Call the Nurse Read online

  It had been in the July of 1969 when we came to Papavray on holiday with Nicholas, Andrew, and Duchess the retriever. We had parked our caravan on the grass beside a little beach with the sea shushing and lapping at the pebbles nearby.

  George was a Glaswegian. His father had left Papavray to find work while still a young man and, like so many, had gone to Glasgow, where he lived, worked, and died without ever returning to the place of his birth. Somehow, George had never had the urge to visit the isle of his antecedents. Until now!

  Elizabeth and John had already started college by then and thought we were mad to travel so far just to ‘sit on an island’, as they put it. Nick and Andy had very different ideas. We had only arrived the night before but they were already pronouncing this as ‘the best place in the world’.

  So here we were on this quiet little beach enjoying the clear northern air. There was quite a large house in a garden nearby and two cottages appeared to be growing out of the rocks of a promontory across the bay. Apart from these buildings, we were alone, looking across the sea loch to a couple of islets and away to distant mountains. The setting sun was sending slanting bronze light across the water, burnishing the tops of the waves as they broke against the far shores. I could smell the peat smoke that was rising in blue snakes from the white chimneys of the two cottages.

  We had wondered, with our southern conditioning, if we would be allowed to park on the beach, but as we were self-sufficient for two days, carrying twenty gallons of water and had the all-important loo, we were cautiously hopeful. However, the flimsy and all-too-obvious loo tent fell victim to the wind after only one day’s use.

  We had become aware, during the night, of an odd slapping noise on the side of the caravan in the blustery wind. On peering out of the window, I was just in time to see the loo tent heave itself upward, break its guy ropes and leap into the air. Like a kite in the hands of an amateur, it touched down twice before disappearing skywards. We thought of attempting a rescue but on opening the door to the gale quickly decided otherwise.

  When morning came, we awoke to chuckles and some rather rude remarks from the boys, who were looking out of the window. The chemical toilet was sitting in lonely splendour on the beach like some unsophisticated throne of a minor potentate, while some of the toilet roll was attempting to wrap itself around it as though trying to clothe its nakedness. The rest of it was in small pieces that were fluttering damply over the pebbles and out to sea like so many demented seagulls. Later, on a boating trip to the islets, we found the tent draped like a pall over a large rock. It was beyond repair. Luckily, we were invited to put the loo in a nearby shed!

  On a leisurely walk later that day, I stood and watched a large yacht sailing up the sea loch. Little did I know then how much this boat, or rather its occupant, would change our lives.

  It was a rather luxurious boat, and I watched as it glided into the bay. It anchored and, after some delay, a dinghy was lowered, packages appeared and were stowed and then a none-too-nimble figure got in and the craft began chugging towards the shore. He made landfall at a little jetty and started to unpack the dinghy. George and the boys joined me and we ran along the path to offer assistance. Or were we just being nosy? In any case, our offer was accepted with alacrity.

  The boat owner lived in the house with the garden, and it proved to be up about 30 steps. We puffed and groaned our way up with boxes and packages to find ourselves in a beautiful garden. Real gardens are rare in the islands, as the harsh weather, poor soil, ravages of deer, rabbits, cows, foxes, and every other living thing makes the growing of anything other than potatoes almost impossible. But this was a gardener’s garden. We collapsed onto a stone bench, hot and breathless. We all introduced ourselves.

  Alistair Macphee had the typical short, stocky shape of the Highland hill-dweller, his appearance belying a precise English accent. Clad in a navy-blue jersey and seaman’s cap and sporting a large moustache, his teeth were firmly clamped round an empty pipe.

  ‘Come in, come in! We all need a dram after that,’ he announced, without removing the pipe. Having spent several days alone on his boat, Alistair was ready to chat, so, packages forgotten, we settled down to hear his life story.

  He had been born on the island during the First World War and lived among the local children until the age of eight, when his father decided to leave Papavray to start a business in the south of England. Alistair grew up there, and when he reached adulthood he took over his father’s business and became quite wealthy. However, he never lost touch with Papavray, and when he was nearing 50 he decided to retire to his native island and put managers in to run the business.

  So he built this lovely home and travelled to London occasionally to keep an eye on the business but always returned with a sense of relief. He said that Papavray was civilised and London was barbaric. Alice, his wife, whom we met later, was the gardener.

  That day, as we sat in this lovely house and gazed across the sunlit bay to the hills and mountains beyond, our dream was still just that . . . a dream. Of living somewhere like this, of becoming a part of a slower way of life, of waking to the sound of the wind or the birds instead of listening to ten-ton trucks rumbling past.

  Of course, there were enormous difficulties. Work, somewhere to live, education for the boys. But now we were talking to Alistair. And that made all the difference. He entered into the spirit of our aspirations with enthusiasm.

  As far as work was concerned, we knew that you could tend sheep, fish, grow potatoes, and so on, but these were not options for us. Whilst we were prepared to do without luxuries, we did not want poverty. George was used to designing and installing computerised control gear for large industrial concerns all over the globe. Had we been talking with a crofter, he would have felt that the sheep-tending or fishing was all that we should require. Someone from the south with a conventional background, on the other hand, might not understand why we wanted to relocate to the far north at all. But here was Alistair, who understood both points of view. An islander by birth and inclination, he knew well the pull of that way of life, but, being an erstwhile businessman, he also appreciated our expectations of that life: a decent standard for the boys, a comfortable home and enough for some of the finer things of life, not just a pound left over when the bills were paid.

  If George was prepared to do basic electrical work, said Alistair, like house wiring and installing radar and sonar equipment on fishing boats, with a possible departure into the erection of TV aerials . . . We looked surprised at this, but it seemed that the first television signals were only just reaching the island.

  He puffed ruminatively on a pipe that had several dead matches sprouting from its bowl. We were to learn that he very rarely smoked tobacco, only dead matches, so inexpert was he at lighting his pipe.

  Looking doubtfully at me, he said, ‘Do you do anything?’

  Did I do anything? Apart from having four children, George’s invalid mother to look after, a husband who was rarely at home, a dog, two cats, a caravan, and a large house and garden, I also had a job as a nurse/health visitor! Did I do anything???

  ‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Nursing, eh?’ Nodding sagely, he continued, ‘Yes, I think that between you, you could make a living. A modest one maybe but, yes, you could do it!’

  We drew deep breaths. Could we? Dare we? Was this what we had been dreaming about for so long? It would mean leaving financial security, selling our house, and abandoning everything we knew. But Alistair had given us hope.

  With many thanks, we departed for our tiny home on the beach. George and I talked into the night but eventually decided that the first thing to do would be to see if there was any hope of finding somewhere to live. If that proved impossible then there was no point in agonising. And it could easily have proved impossible. We knew that under crofting laws the crofts were passed from one generation to the next. They were never sold because the land belonged to the laird even though the crofters owned the houses and outbuildings. Wit
h the diminishing population, however, many crofters had inherited more than one croft and, while they jealously guarded the land, they often had no use for the extra house. So an acre or so around the house would be fenced off and sold as a ‘feu’—the name for almost anything that wasn’t a croft. But so feudal was the system that not only had the laird to approve the sale but he and his minions had the power to accept or reject the potential buyer. Meetings were held where the character, lifestyle, probable usefulness, and even the religious background of these individuals was probed. So even if we decided to become middle-aged dropouts (Elizabeth’s words) we’d be very lucky to find anyone willing to sell us a piece of land and even luckier to be accepted into the community.

  We slept poorly that night, but the next day an extraordinary thing happened which made us think that fate was taking a hand.

  THREE

  A ‘small acre’

  We had driven along the little coastal lane from the beach to find a phone box. Beth had been taking exams at college and we wanted to find out how she had fared. We reached Dhubaig (although we did not know the name of the scattered little township at that time) without seeing any sign of a phone, so we looked around for someone to ask.

  Standing beside the road was a crofter, very weatherbeaten, and his wife who was wearing a bright apron. They were feeding some chickens and regarding us with frank curiosity. This part of Papavray was so remote and the road so primitive that the appearance of any strangers aroused immediate interest. We asked about the phone and, with much gesturing, they pointed to what looked like a tin hut but which, they assured us, was the post office. We chatted and with some self-conscious hesitancy we expressed our half-formed hopes that we might be able to live here one day. An odd glance passed between the crofter and his wife.

  Taking courage, George blurted out, ‘Do you know if anyone has a house or land for sale?’

  ‘Yes, I have!’

  For just a second, the world stood still. I was sure of it! I was suddenly acutely aware of the birdsong and the smell of the damp earth. Was this a coincidence or a minor miracle? Or fate? I stole a glance at George. He was staring at the blue-eyed, wind-reddened face of the crofter.

  ‘Well, I . . . um . . .’ George was lost for words.

  Mr Crofter was looking at his boots and shuffling his feet. I felt then, and continued to feel, that, on Papavray, negotiations of any sort were conducted through a fog of half-understood cultural differences.

  ‘Well, y’see, old Morag passed over some time back and she’d no bairns to her and no relatives foreby. No. She left the croft to go back and I got it from the factor.’

  Trying to unravel this information was as bad as untangling Andrew’s fishing lines, but I was impatient to see the house, so I didn’t ask for an explanation.

  ‘It’s not a croft, y’understand, but I can let you have the house and a wee bit land on a feu.’

  Although Alistair had attempted our education on the subject of ‘feus’, I was still rather hazy about the difference between a feu and a croft. Indeed, everyone called our property a croft anyway.

  ‘Come away in and have a cuppie,’ piped Mrs Crofter. No introductions had been made on their side, so we had no idea of their names.

  The last thing I wanted to do was to chat over a cup of tea. I wanted to see the house and this ‘feu’ thing, but courtesy demanded that we accompany them into their home.

  A scaldingly hot cup of tea was served in chipped but oncebest teacups with saucers. When we got to know these people better and were accepted into the community, we were given older cups with more chips and no saucers. The conversation ranged over the usual themes of the weather, the tides, the sheep—everything except the house. It was as though once the offer had been made, as it were, the subject was closed for the time being. Looking back, I can now see that they had probably already said too much, as the laird had not been approached for his permission to divide up this croft that our crofter had somehow wangled into his possession.

  We eventually persuaded Archie and Mary, as they turned out to be called, to show us the house. They led us through a small gate and across a long narrow croft of about three acres. At the opposite end was a miserable, dilapidated building with a rusty corrugated-iron roof, rotting door, and filthy windows. Approached by no path or road of any kind, it stood among the tussocky grass and rugged boulders, staring out across the valley to the distant mountains.

  The village of Dhubaig was not like most others that we had seen, which had been arranged along the glen roads; this one had no shape or logic to the distribution of the little white blobs that were the houses. It was as if God had tossed a handful of white pebbles into the glen that dipped away below us. The heather-clad hills rose on three sides and the sea formed the fourth. A stream tumbled down the hill behind the house and wandered away over the croft to water thirsty animals on its way to the shore, where it chattered fussily over the pebbles and into the waiting sea. Standing sentinel on a headland across the bay were the ruins of a castle.

  ‘Will we go into the house, then?’

  At last!

  Archie pushed open the drooping door: no key, of course. No handle either. In we went to a tiny hall with doors on either side and a rough, ladder-like stair rising in front of us. We entered the room on the right. Concrete floor, wood-lined walls, a fireplace, and ample signs of its present use as a store for animal feed. Several musty-smelling sacks of knobbly, unidentifiable objects were stacked against one wall. The room on the left was a great deal worse!

  ‘This is the room,’ announced Mary. So far as I could see, they were both rooms of a sort. I must have looked puzzled.

  ‘The other one is the kitchen. This one’s “the room”.’ Mary considered this to be sufficient explanation.

  Later, I learnt that the early crofts had only two rooms: the kitchen and the bedroom. The later ones were built with a rudimentary bedroom upstairs, so the second downstairs room became something of an embarrassment, as no one knew what to use it for or what to call it. So it was ‘the room that wasn’t a kitchen’, later contracted to simply ‘the room’.

  I ascended the ladder/stairs to the open space above. A boarded floor and a skylight and that was it! No bathroom, no toilet, and downstairs no kitchen as we know it. Just the two rooms, such as they were. No electricity, no drainage (there was nothing to drain anyway) and one tap. And that was outside. Some house!

  But . . . as I looked out of the skylight, a skein of geese flew past and across the glen a young girl started to play the bagpipes, standing at the end of her cottage on the hill. The sky was clearing in places and shafts of silver-yellow sunlight streamed over the far mountains, picking out the jagged peaks against a blue/black, inky sky. As I watched, two people greeted each other on the road down in the valley, stopping to talk, and had I been able to understand the Gaelic I could have heard every word: the village was so quiet.

  George was prowling about outside, looking at the byre, the stream, and the land around the house.

  ‘And how much land would we get with the house?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I’m needing the land for the cow and the oats. Then there’s the lambing . . .’ Archie was hedging. He obviously did not want to let us have much land.

  ‘What about an acre?’ queried George.

  ‘Oh. No, no. Indeed no. Not as much as an acre! I couldna spare an acre.’

  ‘Oh, well then, I don’t know . . .’ George left the sentence in mid-air. I was scared for a moment, thinking that he really would decide against the whole thing if he couldn’t get his acre. Did he know how much I wanted this? Did he feel the same?

  ‘Ach, well . . .’ Archie kicked a stone.

  Mary put a stop to this merry-go-round by saying firmly, ‘Well, you could have a small acre.’

  ‘What’s going on, Mum? Dad?’

  Nick and Andy had returned from discovering the stream and its possibilities. The boys now stood side by side, viewing the house with s
ome horror.

  ‘The island is great and so is the village, but we can’t live in that!’ announced Nick.

  But Andy was beginning to develop opinions of his own. He addressed Nick.

  ‘They’ll get it fixed.’ He turned, ‘Won’t you, Mum?’

  ‘Of course,’ I assured them. ‘Would you like to live here?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ they replied in unison. Then a worried frown creased Nick’s brow. ‘What about school?’

  Ah! In the south of England in 1969, 11 year olds were sent where the education authority decreed: there was no choice. This was one of the things about which we were unhappy.

  ‘Alistair told us that the senior school is on the mainland. Pupils living a long way off have to stay in the school hostel during the week. Would you mind that?’

  ‘Mmm . . . it might be fun . . . but . . .’

  He sounded doubtful, as well he might. It would be a big change at an impressionable age, but we were convinced that it would be a better option than the tough school that he was due to attend.

  ‘We’ll talk about it all, I promise,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  They didn’t. They rushed off to explore the shore and watch a boat coming into the bay. The bay that gave the village its name: Dhubaig. ‘Dhu’ meant ‘black’, referring to the rocks, and ‘aig’ was Gaelic for ‘bay’.

  I wandered back to the house (in its ‘small acre’), leaving Archie and George to talk about money—the part of the purchase of any property that I always found embarrassing, despite having moved many times and lived in several different countries.

  Under the stairs and opening into the kitchen was a box-bed that I had not noticed in my hasty glance round the room. It was the first I had seen and appeared to be a kind of wide shelf about two feet from the floor, in a sort of cupboard. There were no doors on this, but a tattered curtain hung in front of it. Rotting bedding was still in evidence and the walls were covered in a paper depicting exotic flowers such as old Morag would never have seen. I stood beside that bed and was aware of a cold, rather strange feeling: rather like opening the door from a warm room into an unheated porch. There was a very odd atmosphere there. Even when we had rebuilt and heated the house, the cold spot persisted.