The Last Wanderer Read online

  Not that she was unloved by her father. If anything she was Magnus’s favourite, and he always made a special effort with her out of pity, she thought, because Dolina couldn’t. He never said this, of course, but Ina knew, and instead of feeling better she felt worse. It was almost as though he had unwittingly acknowledged that Dolina had reason for with-holding affection from her daughter and he felt sorry for her. So it was always there, the shadow of the boy called Angus, barring her way to her mother in particular, casting a shadow over her father’s affection. She wished she had been given her own name as well as her own birthday, whatever that name would have been, though she never voiced that thought. Certainly there were no more Polson bairns, and delving deep into her memories and thoughts all those years later she would wonder if that was because Dolina’s grief had barred the bedroom to her husband as surely as her heart had been barred her two youngest bairns.

  Sometimes she wondered if she had got it all wrong, if in fact the entire family had been affected by the loss of Angus, when Ina had thought it had hurt only her and Danny. She began to think this many years later when she was a mother herself and was trying to make sense of her own daughter, Margo, and how she had turned out. But the more questions you thought you’d answered, the more there seemed to be. Just as you thought you had the thing sorted, when you’d chased it to its source, you would find another puzzle waiting there patiently for you, like a fankled skein of wool with so many twists and turns that it could never be undone and you had to abandon it or it would drive you mad. Sometimes you just had to switch off your head and leave it, especially now that her head was so much older and, she admitted it, more easily confused. Anyway, it was just possible, she supposed, that she had tried to make up to her parents, her mother especially, for their lost boy, by sometimes behaving more like Angus might have than Angusina. It gave her a sense, too, of wanting things to be different, or to be somewhere else, in another life where she wasn’t faced daily with this undeclared contest she could never win. She would daydream about what it would be like in a place where Angus had never existed, and maybe that was why she looked beyond her allotted horizons. That and the stars, of course, existing somewhere far away, nightly opening up the promise of distance and travel. There was a universe, she slowly realised, beyond where she lived.

  Ina, like the other Polsons and most of the other islanders, had reddish fair-hair, pale skin and grey eyes – Viking colouring – and they were determinedly proud that they were more Scandinavian than Scottish. Indeed to call a Shetlander ‘Scotch’ was the deepest insult imaginable, as mainland Scots were acknowledged to be the scum of the earth. The Shetlands had been given to Scotland as a royal marriage dowry but that didn’t mean the Shetlanders were Scottish. As Magnus Polson said, ‘If a cat has kittens in a fish box, you don’t call them kippers’. Not only did the Scotch look and behave differently, but they spoke oddly, too, though if you listened hard you could make out some of the things they said – not that you would ever admit that, of course.

  Native Shetlanders had once spoken a Scandinavian language called Norn, but that had died out after the Reformation when bibles began to be written in English, and it was finally seen off by the Union of the Crowns and the influx of lowland Scots who appeared on the islands. For as long as anyone living could remember, Shetland had its own part-Scandinavian, part-Scottish version of English, though the advent of schooling governed from mainland Scotland had brought with it attempts to make the local bairns ashamed of their own language. That the same verbal cleansing had been visited on every bairn in every area of Scotland wasn’t known to the Shetlanders; even if they had known, it would have meant nothing to them. It was none of their business what was happening in a foreign land, and that’s what Scotland was to every Shetland mind. People with names beginning with Mac or Mc were ‘Scotch’, even if their families had been in Shetland for generations, and they were always slightly suspect; so too were those who had come north to find work in the burgeoning fishing industry, who ate creatures like crabs, limpets and mussels; things the native islanders regarded as beneath them and fit only for baiting nets.

  In the winter Magnus would take his family to gather whelks, walking miles along the beach at low tide, turning over stones in the pools. If they were lucky they might have the use of a boat, but mostly Magnus would carry sacks of whelks over the hills on his back. Then they’d be weighed in pecks and bought by the local shops for vouchers that could be redeemed for groceries or provisions. No decent Shetlander would ever eat such things, but the ‘Scotch’ did, so that should tell anybody what they were like. They were all in the fishing and lived ‘ootby the Burgh’, in Burgh Road on the outskirts of Lerwick, along with those regarded as ‘mixed breed’, who had ‘Scotch’ as well as Shetland blood, and Magnus Polson being a fisherman, though a full-blooded Shetland fisherman, his family still lived among them, even if they didn’t trust or like them. The people who lived ‘ootby the Burgh’ were regarded by those who lived ‘inby the Burgh’ as rough and ready, so fights between the bairns at school were commonplace, in which the ‘inby’ bairns called the ‘ootby’ bairns names and received a hiding in reply. Rough and ready they were, as proudly as they were Viking.

  Almost everything in the diet of those days was salted. Magnus, Danny and Ina would catch fish with a hook on a piece of string at the South Mouth of Lerwick Harbour and carry them home in a basket, to be gutted, split and soaked in a tub of brine for forty-eight hours before being laid out on planks of wood in the sun and wind to dry. Then, to make them edible, they had to be soaked in water overnight and boiled the next day, but there was no alternative in those days before fridges and freezers. The Polson bairns, however, ate better than many others, because their mother came from farming stock and her family and friends would come visiting with food to sell or barter. If Dolina had no money she exchanged salted whitefish or herring for potatoes, butter, eggs and buttermilk, so with meals of salt fish or salt mutton her family had potatoes with their skins on and melted butter poured on top.

  As a change from salt fish they would sometimes get three-pence of scrap meat from the butcher, which would make enough stew to last two days; or they would eat salt mutton, if they had been able to afford a half-crown for a small lamb the previous October, or five shillings for a bigger one. Even the smallest bairn in Shetland knew how to feel a lamb to judge how much flesh was on its bones. Between October and Christmas the lamb was fattened up, then taken to the slaughter house to be killed and dressed. As you took it in the lamb was given a number, and two days later you went back with a basket, quoted the number and were given the butchered lamb. They would have a pot roast and some chops while the meat was fresh, and salt the rest for later, soaking it in brine for twenty-four hours then hanging it out to dry.

  Nothing was wasted: you even got the lamb’s skin so that you could take it to the Sutherland Wool Mill in Brora, where the fleece would be spun into brown, black, white or fawn wool for knitting. Everyone knitted in Shetland, bairns learned as soon they could pick up the wires, or needles, playing their part in keeping the family alive. In those days when there were no state handouts or benefits, every penny counted, even if they never actually saw one. Mittens, socks and intricately patterned Fair Isle jumpers were exchanged by the local shops for the inevitable vouchers: money only changed hands when wages earned by the family went to pay for goods bought on credit during the week, and often there wasn’t enough to pay more than part of that.

  It was a poor life, she supposed, but they didn’t know any other; what the Polsons had was no different from all the other families around them. Knitting wasn’t only part of daily life, it was part of their survival from one week to the next. ‘Makkin,’ it was called, and even if you went out to see a friend of an evening, your mother would shout, ‘See and take your makkin with you.’ Everyone who could afford it had a sheath, or leather belt, to support the three or four long needles needed to knit a big Fair Isle jersey, and those who c
ouldn’t improvised. They would gather the feathers of a skorie, a young gull, tie the stems up tightly in a bunch, secure the bunch around the waist with string and stick the needles in the stems. The lassies would gather in one another’s houses, telling tales, gossiping about the things young lassies always gossip about, telling jokes, and all the time there would be the click-click of the needles as they laughed and teased each other about who had their eye on which laddie.

  Another good time for ‘makkin’ was on a Sunday. Shetland was solidly Protestant in those days, and Sunday was regarded strictly as a day of rest, except for three visits to church in their Sunday best. Ina hadn’t minded the summer services at the Mission for Fishermen at four o’clock every Sunday, because she loved music and the fishermen were fine singers, but there were also visits to be paid to the kirk, the Congregational or the Baptist or one of the others, and her mind was never really on it. You could listen to music on the wireless on a Sunday and you could knit, but beyond that there was nothing to do but long for Monday morning. On Monday her father would either be off to sea or the factory in Bressay, and their hours of star-gazing together would be over till he came home again. Often in her life she had the feeling that somehow she could never entirely win, she mused; maybe it was punishment for resenting those endless visits to the kirk on all those Sundays.

  Every morning her father was at home he would lay the fire using wood gathered from the shore or from the docks and dried. On top of that he would put coal, if the family had been able to afford a half-hundredweight from Hay’s coal dump. Sometimes they would be lucky and find free lumps that had come from the huge coal hulks that arrived to deliver fuel for the steam drifters, but usually they burned peat cut from Free Hill, where anyone could have what they needed at no charge; all they had to do was cut it and carry it home. Ina and Danny were the usual volunteers to go with Magnus. They were always trying for Dolina’s attention, she supposed – or she was, at any rate. She and Danny never discussed it, so Ina didn’t know what he was thinking. They carried the peats home in a kilshie, a basket. Sometimes her back was red raw with the kilshie scraping her skin, but she never said anything. Attention wasn’t the same if you had to draw it to yourself, she always thought.

  Unlike the rest of the family, Dolina Polson was dark-haired and blue-eyed. In Ina’s mind her mother’s looks became part of her unattainable quality. When she was very young and had no understanding of how losing a bairn could affect a woman on a very basic, almost primeval level, she had assumed that part of the reason her mother mourned Angus so deeply must have been because he resembled his mother rather than the rest of the family, as indeed he did in the picture she carried of him in her own mind. She had found a shard of a mirror once on the shore and kept it under her bed, taking it out when no one was about and staring into it longingly, hoping that one day her eyes or her hair might change colour. If only she had dark hair, she reasoned, if her eyes were blue, maybe Dolina would notice her more and think of Angus less. There was never anything to suggest that this might be the case, but she remembered trying throughout her childhood to come up with the right combination to unlock the secret entrance to Dolina’s closed heart, and that one was as good, or as bad, as any.

  Years later she wondered whether that was why Danny had been such a good boy, too. She didn’t think of it till her role as wife and mother had proved obsolete and she’d taken to reading books. Danny was a kind lad who would do anything for anyone, and maybe, she thought, his unfailing kindnesses had been his attempts to earn his mother’s approval. There was that time one of his school pals had fallen out with his parents and taken to living in an old boat lying at the docks. It was Danny who had taken Davie coats to sleep under, and even his own dinner, as he tried to persuade the boy to go home and make it up with his parents. Danny was always helping people; he was the one who tried to settle fights in the playground, so that the other bairns came to rely on his negotiating skills, and whenever there was a dispute the cry would go up, ‘Where’s Danny Polson?’ Funny when you thought about what lay ahead.

  With her father, Magnus, attention and affection came without his bairns having to earn it. He always had time for his youngest two, telling them tales of how his family had become fishermen when, like many others, they been turned out of their crofts during the Highland Clearances, finding themselves of less value to the lairds than sheep. Many had gone abroad – to Canada, Australia and New Zealand – taken away in ships on voyages lasting many weeks. Only half would survive. Some went of their own accord, if having no choice could be described as their own accord, while others, regardless of age and health, were violently forced from their homes and put on the big ships, clutching what little they could salvage and watching their homes burn as they left the land their families had worked for generations.

  Ina’s great-grandfather and two of his brothers had decided to stay, however, their families living on the shoreline as the menfolk took to the sea to feed them. Many did that, men more suited to the land than the ocean, and often they didn’t come home again. There were no trees on Shetland, so wood had to be imported from Holland to make open-decked boats, clinker-built with overlapping planks, sitting low in the water and pointed at both ends, like Viking ships. They were called ‘sixerns’, because they had a crew of six men rowing, but as these first fishermen became more experienced, the size of the boats increased. It made sense: the bigger the boat, the more nets could be carried, and the more nets, the heavier the catch. Nets were lowered into the water and kept afloat by ropes with corks dotted along their length, and the larger nets by tarred floats, or buoys, made from the inflated bladders of pigs or bullocks, or the skins of sheep or dogs; on the East Coast dogs were specially bred so that they could be converted into floats.

  Disasters were common, and no family Ina knew as she grew up was left untouched. There was the great storm of 1832, when seventeen sixerns and 105 men had been lost, and another in 1881, claiming ten sixerns and 58 men, including her Polson grandfather and three of her uncles; death at sea was part of life in Shetland, as it was for every fishing community. And in those early days men were accosted by Royal Navy ships and press-ganged, taken from their little boats at sea, or while they were ashore in some port away from home. Sometimes they would arrive home many years later, but having dreamt of returning home since the day they had been taken, once ashore they found their experiences had changed them and they couldn’t settle with the families they had yearned for. Others were never heard of or from again, because most died of their injuries during the attack, from the conditions and treatment aboard the big ships, or in battles that had nothing to do with them.

  One of her great-grandfather’s brothers, Andro, had been left for dead when the Navy had taken the other five men from their sixern. The big ship with the full sails had happened upon them while they were fishing and had sent a smaller boat out, ordering the Shetlanders ‘in the King’s name’ to come aboard. It was a legitimate way of recruitment, and fishermen could buy permits exempting them from the activities of press-gangs, but few bothered, firstly because the Navy didn’t always take any notice of such niceties, and secondly because, even if a permit might have protected them from being dragged off, there was little money for such things. The Shetlanders on Andro’s boat fought back – though there was little they could do against guns and cutlasses. Meanwhile the Navy men, thinking they had killed Andro, and therefore having no use for him, left him lying in the boat. He was later found by another sixern from Shetland, surviving to see his home more by luck than anything else, and even nearer to death than when the Navy men had left him.

  ‘He was covered in blood, his own as well as his lost shipmates’, and barely conscious,’ Magnus would tell his bairns, ‘and once he had recovered he found he had a great fear of going to sea in a small boat again. So he borrowed what money was in the family and went to Canada, to a place he had heard of from earlier emigrants: Nova Scotia, “the Land of Trees”. He never came ba
ck to Shetland.’

  ‘And did he send word that he was well, Da?’ Ina asked at this juncture, as she always did.

  ‘He did, he did,’ Magnus replied quietly. ‘He had a good life out there, and because of him we have family there now.’

  Ina and Danny would lie on their backs alongside their father, staring up to the sky, lost in the world above and the one that Magnus had created in their minds.

  ‘There are so many trees in Nova Scotia,’ Magnus would tell them, ‘that you can barely walk through them, so they say, and when you look up you can’t see the sky like we can now, only the high branches of these big trees all crowded together, and it’s so dark you can’t see a foot in front of you.’

  He shook his head. In treeless Shetland the concept of a forest was hard to imagine. ‘Just think on that, now,’ he mused, chewing on a grass stem. ‘And Uncle Andro always said if any of us ever wanted to join him in Canada he would make them welcome. Even if the people he lived among were mainly Scotch people, he said, they were different when they were away from home, better somehow, though each kept to their own. He has a debt of gratitude to the whole family who helped him escape there by giving them what money they could,’ Magnus would nod solemnly. ‘And though he’s long dead now, his family know this, and would honour it, too, because that’s the kind of people the Polsons are. You could turn up at their doors and say you were a Polson from Lerwick and without asking a question of you they would take you into their homes and do everything they could for you.’

  Danny liked the family stories best. Ina had always known that he wasn’t quite as keen on the stars as she was, but he stayed for the rest of Magnus’s performance just to be near him. After exhausting family history for the time being, Magnus would chew on his grass stem for a few silent moments, gaze once more up to the sky and say, ‘You see that star up there, the one at the tip of Ursa Minor, the one they call the Little Bear?’