To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
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started recently to shrink): six foot and a bit. So I decided that since no one knew us on this sudden island, we should go into a pub and order drinks, as well as ask about the tide times. My grannie, Bina, used to enjoy a glass of a sweet stout called Mackeson, and when my mum wasn’t looking she gave me a taste of it – and for it. It must have been a mixture of my Scottish accent and some nervousness, but when I ordered it the landlord put a large bottle of something called Double Maxim on the bar. Brewed by Usher Vaux, it was a brown ale that turned out to be revolting, bitter and sickly at the same time. Because we could not risk being found out as underage drinkers (we had seen a policemen in the village), we had to pretend to like it and between the three of us we managed quickly to swallow this vile concoction. Worse was to follow when the barman told us that the causeway would not open again until about 10 p.m.
By the time we left the pub, feeling a little tipsy, having flung down what turned out to be a strong ale (like Newcastle Brown Ale), our spirits plummeted when we saw that the village shop, the only possible source of food, had closed. I went back into the pub and bought three packets of crisps. Sitting on a bench near the ruins of the priory, having untwisted the blue packets of salt, shaken it over the crisps and then shaken the bags, we devoured our meagre supper and agreed that we should probably not cross the causeway in the half-dark and then blunder about trying to find somewhere to camp on the mainland. Better to stay on the island.
But where? The dunes to the north looked promising. When we walked out of the village, past some bungalows that seemed the epitome of comfort, their larders doubtless bulging with food, we saw a sign by the car park that sent our hungry spirits sinking ever lower: ‘By Order of the Cheswick Estates, No Camping’.
Why we decided to walk to Lindisfarne, or whose idea it was, is mercifully lost to memory. And looking back now, having helped raise children of my own, I am amazed that our parents allowed us to go so far from home without any adult accompaniment, or even any means of contacting them. My parents did not have the phone and I doubt if my companions’ families did either. It never occurred to me to ask them. In many ways the 1960s were more innocent times, but those degrees of trust and freedom still surprise me.
I recall that the year before, the three of us had been inspired by President Kennedy’s challenge to Americans to improve their fitness. His measure was simple. If you could walk fifty miles in twenty-four hours, you could claim to be fit – and in the summer of 1964, the year after Kennedy died in Dallas, we did it. Setting off in the middle of the afternoon, we walked through the night to Berwick-upon-Tweed from Kelso and back again with only a brief rest in a bus shelter. Somewhere near Norham, where the road bends around the entrance to a farm, we sat down on a grassy bank to eat the last of our sandwiches. I must have fallen asleep, for when I woke in the darkness, my friends had disappeared. Leaving me alone. As I took a few, fearful steps down the long and lonely road home, they jumped out from behind a tree. Perhaps because we managed that without mishap, our parents allowed us to do another long distance walk – although if we had told them of our antics on the causeway, it would have been the last one.
While the reasons for choosing Lindisfarne have long fled into the darkness of the past, there were plenty of grumbles about being on a bloody island with no food and no choice but to break the law by camping. As we approached the dunes across a broad, open area, a light came on in my head. If we did not camp, but only slept out, then the policeman we had seen could not arrest us. We were not camping, only sleeping. Nothing about that on the sign. And anyway, it was a mild, even balmy, night, with no breeze to speak of. Suddenly it seemed that our troubles were turning into an adventure.
By the time we passed the last of the fenced grass parks and their small, snuffling herd of cows, the sun had set away to the north-west, slipping behind the Cheviots, and gloaming fell. Beyond the farm fields lay the line of sand dunes and as the bright day gave way to full moonlight, we were able to find a path through the undulations and the clumps of spiky marram grass. Looking at a map, more than fifty years later, I think we must have walked towards the north-east corner of the island. So that we could keep lookout – for the police, and perhaps the enraged owner of the Cheswick Estates, or whoever had put up the sign – we searched the horizon for the highest dune.
For our fevered boyhood sense of conspiracy had persuaded us that we would definitely be hunted, tracked down. In the village, all eyes had been on us. From behind curtains, behind the bar, on street corners, as we splashed across the causeway, we had been noticed. Definitely. Strangers were in town. And even now a group of vigilantes (we were well versed in the terms of TV westerns) were probably being deputised by the village policeman to form search parties to find and arrest these intruders. In these parts, Scots had long been thought of as suspect. Even if our lawyers could argue down the charge of illegal camping on a technicality, we could still be convicted of under-age drinking, a serious offence, especially in England, probably. At any moment sirens might wail, blinding searchlights clang on, and we would be hauled off to spend a night in the cells. In the dread phrase, my parents and Bina would be black affronted and my sisters would never let me forget it.
When we scrambled up the highest dune we could find, each step pushing down small avalanches of sand, we saw that there was a shallow plateau behind it, encircled by a ridge of sand held together by marram grass. Hunkering down there, we would be out of sight from below. One of us had found some Bassett’s Treacle Toffees in an ignored pocket and we sucked slowly on the sugar, trying to make each one last.
By some forgotten process, probably because it was all my fault, the under-age drinking in particular, it was decided that I should take the first watch while the other two laid out the ground sheet of the tent (was that camping?) and wriggled into their sleeping bags.
Using the rim of the sand dune like an imaginary rampart, I lay on my front looking south, the direction trouble would come from, and I scanned the twinkling lights of the sleeping village and the dark silhouette of the castle, presumably the stronghold of the fearsome owner of the Cheswick Estates and his henchmen. Far beyond, it seemed, I saw the sweeping beam of a lighthouse playing across the sea. At the time I did not know it was the Longstone light on the Farne Islands, the place from where Grace Darling and her father set out in their famous recue of shipwrecked sailors. Idiotically, I wondered if the light showed up our position to the bands of desperadoes who were roaming in the gloaming, hunting for us.
After a time, I turned to see that my companions were lying still, fast asleep. It was a balmy, windless night, well lit by a full moon, the sort of half-dark sometimes called the summer dim in the north of Scotland, and as thoughts of marauding bands of policemen gradually faded and a silence settled, I found myself looking, almost hypnotically, over the endless wastes of the North Sea and listening to the wash of the waves. To the south, there was enough light in the sky to see the outline of Bamburgh Castle, although I was not sure what it was. Little by little, the dune became less like a rampart and more like a high vantage point, a place from where I could see the sky, the sea and the land. My watchnight cannot have lasted more than an hour or perhaps two, but I remember it vividly.
Perhaps I am reading history backwards, but I think on that moonlit, silent night a peace descended on me, something I had not felt before. It may be that after the excitements, exertions and daftnesses of the day I simply relaxed, realising that no one was looking for us, that we were alone out in the dunes. But if that was so, then surely I would have fallen asleep like my companions. Instead, without knowing it, I think I was keeping vigil, unconsciously allowing the spirits of that place to swirl around me and release a sense of inner calm as I looked out over Creation. This may sound highly unlikely for a fifteen-year-old boy on the threshold of life, but looking back across the years I believe it to be true. It turned out to be a beginning of sorts.
Ignorant of the phrase, I sensed then that the island had a powerful genius loci, was a place of spirits. And each of the many times I have returned in the last fifty years, knowing more, I began slowly to realise that for me Lindisfarne might be more than beautiful, atmospheric. It might be the saving of me.
* * *
Now nearing the end of my seventh decade, I need to face some actuarial facts. I may have ten more summers of active, relatively healthy life in front of me, if I am lucky. But to enjoy them – and face the end when it comes – I need to change what is in my