Friday 7 October 2016

St Kilda

The islands that make up St Kilda are treasures in the crown of Scotland. They are magnificent, whether seen from air or sea. Perhaps they are not beautiful; they are too composed of wild elements to be what we might ordinarily consider beautiful. I have had the privilege of visiting St Kilda many times, and of staying there. In 2005 I made a programme for BBC Radio on the story of the main island, Hirta, for it was 75 years since it was evacuated, its tiny population brought to the Scottish mainland. It may be that that programme, A Requiem for St Kilda, can still be found on the net.

I think that no visitor could fail to be humbled by the courage of that population in surviving on Hirta for all these hundreds of years. But the fact is that the people did not just survive, they thrived. The early accounts of visits to St Kilda make it clear that this was a group of folk who loved music and dance, who celebrated their island and their life on the edge of the world. What is clear is how utterly bereft they felt of their island home after 1930: one of the most poignant stories tells of a man who sailed out for years afterwards simply to see Hirta, the rock that had been his childhood home.

I thought about all this again when writing in my cabin a few days back. What came to me again was a sense of the fierceness of the wind, for we who live mainland lives can have little sense of the power of the wind out there in the middle of the North Atlantic. That was my journey in: what it meant to leave the full force of the wind behind. What it meant to come to somewhere that was silent.


THE ST KILDA WIND

A hundred miles west of sanity
St Kilda lies like the wreck of a dragon
crashed into Atlantic waves.

A few bones of bare rock, ungreened;
only a million seabirds wheeling the white stacks,
the air sweet with their stink.

Yet how many hundred years
a huddle of humanity clung to these rocks,
spindling the cliffs with their homemade ropes
to bring back baskets of birds.

Their whole lives chased by wind;
not a breeze, not even a gusting,
but a full-blown gale of wind
everywhere they went and each new day.

They learned to live with it,
their faces windswept
till it was woven through them.

How strange in 1930
when they were beaten in the end
and a boat brought them back to the mainland.

How strange the quiet must have seemed to them;
how it must have kept awake their nights;
how they must have had to learn to walk again
unheld by weather - to tightrope the silence,
the tree-lined boredom of our towns.

As the ghosts of white birds
still wheeled and clamoured their heads -
held in the hands of the wind.




www.kennethsteven.co.uk

1 comment:

  1. I listened to your amazing documentary many years ago by candlelight with my newborn son in my arms and my mother by my side. I was looking for it last night. He is twelve now and it would be wonderful for him to hear it. I can't find it.

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