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The oddity of a closely remembered late childhood is that I might not perhaps remember it in such detail had it genuinely been my own. Nonetheless, it did its binding work. Above the house is a loch called Loch Scoltaire. Each child kept his or her wooden boat slung in the boathouse there. In the centre of the loch is a small island, surrounded by other islets on which terns nest and dive-bomb your head as you row or swim to the central island. There is a Victorian pleasure-house, suitable for picnics and sketching, from which, in the nineteen-twenties, Papa’s glamorous mother might have gone swimming naked before setting up her easel. One summer when Andrew was about six, it was mooted that he was brave and old enough to have me in his charge overnight for a camping expedition in the little house on the island. He was an enchanting child, with a head like a broad bean and an enormous mouth. We set out up the hill through the heather and gorse and over two rusty stiles with our equipment. Andrew was in his striped pjs, maroon dressing gown and those old-fashioned slippers that little boys used to have resembling those worn by elderly gentlemen. I can’t remember what I was wearing, but it wouldn’t have been anything like as practical as Andrew’s attire. It had been made very plain that Andrew was the expedition leader, as indeed he was, since I can’t row. We pulled out the littlest dinghy, Duckling, climbed into her, trimmed our weights as far as we could and Andrew rowed lustily to the small island where we made fast the painter.
We settled down in our sleeping bags. We had brought two eggs for the morning and firelighters and matches. I was to be on wood collection duty. The island is maybe the size of four king-sized beds, the wee house the size of one. We told one another a few scary stories and soon Andrew, dear bean, was fast asleep. The next thing I knew was that we were participants in a really creaky Enid Blyton or Swallows and Amazons plot. I heard the muffled sound of oars and saw the fairy fire. I heard the deadly tread. All the other siblings except Jane, who was too grown up, had accoutred themselves as ghouls and skeletons and beasties. Anyone else in the house who could be persuaded to come along had done so. One house guest had had the idea of laying paraffin on the water and lighting it. But Andrew and I slept through that part of the invasion. It was such a comfortable haunting, safely to be teased by people who had gone to the trouble of frightening one just enough and then arriving to reassure, so that there we all were on the tiny island inside the already small island of Colonsay, sitting in the brick house with six little wooden boats pulled up stern to and painters tied with a round turn and two half hitches. In the morning Andrew and I went home to the big house for breakfast even though our disgusting boiled eggs had been so filling and nourishing.
With great patience, Ji
The best of the wasp incident was that every day Papa would say, ‘Claude darling, are you sure you’re all right, you seem to have got bigger.’ So, yet again, he made a comforting repetitiveness that when I started to deflate meant that the other children could tease me painlessly by pretending to be Papa. Later, we discovered that I was also allergic to Wasp-Eze, allergic both to the attack and to its prescribed redress.
The length of the summer days in the North, and the delicious light that lingers, retreats and is reborn, fills my memory with summer evenings when we smoked the mackerel we caught or made moules marinière in a bucket. The sea in summer can be purple or it can be aquamarine and so it is with the sky. Coming back from long days on a beach with one’s young children in a flotilla of boats, watching the kittiwakes and chugging into harbour with the remains of a picnic and piles of sandy tired children has become part of my deep life. One day, we were at sea in a small chunky boat, about eighty years old, like all Papa’s boats an orphan. We were just off a bay named Balnahard where the mackerel crowd. We had our darrows down and were waiting for fish. As a child I loved the gutting and it used to be my job to gut at sea, but since having children I can’t do it. Suddenly everyone’s darrows were leaping and on each hook were not one but three or sometimes five mackerel and then we found ourselves witness to what might have been an illustration of the food chain. From the sea leapt a sparkling cloud of colourless, minute fishlets, followed by a jacquard silver-and-blue arrow of mackerel followed by three perfect, classical dolphins as though posed upon a vase and then, enormously, slowly, holding back time with its size, the huge bridge of an emerging basking shark, three times the size of our boat.
Sometimes Papa might be persuaded, if the evening was flat calm, to take us, as children, and later with our own children, through the strand between Colonsay and Oransay, but at low tide so there was a danger of going aground. The benefit, however, was that when he turned the engine right down and steered as he can by feel, we were among seal families, for it is just off Oransay on Seal Island that the seals go to pup and we could watch them suckle and kiss and roar and chat and sing, the mothers so confident (so long as we kept quiet or did nothing but sing rather than talk) that they did not flop into the water leaving their babies but stayed with them on the kelpy rocks. We have been no more than six inches from those white baby seals with their awful cat-food breath and their black marble eyes. The sea on nights like that was like milk and, going home, there might be phosphorescence in our wake. We would tie up the boat in the harbour and unpack the box full of gutted fish, the exhausted picnic, Papa’s bottle of pink wine and our beach bags, a different colour for each child, with our names embroidered on. I was proud when Ji
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