Atlantic Britain (13 page)

The figures were clear enough: if the tide could not be beaten, we could go with it, allow ourselves to be swept through the Sound between Skuvoy and Sandoy and then, in five or six hours, as the tide turned, we would be swept back in with it, north of Sandoy and up to Torshavn.

That sounds like a neat bit of geography, riding the earth as the earth needs to be ridden. But it failed to take account of one thing: the wind. It had veered again into the northwest and was coming at us in lumps, gusted and broken in the lee of the tall islands. One of the gusts, its arrival invisible in the dark, drove the
Auk
further over than she had ever been. Books, pans, and possessions went scattering all over the cabin below. I found myself, for a moment, standing vertically on the lowest part of the mizzenmast, the entire
world of the
Auk
turned through what must have been sixty or seventy degrees. Then she came back up again and on we plunged. No damage except to the anemometer at the very head of the mainmast, whose revolving cups and arms had been swept away. We now had no idea how hard the wind was blowing.

There was no way we could head into a wind like that, and so our predicament was set. We were held for the time being almost fixed between wind and tide, as if between the finger and thumb of the Atlantic world, the boat, and all of us, under immense strain, the seas breaking white on the dark headlands a mile or two to the west, but, for all the rush and violence, immobile.

It was wonderful, a savage spectacle in bitter monochrome. I had never been in such a place, held as if gravity-free, but so brutally subject to the world, to its wind and waters. The Vikings thought hell was cold, ‘the cave of sharp thorns, a cold, wet hollow where even the water is bitter’. But was anywhere so hellish and so heavenly as this? At once? I said as much to George, but he didn’t like it.

The engine was not happy. Its note had changed and George guessed, as turned out to be the case, that
when it was running with the boat heeled over so far in the gusts, it had sucked a dose of seawater in through the leeward diesel breather pipe, whose mouth is only just above deck level. The fuel was probably contaminated now and the engine was labouring. If it failed out here, and if the rig broke and left us without motive power, then the tide would surely set us on to the headlands, no place for any talk of magnificence or spectacle. I stood corrected, my excitement from then kept private, my love of all this silent.

Perhaps that too is an Atlantic lesson. If you are to exist in these wild places, then you must be both George and me: relish the totality, give yourself over to the magnificence of this world and, at the same time, resist and control it. In other words, both submit and deny. Neither is good enough without the other.

We read the instruments and gauged the transits. The strength of the tide was due to fall over the evening and eventually, before midnight, to turn in our direction. Very slowly, our speed over the ground began to climb. We could reduce the revs of the engine. The lighthouses guarding the entrance to Torshavn Sound began to beckon us in. Finally, just before midnight, the lights of the port itself came clear of the headland
to the south of them. We were out of the tide grip and making for safety. Harbour lights! Our final landfall, at last, tying up between the Faeroese boats in the inner harbour, exhausted after another dance with the Furies.

Even as we arrived in the Faeroes, it was clear that the time had come to go home. The week or so we spent in the islands was overshadowed by the winter. The snow had already come to lie on the tops of the hills. The Faeroese themselves stood with their hands in their pockets on the quaysides and clucked their tongues at us.
Where
had we come from? Where? A Cornish boat? At this time of year? It could be windy in the Faeroes. And did we know about the tides?

But, for all that, there was no wagging of fingers. The Faeroese are seamen of the most self-reliant kind. There are no lifeboats in Faeroese harbours, because ‘we don’t want to rely on an organization to save us. If we are out fishing and someone is in trouble, we’ll go and help him ourselves.’ They have made this Arctic frontier of the North Atlantic their own. They make a fortune out of the cod and haddock in the spectacularly rich grounds their 200-mile fishing limit encloses.

The islands’ GNP is over £1 billion a year, just
over 80 per cent of that coming from the fish. One morning, when we were in the northern boomtown port of Klaksvik on Bordoy, a trawler came in after only ten days out on the Faeroes Bank, carrying 100 tons of cod, worth £180,000, and paying each of the twenty crew £5,500 for their ten days’ work. Klaksvik was full of fishing stories: boats taking so much fish that they have sunk under the weight of their own catch; another, a rather rusty second-hand trawler from Hull, going down a few years ago when the weight of fish actually broke through the bottom of the hull.

Can you imagine, after all George and I had struggled through in the course of the year, how extraordinary this atmosphere seemed? All year we had been on an impoverished edge, which was drawing what life it had from the exigencies and difficulties of its existence. Out here in the wildest province the North Atlantic could provide, after such a hair-raising arrival, we had come to a world of over-brimming wellbeing. In Torshavn, little wooden cafes, smelling of apple and cinnamon, served Viennese cakes and cups of dense, rich coffee. The boatyard on the south side of the inner harbour was run with a photocopier-level of efficiency - no rubbish, no fuss, no rusty,
macho heroics, just acres of clean, businesslike, swept concrete and men getting on with it. This wasn’t some raw, exposed outermost place. It was its own middle.

We went catching fulmars on Kalsoy in the far north of the archipelago; we went digging coal with handpicks at Hvalba on Suduroy; we went catching sheep on Koltur with Bjorn Patursson, the one farmer still living on that island, teetering with him along a cliff path in pursuit of the rams he had put out on the most exposed flank of cliffside pasture he could find. He had brought along his friends and cousins, and his nephew, who farmed the other side of a tide-ripped channel at Kirkjubour on Streymoy, where the Paturs-sons had farmed at least since the mid-sixteenth century. All of them had arrived on Streymoy by helicopter, a subsidised service for remote island farmers who wanted to gather their sheep. Bjorn’s son-in-law, an engineer on an oil support boat in the Gulf of Benin, now on leave, told me how a farmer on the neighbouring island of Hestur had been gathering sheep on a path like this a few years ago and had slipped. Half of him had been found in the sea and half on the rocks. We talked about seabirds. ‘There’s nothing I love more than a Manx shearwater,’ I said.
‘Yes, delicious, aren’t they?’ the handsome engineer said. And we all slaughtered the big, rough-woolled rams with Bjorn that evening, a captive bolt to the head as he held the animals in his arms. Tears came into his eyes as the first of them died, ‘because it is that time of year, and I cannot help thinking of all the years past when I do this’.

I wanted to be Faeroese! Everything I had hoped for from the Atlantic world seemed to come to fruition here. We were in our last few days but we had landed in the place I had wanted to be all year. The islands had neither died, in the way so much of the west coast of Scotland has died, nor been reinvaded and yuppified as so much of southwest Ireland has been. The ways of being on the Faeroes, which had always sustained people here, of fishing and fowling, of raising sheep and cattle, of making extraordinarily warm, dry, and comfortable, turf-roofed houses, even of knitting jerseys and building small wooden boats - all this was alive here in a way it simply is not further south.

The living survival of habits of mind, more than any ancient technology, is what drew me. The Faeroese think that the more extreme the conditions an animal has been subjected to, the tastier the meat. Hilltop
flesh is better than the soggy stuff from the seaside; remote island flesh better than the wide open pastures of Streymoy; best of all is mutton from the sort of near-vertical ‘garden’, as he described it, in which Bjorn had kept his young rams all year. The Faeroese continue to chase and eat the wild things that the rest of Europe has become too squeamish to countenance. Puffins, fulmars, guillemots, pilot whales, even dolphins, form a steady part of the Faroese diet, not as some fetishistic return to the life-giving properties of wild food but ‘because they are delicious’, as Bjorn said, which they are.

What was I after here? What did I envy in them? Everything! Their smiling, skilful relaxation as they danced their way along the tiny, sometimes slippery cliff path we took to collect the rams, which I and the film crew crept along as if we were within an inch of our lives (as we were); the unaffectedly serious and respectful way in which they treated the animals they were preparing to slaughter; their uncomplicated hospitality; their knowledge that their families had owned and farmed the same hillsides for many centuries, not, as it might be further south in Europe, as grounds for rather fat complacency, but for a sort of tough-minded
confidence and brio; the combination of calculation and breeziness that means that houses are only built in those places where boulders from the fast-eroding ridge-tops will not crush them, and yet which decides to paint them in the most expressive fishing-boat colours; which lays out the long-lines to catch cod in the most precise and delicate ways on the seabed, and then decides to sit up and play cards all night because ‘sleep is for old men’. The Faeroese, in other words, combine precision - Switzerland is not tidier - and gusto, daring and kindness, an understanding of the violence and difficulty of their environment, with a kind of panache and showmanship,
and
a phlegmatic calm, all of which makes them the great seamen they are. Maybe, I wondered, this is what the Vikings were like. Were these the qualities that conquered the world?

Or perhaps there is something broader at work here. This is exactly how nineteenth-century visitors used to describe the St Kildans, dancing down their 1,000-foot cliffs on horsehair ropes with as much abandon as most of us can manage on a bicycle, laughingly living on an edge that would terrify others. It is not now, though, a set of qualities you find in those
parts of Atlantic Britain from which the population has drained away over the last 150 years. Why is that? Why has the vitality remained in the Faeroes that has largely evaporated from other North Atlantic islands?

There may be a political-cum-historical explanation. The Faeroes are a unique case. Although their population and language are largely derived from Norway, a series of historical accidents has meant they are politically subject to Denmark. The Faeroese’s idea of themselves disconnects them at heart from the country into which they might otherwise have retreated. To be Faeroese is to be, in your essence, independent and self-sufficient, not reliant on some big, powerful centralised market to the east and south but to be thriving, coherent, and well, out here, a thousand miles away in mid-Atlantic. This is where they are. Remote from where?

Life on the Faeroes is not antique or nostalgic. All farmers are on the Internet. The ferries are full of shiny new BMWs and Mercedes. The cod-processing factory in Klaksvik is as sleek and neat as any in the world, producing
goujons de cod
or boxes full of ready-to-sell stockfish for anywhere in the world that wants it. The Faeroes, in other words, are not living in the past, but
importantly they haven’t abandoned it either. Sheep, for example, are not sent to some central abattoir-cum-wholesaler to be slaughtered and sold. They are killed, and eaten, on the farm where they grew up, something that is now illegal in the rest of Europe. Men continue to be both farmers and fishermen here, in a way that was once universal on the Atlantic margin but has now almost entirely disappeared under the pressures of professionalisation.

That perfectly real, and often clearly difficult, combination of the inherited and the current made me love the place. The Faeroes didn’t get to me emotionally, in the way that the monks of the Golgotha monastery had done; nor give me the moments of ecstasy that Skellig Michael had; nor seem as intriguingly and disturbingly powerful as the figure of Herve Mahe in Port Magee. But the Faeroes felt rather better and even healthier than those strange extremes had done. The Faeroes, if only I had been Faeroese, would have been for me what they are for the Faeroese - that strange and beautiful thing: a wild Atlantic home, filled with women, children, schools, home, homeliness; and with wildness, bravura, excitement, an incredibly abundant wildlife, and a perfectly straightforward relationship
to it, neither destructive nor over-reverential, but energetic, optimistic, confident, healthy, and alive. Everything you might hope for from home you can find there; as well as everything you might hope for from the wild. I don’t know anywhere like it, and it now floats in my mind as a kind of dream.

If the monks of Golgotha have any influence on these things I would ask them simply to pray for this: would God please bring me, and all those I love, back as Faeroese? But I know they don’t, he won’t and that the world does not work like that. Perhaps, in the end, we are all removed from the lives we would like to lead, emigrants and exiles to a man.

The end was wrong, though. Our arrival in Torshavn had done damage to the
Auk.
The battens had been torn out of both the mizzen and the mains’l on that wild night when we had been caught in the tide. The gulps of seawater which the engine had sucked in had not done any good at all. While I had been gallivanting around the Faeroes with the film crew, relishing my arrival, fowling and fishing, tucking into my pilot whale stew, George had been buried in the harbour trying to get the boat sorted and the sails repaired. The steering system seemed to have developed a fault too: when you turned the wheel to port the rudder would sometimes respond and sometimes not, a hydraulic problem whose cause wasn’t clear. Even at the last, the wholeness George and I had both wanted from this journey was as far away as it had ever been.
I was having fun, he was in the engine room. I would arrive back at the boat saying ‘Hi!’, he would look up wearily from the bilges after two or three frustrating hours, trying to get a nut on to a bolt in a corner which you could scarcely reach and could not see.