When I was in the south it was easiest for me to say that I was ‘Scottish’ or ‘come from Orkney’ but that was not what I would say to a real Orcadian. Although I was born in Orkney and lived there until I was eighteen, I don’t have an Orcadian accent and my family is from England. My parents met when they were eighteen, at college in Manchester, where Dad was retaking the A levels he’d missed due to his first bouts of illness and Mum was studying business. Mum grew up on a farm in Somerset, Dad is the son of teachers from Lancashire and was brought up in a Mancunian suburb. It was visits to Mum’s farm that made him decide to go to agricultural college. My parents have lived on the islands for more than thirty years, over half their lives, yet are still viewed as English, from ‘south’.
Usually, English people think that my accent is Scottish and Scottish people think I am English. The old Orcadian way to ask someone where they come from: ‘Where do you belong?’ My parents heard that often when they first arrived. I might come from Orkney but I often didn’t feel it was where I belonged. At primary school, ‘English’ was a term of abuse.
When I was little, the only black kid at the secondary school went missing. He lived up near the cliffs of Yesnaby. His younger brother came on our primary-school bus and the adults talked seriously at the bus stops. A week or so later his body was found washed up at the beach. My playground experiences made me assume that racism had driven him to the cliff.
As an adolescent I didn’t want to become part of what I saw as a subtle conspiracy to present Orkney as an island paradise. Tourist information proclaimed the beauty and history, endlessly reproducing pictures of the standing stones or the pretty winding street of Stromness when what I saw was boring buildings and grey skies. But although I regularly complained about Orkney, I was on the defence as soon as someone else was sceptical of its charms.
It’s a push and a pull familiar to many young people from the islands. We ended up back here again and again, washed back, like the inevitable tide. I grew up in the sky, with an immense sense of space, yet limited by the confines of the island and the farm. On a day off from cleaning, the wind was in my hair down at the harbour in Kirkwall, which smelt of fish and diesel; out to sea, lights twinkled on the low hills of the north islands, Shapinsay, Sanday, and beyond them, over the horizon, Papa Westray. I was conspicuous and discontent in that small town after having lived away.
When we were teenagers we mocked the tourists. This World Heritage Site was our home, not just somewhere holidaymakers could buy tickets to see. After hours, when the coach tours had left, my brother, friends and I climbed into the stone Neolithic houses and tombs, with fingerless gloves and disposable cameras. In the morning the attendant would find burned-out tea-lights and empty wine bottles.
I was a physically brave and foolhardy child. I climbed up stone dykes and onto shed roofs. I threw my body from high rafters onto hay or wool bags below. Later I plunged myself into parties – alcohol, drugs, relationships, sex – wanting to taste the extremes, not worrying about the consequences, always seeking sensation and raging against those who warned me away from the edge. My life was rough and windy and tangled.
Growing up in the wind leaves you strong, sloped and adept at seeking shelter. I was far away when the farmhouse was sold, the value of the farm and our home split between my parents. Dad kept the farm and installed a caravan there for the nights he wasn’t staying with his girlfriend, while Mum bought a house in town and rarely visited the farm again.
Mum was a farmer’s wife and a farmer’s daughter but also a farmer herself. As well as doing all the cooking and housework for the family, she drove tractors, mucked out cattle, built fences and dykes, and filled in the potholes in the farm track again and again. She and Dad worked together to dose the sheep with wormer and clip the feet of the ones with foot-rot, and to pick the stones, which each year worked their way up from the earth’s mantle, from the ploughed fields before the barley was sown. Dad sheared the sheep, then Mum rolled the fleeces into tight bundles. After the divorce, she missed the farm terribly but it was too hard to visit.
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Every cleaner was female and every room that we cleaned was occupied by a man. These women cleaned and scrubbed and washed all day at work, then went home and did the same for their husbands and children, and had done for years. They were experts. As I watched my supervisor’s finesse with the mop, how she squeezed at just the right pressure and angle for optimum water and bubbles, I knew I would never achieve such skill. I thought that the firemen on the island were capable of doing their own laundry and changing their own beds.
As I paired up grizzled socks, threw away discarded pornography and cleaned toilets, I wondered if I would be happier if I had never left. Would it be easier if I’d married someone I’d gone to school with and stayed off the internet, if there had been less of a gap between my aspirations and reality? I thought about my mum. Maybe she had wanted more too. She was not much older than me when she found herself with two kids, abandoned on the day she gave birth and many times after that. She was a capable and caring woman, pushed to her limit on a cliffside farm on a strange island.
Mum turned to the Church when my brother and I were small and she was looking after a farm and toddlers while her husband was in a psychiatric ward two hundred miles away, across the sea. Once she had to sell the whole sheep flock because she couldn’t manage them on her own and didn’t know when Dad would be back. They thought that might be the end for the farm but they managed to piece it back together. In many ways, her faith kept the family going for a long time but, later, it was part of what broke it up.
Dad would say the modern, evangelical Church found her, preyed on and brainwashed her. She would say she was saved. It depends who I’m speaking to as to which side I agree with. I remember people from the Church helping out and decorating our living room while Dad was in hospital. He remembers coming back and finding new Bibles and religious books in the house, in their bedroom.
As the days grew shorter, it was dark when I left home to go to Flotta in the morning and when I returned at night. At the end of Orkney’s long, bleak winter I was fading, hiding in the shadows. One afternoon, carrying my Hoover up a glass stairway, I walked into a shaft of sunlight. I looked around to see if it was safe, and lay down on the carpet, the light warming my hair.
Another day, when my supervisor found me crying in the toilets, not for the first time, she told me, with the kindest intentions, I had to leave: this was obviously not where I wanted to be. With my next wage slip, they sent me off on the workers’ boat for the last time. A few days later, I walked into each room of the farmhouse, saying goodbye, before leaving with a rucksack and a one-way ticket for London.
4
LONDON FIELDS
MAY IS MY POWERFUL MONTH of change and possibility: it’s my birthday and my middle name. There is a manic freshness in the air: I cut my hair and take baths at six a.m., draw pictures, wear strange dresses, apply for jobs and take drugs. There are new people to fall in love with and I have a spark that attracts things, needing less sleep and food. I drink more. My body feels right and I walk straight and strong across town. On these days composed of quests for experience, I say yes and pull on my boots again, excited and uneasy.
We called it a picnic although no one was there for the food, of which there was little – a few tubs of corner-shop dips turning crisp in the sun and a punnet of cherry tomatoes. Our group was sitting around a rainbow-striped blanket. It was one of the first truly hot days of the year and the sun on my bare feet felt luxurious. I ran my hands up and down my legs under my long skirt.
In London, with our commutes and travel cards and high rents, we could be isolated and had to find new ways to make a community. Each weekend when the sun shone we went down to the park, to London
