Whenever I come home to the shadow of Ben More, to the cottage, the better part of two hundred years old, I’m reminded of the first day I was brought to the island, having been adopted into a fisherman’s family at age eight. The rocky terrain, the cottage, and the kitchen haven’t changed in sixty-five years.
More than just a room, the kitchen is where I recall mum spending most of her day. Gladly so, she would say. It was the heart of my family’s existence, evoking memories of childhood. Take the copper kettle sitting on the cream and black Aga, its battered swan-neck spout and buckled lid — the same kettle that sat on the stove the first day I arrived.
Memories flow like water bumping through the lead pipes of my brain. The smell of matches being struck, hearing the boom of exploding gas igniting a blue flame.
Whenever neighbours and friends came by mum was welcoming, wanting everyone to feel at home. I don’t know to what I can attribute her kindness other than it being something beautifully natural.
On wintry days, she offered a blanket for their knees, enjoying the warmth of the Aga while she made pancakes. Mum said there are as many ways to make pancakes as there are to make friendships. She made them thick, adding fresh berries and syrup. The rest of the cottage mum kept spotless but bare and dismal, and the furniture, now officially antique, well-polished. It is horribly functional. Visitors, as rare as they are, comment on the furniture’s Victorian style. To me, even sixty years on, it feels wonderfully normal.
Serenity is everywhere on the island, but none more than here in my study, once my father’s. It is a room filled with immeasurably big furniture, bookcases, desk, lamps, and old photos. Margaret Tarrant prints now hang on its pale yellow walls, those that once hung in my bedroom when a child, now hung here to enhance my feeling of security.
Beyond the window can be seen the Ardnamurchan Peninsula. Sitting at my laptop, all I do is breathe, and from that breathing comes life. I have no grand ideas that I’m a good writer, let alone chase the idea of greatness; I am a storyteller. But I know this, when I stand on the Scottish home soil I feel the poetry in the Celtic air.
How I wish with all my heart that bringing my parents back was a simple matter of slaying a dragon or pushing away mountains with my bare hands. Sadly, the world has lost its dragons, and mountains insist on being climbed and not pushed.
I spend hours thinking about the shorelines, some jagged and unforgiving, others distantly sandy, and that long-ago feeling of dad walking with me hand-in-hand along the water’s edge.
As a kid, I climbed Ben More, mountainous but gently mannered, to free myself from the island’s capture and feel the elation of seeing toward the mainland. Oft times catching sight of a yacht tacking hard, fighting the wind ‘mid-sound’ and me waving like a city kid might wave at a passing train.
It’s hard for me to talk about the island’s mountain rising from the Isle of Mull, its craggy face, wet and shadowy, and have people understand that it was a living thing, a protector, a guardian, a constant, like a parent. It had good days and bad, one day gentle, the next severe. So it was with the mountain, letting you go but calling you home.
Dad was a trawlerman, strong, and a poet. Not a romanticist, or romantic, but a man beaten and shaped and inspired by working alongside the peril of nature’s wildest and unpredictable children.
On the desk, beneath the east-facing window, is an aged Smith-Corona. It belonged to dad. I still hear the clickety-clack of letters being punched out, making up poems, and imagine all those he had yet to write — a thought keeps him within an inch of my heart.
I return to Ben More’s shadow, having travelled a million miles away from my youth, coming home as an old man to listen to the snowfall, feel protected from the storms of life, hear the screech of the gulls, smell the lobster pots, and taste the salt air cleaning my throat. Where people’s lives are entwined in the mystery of the fog, lived openly, with respect, passion, and unafraid of work hard.
For decades I came home when hurting like hell, when tears came without notice, catching me in the middle of some memory, or when remembering how beautiful the hills looked against the coastline and wanting the coolness of the water around my ankles.
Beyond the kitchen, beyond youth, Paris, and the friendship of Leonard, there were no more homemade pancakes, no clatter of the Smith Corona’s keys, no heat next to the Aga. I rarely receive friends, but when I do, I make tea.
What is written above is absurdly sentimental, and my only excuse is its absolute truth . . . and to reassure myself I’ve not become a beast in the world.
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