Many of the stories in this book are set in winter, round about Solstice and Christmas and New Year.
In the north, winter has always been the time for story-telling. In Orkney until recently the hearth-fires were stoked up in Hall and croft on the long nights and story-tellers and fiddlers came into their own.
Winter, season of storm and dearth, is still a mighty quickener of the imagination. The stuff of narrative lies thick everywhere, but in the past rather than in the present. Now the mind is too easily satisfied with the withering pages of newspapers and their ‘stories’, and with the fleeting shallow images of television serials.
The medieval Icelanders were magnificent story-tellers. Their kinsmen in Orkney and Shetland had the Orkneyinga Saga, an anthology of stories to hold children from their play and enthral old men in chimney corners on a winter night. Those sagas were hewn from the inexhaustible quarry of human nature, as it appears in action and speech: vivid timeless masques. Real earls and heroes and villains bestride our saga, and the common people, as in Shakespeare and Sophocles, make rare appearances. I have chosen to elaborate one of the most moving incidents from the Orkneyinga Saga, in which the greatest of the Orkney earls, Rognvald Kolson, has dealings with fisher-folk in Shetland. The many-faceted character of the man – master of verse, navigator, statesman, as well as more homely skills – is flashed off this one exploit.
But the quarry for northern imaginative writers is deeper still. There were the older tribes that built the brochs, and Skara Brae and Brodgar; back and back to the first hewers and setters of stone, mysterious shadows on the skyline who came not too long after the melting of the ice. Those anonymous peoples have left only a few marks on their stones. Their languages are lost. Their stories perhaps survive in the remaining fragments of folk-lore.
The wheel of summer light and winter darkness must always have influenced northern poets and story-tellers: their themes and styles. The seasons are not opposites, but complementary. It is in winter barns and cupboards that the riches of summer are stored. Into the dark solstice comes the light of the world. We know that our candles and fires are one with the corn-ripening sun. From the wheel of the year came, wavering and lovely, the dances of Johnsmas in summer and the boisterous Yuletide reels.
A northern story-teller must try to order his words into the same kind of celebration.
G.M.B.
December 1988
1
The man woke up in his hut, and he heard the wind prowling outside. Through the small window of his bothy he could see the dark clouds moving swiftly, high up. A little grey light entered.
Very faintly, he could hear the dash of waves against the headland.
Ah well, there would be no fishing on such a day. He was glad about that. Half a dozen of the young men had spent the night before up at the smithy, drinking the blacksmith’s grey whisky, a month old. It was said to be a very good whisky, the best in the island, the best in all Orkney maybe. And it was Thomas the blacksmith’s special winter brew. This young fisherman did not like it, but if he had refused to go up to the shuttered smithy on the night of the tasting of the winter brew, he would be shamed forever in the parish. The young ploughmen wouldn’t want to be seen speaking to him till after the year was on the turn. This fisherman was a good-natured man, and well-liked everywhere. It would be a sorrow to him to be denied the friendship of his fellow bachelors, even for a day or two.
Next winter it would be different. In June he would be married to Norda, and then he would be no longer expected to have a first taste of the awful new home-distilled whisky up at the blacksmith’s. A married man was not wanted on those occasions.
Ah well, he had gone up to taste the winter whisky at the smithy – and he knew well what the outcome would be – and now he lay here in his bed, with misery in his head and stomach, and lead in his bones.
He couldn’t remember much of the celebration either, after the first hour. There had been a chorus or two, and Jock of the Mill had tried to tell a ghost story but had forgotten the end, and that had brought on him a storm of derision. And all the time the bowl of grey rank stuff had gone round, replenished now and then from the great tilted stone jar of Thomas the blacksmith.
How the young island men had teased each other, awkwardly and gently to begin with!
Even though he took only small sips out of the circling bowl, the raw whisky made his throat wince. And his stomach burned, as if rags were smouldering there.
All at once, it seemed, he remembered little more of the night’s drinking. He remembered, vaguely, that there had been a fight, two young men from rival farms raging about each other with tangled arms and strenuous shoulders, and the blacksmith tearing them apart. And he remembered Dod the fisherman from the Voe slithering off the bench and being carried over and laid down beside the forge. He remembered, dreamily, Will the orra-boy at the Glebe letting the bowl half full of whisky fall from his hands with first a splash and then the shattering of the bowl in a hundred clay shards. He remembered, quite distinctly, the drunken lad fumbling with the bowl, and the slow descent of a sheet of grey whisky on to the flagstone, and the fine curve the bowl made as it followed the liquor, and the faraway splash and the fine clean crisp crash … After that he remembered nothing.
Somehow he had found his way back through the midnight to the bothy. He was sure that no one had carried him home. That would have been a shame past bearing. He wondered, through his hangover, at the perils of his mile-long stagger between the smithy and his hut. The last two hundred yards was a narrow twisting track down the sea-banks.
It was well past noon. In two hours the sun would be down.
The storm would come to nothing. Already the sky westward was shredding thin, and the sun shone weakly through. The wind had shifted to the south now. The sea was quieter in the bay.
Tomorrow he could set his creels. He would have to set his creels, for more than a few shillings would have to be scraped together for the wedding in June. Tomorrow was the shortest day – after that the tides of light would begin to flow.
This bothy at the Taing that his great-grandfather had built was going to be pulled down, or burnt, and he and half a dozen other young men were going to build a proper house of quarried stone. And there he would bring Norda his young wife.
He threw off the blanket and heaved his wretched flesh-and-blood-and-bones on to the edge of the bed. He had slept in his clothes, but some very old instinct of propriety had made him take off his leather sea-boots, drunk as he was.
The mackerel bait was there in the jar. The creels, fifty of them, were neatly stacked in the corner next the sea.
Would he get them all baited before the sun went down? He would have to – it would be today an enormous pain-racked labour – he could not work in the darkness, and he had forgotten to put fish-oil in the lamp.
He took down the first creel, and then looked for the knife to cut the bait. What should have been the simplest of tasks called, this day, for courage and concentration.
A voice from the open door said, ‘What thinks thu thu’re doing, man?’
It was Norda, of course. ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ he said. ‘What does it look like? I’m trying to do my work so that we can be married in summer’ …
Norda took the knife out of his heavy hand.
‘It’s a good thing,’ she said, ‘that I came when I did. Do you not know what day this is?’
‘It’s the day after the winter whisky drinking,’ he said. ‘I’m suffering because of it.’
‘The morn’s Thomasmas Day,’ said Norda. ‘Nobody works on Thomasmas Day. If thu had baited one creel, man, something pitiful and cruel would have happened to thee. Thu may be sure of that. There would be no wedding next June, and no house built, and I’d end up a poor old withered woman in the black croft of Byres up there on the side of the hill.’
‘That’s all nonsense,’ said the young fisherman. ‘Time all that superstition was forgotten.’
But he put the knife back on the table, and stacked the creel once more.
‘What fools men are!’ she said. ‘They all hate that coarse whisky the blacksmith makes. And yet they must take part in it, to show what fine manly chaps they are … Look at the way thee hand’s shaking! Thu’d have cut thee fingers off. But that would be nothing to the worse things that would happen. Go back to thee bed, man. Look, I’ve brought thee some fresh milk. I knew it would be like this with thee. All the parish women knew what was going on in the smithy last night. The milk’ll lie kind on thee stomach. Here’s some lamp oil too, in this flask.’
He crawled back into bed as sore as if he had fought with a whale all night.
‘It’s kind and good wisdom we have from the folk that have been in the kirkyard for hundreds of years,’ said Norda.
The sun through the webbed window was setting in a red and black smoulder, close to its southern meridian.
She smoothed the dark sweat-tightened curls of his hair and beard. This man Aaron Rolfson was to be the provider of their children. But the labour of every man is a chancy thing, and it is best always to hold carefully the old customs and ceremonies of the folk. In the strictness of the observance there is a sweetness and a release.
After the girl had lit the lamp – for now the midwinter shadows were gathering swiftly – she sat on the edge of the bed and sang to him:
The very babe unborn
Cries ‘Oh, dule! dule!’
For the breaking o’ Tammasmas night
Five nights afore Yule.
The words fell, like soothest drops, into his bruised ear.
2
For more than a year the man had known himself to be drained of ideas and images. He had been able to do nothing at his ‘work of words’.
‘I’ll go back to my sources,’ he said. ‘That may unlock something.’
His roots lay in an island in the far north. He had never seen the place. All he knew were the few stories a grandfather had told him when he was very young. And his grandfather had left Orkney as a child, when his own father the seaman settled in Leith. But the power and the strangeness of the stories had remained with him always. In time he became a story-teller himself, a moderately successful author of adventure stories, spy stories, sophisticated thrillers. He had won a certain fame that he knew would go out, and never be rekindled, after his death. Several of his novels had been made into films. Financially, he was well off. There was no necessity for him to write another page, ever.
But the idleness and the impotence irked him increasingly.
He bought a copy of a new translation of the saga of the islands: a marvellous account of the medieval Norse earls of Orkney and their friends and enemies, their viking exploits, their bouts of piety, their winter burnings, their shifting relationships with the great king of Norway in the east. ‘If only I could write as lithely and powerfully as that old nameless story-teller.’
It was getting on for midwinter. ‘We are going north to the islands,’ he told his wife. ‘I think I may be able to pick up a thread or two again. It is just possible.’
Everything went wrong from the start. There was fog – the planes were delayed for two days. They lingered in Kirkwall. He visited the Norse Cathedral of Saint Magnus.
They waited in a draughty shelter at a village pier for the ferry to take them to the island. It was a stormy crossing. His wife wasn’t sick, but among the spindrift and the plungings and the broken circles of gulls she gave him one look of utter misery and reproach.
The island of his ancestors, when he stepped ashore, was far from welcoming. A cold rain stung their faces.
The little hotel was one of those modern buildings that can be seen anywhere in the world, synthetic walls hastily bolted together. Except for the young proprietor and his wife, it was empty. ‘You see, sir,’ she said at the desk, ‘we don’t expect visitors in winter. The staff leave at the end of September’ …
The room was bitterly cold. He had to put coins in a meter before the bars of a little electric fire began to glow.
He went out alone into wind and rain. Desolation and ugliness all around. Most of the crofts were in ruins. A few sheep moved on the hill. A dog barked distantly.
According to the sailor grandfather, the great place for stories had been the blacksmith’s in the village. He met a boy on the road. With quick courtesy, the boy pointed to the road that led to the village. He came to it at last, a cluster of a dozen houses at a crossroads, a bleak old church, a shop that called itself a ‘general merchant’s’ … In the shop which was also the post office he bought tobacco and asked where he might find the smithy. ‘No,’ said the apple-cheeked wife, ‘there’s been no smithy there for twenty years and more. The smithy got run down, you know, once the tractors took over from the work-horses. That’s the building over there across the road, it’s a garage now. The blacksmith’s grandson, he runs it, if ever you need a taxi … This weather, it’s awful! I hope it improves for you’ …
His wife was in bed, reading, when he got back to the hotel. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ she said.
‘Not yet,’ he said.
He went to the bar. It was deserted and the shutter was up. He rang the bell. The young hotelier came. He asked for a double whisky.
The sun was down. Shadow by black shadow, the stormy greyness of the short winter day was being quenched. His family archaeology would have to wait till tomorrow. The young hotelier was English. He knew nothing about the island families.
‘There’s a house on the island called Taing,’ the man said. ‘Would you know where it is?’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the hotelier. ‘We’ve only been in the island a year.’
In the bar, over another large whisky, he turned the pages of the paperback Orkneyinga Saga. There were magnificent winter stories in it.
He closed the book and looked through the window. It was black dark outside, though it was only half-past five. The wind had torn the clouds apart. A few stars shone through the rent. His spirit stirred inside him. A faint glimmer of starlight moved on the turbulence of the sea.
‘Would you be wanting anything more?’ said the hotelier.
The writer and his wife ate a supper that came mostly out of tins. The chef had left at the beginning of winter, too.
They hardly spoke to each other. He had never seen such coldness of reproach on that lovely face.
He liked the woman who kept the shop. Next morning she wondered, aloud, over the purchase of tobacco, why on earth anybody would be wanting to come to the island at this time of year. Would he be a birdwatcher? The folk who dug up the old mounds and stones, they came at any old time. She wouldn’t wonder if it wasn’t government business that took him north. Or something to do with the nuclear energy or the oil.
‘Are there any Rolfsons in the island nowadays?’ he said. ‘That’s my name. I’m looking for places connected with my family.’
Well, if that wasn’t a wonder! Of course lots of folk came to the island looking for their ancestors, generally in summer when the weather was good. Every summer there were five or six lots of Americans looking for ‘their roots’ – that’s what they called the old ruined ruckles of crofts their ancestors had emigrated from … She had heard tell of the Rolfsons. But no, there were no Rolfsons in the island now – not one – only them in the kirkyard … Oh, it had been a great pleasure, talking to him. She hoped the weather would improve. But it was winter, near the shortest day. Some of the older men might be able to help him. Old Tom Skaill at Ness, he had a long memory now. Old Tom could go ranging back through the generations.
The church was locked. He read on the notic. . .
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