Authors: Amy Liptrot
Almost against my will, I’m becoming more interested in learning about and visiting these places and have now been to all of the inhabited islands but three: archaeology-heavy Wyre;
Auskerry, home to just one family who changed their surname to Auskerry; and Papa Stronsay, where the only inhabitants are a community of monks, the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer.
It’s surprising to me that, after the corncrake season finishes and they have migrated back to Central Africa, I choose to go even further from the city: I’m spending the winter on Papa Westray, known as Papay, the most north-westerly and one of the smallest inhabited Orkney islands, just four miles long by one mile wide with seventy residents. Papay is a long, thin island. In map form, it looks a bit like a Wotsit, or an old man with a walking-stick, vomiting. I’d visited in the summer to help the RSPB count rare
Primula scotica
and liked the place, sensing a friendly community proud of their beautiful island.
An air service operates between Kirkwall and the north Orkney islands of Papay, Westray, Eday, Sanday and North Ronaldsay. The smallest and most northerly of these islands, Papay and North Ronaldsay, where ferries arrive just once or twice a week, are particularly reliant on the plane. The island’s teenagers make the twenty-minute journey to Kirkwall on Mondays and Fridays, attending the secondary school and staying in the halls-of-residence during the week.
Early one morning in mid-November, before it is light, Mum drops me off at Kirkwall airport. At the North Isles desk, the pilots and airport staff know most of the passengers by name. There are no queues or passport checks: we just walk across
the runway, the same runway from which Dad was taken to hospital the day I was born, and use a step to enter the eight-seater propeller plane. Inside, there is no division between the passengers and the pilot – he simply turns in his seat to tell us to put on our seatbelts. Being in such a small aircraft feels like being in a car in the sky. As we rise, I grip my seat. Day is breaking. We pass over the town and see fishing boats and ferries below. We fly over Thieves Holm, an uninhabited skerry to which witches and criminals were once banished, and over the now-uninhabited Hellier Holm with its lighthouse, over Shapinsay and its Victorian castle, and Egilsay and the Norse kirk where St Magnus was executed.
I relax. It’s a privilege to travel like this and I feel good when I’m going somewhere. The movement of the plane settles me and I think about what I’m doing. I’ve been back in Orkney for most of a year but still often feel off-kilter and ill-tuned. It is time to find my own place but this time I’m going north, not south. I want to experience life on a very small island, smaller than the Orkney Mainland with its two small towns. On Papay I know I’ll be part of a small community of seventy, bound together by sharing a limited area of land. I want to find out if anything else binds the people. My living costs will be low and a winter in my own house, close to the sea, will be the next step in my recovery. I want the islands to continue holding me together and keeping me up.
The North Isles are spread out below and, as the sky lightens, we pass above illuminated fish farms, aquamarine bays and dark skerries before reaching Papay. The island is small, low and green,
mostly split into orderly fields by dykes and fences. The sea churns white at its rocky edges, as if the island is constantly fighting off engulfment.
We land briefly on Westray before making a two-minute hop over to Papay – the shortest scheduled flight in the world. Papay’s airport at first seems little more than a field and a shed. Flights are met by farmers Bobby and his brother David, who, I learn, two or three times a day break from their work, put on waterproof uniforms and drive 4x4s to the airport to attend to the plane. Jan, who lives on the island and whom I met when I was here in the summer, is waiting to meet me. I’m carrying, among other things, a bag of fire kindling, my laptop, three kilos of porridge and thermal underwear. She drives me just a couple of minutes along the road that bisects the island to the little pink house where I’ll be living for the next four months.
The RSPB has a reserve on Papay and the house is the RSPB warden’s cottage, named Rose Cottage for its lurid pink paint job, making it distinct from the stone and pebble-dashed houses on the island. Locally, the cottage is called ‘the birdy hoose’, home during summer to the ‘birdy wife’ or ‘birdy man’ but it is usually empty over the winter. I’m no longer working for the RSPB but when I realised they had a house empty for the winter and asked about it, they kindly agree to let me stay there, paying a small rent and keeping the place dry. This winter there will be a light on in Rose Cottage.
I had been warned that the house, which I’ve not visited before, is draughty and cold, and when I arrive, I am apprehensive. It has been empty for a few weeks and smells slightly damp,
but once I get the open fire going and hang a heavy curtain over the low door to block draughts, it’s really quite cosy in the kitchen. I sit in the old armchair by the fire, looking around at the mismatched paintwork and crockery. The house has no insulation so, like the caravan, it will be impossible to live here without being aware of the weather.
The cottage, built in the sixties to house workers building a ‘new’ (as it’s still known) pier for the ferry to moor, is at the narrowest part of the island, just five hundred metres from each side to the sea. Through the two windows in the kitchen facing south and east, I can see the water surrounding the island on three sides, port, fore and starboard, and watch the sun’s short southern journey as I did last winter while building dykes. Here, I will have a constant awareness that I am on an island and have been told that, in high weather, sea spray can be blown the whole way across our small strip of land.
There are objects in the house collected by the wardens who have spent summers here: shells, bones, small pieces of crockery worn down into rounded pebbles by the sea. A vertebra of a small whale hangs on the bathroom door and a perfect spherical sea urchin sits on the mantelpiece. I find dissected owl pellets containing the bones of Orkney voles, and a storm petrel wing, still carrying the distinctive and not unpleasant musky odour of the bird.
Although I’m new to Papay, I’m not new to rural island life. Rose Cottage is at the end of a farm track and the sound of a
tractor passing my bedroom window is familiar. I grew up with the cycles of the farm seasons and know the daily winter feeding routine, when the hay or silage harvested in the summer is doled out to hungry livestock, and note the day the cattle are taken into the byres for the winter. Outside, I wear wellies all winter, like Dad does most of the year.
I decide that I will spend my time in the kitchen with the fire, leaving the rest of the house to the cold. From the kitchen, I see the Holm, Papay’s calf island, and the creel boat belonging to Douglas, now the island’s only fisherman. I can see all of the biggest North Isles apart from Stronsay. To the east is a landmass with cliffs forming three steps: ‘the heads of Eday’. Further along the horizon lies Sanday, and when the sun rises, it lights the island’s curves from behind, making silhouettes of wind turbines on the hilltops. North again, on a clear day North Ronaldsay is visible, so low-lying that just the houses can be seen, disembodied and floating on the sea.
On the other side of Papay, to the west, is our nearest neighbour Westray, home to three hundred people, supporting such things as a shellfish factory, a junior-secondary school and a chippie. The peedie ferry goes from Papay to Westray and back every day, carrying one teenage schoolboy and goods from the bakery. Behind Westray, the heather-clad mound of Rousay rises, and beyond that, the hills on Orkney’s Mainland. I watch clouds decaying into rain or snow on the Mainland on days when it is dry on Papay.
On Papay itself, down the road along the middle of the island, beyond the airfield, is the cluster, not quite big enough to be
called a village, of the post office, church, school and shop/hostel, seeming closer than it feels when I am trying to cycle there on a windy day.
At the moment there is still some green in the fields, but as the winter progresses the landscape will become more washed out and by March the view from my kitchen will be at times almost monochrome, if it wasn’t for the fluorescent orange windsock at the airport. I didn’t imagine I’d move to Papay and find myself in a flight path. On these winter mornings, I’m often woken by the plane descending over Rose Cottage. Sometimes it spooks every bird on the island, it seems, and I watch from my kitchen window ten or so different flocks rising at once, the sky suddenly busy with clouds of greylag geese, turnstones, golden plovers, snipe.
Having my own place again is a risk. This would be the perfect location to do some solitary drinking. I remember those nights at the kitchen table on the farm when I was working on Flotta and later in London bedrooms. Each session would take the same pattern: at two to five drinks I would be elated, feeling free and adult; but after six to ten a desperate loneliness came and I would make frantic efforts to avoid being alone. Often, in the mornings, I’d go through my phone history, text messages and emails to find out whom I’d tried to contact, looking for an audience or affection.
I went through years of hung-over days when my only aim
would be to avoid talking to anyone or having to do much work. I had a couple of hours, every day or two, of heady drunkenness and spent the rest of the time either repairing the damage done or hanging on – white-knuckling – until I could get to the shop, be alone, and start the cycle again. I am not going to fall into that unhappy unproductive pattern again. Mum said that, during these coming months on Papay, I would need to call on strengths I hadn’t used before. She first moved to Orkney at the beginning of a long winter, so she knows.
Rose Cottage is like a perfectly designed halfway house, where I can have my own place and develop healthy, responsible routines, within the sheltered community of the island.
There are no flatmates or close neighbours to hear me crying at night. I worry about being the type of clueless incomer with few practical skills, who gets things wrong and can’t cope in the first harsh winter. In rough weather the little concrete-block house makes noises: rain on the windows, wind shuddering down the chimney and creeping in under the door. Southerly winds are when it’s coldest in the house, when draughts sneak through imperceptible cracks in the window frames.
It’s been some time since anyone’s touched me. This week I’ve seen more seals than people, noses uppermost in the bay. There is the opportunity of isolation here in our little houses down tracks, of security in the routines of island life. I used to have headaches and miss school several days a month. In drink, I found
new escapes and solaces; I had hangovers and called in ‘sick’ to work. I was lazy and flaky but also maybe I needed those spaces to retreat to. Since I’ve been sober I have treated myself like a fragile object, giving myself plenty of space and simplicity, weeks spent keeping close and low.
There are things found on Mainland Orkney that we don’t have on Papay: a swimming pool, a pub, a resident minister, a doctor. There are also no hares or hedgehogs here. But the mammals we do have, we have in abundance: seals, rabbits, mice. Scientists are interested in studying small island populations. The house mouse –
Mus domesticus
– on Papay was found in a study to have a difference in mandible morphology: bigger jaws than mice elsewhere. Limited to a small breeding pool, the mice evolved to suit their habitat.
I tell people I came here simply for the cheapest rent I could find. Although that isn’t completely true, I didn’t choose to come here to ‘downsize’ or ‘get back to nature’. It wasn’t my plan to return home for recovery, it was more that I came back for a visit and got stuck. This is where I come from, not – like most English people in Orkney – where I chose to come to. The last year has been a gradual process of saying, ‘I’ll just stay for a few more weeks,’ for dyking or lambing, then for a few months the corncrakes, and now I’ve committed to a whole winter on Papay. Orkney keeps holding onto me.
I get outside every day and have set tasks to sustain myself over the winter. I’ve heard that, to the far north-west, you can see Fair Isle on a clear day and I scan the horizon with binoculars. I search the beach for groatie buckies, the local name for
small pink cowrie shells, prized as the most special kind of shell to find. I bake bread. I photograph patterns. I pick up driftwood for the fire – best done after a full moon or a gale, the most fruitful coast depending on which way the wind has been blowing.
While I was the corncrake wife, I was busy and professional and rarely mentioned what had happened to me in the previous few years. Here, I have time and space so am able to let myself think about how and why I made the decisions I did, and in particular what made me realise that opting for rehab and total sobriety was not an overreaction to my situation.
Less than a month after I was arrested for drink-driving in Orkney, I was back in London. Although I know the attack was not my fault, it would not have happened if I had not been so drunk.
Starting in the afternoon, I met Gloria, as I often did, at the pub on the market. The stalls were packing up, revealing a debris of discarded vegetables and cardboard coffee cups. It was still afternoon but people were drunk, sitting on the kerb with pint glasses or cans from the corner shops. Gloria had recently moved to Hackney from Notting Hill after refusing to take any more money from her father. That summer she still had savings and I was pretending I was okay, acting like I still had a job.
I liked to roll the chilled glass against my face while listening to Gloria’s lightly sarcastic comments about mutual friends. We talked brightly, picking out the positives in our unlikely job
prospects and joking about the men we’d hurt. In the female bluster of mutual reassurance I forgot to say what I felt: that I was scared and that something was about to give.
From the market, my drinking moved on to a Vietnamese restaurant, then back to my brother’s house, where I was sleeping on the sofa, to get dressed up, then the club. Someone gave me some MDMA. I tried to go home but on the bus some people – I’d never met them before – told me about a warehouse party and I joined them. It was wild, staircases full of bodies, some of whom I knew. I’d never been to the place before and it was so good. I suddenly realised that it was close to my ex-boyfriend’s house and I wanted to tell him about it. I’d gone over the peak: my excited drunkenness had tipped over into recklessness and self-pity.