North Star (27 page)

We stood like that for a long time, oblivious of everything. And we were relaxed. We were no longer fighting each other. We had surrendered to something stronger than ourselves, and standing there with my arms round her, the softness of her body, the pressure of her lips, I felt a strange surge of confidence, a feeling that I had found myself at last – that I knew where I was going now and had the strength to get there. It was a marvellous, quite ecstatic feeling, and not explainable in any way.

‘The kettle,’ she murmured, and pushed me away. The kettle was boiling its head off and we were suddenly both of us laughing for no apparent reason, except that we were happy.

She leaned forward and switched off the gas. She was smiling
now, holding out her hand to me and leading me out of the kitchen. The bedroom looked straight out across the voe and I remember a pale line of light to the west reflected on the water.

Then we were together, and for a long time, it seemed, the world stood still and there was just the two of us, everything beyond that tiny room, beyond the absolute harmony of ourselves and our bodies, as though it had never been, all stress gone, an obliteration in ecstasy.

I had never had this sort of an experience before, the giving and taking without restraint. Love is not a word normally used by trawlermen, but at least I knew it when it happened. And afterwards, there was a lot to talk about, sitting smoking together over coffee in the kitchen.

She put up a parcel of food for me and by then it was full dawn with the cloud all gone and the greenish pink glow of the sun just beginning to limn the line of the hills on the far side of Clift Sound. We kissed and she clung to me a moment, murmuring something about being careful and not doing anything stupid. But she didn’t try and stop me. She knew it was a thing I had to do. ‘There are ordnance survey maps behind the seat,’ she called to me as I drove off. I waved, and then I was up the track and over the hill, with time to wonder what the hell I thought I was doing when I could have stayed with her. But that, I knew, would have been anti-climax after what we had just experienced. At least I was doing something, not waiting around until Gorse arrived.

Up by Scalloway I turned on to the main road and kept going north along the shores of Asta and Tingwall lochs with the sky a brilliant green shading to duck’s egg blue and the steep slopes of the hills standing black above the water as the sun’s glow increased in the east. There were flecks of mackerel cloud ahead and soon all the great bowl of the dawn above the peat hills was aflame. By then I had put Gertrude out of my mind; my thoughts were now concentrated on the journey ahead and what I would find up there at Burra Firth.

The sun was bright in the mackerel sky and it was warm as
I drove through the dale between the black peat hills of Mid and East Kome. Coffee and sandwiches by Loch of Voe, then more black-peat diggings to Dales Voe and up over Swinister to Sullom Voe, where a ship was offloading material at the jetty and the wartime camp had been adapted for the use of the contractors building the oil terminal for the Brent and Dunlin fields. I was able to fill up with petrol here, and in the hotel, now full of contractors’ men, instead of tourists, a surveyor who had just arrived gave me a copy of one of the London papers. I hadn’t had a chance to read a newspaper for several weeks, but the world didn’t seem to have changed. I glanced at the headlines over my coffee and it was all gloom – strikes, disruption, shortages, and Britain as always on the verge of bankruptcy. It seemed incredible that union bosses and more of the media men didn’t come to Shetland and see for themselves the brighter hopes for the future.

An hour later I was at Toft, a north wind driving down Yell Sound, the waters broken and streaked with white. Standing on the pier I couldn’t help thinking what a target Shetland could become when half the lifeblood of industrial Britain was passing through these islands. On Mainland of Shetland the people were of fairly mixed race, infiltrated over the years by Scots and others, but when I crossed into Yell, and farther north to the last island of Unst, I would be among purer Viking stock, men closer to the Faroese, the Icelanders and the Norwegians than to Britain. And if Iceland became wholly Communist, or the Russians moved across the Pasvik River into Finnmark in the north of Norway, how would these men react? In this watery land, touched with the old glacial hand of the last Ice Age, England seemed very remote and London a whole world away.

Sitting in the Land-Rover, reading the paper while I waited for the ferry, I came across the headline:
VILLIERS HITS BACK AS VFI SHARES TUMBLE
. It was an account of the DTI Enquiry in London into the Star-Trion deal and Villiers was challenging his detractors to risk their own money on the West Shetland shelf –
The trouble with our country is that politicians and their bureaucratic masters are only interested in equality in poverty
–
in how a meagre cake can be shared more fairly
–
when they should be bending all their energies instead towards increasing the size of that cake by every means in their power. This is what I am doing
,
and shall go on doing
–
whatever the cost
,
whatever the risk
.
Call me a buccaneer if you like
–
that is a term of abuse thrown at me by Mr Swingler
,
my own Conservative member
.
All right
,
I am a buccaneer
,
and when times are hard
,
as they are now
,
Britain is the loser that there aren’t more of us. but when
North Star
brings in another field – as I am confident it will
–
you won’t call me a buccaneer then. You’ll pay tribute to my sagacity
,
claim me as the shareholders’ friend
,
while others will call me a capitalist and scream for nationalization of my company
.

The ferry was halfway across now, and I sat watching it crawl like a steel beetle across the foam-flecked waters of the Sound, seeing in my mind the man I had talked to on
North Star
at bay in that courtroom, angry and obstinate, fighting back with all that extraordinary vitality and energy of his. I turned to the City page. There had been a run on VFI shares, now standing at a new low and less than half the price they had been when the market as a whole had bottomed after the Arab oil embargo. I was thinking of
North Star
then, of its loneliness out there in the march of the westerlies, and of its extreme vulnerability under the orders of a man near desperation and periodically under the control of a toolpusher whose luck appeared to have run out.

Tailor-made to our purpose.

The ferry berthed while I was thinking about that purpose, about who would gain. Not the workers. Nor industry. Certainly not Britain. The direction my thoughts were taking scared me and I drove on to the ferry feeling as though, in crossing the Sound, I was moving into another world, a step nearer the destiny to which all my life had been a preparation. It was not a nice feeling.

From Flukes Hole on the other side I took the lesser road that ran up the western coast of Yell. From Gutcher it is only just over a mile across Bluemull Sound to the island of Unst and then six miles on a good straight road to the main port of Baltasound, another two to Haroldswick. There, in a little house behind the harbour, up near the school, an old man who understood the use of words took me into a strange wild world of myth and legend. He had bright bird-like eyes, intensely blue in the dark wind-wrinkled face, large gnarled hands, and a voice so soft, so lyrical in speech, that to hear him talk was like listening to music. His name was Robert Bruce – ‘That’s no’ a verra good name to have in the island of Unst.’

I thought he was referring to the early Scottish king, but no, he was harking back to a Laurence Bruce – ‘the Great Foud of Zetland’, he called him – a tyrannical land-grabber who, from his castle at Muness, had held all Unst in the thrall of Scottish law during the last days of the first Elizabeth when James was still only king of Scotland. It was a strange, haunting story, a Romeo and Juliet legend of the north, and at first I did not understand why he was telling it to me.

When I had arrived in Haroldswick I had gone to the Post Office, and because I had to explain my need of accommodation, I said I was an ornithologist. Birds were the main attraction for visitors and it would allow me to walk the hills around Burra Firth without exciting comment. The Bruces had just had a cancellation, so I had been sent to them. But Robert Bruce, a retired schoolmaster living with his sister, now occupied his time helping with the preservation and marking of seabirds on the western cliffs and I don’t think it took that shrewd, beady-eyed little Scot long to realize I was no ornithologist. So instead of talking about birds, he told me the story of Edwin and Helga, and how, to escape the wrath of her people, whose leader had been murdered by one of Bruce’s minions, she had rushed her lover to the family’s little boat and sailed for Yell in a northerly gale, past the great cliffs of Vallafield,
to be lost for ever in the roaring tide race off the entrance to Bluemull Sound.

It is too long a story to repeat, and I have forgotten much of it – and in any case the beauty of it was in the telling. But what I do remember is Bruce’s guile and greed, his despicable ruthlessness, and the fierce, law-abiding determination of the islanders who had sailed an open boat three hundred miles to Scotland to lay their just complaints before the King in Edinburgh. ‘And do you ken why the Scots were in Zetland?’ Bruce asked me, his bright eyes fixed on me like the Ancient Mariner. ‘Because the islands were handed over to them as a pledge for a Danish princess’s dowry. The people were subject only to the Scots king, retaining their own laws and customs, but history is strewn with conditions of treaty unfulfilled and Bruce, as gauleiter for the Crown, violated them with a vengeance.’ Looking at me very closely, he added, ‘In this lonely island of Unst we are very vulnerable to big northern shifts of power.’

And then, as his sister took the blackened kettle from the hob and made the tea, he began telling me an older island story, of the Pictish inhabitants a thousand years ago who, when their brochs were destroyed and all their lands taken by Vikings from the fjords of Norway, had been forced to retreat into the great caverns of the south-west from which they emerged only at night. ‘They were the trolls, you know, the little people of superstition – call them dwarfs, gnomes, fairies, it’s all the same – you watch for them at night, mind your children don’t get stolen and put out offerings to placate them. That’s what the early Norse did and only Coul, the old priest man, captured from the Celts of the south, ever saw the caves in which they had found refuge, and he died just after they had let him go.’ He told me the story then of Gletna Kirk, the church Coul tried to build and which they destroyed in the night, thinking it was to be another of the invaders’ strongholds.

But by then my head was nodding. It had been a long day
and I drank my tea and went to bed, to wake once, briefly, in the night and remember how the old man had harped on successive waves of Northern invaders.

In the morning, after breakfast, I went with him up the road to Burra Firth, about a mile and a half to where a track branched northward. ‘You’ll not be finding many birds up there, not unless you go right to The Noup and that’s a good long tramp by Saxa Vard.’ The blue eyes watched me curiously from under his peaked cap. ‘Better you come with me up Milldale to Tonga. There’s all the birds you could ever want there and I can show you Goturm’s Hole.’

I thanked him and he nodded. ‘Suit yerself.’ He half-turned, then paused. ‘Take the right fork in half a mile and it’ll bring you to Buel Houll. There’s a good view there of The Ness on t’other side of the Firth with Fiska Wick beyond and a fishing boat close inshore. You’ll see in your map there’s a track from just near Buel Houll that winds round Housl Fiel and straight back by the School.’ And then he asked me, ‘You’ve no glasses?’

‘No.’

He slipped his own from off his shoulder. ‘You’ll need them I’m thinking to see what you want to see.’ He nodded then and left me, walking with a steady, tireless stride, his body bowed a little into the west wind. I examined the glasses he had given me. They were Zeiss, small and very compact, but of extraordinary clarity and brilliant magnification. Birdwatchers’ glasses, but he’d known when he handed them to me it wasn’t birds I had come to watch. I went up the track, and before I had reached the fork, I could see the black hull of the fishing boat anchored off a sprawl of buildings on the far side.

I took the left fork, and where the track ended I turned north along the edge of the firth. It was very quiet, only the sound of the seabirds and the lap of the water on the rocks. Root Stacks was right below me and I lay in the grass watching the buildings opposite, across the narrow strip of water. White puffs of cloud sailed over the hills and it was warm, the breeze-block
sprawl of the Root Stacks Hotel basking in the sunshine. Through the glasses I could see the sign quite clearly, a painted board on the stone-built front of what must have been part of the old original steading, and just below it, on a wooden bench, an old man sat dozing in the sun, his face strangely twisted. He had a stick beside him and there was a dog at his feet, a black and white collie curled up on the sheep-cropped grass.

It was all very peaceful and nothing stirred for a long time. Then, shortly after eleven, the dog uncurled itself and began to bark. A Land-Rover was coming down the track. The old man stirred and lifted his head, the disfiguring line of a great scar showing. The Land-Rover stopped and three men got out. One of them was Sandford. The old man shook hands with the other two and they all went into the house, including the dog, and after that the stillness and the quiet descended again.

I must have fallen asleep, for I woke suddenly to the sound of the dog barking. Five men were loading packages into the Land-Rover, the old man watching them, leaning on his stick. They piled into the Land-Rover, Sandford driving it up the track that disappeared behind The Ness to where my map showed the narrow gut of Fiska Wick. Ten minutes later the quiet was shattered by the sound of an outboard and an inflatable with four of them in it nosed out from under The Ness and headed for the fishing boat.