approached some traffic lights on the A9 - roadworks. While waiting we noticed a bloke collecting up some signs for an event that had recently taken place. A midsummer festival of some kind. We watched him stuffing the signs into the back of his car, and were intrigued by the last one which read “The Outsider Is Coming”. Near Dalwhinnie, the Morrison’s lorry which had been holding everyone up, pulled over into a lay-by to let others pass. Brownie points to be set against Morrison’s No. 9 position in the eco-friendly Top Ten.
“What was that pub last night called?”, Jacky asked.
“The Barrel Alehouse”, I replied.
“The Bowel Alehouse - funny name for a pub”.
Still a great open road. I’m thinking of starting an A9 appreciation society. We passed The Muir of Hilton, The Storehouse of Foulis (a farm shop), the dead distillery of Dalmore and the Glenmorangie distillery. Across the beautiful Moray Firth, onwards, bagpipes blaring, to the delightful Firth of Cromarty. On the Black Isle we drove twice round the same roundabout and still took the wrong turning! “You’re concentrating on Bob Dylan too much”, Jacy observed. We were playing, on our new CDplayer, ‘Good As I’ve Been To You’, on which Bob plays folky guitar really well. Some great tracks, including “Canadeeio”, the song made famous by Nic Jones, one of Kate Rusby’s early influences. It’s also got “Arthur MacBride”, a tale of two Paddies who beat up a couple of English soldiers for trying to persuade Arthur and his cousin to join the British army. It being on Christmas morning, Arthur and his cousin took out their shilelaghs to the Englishmen and “lathered them like a pair wet sacks”. No wonder I went wrong at the roundabout.
The A9 follows the coast of north east Scotland and, on a clear sunny day like the one we experienced, presented us with wide vistas of Mediterranean blue sea, rolling hills and interesting cloud formations. We stopped at Brora, where we had stayed, or so we thought, on our 1978 trip. Memory Lane seemed to be unrecognisable and left us wondering what happened to our brains in the past 30 years. It was like a completely different place. A bit worrying. We stopped again at Helmsdale, having noted Golspie, which seemed like a perfect little town at the edge of the sea. At Helmsdale harbour we saw an old boy sitting on a bench next to a full washing line, and a fishing boat high in the air. It was being lifted up by a crane, to be deposited, thus, in the water of the harbour.
We took some refreshment at the Bridge Hotel. I ordered a bottle of organic ‘Red Kite’ beer, brewed at the nearby Black Isle Brewery. It took me about a quarter of a pint to realise that the ‘Red Kite’ was definitely off. I was given another without hesitation. It tasted only a little better. We sat at a table next to the ‘Offenbach’ grand piano, made by Bruce Miller of Aberdeen, and perused the News Chronicle songbook “Music for the Home” by Langdon Ronald, published in 1932 and sub-titled “Favourite Songs, Famous Waltzes, Renowned Pianoforte Pieces, Arias from Grand Opera, Cryes of London and Grand Marches”. In the Foreword, Mr. Ronald had written that “the habit of listening to music rather than performing it is deeply to be deplored”. I’m with Langdon on that one. Jacky was pleased to see that the volume included ‘Onaway Awake Beloved’, with words from ‘Hiawatha’ by Longfellow and music by Samuel Coleridge Taylor. A couple from Dundee came in and sat at the next table, quite old, the man with an extremely nasal voice that night have induced giggling, something to do with his palate, I think. They had stayed at the Bridge Hotel before and insisted that we should go upstairs and check out the drawing room, little changed since Victorian times, except for a domineering 36-inch television set on which two children were watching an American cartoon. It was quite amazing - dozens and dozens of deer skulls with associated antlers, a
massive elk or moose head with lovely sad eyes sticking out from the wall above the fireplace, together with several other examples of the taxidermist’s art.
On the last leg, after we had turned inland, we were overtaken by a van that belonged to a dog-kennel boarding set-up. On the back, it read “Dogs In Transit” and we noticed that its number plate was K9 OME. At Halsary we stopped in a lay-by in open moorland, in order to look at the 20-odd very tall windmills of a wind farm. It was certainly breezy up there. Their sails all went round differently, much more interesting to watch than if they’d been choreographed. I had a quick pee up against a memorial to 6 airmen killed nearby, on February 1, 1945, when their Fortress aircraft crashed on returning from a weather reconaissance mission over the Norweigian Sea. Below their names, it said “who flew beyond the storms - into the
sunset”. Just before Thurso we passed through another village called Spittal. Funny how that happens.
We booked into The Station Hotel and then went out to explore Thurso, possibly named after the Norse God Thor, on a Friday night. Just around the corner we noticed a pleasing neo-classical building, with a dome and a portico, called The Miller Institute, which had been the first school in Thurso. In the rather one-horse town, a group of kids were hanging out. One girl opened a conversation with us and showed us the way to the Y-Not Bar. On the way we passed a dingy Lounge Bar, outside which were three or four middle-aged men, smoking. As we, Sarah-Jane and her friend, went by one of the men called “You’ll be ready in a couple of years”, then his mate shouted, in a smokey, drunken voice, “You’re ready now!”. A bit shocking for us well-brought-up southerners from above the poverty line.
There were about a dozen twenty-somethings in the Y-Not. The young barmaid had an interesting, friendly face and broken front teeth. Quite rough looking people, but that’s just appearance, which is different, more earthy, in Scotland. Jacky had a red wine and I couldn’t decide. There were seven different kinds of draught lager, two ciders and one Guiness pump. I plumped for a pint of Old English - it seemed appropriate. There was a DJ playing only thumping dance music but not too loud. Also two amazing Jim Beam advertising objects. 3D versions of Gibson guitars, lit up with red neon lines that followed their contours. They had the characteristic Gibson lozenge fretmarks and the Gibson logo on the headstock. They probably cost as much as the real thing. Various stages of inebriation amongst the young men, most of whom were wearing black t-shirts. Made-up girls, some fat, with low-cut tops, showing their bellies. We had pizza, drank our Shiraz that came in small bottles like those you get on the train, and admired the large photoss of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, as the relentless thumping of dance music continued unabated, making me wonder why they didn’t have large photos of drum and bass stars instead of Dylan and Co. After pizza, the broken-toothed barmaid persuaded us to try the cheesecake with fresh raspberries. It was huge.
On the way back to the hotel I photographed a statue with a seagull sitting on his head. He turned out to be a local politician of days gone by who may or may not have deserved a seagull shampoo. Back in our room at the Station Hotel, we noticed that it contained an ironing board, a trouser press and a sturdyumbrella. We didn’t need any of them.


The Fiddlers of St. Magnus

Saturday brought another kipper for breakfast. We shared the dining room with a party of Italian tourists who had come on a coach, on the back of which was the slogan “travelling through the new millennium”. We got the ferry across sparkiling water, a large cloud sitting on Hoy and its old man. Passengers stood on the sundeck, calm like the sea, and in a sort of trancelike state as we magically entered the harbour of the fairy-tale settlement of Stromness. First, we bought groceries from E. Flett’s shop, where Orkney potatoes cost more than twice as much as potatoes that had travelled up from the Channel Islands. A granny was standing outside the shop, cuddling two beige young girls with nice Afro features and broad Scottish accents.
I said “You’ve got your hands full, to which Granny, referring to the girls, replied “They’re cold”. That was hardly surprising as the girls both had sleeveless tops. We walked back down into the town, looking for a jar of Marmite. In the grocery shop I asked one of the girl shop assistants if they sold it. She looked as if she’d never heard of Marmite so I thought maybe Marmite hasn’t reached Orkney yet. But I wasn’t convinced - the violin, for example, had managed to get here. I tried to describe it to the girl “It’s black stuff that you put on bread”. All became clear when the softly spoken girl murmured “I don’t know. I’m Hungarian” “Oh, sorry”, I said, feeling somewhat old and confused.
As we drove out of Stromness, I noticed a man with long grey hair and sandals, standing at the bus stop. He’d been in Flett’s at the same time as us. He had a thin, sort of Celtic snake tattooed on his arm, going up like a peeled orange skin from his wrist until it disappeared under the short sleeves of his shirt. I think he may have been interested in standing stones.
I’d seen, on a noticeboard in Stromness, a poster announcing that the Orkney Traditional Music Project was about to perform a lunchtime concert in Kirkwall, so we drove the few delightful miles between Orkney’s two biggest towns, past standing stones, burial mounds, cairns and visitor centres. We drove through Finstown, which pleased us as we’ve got a friend called Finn.
In Kirkwall, three cheerful looking young men strode jauntily along the main street. One of them had a white t-shirt with lettering on it like an eye test. The letters got smaller from top to bottom - “You read this while I check out your tits”. By the time you got to tits the letters were very small.
Half an hour before the concert was to start, so we took the chance to buy some whisky. In an old-fashioned shop in a narrow, paved street I saw an advertisment for “Old Orkney”. A lady in front of me was buying a bottle of gin, so I asked her about the local whiskies. She recommended Famous Grouse. Of Old Orkney she could only comment “Aaaargh, it’s rough”. That decided it - I ordered a half bottle of Old Orkney. It’s now made in Elgin by Gordon and MacPhail and has, as a sub-title, “The Islands’ Peedie Dram”. Peedie means little.
The concert was held in St. Magnus’ cathedral, which had been founded in 1137 by the Viking Earl Rognvald-Kali. It is home to the earthly remains of St. Magnus who had inherited the Norse earldom of Orkney. The cathedrals’ great, massive pillars. No fuss. And several beautifully carved tombstones. The lettering on these had been carved in relief, rather than being chiselled out, which is the more common way, I think. Lovely letterforms. One stone was for a woman called Mary Young, who died around 1680, wife of one of Kirkwall’s magistrates. “She lived regarded and died regreted”. As well as the words, the tombstone showed a picture of a woman, a skull and crossbones and an egg-timer. Another tombstone had a carved image and the motto “Ad hoc, Ab Hoc, Per Hoc”. Ad Hoc was illustrated by carved angels, Ab Hoc by a human figure, Per Hoc by a skull and crossbones. To this from this through this. All these tombstones had been carved in the same style, all from the 1670s and 80s. A small notice informed us that they were mostly the work of James Adamson, Mason Burgess, who died on April 23, 1682, aged 74. He “left alyve” his son Patrick who carried on his father’s work. Heir Rests, Heer Rests.
The Orkney Traditional Music Project started in 1998, its aim to keep alyve the music of this place by encouraging younsters to play the fiddle and accordion. It seems to be very successful as there’s lots of traditional music, mostly fiddle, going on and also some young composers of new tunes. The concert was played by six musicians aged 14 - 18, three boys, three girls, five fiddles, one accordion. We sat in the front row so that I could study their vibrato. Two of the girl players were extremely shy and neither looked up at the small audience, on cathedral seats, nor tapped their feet throughout the performance. They played simple but beautiful music, all tunes from Orkney, some written quite recently. The two boy fiddlers wore shirts advertising alcoholic drinks. One sported the Scotland football shirt, sponsored in large letters by “Famous Grouse”. The other read “Vive Cuervo Tequila”. How the contradictions of capitalism enrich our lives. They’ve got to advertise energetically up here to persuade the locals that Tequila sunsets are tastier than the islands’ peedie dram.
The music project has also produced a tunebook, “The Orkney Collection”, that contains 55 local jigs, reels, airs and waltzes. It includes “The Birsay Reel” by G.Flett of Birsay. (We’re staying in Birsay, in case you were wondering why this bit is Birsay-oriented). Also compositions by Ronnie Aim who worked in a bank in Kirkwall until his parents died, after which he ran the shop, drove the van and delivered the letters in Holm, as well as composing tunes, playing confidently and founding the’Orkney Strathspey and Reel Society’. Tommy Mainland, too. Mainland’s a funny name for an island, by the way.
I bought a CD by The Selkies, three local girls. The album’s “Gaan Wae The Flow”, on which they play half a dozen of the tunes in The Orkney Collection book. The CD notes say “Carrie, Dawn and Tina, who are all valued members of the Orkney Amateur Swimming Club, first played together two years ago at a concert at Pickaquoy Sports Centre”. The notes also explain SELKIE: (n) a mythical creature, which comes from old Orkney folklore, who was able to change from a seal into a person. Now the word selkie is used in common Orkney dialect for the Grey Seal. Great name for a band - ‘The Grey Seals’.
So it’s not until mid-afternoon that we head for Loons Cottage, our holiday accomodation, of which we have an estate-agent’s photo and some directions which include taking a left at Twatt Church. Beyond the left edge is the house of Phyllis and Ronnie Ballantyne, a good five yards away. Phyllis comes out to show us the ropes and apologises for being in a hurry but she’s late for a ‘henny party’. “See you in the week”, she says. It’s a tiny cottage, the bed more or less filling the bedroom. Bit of a larf looking out of the French windows in the kitchen/sitting room looking out over Loons RSPB reserve. Never seen so many curlews. Keen songs.
We went to the hide and saw.....we heard a car pull up outside and decided to leave in case some serious twitchers came in and made us feel inadequate. Outside, we couldn’t politely avoid a gent, recently exited from a Ford Ka, in plus fours, a floppy hat and a hare-lip. He was from Darlington and his dad had been stationed at Twatt aerodrome in 1945, when Herr Lipp was only three years old. Maybe those dead airmen at Halsary were given duff advice by air controllers at Twatt ‘drome, I don’t know. We had what I thought was a brief conversation but, with hindsight, was actually a tolerably wide-ranging monologue. Before we knew it, he was telling us about his trip to Zimbabwe to visit a land-owning English friend who should never have fuckingwell been there in the first place. I mentioned something about the current inflation rate in that country, which is predicted to reach 1.5 million per cent (no, I haven’t got it wrong) by the end of the year. “The blacks just sit around doing nothing”, he explained, and went on to tell us how he has attended the RSPB members dinner every year for the past twelve. “Very generous with the champagne and some interesting speakers. Gives you a glimpse behind the scenes.”. Who the fuck wants a glimpse behind the scenes of the RSPB, I was thinking to myself. Jacky was pulling at the sleeve of my jacket but I was rooted to the spot like I’d just downed a pint of vallium. He then gave us mad directions involving ley-lines between barns and hilltop cairns to an area where you can find the elusive Primula scotica, a tiny purple primrose only found up here. “I took a photo but I don’t know if it will come out - they’re very small”. I hope he had an enormous telephoto lens otherwise his friends (?) are going to be bored rigid. Anyway, for his next holiday he’s thinking of going to the Isle of Wight, as he’d seen a TV programme about it. “You’ll have been to the top and bottom of Britain then”, I said, dully. So dully that the only option was to say goodbye and breathe a sigh of relief at escaping this person of under-developed listening skills. Didn’t he realise I had lots of really interesting things to say? I’ve just about had enough of orally-challenged people with nasal voices already and we’ve only just arrived.
We spent the evening drinking our box of Namaqua wine from South Africa, eating our fish-head soup, made from the large cod-head that I’d bought earlier from the farmers’ market in Kirkwall, with cauliflower, listening to the Selkies followed by the Archive Hour on Radio 4 about polio-victim Michael Flanders of Flanders and Swan. I’m hoping that our culinary experience improves after Jacky has banned me from making any more fish-head soup. Lesson 1 - How to get the Missus to do the cooking.


Not Dark Yet

When we woke up on Sunday the sun had gone in and we were in a cloud. Grey and rainy all day - great. To begin with I made an attempt to murder ‘The Stronsay Waltz’ by J. Chambers on my fiddle. It says in The Orkney Fiddle Collection that it’s the first tune students are taught. Even so, it was beyond me, mainly because of a mistake on The Selkies CD cover.They’ve got Track 12, The Stronsay Waltz going into the Tenessee Waltz, rather than the other way round. So here I am listening to the Tenessee Waltz, trying desperately to fit what I’m hearing to the score of The Stronsay Waltz. Jacky soon sorted out the confusion for me. Having done so, she said I was a pillock. What a racket.
Later on we went to Birsay in the rain, right up in the north west corner of Mainland, had a quick look at a ruined palace and bought some Marmite from the shop run by a woman from London who’s going to move back down south because the winters are too long. We walked across the causeway to the Brough of Birsay, where there are remains of Viking houses which we didn’t visit. On our return we bought cups of tea from a nice lady selling refreshments out of the side of a K-reg white Leyland DAF van parked at the Point of Buckquoy. Her husband sat in the passenger seat reading the paper. I asked if they knew anything about the West Mainland Strathspey and Reel Society. She didn’t - “I’ve no music in me” she said apologetically. I ordered a bere bannock with cheese from Craigie Farmhouse. Bere is a cereal a bit like barley but even hairier and the grain grows on four sides of the ear instead of just two.
It hasn’t got dark here yet. It’s light when we go to bed and still light when we get up in the morning. On Monday we went again to Kirkwall to buy a CD of the recent Orkney Folk Festival. Nice acronym - OFF. We soon discovered the Wrigley sisters’ music shop and cafe, called ‘The Reel’. Hazel and Jennifer Wrigley, guitarist and fiddler, also teach upstairs. A lovely establishment. Fiddles and accordions everywhere and a piano in the cafe. Anyone was invited to play on the instruments but only if they played a proper tune all the way through. “We don’t want to hear you practising”, it read. We had tomato soup, wrote our postcards and listened to Orkney fiddle on their CD player.
The Kirkwall Museum starts with a random group of very old looking quern stones sitting in a corner of the courtyard. The first display to catch our attention was a collection of crocheted items done, in mid-twentieth century, by a lady called Hettie Scott of Harray near Dounby. Hettie, we read, had been born with no hands and no legs but could, nevertheless, crochet, embroider and paint. She wrote her autobiography holding the pen between her toes. I wondered how she could have toes but no legs but I’m sure it’s possible. Thalidomide?
On the Westray stone are some of the first spirals ever drawn in Britain - somewhere around 2000 BC. Another old stone, from Sanday, had a design of chevrons while, from the 6th and 7th centuries were some Pictish symbol stones. One had a form of simple yet indec=pherable writing scratched into it. It’s called Ogham and reminded me of the linear symbols in some of Tony’s paintings. Another stone had drawings on it, including a quite well drawn eagle which, we read, represents St. John, the one who got part of the royalties for the New Testament.
Later we learned that between 1595 and 1643 forty eight women were tried by the church courts in Kirkwall for witchcraft. At least twelve of them were executed. Then a bit about piracy. “In 1725 John Gow from Stromness ended his short but murderous career on the pirates’ gibbet at Wapping”. We then perused some snuff ‘mulls’ made from ramshorn, a birch rod for “whipping young offenders” and some gutta-percha golf balls.
Lastly, we visited an exhibition of paintings by Stanley Cursiter, an Orcadian who went to Edinburgh art school in the 1920s and later became director of the Scottish National Gallery. Great paintings of landscapes and seascapes and portraits of Scottish people in local knitwear. A particularly nice one entitled ‘The Fair Isle Jumper’ showed a lady called Roberta Farquharson. I’ve always liked that name and enjoy pronouncing it Far-Kwoo-Har-Son. Stanley had also written a biography of the famous Scottish painter Peploe who I’d first encountered recently while reading the truly dreadful ‘44 Scotland Street’ by Alexander MacCall-Smith in Liberia. On leaving the museum we went straight into Judith Glue’s shop selling Fair Isle and other knitwear where we purchased an orange pullover with runes around the cuffs and waistband. That evening Jacky said “There are no supermarkets here”. Great to be uncommercialised for a short time.


Up the Khyber

Tuesday was another day in a thin cloud, curlews warbling, fiddles playing and the landscape exuding a
timeless calm. The calmness of the landscape stops people getting angry, we thought. In the morning Jacky finished off “Labyrinth” by Kate Moss which she enjoyed very much but damned with faint praise -“excellent holiday reading”. I continued to murder The Stronsay Waltz in the spare bedroom with the door closed.
We went into Stromness, passing a sign for hand-crafted bodhrans which we were not, I have to say, in need of at that point. Stromness has a lot going for it. The name for a start. Also, it has just walked out of a fairy tale and is still a bit misty. Amazingly quiet and empty as the lobster pots. I bought a Wrigley sisters CD and Jacky bought a book by St. Aubin. We noticed a Victorian barometer and thermometer set into a wall next to the bookshop. It had been made by Negretti and Zambra of Hatton Garden London EC2, “instrument makers to her majesty”. It had a couple of meteorological epithets e.g. “Long Foretold, Long Last; Short Notice, Soon Past”. Meandering along the paved main street, the sea down little alleyways where washing hung on washing lines, we soon came to Mrs. Humphrey’s house, on which the plaque said it had been used as a “temporary hospital in 1835-6 for scurvy-ridden whalemen who had been trapped in the ice for months”.
Then on to Rae’s Close, named after the Orcadian arctic explorer Dr. John Rae who, in 1854, ‘discovered’ Rae Strait (how’s that for a coincidence?), the last link in the North West Passage. We then passed the house of a harp maker in whose front window stood a banjo with a great gash in its skin. At Login’s well we read that “There watered here The Hudson Bay Coy’s Ships 1670 - 1891. Capt. Cook’s vessels Resolution and Discovery 1780. Sir John Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror on Arctic exploration 1845”.
The first cabinet I fixed on in the truly wonderful (c.f. Pitt-Rivers) Stromness Museum concerned lighthouses. Robert Louis Stevenson “came from a family of lighthouse engineers who served the Northern Lighthouse Board for 130 years...Between 1788 and 1915 they provided Orkney with eleven major lighthouses, by far the largest number in any British country”. They were at Auskerry; Sule Skerry; Helliar Holm; Noup Head; Westray; Copinsay; Start Point, Sanday; North Ronaldsay 1 and 11; Hoy Sound, Low and High; Cantick Head, which made for a safe entrance to Longhope and Scapa Flow; Pentland Skerries and the Brough of Birsay. Hoy Low and High are, confusingly, on the small island of Graemsay if you were wondering. Next my attention turned to a fiddle made of tin. “After his wooden fiddle got broken on board a herring boat, James Foubister of Newbanks in Deerness made this tin one, which survived”. Then a small display about Old Orkney whiskey. Originally, it was made at the Man O’ Hoy distillery here in Stromness, founded in 1828 and demolished in the early part of the twentieth century.
And on to the history of Eliza Fraser who lived in Stromness with three children and a ship’s captain for a husband. Leaving the kids with her mum, she decided to accompany the old man on one of his journeys. She was pregnant when they sailed away from St. Katherine’s Dock in London in 1835 on ‘The Stirling Castle’, the name, as luck would have it, of my local pub when we lived in Camberwell. George, Harry, Neville and other Jamaican acquaintances slamming down their dominoes like cracks of lightning. Eliza was eventually shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef the following year and was taken as a slave by Aborigines. She watched her husband being speared to death and her pregnancy came to an end. She was taken to a
“corroburee”, a large gathering, festival of Aboriginal tribes, where she was the main attraction. Incredibly, she was rescued by a ‘trusted Irish convict’ by the name of John Graham. She’d had a bad time. “Although only 38 years of age, she looked like an old woman of seventy, perfectly black and dreadfully crippled....Her legs were a mass of sores where the aborigines had tortured her with firebrands.” A couple of years later, she tried to make some money by being exhibited in a booth back in London. The poster explained “Stirling Castle wrecked off the coast of New Holland, Botany Bay. All killed and eaten by sausages - sorry, I misread my notes - savages. Only survivor a woman. To be seen: 6d admission”.
Another cabinet, this one about the Hudson Bay Company and Orkney’s connection with Canada which has left lots of genetics to be unravelled. Some Orkney surnames - Garson, Inkster, Norquoy, Hourston. The display also talked about an Orcadian called Magnus Twatt who worked for the Hudson Bay Co. 1770 - 1800. He was sometimes a hunter and trapper, sometimes a canoeist, transporting furs. He “took for a wife” a Cree Indian woman. In 1978, Bob MacLeod came to Stromness from Moose Factory, along with Ray Spencer of Fort George, Canada, to play in Orkney. “Their Cree Indian fiddle music included fiddle tunes that would have been played in Orkney centuries ago”.
Up the stairs was a life-size diorama of Dr. John Rae kneeling in a rubber dinghy, doing something manly in the Arctic. We saw his fiddle, which he took with him on four expeditions to the Arctic between 1846 and 1854. Next to him was George Mackay Brown’s rocking chair, an interesting contrast.
Upstairs we marvelled at the six-foot long leathery turtle caught by Westray fisherman Edwin Groat who, in the photograph, looked not a little shell-shocked. I pulled open drawers of birds’ eggs - the guillemot eggs were a funny shape and very blotched. There were also displays of tropical butterflies, pinned down and shining, brought to Stromness by Orcadians on gap years and above them the splendid Stanley Cursiter oil painting of Linklater and Greig entering Yesnaby Noust.
The entry ticket to the museum lasts a week so we’ll go back for a bit more. You can only take in so much before you need a nice cup of tea.
Walking back we noticed a narrow street named Khyber Pass. We walked up it so that we could say we’d been up the Khyber. At the top was a great view over rooftops to the harbour. Three men with brooms were sweeping some rubbery stuff across a flat roof. Their vans said ‘Firestone’, the only company in Liberia.
We watched the ferry leave. It backed out of the harbour and turned completely around very very slowly before passing between bouys. Very slowly.
We had a drink in The Stromness Hotel, in a bay window upstairs overlooking the harbour. Back at Loons we met Phyllis’ blue-eyed husband, Ronnie, who had been born in the farmhouse 300 yards away.


Teen Session at ‘The Reel’

On Wednesday we visited Sandwick church in the Bat of Skaill. In the graveyard we saw more Orkney surnames - Gaudie, Johnston, Marwick, Linklater, Merriman, Garson, Cursiter, Wishart, Loutitt, Irvine, Groundwater. It seems that the women up here hang on to their maiden names, at least for the purpose of identifying their gravestones. Examples are “In memory of Isabella Brass, wife of William Kirkness” and “In memory of Hugh Stockan and his wife Catherine Flett”. A bare, elegant building. The leaflet reads “even well into the twentieth century sermons might last over an hour and those who were inattentive were publicly scalded”.
We failed to locate the Geo of Snusgar, mainly because we don’t know what a geo is. There are several of them around the coast. I photographed the Hole o’ Row, a natural arch formed under a hill, the Knowe of Row, by the sea. Skara Brae is the most famous archaeological site in Orkney, in a beautiful spot in the Bay of Skaill. It was a neolithic village 5000 years ago and was discovered one day in 1850, after a storm and high winds had blown away the topsoil, by William Graham Watt, the seventh Earl of Breckness, who lived in the nearby Skaill House. As we walked up to the Visitor Centre, we saw Gandalf in lycra, a cyclist with flowing white hair, a bit thin on top, and very short shorts. Inside we looked at the small exhibition about Skara Brae. In the visitors’ book someone had written ‘Queen Victoria’ address ‘Windsor’ and in the comments column ‘One was very much amused’.
After the neolithic village, the visitor is directed to Skaill House. In contrast to the rather basic stone decor of the neolithic houses, the 1950s interiors of Skaill House made me think how much more interesting life was in 1950 than 3000 BC. In the dining room, we looked at a set of plates and dishes that had belonged to Captain Cook. They were described as ‘Oriental Lowestoft’, while the large dinner table itself was laid with ‘Copeland Spode’. The next room was the library. I spotted on one of the many shelves a guidebook to Lowestoft that had cost one shilling. Most of the other volumes were about hunting, shooting, fishing and sailing.
The house had been renovated by Colonel Scarth, the eleventh Earl of Brackness. In the drawing room was a flattened tiger, like in cartoons, spreadeagled on the floor as a rug, but still with its entire head, looking up at you. It had clearly not been to the dentist’s of late. The ‘rug’ had been brought back by the present Laird’s grandfather, Robert Scarth Farquhar (FAR-KWOO-HAR) Macrae, who had once been inspector general of police in Bihar and Orissa. We had a peep into the bedroom of Colonel Scarth’s wife, Katherine, who outlived her husband by about 17 years, during which period she lived her life almost entirely in her bedroom. By the bed was a book entitled, steamily, “Nights In Bombay”. She also had had a Pifco Electric Massager. Its box was on display. The painter Stanley Cursiter had been friendly with Colonel Scarth to whom he’d given a painting called “Odness”, which is on Stronsay.
A slight digression about the Scottish ten pound note. On the front is a picture of a lady called Mary Slessor. On the back is a sailing ship and a white woman with four African children. In the centre a small map with places on it like Nkanga, Ikotobong, Ekenge and Amasu. These places are located in larger areas called Ekoi and Ibibio. I concluded that Ms. Slessor went to Nigeria to do good work and was awarded a tenner by the Scottish Executive. I won’t digress further by describing the seven-sided Orcadian nine bob coin, currently protected by UNESCO.
We had a drink in Flatties Bar - a Red MacGregor for me, brewed in Quoyloo. Later we went over to Kirkwall for one of the Teen Sessions at the Wrigley sisters’ cafe. Several young people played fiddle together. A man from the Highlands tried to join in with the locals on guitar and started singing and playing loudly a Highland song. The yougsters just looked at him impassively and cuddled their fiddles to their chests, protecting their tradition. Wonderful, if not for Jock. He stopped after one verse and said, desperately, “Do you do any Dylan songs - Bob Dylan?...” One of the kids said “Who’s he?”. The Highlander gave up and the locals continued with their impregnable Orkney agenda. The Deerness Reel, Scapa Flow, The Stronsay Weaver. Ronnie Aim would have been proud of them.


Venus Hourston’s Plastic Rainforest

On Thursday we had a coastal walk from Marwick to Birsay and back. At the summit of Marwick Head is a plain stone tower, a memorial to Earl Kitchener of Khartoum who ‘perished’ in the sea nearby on HMS Hampshire in June 1916. The vertical cliffs at Marwick are quite spectacular and high rise apartments for thousands of kittiwakes, black-backed gulls, razorbills, guillemots, puffins, great and Arctic skuas, many of them wheeling over the sea, enjoying their fly. To the south we could see the coastline of Hoy and the Old Man, to the north the Brough of Birsay and further round the island of Rousay. We strolled down an area called Mount Misery, passing the Point of Snusan and crossing, on foot, the Burn of Broadhouse before
arriving at the settlement of Birsay. We bought a loaf of bread, four cans of McEwens Export and a half ounce of Golden Virginia at the local shop, outside which we met a very peculiar looking three legged cat.
On the return journey we did a bit of birdwatching from scary positions as near to the cliff edge as we dared. We got good views of the graphic faces of three puffins perched on a ledge. It was a classic, if rather smelly, coastal walk, the aroma of guano dominating the cliff parts and the perfume of decaying seaweed spicing the beach sections.
In the evening we went into Stromness for a meal. Before eating we called into a B & B place that we thought must belong to Venus Hourston, the lady at whose previous house we’d stayed back in 1978. Then we had been struck by the way Mrs. Hourston had decorated her interiors with every kind of plastic flower, glass figurine, candles that worked by electricity. The large garden of her new place bears all the hallmarks of Venus’ decorative genius. In it, several resin-moulded Greek figures, plastic ducks and geese, four stone squirells climbimg up a false tree trunk, a cat, a fox and a four-foot high white plastic windmill. Most of the ground in the sloping garden was covered with red granite chippings. “Thirty tons of chips”, she told us. In her new foyer were several large plastic trees in plastic pots, like a plastic rainforest. In some of the trees were perched artificial, brightly coloured birds made of feathers. She told us where her previous B & B place had been, so we went to look at 15, John Street and had some vague recollections of our 1978 lodgings.
We dined in the Scapa Flow Restaurant in the ancient Hamnavoe Lounge of The Stromness Hotel. We could see the islands beyond. My starter of cream of chicken soup arrived with a wrinkled skin on top. Jacky maintained her happy mood despite her shrimp dumplings. I followed up with vegetable moussaka while Jacy tucked into her seafood pie, blatantly ignoring my earlier warning about high phytoplankton levels at Scapa Flow. We had a jolly time but neither of our meals included anything that had been alive in the recent past. The house red was very drinkable.


Stane Pies and P.scotica

We went to the Stromness Museum again on Friday morning to take a second look at the cabinet about Dr. William Balfour Baikie. Born in Kirkwall in 1825, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University before joining the Royal Navy. In 1854 he went to West Africa to explore the Niger River as Mungo Park, another Scot, had done before him. Baikie made another trip to West Africa in 1857 but the ship hit a reef and was destroyed. Baikie and the rest of the company were stranded for a year before being rescued by another British vessel. According to the information card, “Baikie refused to leave until he had paid the local people for the food they had received. He caught up with the (rescue) ship a few days later in a canoe that was overflowing with gifts”. Baikie actually stayed in Africa and “founded the town of Lokoja” while his “anti-slavery beliefs brought him in conflict with the local chiefs”. He decided to take a trip back home in 1864 but, having called in at Sierra Leone, unfortunately caught a fever and died. Apparently, his name lives on in the Ibo word for white man - ‘beke’. In his cabinet were several interesting artefacts from Africa, including a leather and raffia belt with Juju ‘blokes’ to protect the wearer from evil. It had come from northern Nigeria.
I checked out a cracked portrait of a man called Hugh Miller, who lived from 1802 until 1856. He was a stonemason, geologist, theologian, journalist and poet who came from Cromarty. His father, a sea captain, was drowned when Hugh was in his early teens. The night of his father’s death, the door of thefamily house suddenly burst open in the wind. Hugh went to the door and saw “the severed hand and arm of a woman, dripping with water, hovering (not hoovering) in the doorway”. Not long afterwards he had a fight with his schoolteacher and became a stonemason. He got interested in the fish fossils that occur in the Old Red Sandstone on Orkney, became a journalist on “The Witness” newspaper in Edinburgh and proceeded to publish some books of the poetry he had written.. After many fossil-collecting visits to Orkney he wrote, in 1847 (four years before The Origin of Species) a study with the charming title of “Footprints of the Creator or the Asterolepis of Stromness”. Miller was actually a devout Christian, beleiving in the Biblical creation myth rather than in evolution. I was shocked, reading the info about this interesting man, when I came to the following - “Tragically, Miller took his own life on Christmas Eve in 1856. He had just finished correcting the proofs of his final book when, in the small hours of the morning, he shot
himself. He was suffering from a probable brain tumour which caused terrible headaches and hallucinations. In one of these attacks, he had chased imaginary burglars with his revolver”. One of his poems mentions the fossilised Old Red Sandstone fish as having been “baked in stane pies before Adam”, which I thought was a nice way of putting it.
Downstairs I found Jacky looking through a big folder about pirates. The main man is John Gow, who I mentioned earlier as having been treated to the gibbet at Wapping Steps. Gow was put into the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, London. The trial was at the Old Bailey but Gow, understandably, held up proceedings by refusing to enter a plea. A bit like Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague. Gow was ordered to be tortured until he entered a plea. “His thumbs were squeezed between a whip-cord by two men, until they broke. They were then bent double and broken again. Even after they had been bent and broken a third time, Gow refused to plead.” He was then ordered to be “pressed”, which meant that they put “so much iron and stone weights on his body as he could stand”. After a few days of being pressed, Gow pleaded guilty and was immediately sentenced to death.
We took a trip to Yesnaby to see the amazing rock formations and to search for Primula scotica. We saw Yesnaby Noust into which Linklater and Greig entered in Stanley Cursiter’s painting. We walked all around the cliffs nose to the ground trying to walk the line between a distant barn and the nearby cairn, as advised by Herr Lipp. It made us notice all sorts of other wild flowers that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen - the grass of Parnassus, buttercups, bladder campion, marsh orchids, bog asphodel. Having given up the search, disappointed, we wandered back to the car park. Jacky’s sudden shreik made me jump. “There it is - that’s it!!” And there it was, the miniature primrose with red-violet petals. And, of couse, once you’d seen it you couldn’t not see it. It was everywhere but nowhere outside a 15 yard radius.
It didn’t take long to pack up after our week at Loons Cottage. We drove slightly sadly to the Saturday morning ferry in the rain and waited in a queue of cars opposite Venus Hourston’s garden before checking in. Bye-bye to Stromness and the barely visible Old Man, down the gangplank at Scrabster, heading south to the sounds of Devon Sproule keeping her silver shined and young Orcadians playing their fiddles. Back again in 30 years’ time?