The Edge of the World

I remember sitting in an office in 2003, surrounded by colleagues, when a tune came unbidden into my head. I don’t know why I love you but I do … We weren’t hooked up to the internet then. In fact, we were still getting our wages in cash, delicious brown envelopes delivered to our desks each Thursday afternoon.

I asked around the office: ‘Who sang that song?’ - and although everyone knew it, no one could name the performer. I went to the pub after work, asked around there, and it was the same story. A familiar tune, but no clue.

A couple of days later we got the internet, and the first thing I did, the first thing I ever looked up, was who sang that song. Yes, I’d heard of him, but if I had spent the rest of my days chained to a pointy rock like a penitent prophet, I would never have found the enlightenment that a flurry of key strokes administered on that seminal day.

In that moment, and in all those first moments across the globe, the course of humanity was changed. 

It’s a brooding time of year. I’m nursing a cheap bottle of wine and going down rabbit holes on the net, reading articles about a place that would not have had rabbits. St Kilda, a speck of an archipelago 40 miles NW of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. The remotest inhabited place in the British Isles until it was voluntarily evacuated in 1930.

I guess some would see romanticism in this volcanic landscape, thinly populated with people who must surely have been inbred. Victorian photographs show a group of doughty looking people who, whilst not being on the Appalachian scale, all bore an uncanny resemblance to each other. At home (a stone bothy fuelled by peat fires), they cooked sea birds and their eggs. If they were lucky, they might scratch a potato or two from the crofts by the pounding Atlantic. No salt. No butter. Rien. The women bore the brunt of the hard work while the men huddled in their daily ‘parliaments,’ but when the men did work, it was dangerous. In order to hook a seabird, they had to abseil down the highest cliffs in Europe. Holding the rope was just a little guy perched on the top. A strong wind, and he’d have blown away - and there were times when they did. When someone passed away on St Kilda, they used to say ‘they’ve gone over it.’ 

In 1930, there were only thirty eight people left on the island. They settled on the Scottish mainland, where most of the St Kildan men were put to work in the Forestry Commission, which is ironic, because there are no trees on St Kilda. 

You can look all this up. The realities of this kind of life are there to read with the brush of a finger. But to me, it brings back the death of a neighbour on or around New Year’s Eve 1999. The countdown to a new millennium when no sane person believed in that bug of theirs. But Hilda’s world ended that night when she fell down the stairs. Quite by chance, Hilda was a St Kildan, one of those evacuated at the age of five. Hilda wasn’t her name, but it rhymed and so it stuck that way. She was a strange woman who had somehow netted a nice husband like her father had once netted a guillemot for tea, and they migrated south to England along the way. Her dialect was strange. On the island they spoke Gaelic Scottish, and that was the language her parents continued to speak in their new, mainland home. On Sundays she wore an unsettling bonnet which seemed to me, a younger and more stylish woman then, to be cultish.

When the postal service resumed in that New Year of sparkling promise, (the granddaddy of clean slates), the postman noticed bluebottles buzzing against the porch window, through which he could see the stairs, but not the lowest of them. Bluebottles in January are unusual. They need a warm place and something to feed on. They found all that with Hilda from Kilda. 

My mother once related a story Hilda had told her about why they left the island. It was the Great War which catalysed this final exodus. The islanders got used to seeing troops defending the Atlantic shipping lanes, and when they left, they found that after a thousand years of solitude, the loneliness had become unbearable. They had connected, and, much like the internet, they could no longer manage without it. 

And here I am now, alone as usual these days, finding things out about Hilda’s heritage that I could not have discovered a quarter of a century ago without a specific reason for doing so. And yet our knowledge now seems a mile wide and an inch deep. My children just about escaped the internet, and read books before going to sleep. It’s hard to imagine that now, that in the wink of an eye, our children are watching cartel executions under the covers, and Swallows and Amazons is the name of a porn site. 

I got a little hooked on St Kilda because, to be honest, I find it compellingly ghastly. Eating nothing but fishy birds, and sending messages out to sea in floating pigs’ bladders. Whipping winds, relentless rain, no alcohol and the unforgiving bible on Sundays. No proper medical care and a two-and-a-half day journey in a rowing boat to find any. That’s not romance. That’s a horror story. And you don’t want to read about the dogs, although I guess you will now. 

The year 2000 was also the year my husband, Bren, disappeared. That sounds more dramatic than it is, because the bugger took his passport and the family car and left me alone with two kids. I don’t recall how I did it now, but I got through it, and I haven’t heard from him since. He hasn’t asked for a divorce, enquired about the kids, or sent any money, so to me he’s just an unpleasant smudge. And yet my fey fingers led me to a Facebook page for St Kilda, because in the summer months they have scientists and ornithologists visiting and I figured that there is no area of life that isn’t covered by FB.

And here’s why I’m telling you this. Don’t get your hopes up. This is not a crashing denouement. It’s just that when I scrolled down the photos of St Kilda, mostly of rock piles and relieved seabirds, I see a photo of Brendan, stood outside a line of roofless cottages once called The Street, with a woman on his arm. They look comfortable together, like they’ve been joined for years. He looks avuncular and charming. That was Bren all over: a bastard in teddybear’s clothing. 

There’s no tag, no comment, nothing at all. Just Brendan and a plain, outdoorsy woman I will concede to be exactly his type. And I am left thinking two things. The first is prosaic. I have run out of wine and I would like another glass because I’ve been good, but today I feel like abseiling down a cliff. 

The second is harder to explain. I think I want to say that people have always been connected, but the internet exposed the extent of it. With one bottle of wine and a packet of crisps, I have discovered by chance Hilda’s childhood home and my errant husband, having not woken up this morning thinking of either of them. Is this a good thing? I don’t know. It’s convenient, but so is processed food. 

It all seems synthetic to me, all these Happy Birthday’s and Bless You’s and air kisses. Mwah! Mwah! We were happier before all of this. Cars broke down on the hard shoulder, but they got fixed, somehow. Kids went to school without mobiles, and God willing, most of them came home again. Burgeoning romances conducted through landlines with your mother listening in and giggling to herself. Looking forward to the top forty on the radio on Sunday nights. I couldn’t tell you who’s been No.1 in the music charts in the last twenty-five years. I guess no one is anymore. We’re just a blended mass of pouting narcissists, too scared to speak to strangers and despite all of this information at our fingertips, just undeniably dumber than ever before. 

You know, I spent three days and nights after that song popped into my head, asking strangers who sang it. I had conversations, a giggle, I made connections by my brazen solicitations, and no one minded. Yes, there was joy when I got the internet and found out immediately, but not half as much joy as I would have got from an old boy in the Red Lion, say, leaning across and whispering ‘Clarence Frogman Henry’ in my ear.