Entry Island

We set off in the morning, a brown pony tethered to our cart and pulling it along rutted and potholed roads till we struck the main north — south highway. It was a touch wider, perhaps, than the roads I was used to, and deeply scarred from so much traffic heading to and from Stornoway.

I sat up next to my father and told him I thought that I could walk faster than our pony. But my father said we needed the cart to bring back our winter provisions, so I should be patient with the beast and be thankful that we had her to bear the load on the road home.

It was the first time I had strayed further from our village than Sgagarstaigh, or Ard Mor, and I was amazed at the size of our island. Once you left the sea behind you, you could walk all day without ever seeing it again. But the land was pitted with wee lochs reflecting the sky, and it broke up the monotony of the landscape.

The thing that amazed me most, though, was the size of the sky. It was enormous. You saw much more of it than ever you did at Baile Mhanais. And it was always changing with the wind. You might see rain falling in the distance from a bank of black cloud. But if you turned your head just a little the sun would be shining somewhere else and there could be a rainbow vivid against the black.

The heather was a wonderful deep purple, punctuated by the yellow heads of the wild tormentil that grew everywhere. At first, as we left the mountains behind us in the south, the land folded over on itself again and again, broken only by the silver-mossed rock that burst through the peat, and the streams and rivers that tumbled from higher ground, teeming with fish.

‘Why is it,’ I asked my father, ‘that we don’t eat more fish when the rivers are so full of them?’

His face set and he glowered at the road ahead of him. ‘Because those that own the land won’t let us take them,’ he said. ‘The fish in these rivers, boy, are only for those and such as those. And if you’re caught taking one, you’ll end up in the jail faster than you can say bradan mór’ — which was the Gaelic for big salmon. And plenty of big salmon there were, too. In just a few weeks they would be fighting their way upstream, jumping the rocks and waterfalls to spawn somewhere up in the hills.

As we got further north the land flattened out, and there was not a tree in sight. You could see for miles across the moor towards the west, and on our right I caught occasional glimpses of the sea. The Minch, they called it, and I knew that somewhere beyond The Minch lay the mainland of Scotland.

As darkness fell we were still some miles from town. My father drew our cart into the lee of a crop of rocks where we were sheltered from the wind and unwrapped the marag dhubh that my mother had sliced and fried for us before we left. Blood from the cow, mixed with oatmeal and a little onion. Black pudding they call it now in English, but we knew it then as famine food. Blood drained from the beast in small quantities so that you got at least some protein without having to kill the animal.

And then we slept beneath a tarpaulin, huddled together for warmth, the canvas pulled up over our heads to protect us from the midges, those wee biting flies that come out in black bloody clouds when the wind drops.

It was fine weather when we reached town the next morning and made our way among the carts and traps that rattled along the length of Cromwell Street. There were whitewashed cottages on one side, and tall stone buildings the like of which I had never seen before, gables and dormers and bay windows. On the other side sunlight caught the wind-dimpled waters of the inner harbour where fishing boats were lined up at the quay. A spit of land crammed with shops and houses separated the inner and outer harbours. And anchored out in the bay beyond them, several tall, three-masted sailing ships sat proud on the high tide.

Away to our right, on the hill that rose above the inner harbour, Seaforth Lodge dominated the skyline, a great big two-storey stone house and outbuildings that commanded marvellous views of the town and harbour and the ragged coastline to the east.

‘Who owns that?’ I asked my father.

‘A Mr James Matheson,’ he said. ‘A very rich man who has just bought the whole of the Isle of Lewis.’ He said he had heard that Matheson paid one hundred and ninety thousand pounds for the island. And I could not imagine so much money. ‘It means he owns everything, and everybody, on it,’ my father said. ‘Just like Sir John Guthrie at Ard Mor owns the Langadail estate, and everything and everybody on it. Including us.’

When we reached the centre of the town my father told me to go and explore while he made his tour of the grocery and hardware stores and the ship’s chandlers, to buy tools and grain, and a little something for my mother and the girls. He grinned at me. ‘And a little baccy for myself.’