Katie and her second husband William, who have been married for almost thirty years, grew tired of London. Katie is a country girl and needs to hack and dig to make a day feel lived through. William is extremely adaptable. They and their three children moved to a house on the Firle Estate near Charleston. They rented Bushey Lodge, a house that Cyril Connolly and his wife Deirdre had lived in. With driven application they commenced to become organic market gardeners just before the idea had caught on. Katie and William’s market gardening produced aesthetically pleasing vegetables in magnificent abundance. Katie loved the names; she was especially fond of a floppy lettuce called Grande Blonde Paresseuse. They grew purple potatoes and Japanese artichokes and cardoons, tigerella tomatoes, yellow beetroots, rainbow chard and a host of products that the supermarkets have now made familiar. Their project foundered on an unready market and perhaps too much generosity when it came to the accounting. There had also been an element of using hard physical labour as an anaesthetic, for at this point there was a shadow of unhappiness over each of their lives.
Enduring town life but not attached to it, Katie was delighted to be asked by her brother Alexander to come and live on Colonsay and work with him. I told her she must keep a diary. Colonsay isn’t like anywhere else at all. There’s an adventure every day. You could write a poem every morning and every night. I would like to live there for a good stretch of my life. I began to worry that Katie would get sad when the days got shorter and darkness came down at three, but she has the great gift of Arachne, and every minute is filled. William has now followed his wife to the island. He works as woodman, binman, soothant, impresario, baker.
The topography of the island offers all terrains in little, as though it were an ideal or invented place. It has its great peak, just under 500 feet, its isolated lochs, its whistling, golden, silver, black and pink sands, its cowrie beach and its fulmars’ crags; it has its deserted blackhouses and its wild flags, its own orchid, Spiranthes romanzoffiana, its fairy rings, its Viking burial ship, its standing stones, its overdressed choughs that look ready for town; it is the only place where herons nest on the ground and it has a pair of nesting golden eagles. Its turf is dense and full of wild flowers, including the smallest rose, the pimpinellifolia.
The islanders peopled my childhood, my growing-up, my middle age; some have left, many more have died, several tragically, needlessly. Some, over the years, have been brave enough to dance with me, or even come south to toast my wedded bliss. From the residents of Colonsay I have received steadiness, grace, jokes, music, irony, continuity in the sort of quantity that I would hope to offer a child, or, for that matter, a dumb animal. I have been privileged in this.
There is no avoiding boats on an island. The miracle of the ferry, for as long as I was at boarding school and then at university, was that there might be periods for as long as three weeks when the island was stormbound and the Columba could not get through. This must have been both worrying and tedious for all the adults concerned, but I was having a honeymoon with infancy and felt it bliss to be stuck safe at home, with its routines and rules and habits.
We did run out of food. We tell people we ate curried dog food. I can’t remember if it’s true. It might as well have been. We did eat any quantity of a magnificently Scots viand, buyable in bulk, named SwelFood. It had a connection with the vegetable kingdom. It lived up to its name should you add water. A little heat improved things. I ate and ate on Colonsay and, though not lean, like the others, I didn’t get fat, because I was living a life beyond books, though not without them.
I have never quite got over a bad tic I taught myself, very likely unnecessarily, under my stepmother Christine’s regime — to leap up as soon as one heard footsteps approach, to hide one’s book, and ‘look busy’. I didn’t do that much on Colonsay, at Colonsay, in Colonsay. The nature of my anxiety changed. I wished to fit in. In this I lost bits of myself. This was all my own fault. I think the Howards wanted me as me, if they thought about it at all.
When people look knowing and talk about the popular music of their childhood, I can honestly refer to both my childhoods, in Edinburgh, and on Colonsay, and look blank. When the electricity worked on Colonsay, the gramophone played classical music. Quite by chance I had lit on another musical household. To reach the drawing room from the front hall, you had to go through a curved room called the corridor-room; there was a smiley bison with a centre parting in his horns over the pianola that had sheets taken from Paderewski’s own playing of Chopin, and a piano that we sang around. Mum or Caroline played. It was from the corridor-room gramophone that I first learned to listen for the style of a conductor, though frequently the tempi must have been affected by the wind or the rain outside. We listened a lot, together, to music. I remember the Brahms Violin Concerto and his Hungarian dances, the Mozart Coronation Mass and Litanie Lauretanae, The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute, and Haydn and Boccherini. Just sometimes, Edith Piaf, whom Mum and Papa had seen in Paris. No Messiaen, no Mahler, no Russians, no Wagner, all of whom I love, but came to later. Papa, as on every ‘cultivated’ topic, knows more than he affects to know. He is a natural teacher, the only man I would allow near my younger son with a fretsaw, or near me with an explanation (all done in salt cellars and napkin rings) of how the universe works or what diatonics are. He is intriguing for many reasons. He has not grown old where old means bitter or incurious. Of course he repeats himself. That is because we force him to. We say, ‘Pop, Pop, do the one about…’
We are in our fifties and forties, he halfway through his eighties. I’m lucky to have been caught in his slipstream (he will correct the term, no doubt).
His brother Barnaby, who is perhaps eighty-two, was dying last year. He had had three wives, three children, seven stepchildren. Papa went over to St Louis, where Barnaby has made his own version of Colonsay, to say farewell for good to his younger brother. Papa officially hates death. Barnaby’s nurse fell in love with him. Instead of a funeral, there was a wedding. Barnaby shares his brother’s good looks, though without the beard. Height, black hair, now white but still thick, and cruel blue eyes belied by that smile wide as a wolf’s and as perturbingly white. Papa smiles while he is working, biting down on a small piece of his tongue. His children and grandchildren do it too.
They all carry multifunctional knives around their waists on lanyards, though have had to rethink this since airports grew difficult. Each one’s knife is of great sentimental value, having been given as a reward when, one by one, the children learned to sail their respective wooden boats around the tiny island in the loch.
I’ve never been in danger of possessing such a knife.
The Howard children were sent away to school considerably later than many children of their background, as it might conventionally be imagined. All the children owe their general knowledge and handwriting, their sense of lore and their manner of keeping things shipshape to their governess, Val, who had also been governess to their mother and her six siblings. The big house is full of things Val made with the children: tables with glass tops covering labelled shells gathered during afternoon lessons and laid on old green velvet; lists of birds seen and illustrated; children’s books carefully inscribed in the same fluent rounded hand as each child came to learn it. Val never taught me but the others had that kind of skater’s grace to elide this so that I might sink my roots deeper into the family myth.