Bryan Islip's Blog, page 4

A touch of the Irish.

I wrote about how Brenda Peace had rented her Peace Cottage to us on our arrival in the Scottish Highlands but in I think 2005 she decided to sell her Aultbea manse house (vicarage) called Kirkhill House. She needed Peace Cottage to live in herself. Thus Dee and I and our two, by then old hungarian vizslas needed to find another rental. As I have said it didn't take us long to move, literally over the road into Kitty Wiseman's beautiful Loch Ewe Cottage. Had Dee had her way and were she still alive we would be there yet - and probably for evermore.But such was not to be for events took another of those unexpected, therefore unplanned turns.

Our good friend Brenda had sold Kirkhill House to the Hickey Brothers, two Irishmen in a very substantial way of  business living, each with wives and their own families of four down in the south of England. The brothers had no intention of living in Kirkhill or of even spending much time there but, having carried out some extensive improvements they wanted somebody local to become a sort of visiting janitor. Brenda recommended Delia (and me for what use I would be!) And we were glad of the money.    

Mike and Gerry Hickey are not particularly minute gentlemen although they are gentlemen, as we have realised on many occasions since then. When they turned up in their high powered car at Loch Ewe Cottage to 'interview' Dee the two of them and the two of us and our two doggies didn't leave a lot of space in the living room for the the tea and biscuits, nevertheless we got along famously right from the start - Dee and Gerry in particular shared a deep interest in all things world war one. Hey, she / we had the job!. We would look in on a more or less daily basis to check Kirkhill's security and generally look after things, for the place was hardly ever to be occupied by its owners.

My Pictures & Poems micro business was by then doing OK. Along with our Kirkhill income and our State pensions and  two smallish private pensions from my seventeen years at Sweetheart International plc - and now with the Kirkhill supplement - life was financially well balanced enough. In adddition we were kept pleasantly busy, and in addition even to that we were very happy. Or content; not sure about the difference. Then in 2007 we were offered the sale of Loch Ewe Cottage - and came very close to moving ahead on it. I should explain that Dee and I had often discussed and debated whether best for us to rent or to buy? Dee was always in favour of owning house and mortgage whereas for years past I had convinced myself of the advantages in terms of freedom of movement of  renting or leasing - but only if one kept well clear of Mrs Thatcher's iniquitously one-sided short term rental contract. We had always, since I had sold our house in Hayling Island to fund Joan's Nursing Home costs, managed to find super properties to lease; properties with owners who respected the difference between their house and our home, who realised that we were not about to degrade their property, who had no aversion to dogs or cats and who were willing to negotiate a private form of lease - just like real grown ups!

Just as I was about to cave in to Dee's wishes two things happened. First, the event I had been anticipating for years, i.e. house price collapse - indeed the UK property market collapsed like a pricked balloon. Second, I took a telephone call one morning from Mike Hickey's personal assistant down in Kent; Would I mind, she enquired, if she asked me what rent I was paying for Loch Ewe Cottage? In a nutshell Mike and Gerry would, if we wished, rent us the more than twice as large Kirkhill House at that same price level. Five years lease renewable; yes we could have whatever pets we liked and yes, we could operate whatever businesses we liked, obviously Pictures and Poems and potentially the B&B for which Kirkhill was pretty much ideal. On the owners' side they would want to build on a new and very upmarket sunhouse whilst we were there in residence. And we would make sure there was accomodation for the two of them on the rare occasions of their visits.My only regret about the deal was my inadvertent upset of Kitty Wiseman, owner of Loch Ewe Cottage. She and daughter Ann and Dee had become good and close friends and did not want us (mainly Dee) to leave them..

We were due to move house in the January. In the previous month the area had suffered the worst and most prolonged snows and ice in many years. One freezing morning I emerged from the car at the top of Loch Ewe Cottage's driveway only to perform a backwards somersault and land with a massive thwack on head and back. Dee said the solidity of my head had saved me but honestly, all joking aside, I thought my back and/or hip was broken. I have never had to suffer overmuch in the way of physical pain, I'm pleased to report, but that fall sure made up for it. Anyway late in January 2009, with considerable help from our local friends, we moved in to Kirkhill House.
as it transpired this was to be journey's end for Dee. It could - indeed it may still  be for me as well. But that all lies ahead ....

Sunday best

Early on in our Highlands life there were of course some things of Hampshire that we missed. These were not necessarily important things; the Sunday newspaper for instance. There were no local shops open on the Sabbath, therefore no Sunday Times. It was some while before we discovered that the Sundays did in fact reach the area and that you could order yours for collection in the public bar of the Aultbea Hotel. However to pick up your order you needed to run something of  a gauntlet. I remember very well my first Sunday morning collection .As per every day we loaded the dogs and our backpacks into the Jeep, ready for our walk on the hills. On the way  I popped into the hotel for the paper leaving Dee waiting in the car - only to find four Wiseman brothers aligned along the bar (and their one sister, the lovely Pat serving behind it) all of them turned to examine this sassenach incomer. Obviously finding him fairly harmless the eldest brother, Johnny, offered me a pint of  '80 shillings' - the local bitter beer. To be fair it was more an order than an offer. To decline would not have been a good idea in a village that the Wisemans sometimes seemed to think theirs by right, by strength and by ancestry. That's when the problem began, for I was clearly expected to reciprocate the hospitailty. Now, I have never been more than what you might call an enthusiastic though slow beer drinker of modest capacity. To buy pints for the brothers without one more (x four!) for myself would have been discourteous verging on combative! Besides, I found the company increasingly interesting, almost forgetting one wife and two dogs waiting outside for their daily walk. After more than an hour said wife reminded me. She came into the bar as I was in the middle of a risky joke, surveyed the scene in a new and frosty silence then demanded the car keys and turned on her heels. Delia walked the dogs over the hill by herself that Sunday whilst I later walked or staggered the three miles home. When I reached there, to prove my (entirely false) sobriety I set to work cutting out my greetings cards, not intending to cut off the tip of my finger in the process. Much blood but little sympathy, naturally..

I think it fair to say that most of the locals attend one church or the other whereas only a minority of we incomers did so. One problem was that, even for the religious, the range of local denominations, therefore of actual churches was and remains quite baffling. It seems that whenever in the past there has been a division of theological opinion a new Church has been formed by breakaway and a new church building created to accomodate it. But it has not been unknown for the departing schism to conduct their own services actually in the open air for years before the building took place. There was one well recorded church gathering in a natural cave under the cliffs by the village of First Coast and yet another took place in a grassy hollow by the sea in Gairloch - these days a nine-hole golf course - overlooked by a monumental stone church large enough for a small town but, as I say only one of many local houses of God.

There is a little booklet written by Hector Grant, the first part of which is all about the Grant family's growing up in the settlement of Mellon Udrigle prior to world war two. This is a fascinating autobiography that includes an account of the Grant family walk of some ten miles each way to church in Aultbea and back, in all weathers, clad in their Sunday best. One day recently I was invited by a retired sea captain to accompany him on his boat for a fishing trip.Whilst chugging slowly past Isle Ewe the captain pointed out a certain rock face that sloped down into the sea. This, he told me, was where the stones for one of Aultbea's churches came from. Great slabs had been hand cut from that native rock and slid down into a boat then rowed over one by one to the 'mainland'. Goodness knows how long this process lasted but the large kirk (church) was Hector Grant's family's destination in the 1930's and yet stands ... another reminder that you don't actually need power tools or computers to create a work of such lasting magnificence.

That kirk, and the other one opposite the Isle View Care Home, has been the site of many a funeral, even as recently as since our arrival in 2002. Funerals are important events of great solemnity in Aultbea, and include the funerals of three of the four Wisemans who had been sitting at the bar that first Sunday newspaper day (above). Such funerals - and the wakes that most often succeed them - command the attendance of huge numbers of men and women in black. 

I have commented earlier about my perception of the value of Sunday observance. I can say now, without being a fervent believer in any particular church, that I have have since adolescence always seen the value of a biblical, physical day of rest. By the way, having reached thus far in these autobiographical episodes  whilst skirting around the the matter of religion I am happy to declare my belief in an afterlife. I feel that such a belief makes for a considerably higher value to one's life on earth. After all nothing is worth nothing. For me there is absolutely no value in trying to prove my God better than yours or my God better than no God - or the reverse' as a kind of game of spiritual one upmanship.We all know what is good and life enhancing about a personal observance of the ten commandments, even if these days it is more than ever difficult to live by those commandments.

By the way I believe the Hebrew scholars mistranslated the crucial word COMMANDMENTS. That word should be COMMENDMENTS. Recommendations rather than instructions. JC was not, according to the gospels, given the power to instruct. Perhaps it would have been best and easier by far if he had!.

Animal magic

I think I've said previously that from 2005 Kitty and Ann Wiseman's Loch Ewe Cottage represented, for us - especially for Dee, some sort of heaven on earth. The old cottage was coal-fire cosy, close by the lochside and in a secluded spot within the same remote and tiny village of Mellon Charles as was Peace Cottage. It had a very reasonable rental and even, as it later transpired, an option to buy. We had all our own furniture, books, pictures etc - in other words all the stuff we had brought up from Winchester in 2002. Ranking as benefit equal to all for my lady, we were surrounded by the Wiseman's precious croft animals.

Bearing in mind that hungarian vizslas are by breeding and nature hunting dogs and that they had been brought up in an urban Hampshire setting, there had been in Peace Cottage a fair amount of necessary 're-training'. Most especially when first the two of them set eyes on sheep, chickens, geese and ducks - not to mention the odd (wild) red deer - just by our back door! But in a surprisingly short time all threatening behaviour had ceased and everybody settled down to a life of harmony, or so we thought! 

One day we were out visiting, leaving the dogs lazing in the garden sunshine, the back door open into the dining room. We rarely if ever remembered or found it necessary to lock up either our home or our parked car. Crime was and is virtually unknown. We returned to find Mati, the picture of innocence, as far away on the lawn as she could get and Sorosh, the picture of guilt, under the dining room table surrounded by feathers and one very dead cockerel. We were horrified in spite of the fact that Kitty had two cockerels who were always at it tooth and nail and, to my exasparation constantly competing with each other to hail the crack of dawn - about 03.30 in the summer! Confronted by the scene of the crime, in somehting of a panic I determined in true murder mystery fashion to hide the body, and fast. I drove it miles away and consigned the late lamented to a watery grave. However when I returned home, Dee, conscience stricken as always, insisted I go and confess Sorosh's crime to Kitty. Kitty's main comment was, where is he? He'll make a goodly soup, so he will.  Upon which I was forced to confess to the greater crime of criminal waste.
















On another occasion Kity told Dee that something's getting into the barn and taking my eggs. It so happened that Dee had spotted the miscreant - one of the detested hooded crows had found a hole under the eaves of the building. That same day Kitty went into the barn to collect eggs, hand in hand with her seven year old granddaughter, only to surprise the thief. Caught red handed the crow tried to exit the barn at high speed through the opened doorway, upon which a hen jumped high in the air, talons uppermost, and brought the crow to ground. To the horror of the little girl all the chickens then fell upon the thing and literally tore it to pieces in front of her eyes!

Down on the farm truth is often, at least to me, stranger than fiction. As an instance, at one time Ann and Kitty were losing their precious ducks one by nightly one. Very distressing, especially as they had spotted the culprit. A female otter had given birth to a litter of otterlets in her holt (not sure of the terminology) under a broken down old shore-side building. She was feeding her family right royally at Kitty and Ann's expense, not that they would have dreamed of killing their ducks for food or anything else. Anyway, to put a stop to the slaughter the crofter ladies brought the ducks up nearer their house (and ours) but the bold otteress actually came into their yard, grabbed a duck and made off with it. Ann was just in time to rush out and take hold of the duck's legs. The poor thing had become jammed when being pulled by the retreating otter in a hole in the fence. Ann won that tug of war but this was very much a phyrric victory, for the duck did not survive its ordeal. The next night Ann was lying in wait. When the otter made its appearance she dashed outside, grabbed the nearest throwable object and let fly. Mrs Otter last seen heading for the beach and her holt - covered in white paint!

At lambing time in March Dee would help out with Ann, patrolling the fields in the middle of the night to find and help any ewe that was in birthing trouble. I'm afraid I myself would turn over in bed and go back to sleep. Even in broad daylight the birth process is not of interest to me. (I never even attended one of my own, by the way!) For a supposedly hard-nosed crofter Kitty was incredibly kind to animals, which is why she always has so many cats and dogs. When a sheep gets injured or knocked over in the road the crofter will usually despatch it without a second thought. Not our Kitty! She would take the creature into her kitchen, which instantly became an operating theatre, and do everything possible and some things impossible to mend it. Some of her sheep she kept for years after their commercial value was well out of date. There was one ewe I remember that she called Shirley Bassey. The poor animal had eaten the dreaded poisonous ragwort and had a permanent wool-less sore on its back and only half an ear. But it had lived at least six years in such a condition. Apart from those defects it was an ordinary white woolly ewe. Why do you call her Shirley Bassey? Dee asked. Because she's got curly hair of course, Kitty responded ...!

Of course! But a couple of years on we noticed Shirley Bassey one winter's day lying comatose in the field, her poor eye just a bloody mess. The hoodies had been at it. You can hate those birds. For a time we did. But nature will not tolerate infirmity.

Telling tales - finding words

I wrote many short stories between 2003 and 2006. Dee said they were for practice ahead of my first completed novel but I took each and every one of those stories very seriously. Two of them won prestigious national awards. Speaking of Champions and Willie's Place are included in my anthology, Twenty Bites, ISBN  978-0-9555193-3-8

Actually I had started and had completed 80,000 words or three quarters of an unfinished novel called Rose Feather all the way back in 1993. (I had actually been thinking about it since 1957!)  The intended back cover blurb for that one reads ... Rose is determined to succeed in the game of snooker - in what had always been, especially at the highest level, very much a man’s world. She is looking for help from her father, ex snooker star and hell-raiser, American Henry. And from her friend, up and coming Italian Roberto D’Amato. So why didn't I finish it? Pressure of business is the easy answer but not the right one. The thing is I committed the ultimate sin for a novelist - without knowing it - by sending our the unfinished typescript for critique to my friends and also to the lady who, I had just read in the press, was starting up a book publishing company. That company was to be called Orion, now one of the leading mainstream publishing houses in the UK. Of course I had, in1993, absolutely no idea how difficult it is to get a new novel by an 'unknown' author even read, never mind accepted, therefore I was pleasantly unsurprised when the new publisher wrote back about my Rose Feather in glowing terms, asking to have first sight of the finished script.I should have dropped everything, gone for broke with it. That typescript still resides within my PC. The other day I pulled it up on screen and had a look at it. Hey, it's really good! One day I hope to get it out, dust it off, finish it after these twenty years plus. Then I can ride it to the stars and beyond!!
But in 2004 I finally got around to writing that first novel. It was called More Deaths Than One. Dee knew I was planning a novel with a certain very deep probing theme. but urged me not to do it, to write a thriller first so as hopefully to make some money! The back cover 'blurb' of MDTO reads ... Thomas Thornton has settled down to expatriated family life in Saudi Arabia. He is wrongfully caught up in shariah law on drugs dealing charges but finds himself implicated in a far more universal situation. Injustice is a bitter pill - potentially a fatal one where your landing card is headlined in red italics: 'Death For Drugs Dealers'. Even with a past life as explosive as that of Thomas Thornton's, what odds against a future for himself, his family; what of his love for the ways of Arabia?  
When you finish the writing of your story and then the interminable (and essental) editing, re-editing and re-re-editing (etc) of a serious full length novel there is almost as much pride and satisfaction with your new baby as with the real thing - particularly if that first copy for retail has been produced by a 'proper' publisher.  Alas, I was to find out the hard way that getting one of the mainstream publishers to accept (probably even actually to read) a typescript authored by an ageing, first time novelist is something with a degree of difficulty akin to swimming up a waterfall. After the best part of a year of trying I gave in and decided to go the self publishing route. This of course entails its own unique and thorough understanding of digital technology, and of book layout, and (in my case) of cover design, and of being accepted as a serious writer by the international digital publisher, Lightning Source - oh, and of that little thing called book marketing! So, battered but unbowed it was back to school time! Anyone can learn who wants to try hard enough. The above, ISBN 978-0-9555193-2-1 is the first result; one of which I am very proud.

I sent out a copy for review to a few national newspapers without hearing even if they had been received, but the editor of the the Ross-shire Journal was more encouraging. His published review got my sales off to a flying start. Copies still to this day dribble out in ones and twos whilst never reaching the hoped for hundreds and thousands. And still to this day I receive the odd e-mailed comment from somebody who might have found a second hand copy somewhere and enjoyed the reading of it. It is still in print and available, as they say, from Amazon or all good bookstores (quote the ISBN) or as an e-book. Ditto the two non-fiction booklets On Wester-Ross in 24 Paintings, Poems and Narratives and A Life in the Highlands in 24 Paintings, Poems and Narratives. Ditto my second anthology of short fiction, Twelve of Diamonds and my second full length novel, Going with Gabriel.

As I write this episode of my autobiography I am finishing a third novel, one that I began to write in 2009.  So what? So why? I have no idea. It cannot be for money - the chances of fame and fortune, even if that is what I seek are slim indeed. But I just looked up one of my old poems. Perhaps in this lies the answer ....



Finding Words
After sixty years

Focussing on right now

I found the two fine walkers

Coleridge and his friend
Mr William Wordsworth,
Had a brief skirmish with
That other wondrous set,
The dreamer Keats, the
Poetic mister Shelley
And the bad Lord B,
Went backwards in time
Through Swift and Pope
And Dryden to blind Milton
In his metronomically
Agonistic anti-Paradise
To find my friend John Donne,
A love-struck island to himself,
The whiff of something
Of great meaning thus
Becoming ever obvious;
Like incense
As the swinging starts.


Breathless, reading much of
Elizabethan stuff and such
I circled Shakespeare,
But warily, for a long while
Keeping nervous distance
Unsure about this Everest
Or maybe of my ability
To climb it or find the light
That so many others find,
Went back a long stride
But Chaucer was too tough,
Loved Spencer's Faerie Queen
Then fell on Tamburlaine,
From reckless Marlow and,
Ah! Here it is, (I thought,)
The source! that river
Of sweet scented mists
Still coiled and flowed
And thrust and heaved
And his words lived
And in his halcyon shade
I lay and took my rest awhile
And read how Shakespeare
Was perhaps Marlowe
Come live with me and be my love
They or some one wrote.
Although to me it mattered
Only that their words were.


And then in Winchester
In the dust-silent attic
Of that antiquarian book shop
Logan Pearsall-Smith's
Jewel of a treatise,
On Reading Shakespeare,
Lay opened in my hand
As when something flashed
Brightly in a muddy field
And you stooped to pick it up
And you were looking
Into the bright sun-colours
Of a diamond.


And so the good professor
Opened up the door
Switched on the lights
And there for me that wondrous treasury
Of works to brighten up my days
To hold an explanation for my nights.:
Thus, in the beginning,
Were his Words.

On the move again

Six months after settling her in with us at Peace Cottage Dee's mother, Wynne, having already become something of a local character, pronounced - quite out of the blue - as follows ... Oh, if I never see another mountain or another sheep again - I want to go home. With help from friends down south and in collusion with Dee's sister Gloria we found her a fine en suite room in Fareham's Merry Hall Care Home. I then packed all her goods and chattels with the two dogs into the Jeep and set off at six a.m on the 700 mile trek south. A couple of hours later Dee and Wynne took a taxi to Inverness and then a first class train to Southampton. I actually had time to unload at the Care Home before going with Gloria and Peter to meet mother and daughter on arrival at Southampton rail station, ten p.m. Wynne came bouncing off that train, a woman re-kindled. Personally I was exhausted! Our pair of hungarian vizslas were good as gold, perhaps sensing in the mysterious ways of dogs that they were back on home turf..

Back on our real home turf I set about marketing my artworks as cards etc with renewed energy, much aided and abetted by Dee, now resigned from her Isle View Care Home duties and doing the accounts, manning our marketplace stalls etc. Our tide had once more turned. We and our two dogs, although now visibly ageing, were indeed very happy ....
Good food, a regime of different daily 'walks', each other and an abundance of love - why would they not be happy - indeed, why wouldn't we be?

At this point the contentment was inadvertently shattered by our widowed ladlady and good friend, Brenda, who understandably decided to sell her big old 'Kirkhill' manse house. As a result she needed to occupy 'our' Peace Cottage. We were therefore out, albeit at six months notice. Whilst we were still in the process of cogitating over our next move the phone rang. Dee was out at the time. It was Kitty Wiseman asking us if we would consider her Loch Ewe Cottage for a long term rental? Dee knew Kitty well as they had been working together at the Isle View Care Home. I said, yes of course we will look at it, and thank you. By the way where are you? If you look out of your dining room window, Kitty said, you'll see the cottage just a way up the hill. We walked up to have a look around, hardly able to believe our luck. Loch Ewe Cottage was even more perfect than had been Peace Cottage: mostly hidden in a little wooded dell, surrounded by Kitty's and daughter Ann's sheep, chickens, geese and ducks, even nearer the sea shore, plenty of room for work and comfortable living and a lot better appointed. Perfect for us.This was the view out of our new dining room window ...
Oh, and no difference in the rental - even more important as the years went on for even though our income was happily increasing, Dee's share of her mothers Will was being steadily eroded down to zero by her Merry Hall Care Home fees. But they were genuinely never begrudged for we were happy that her final years were of well deserved care and reasonable contentment. A very fair exchange - one's own roof for one's own care.

I have no doubt but that our five years in Loch Ewe Cottage were as happy as any years that Dee and I had shared, right up until the day of our dogs' passing. For some time Sorosh had developed much pain in his hips as well as bad teeth and severe incontinence. Mati was almost but not quite in as bad a condition. Fifteen is very old for a vizsla. That morning our poor old lad could not get up. Of course, like all animals knowing their end is nigh neither of them complained but Sorosh looked at me and I looked at Mati and both of us looked at both of them and we all knew ... I called the vet. He shook his head at Soroth, said that Mati was close behind, would it not be kinder for them to go as they had lived - i.e. together? I held our boy and Dee held our girl as they each in turn received the fatal injection. The vet took what was of their earthly remains away with him in black plastic sacks. Even as I type this the tears I cannot deny the tears in my eyes. Look, I do not ever want to compare sadnesses but we had truly loved those dogs, those wondrous fellow creatures who had been with us through thick and thin, from birth to death, who so many, many times had lightened our darkness.

We buried the caskets containing their ashes in the beach-side hillock where the ashes of old Seth and Chloe had fifteen long years before been placed. May the four of them always run the sands together. One can always hope...even can believe.

...And the livin' is easy

We made the fairly dilapidated Peace Cottage into a very much loved home between 2002 and 2006.. What furnishings we had not brought up with us I mostly made, starting with my work bench and our extensive bookcases. Downstairs was our living room / dining room, a front room (that became Dee's mother Wynne's bed sitter, see later), a minute kitchen for several months with no cooker so we had to rely on our microwave and a shower room / toilet.

The Beaton brothers, crofters both living one to either side of us filled us in on the history of the cottage. Fascinating it was. Peace Cottage had until recently been the Beaton family home since way back. You have to remember that in the days before and after the Great War this whole area was to a large extent gaelic speaking and needed to be largely self supporting. Everything you wanted or needed repairing you either did for yourself or got a more skilled neighbour to do for you. Bartering was the way to live. Labour saving domestic appliances were mostly in the future even 'down south' never mind up here, where electricity was yet to come. These were, and I think still are people of considerable strength, resilience, resourcefulness and bravery. It is to me no coincidence that the male Highlander had supplied half the armies of Europe with kilted merceneries throughout the middle ages.

A stream - or 'burn' as they say up here - ran in its deep, timeworn channel to the sea within five metres of our front door. Ian Beaton, a man I would guess twenty five years younger than me, pointed out the flat rock in the bed of that stream on which their mother had beaten / washed the family laundry. And Harold Beaton told us how, when the boys were little there had been no appendage to the rear of the cottage, therefore no bathroom or kitchen as such. He and his brother had assisted their father in adding such niceties to the building by bringing rocks up from the beach for the construction of walls. The trouble was that for some years afterwards the family needed to go outside and round to access the new facilities because at that early stage there was no access from inside. Of course nobody needed or wanted planning permissions, therefore nobody had drawn up plans either for their self-built houses or their property at large. The Crofting Laws in the mid eighteen hundreds went some way to establishing an English style land registration but to this day land boundaries are sometimes a source of much irritable - and unnecessary dispute.

Within a couple of years I had generated enough of an income from my painting, greetings cards etc to necessitate a return acquaintance with Her Majesty's Customs and Excise! What is it they say about that pair of unpleasant unavoidables -  death and taxes? By then I had finished my digital wildlife series, painted a couple of dozen pastel landscapes and also a miscellany of oils on canvas. This, below, is a self-portrait (which a friend down south very kindly advised me to burn!)


At that point arose a problem in the shape of Dee's mum. Wynne Boulter, nee Smalley had always been very close to her daughter, Delia. Although Dee often flew south to pay her visits there it became very clear that the old lady's missed her daughter very much. Also she was suffering those scourges of modern old age - leg ulcers and incipient dementia. Like my father she could no longer live in safety by herself in her Alverstok home of some fifty years. Dee and her elder sister, Gloria, eventually found her a Care Home in place of the hospital bed to which she had in the end been consigned. Unfortunately she hated it and said how desperately she wanted to come live with us in Peace Cottage. Like her daughter until recently, she had never been any further north than her Birmingham birthplace unless to Belfast at a wartime WREN. 

So we rented a motorhome from a company with the unlikely name of 'Robin's Reliable Wrecks', mistakenly thinking the name a bit of a clever irony - until the rear door fell off our ancient vehicle halfway up the hill coming south out of Inverness! Never mind, that vehicle served to bring Wynne the seven hundred miles north in relative comfort. (On the way south we stopped overnight in Chesterfield where I was presented with a national an award; my very first, for my short story, Speaking of Champions.) Wynne settled down remarkably quickly at first, especially as a trio of district nurses did more for her leg ulcers in a couple of months that the entire NHS had achieved in a couple of years. My abiding memories of 'Winnie' are legion, for she was what used to be called a real character. I so well recall her often propelling her wheelchair down the driveway to park alongside the little lochside road, where she (an ex wartime WREN as she never lost time in telling people) would sit gazing over the sea in the forlorn hope of seeing 'at least a small warship', its crew lined up on deck as per the tradition on entering Portsmouth Harbour. A couple of times a week I would take her to the Isle View Care Home where she could consort with her peers in the main hall. But she was a very strong willed old lady, was Wynne. She requisitioned a special chair and woebetide any other od the old folks who parked themselves in it before we arrived. One day I sensed there would be trouble ahead when a lady of one hundred and four summers was found to be in 'her' chair. Wynne was only ninety two but I could hardly believe my eyes on seeing her lifting the centenarian by the armpits from her chair on to another!. 

After six months, out of the blue Wynne came out with the immortal pronouncement I want to go home. If I never see another mountain or another sheep I shall be happy. Not everyone, you see, is easily transplanted! We found her a lovely place in Fareham. It was expensively called the Merry Hall Nursing Home and it was to cost her daughters all of their mother's three hundred thousand pounds of savings. That was another irony although I suppose it was as Merry as any such resting place could possibly be. I recall the dozens of fluffy toy animals crowding her daytime bed and, long before Merry Hall, the motor car in which she invested almost human qualities. I can still see the electric buggy in which she travelled with purple cape a'flying down Gosport High Street with such an imperious lack of concern for the following traffic. She point blank refused to use the pavement. I can see that immaculate, flower-filled garden at 26 Madden Close and I can see her beach hut on Stokes Bay outside of which she would sit in the summer sunshine talking with any and every passer-by, often blue of hair and dressed - well … let’s say ‘strikingly’.

When we visited Merry Hall, often with Gloria and her husband Peter, we used to light some spark, where there really was no fire left, by breaking into some of the old wartime songs - White Cliffs of Dover, We'll Meet Again etc.At such times she would talk about Dee's father, Bill, and her Lancaster bomber pilot brother, shot down and eventually killed over Munich in the latter days of the war. At such times she would talk about the great ocean liner she had been watching as it traversed the urban landscape outside her window - five miles from the nearest sea.

‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple,’ wrote the poetess Jennie Joseph … . ‘And I’ll gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells and run my stick along the public railings’. Maybe not quite in those ways but with similar intent, that was very much my mother-in law, the unforgettable Mrs Wynne Boulter.

Oh mine papa!

Throughout the first decade of this century Dee and I would quite often travel south from our new home/s in Wester-Ross to visit our families, sometimes separately and sometimes together. Although neither of us wished to live in our childrens' pockets we certainly wanted to keep well in touch with their lives and to ensure they had a good understanding of ours in return. But that was never easy for our lives had not been 'normal and it was certainly not normal to upsticks and migrate far away to a new life and a new lifestyle at our kind of age, (sixty eight in my case, fifty eight in Dee's) . It didn't matter. As an early nest vacater myself I knew all about flying out from under the wing of mummy and daddy, and this time hopefully without loss of parental love.

My step-mother, Julia, had died aged in her eighties whilst resident in a Hastings Care Home. At her funeral Liz, one of Julia's nurse / carers approached me. Don't worry about your father, Bryan, she told me, I'll make sure he won't be on his own. She wasn't kidding! Before long the two of them were taking sea cruises together and then when he could no longer travel in comfort, no problem, Liz went on taking the cruises solo or with her daughter, naturally at father's expense. Taking more than cruises, actually. Be that as it may, by around 2005 it became clear that my ninety four years old dad was heading in the same direction as had his second wife. He couldn't possibly sustain himself by himself for much longer in his seaside apartment. Several times he fell over, suffering hip and other bone damage as a result and having great difficulty in obtaining any help. Several times he was consigned to spells in hospital. Therefore with his agreement I spent some time looking for the best  place in or around Hastings in which he might in comfort end his days.

At this point I have to say that there had never been overmuch of the aforementioned parental love between father and I, although I must also add that we were probably closer together in the few years leading up to his death that at any time previously. Why should such disharmony have been? I think it went back to my boyhood perception of him as something of an ill-tempered tyrant. The days he returned to my mother, my three sisters and myself at home in Lancashire from his work in London - they were seldom if ever happy. And then I probably blamed father for the loss of the mother to whom I had been very close throughout the war years. I think my placement at age eleven in a public (boarding) school paid for by my wealthy Auntie Kay was not a happy time for me and a source of some scarcely concealed humiliation for father. All his life his brainy and equally good looking elder sister had outperformed him. But perhaps one reason above all was my failure to properly accept my step mother, his new partner Julia Wicksteed. Then again, at Abingdon School  I did OK but let the family down (his words) by my failure to shine either as Olympic class sportsman or acamedician summa cum laude. The final estrangement came a couple of years after leaving Abingdon when I was coming up seventeen and father shot off with Julia to a new civil service position in Singapore, leaving me to enlist in the R.A.F for an early-entry National Service - for want of anywhere else to go. And, by the way, leaving my sister Shirley to rush into an exceedingly bad, much premature marriage in Newmarket. Both of us were emphatically labelled not wanted on voyage.

Whilst stationed in R.A.F. Full Sutton, not far outside York, I met and fell deeply, ragingly in love with my beautiful Joan Wood. In those days one needed to seek parental permission to marry if one was under the age of twenty one. Father of course was consumed from afar with rage or disappointment, probably both. I don't know whether he was expecting his son to marry into the aristocracy or something. At any rate he showed no sign of fatherly congratulations, much less interest in my hoped for bride to be. He wrote me a letter in reply to mine enclosing none of the possibly expected (although unasked for) money plus not a little condemnation and much advice (for advice read instruction) to the effect that, when I had finished a-serving of his her Majestry the new Queen in a couple of months time I should at once apply to join the police force. Advice which I chose to ignore, as those of you who may have been reading these episodes since November may already know.

Don't get me wrong, my father was a fine figure of a man who some had earlier compared to the film star Ronald Colman. He had, as they say, 'a way with him'. His main interests were, in descending order, sitting on his apartment balcony in the shortest of short shorts watching young ladies parading along the promenade or cavorting on the beach, betting on horse races and thirdly the incredibly, unbelievably boring ex-nurse, Liz. Oh, I almost forgot; and the three local housewives with part time jobs as 'chiropodists' who visited him in turn, once fortnightly, at a cost according to his post-death bank statements of fifty smackers a time.I had no problem with the latter; his life, his money.

Anyway I found father the perfect Care Home, fixed everything up and went back north. When came the day for his occupation I entrained again for Hastings and proceeded directly to the Home from the station, expecting to find him comfortably ensconced and holding court. It was not to be. The ninety five years old had arrived earlier that day, sure, but had excused himself and promptly 'disappeared' according to an offended and much panicky matron! I went straight back to his supposedly vacated apartment. He was there of course, acting as if nothing had happened.He told me he hadn't liked the place after all so had walked out through the kitchen door, flagged down a passing motorist and had been given a lift 'back home'. I once again did the rounds of Hastings and St Leonards Car Homes. This time he stayed in the one I found for him - and I stayed close by for three days to make sure he did. Some weeks later, on one of my regular phone calls he assured me that; this place is good, son. I get washed down naked every day by two Chinese ladies.

I organised father's funeral. It was sparsely attended by myself and my two surviving sisters plus Auntie Peggy and her daughter, (my cousin), plus lucky Liz and her daughter (each of whom enjoyed a share equal to my own in the tiny estate), and, touchingly, the two Chinese nurses. I wrote and delivered his eulogy. It was not easy but, strangely, I loved the man more as he lay in his coffin alongside me and then went on his way into the furnace than at any other time. Was he or was I the more responsible for our lifetime lack of mutual affection and that towards my siblings and our grand children? I shall never know. More is the pity.

To be or not to be may be the question, father, but every man surely must merit the memory. Or maybe not.

Getting to know you

As incoming 'Sassenachs' desiring assimilation into the Aultbea community the best things we could have done were done by force of accident. To earn a few pennies, therefore have butter and even a little jam on our daily bread Dee got a job as a cleaner at Aultbea's Isle View Care Home. As all the other lady employees were 'locals' and Dee was a natural maker of friends we were soon in the swing of things. Her work wasn't easy of course. One of the Care Home's residents was a Gaelic speaking old lady who didn't like the English - even to the extent of locking my wife in the broom cupboard - but who ended up by being tolerant, even friendly, even to me! That lady was the one who as a nineteen year old student had travelled down to London one cold December day in the '50's in an unheated Morris Minor along with three male undergraduates, their objective being to 'steal' the Stone of Scone from under the throne in Westminster Abbey and transport it back to its rightful home in Perth, Scotland. (Scottish kings from time immemorial had been crowned on the Stone of Scone, as had UK kings and queens since the Union in seventeen something.) Amazingly their plan actually worked. (Was it customary to leave Westminster Abbey's massive front doors unlocked?) In due course the forces of Law caught up with the miscreants and the 'Stone' was returned to London. Nonetheless Dee's new friend confided in her that the stone taken back by the authorities was not the real one. The real Stone of Scone was / is still, she said, hidden away somewhere in Scotland..

Dee didn't have to be a cleaner for all that long - maybe our first couple of years in the Highlands, after which I was able to earn a bit from my paintings - but we had many memorable - even enjoyable experiences in and around The Isle View. For instance whenever a resident achieved the ripe old age of one hundred years (not all that uncommon) there would be a gathering of staff and residents and friends in the main hall. The Lord Lieutenant of the County or his / her deputy would come across the hills to the Home bearing Her Majesty the Queen's legendary letter of congratulation for formal presentation to the new centenarian. Well, on this occasion Her Worship the Lord Lieutenant made her speech on behalf of H.M., stepped forward to the recipient's wheelchair and held out the letter, upon which the old lady refused it with the immortal comment; "I never did like that woman". Embarrassed silence all around followed by some rather forced light laughter.


The second best thing we did (again by accident) was to move into Peace Cottage, situated between two working crofts owned and run by the Beaton brothers. Peace Cottage was our rented home for the first four years of our Highlands sojourn. Harold and Ian and Ian's wife Fiona proved to be the best of friends - i.e. the kind of friends who are there when you need them and leave you to your own devices at other times. For instance we had discovered on moving in that our expensive three piece Tetra suite would not fit through the narrow passageway from front door to living room, therefore we had to stow it in a leaky old open fronted cowshed.out back. A few days later I explained the situation to Harold Beaton who at once went off to fetch his tools then returned with his customary economy of words in order to remove the entire dining room window, frame and all! The next thing I knew, our suite was safely in the living room and the window was back in place, good as new. Ian and Fiona (who worked and still does work at the Isle View Care Home) have a daughter called Rebecca - Bex for short. Bex took a real shine to Dee, and vice versa, especially after the twelve years old fell off her bike outside in our shared driveway. Dee rushed out to administer first aid and soothing words. The next day a large bar of chocolate appeared through our letter box.

In, I think, 2004 Dee's / our son Rudi and partner Nina decided to get married. They chose to have the ceremony carried out up here in the Aultbea Hotel. A great many lads and lassies from the Fareham / Portsmouth area seven hundred miles south came up with them and occupied most of the available B&B accomodation. All our new friends, both local and incomer, were invited to the wedding. This mixture of near and far worked amazingly well. An extremely good time was had by all. Only a very few minor hitches such as Dee forgetting to bring the actual documentation to the hotel, in which waited the congregation plus a reverend who had clearly been at the celebrations a little early. I was despatched home for the papers. In something of a world record hurry, on my return I backed into the hotel wall, much to the surprise of the congregation assembled inside.


 
That very first February I took out my pastels and 'painted' this winter snowscene. I called it Across Isle Ewe, for it is the view from Peace Cottage. The croft house in the middle distance is now the very successful Aultbea Smokehouse. But before that I had created a series of twelve Highlands Wildlife pictures using a method involving literally hundreds, even thousands of digitally coloured Word Draw shapes. The following Springtime, for the first time I 'exhibited' at a crafts market my artworks as greetings cards . That was in Ullapool. I managed to take eight pounds and fifty pence. Not long afterwards I did a sales tour of the local shops. With what pride did I get home and drop more than four hundred pounds in paper of the realm on the dining room table in front of an astonished, not to say delighted Delia. Our income tap was once again turned on, albeit in but a trickle, but I had big ideas - of course I did - and what a place in which to have them!

Rich and poor

I've been relatively rich whilst owing plenty and relatively poor whilst owing nothing. Which is best? Well, I guess I've treated those two imposters just the same. (Sorry about that, Rudyard!) But for the first time in many years our first months in Mellon Udgigle, Aultbea, Wester-Ross needed to be - to say the least, frugal. I  recall checking the outside electricity meter of Peace Cottage daily in all weathers, hypnotised by the steady tick tick ticking away of our slender resources. We rationed telephone calls to our distant family and collected as much wild fare as we could to supplement our food shopping. Succulent mussels from the rocks and cockles from the beaches that fringe our sea lochs, juicy fat blackberries from the wild tangle (within two months of arrival Dee had twenty or so jars of bramble jelly in the store cupboard) and four kinds of mushrooms from the local woodlands. What kind of mushrooms? Hedgehog, chanterelle, oyster, and most precious of all those fat penny buns (or porcini, or ceps, depending upon what part of Europe you're in). I would have liked to add fish from the sea and the lochs but, as you will understand later, other things had to gain time and cost priority over fishing, Besides, we had no boat.

Two things we never economised on: the right food for our beloved pair of hungarian vizslas, Mati and Sorosh, and our daily one to two hour walks in all weathers, every single day without fail. Because Sorosh was not overly other dog friendly and because Dee had a horror of upsetting other dog owners we never walked the pathways, preferring to set off across the unknown, trackless terrain of which there is a great deal around here, knowing not how far we would go (or be able to go) or what we might find along the way. Over the next years we were to 'discover' many places without sign of human presence, places where we would sit on a favorite river or burnside bank or great boulder or fallen tree to eat the sandwiches and drink the soup or coffee we invariably brought with us. Often we would sit in a contented silence, much affected by the sheer beauty of what most would call the wilderness. After my lady died I commemorated these walks - for myself if nobody else - in a poem called I see her still ...

I see her still



I see her still, and willso long as I have seeing eyes aliveto the hills we walked,with those beloved dogs.So many, many lovely days;so many, many trackless ways.The hills are winter muted now,their lovely colours sombreas if in respect or tribute to she who, leaving me alone,embarked on that adventurethat all that lives must know,this harder, emptier year ago.
I see her still, and willso long as I have seeing eyes aliveto the stony, bouldery shoresor riverside woodswhere we would each dayin all weathers find a seat to eat our picnic lunchoften in silence, contentto watch the play of light, oft-times the drift of rain or snowon hill or moving water, smile atthe play of otters, divers, others,listening to the crying of the gulls.
I see her still, and willso long as I have seeing eyes aliveto the crystal seas of Wester-Rosscold, clear, summertime blue,‘remote’, where she would take off her clothes and, breathless,slip nymph-like in to swim,framed by deep, dark-waving weeds,laughing at me, at the cold; or for the simple joy of it, lithe mermaid in a perfect zone,the one, forever gonethat we had made our own.

After our move to the Highlands in September 2002 we slowly learned to adjust to this place. We learned about a different dimension of time that's imperceptible as a holiday visitor. No point in dashing out for a loaf of bread or a newspaper. Once you're in the village store or the post office conversation is near bound to ensue. And hey, such dalliance may seem inconsequential but it is never a waste of time for it is how you live. We already knew that if one is not to offend the local folk there's to be neither sight or sound of any kind of working on The Sabbath.

After three months came our first Christmas and the much more important New Year's Eve (Hogmanay to we new Scots). We sent out to the family a lot of home made Christmas presents - boxes of the local delicacy known as 'tablet' - a kind of fudge that Dee became a past master at making. Max and his Spanish girlfriend had come across to stay with us over the holidays. That first proper Highlands Hogmanay was a memorable experience. The routine here in Aultbea is quite time honoured. About nine pm you go to the hotel for a pint or several then wander across the road to the village hall - a relic of WW2 when this area became home to thousands of servicemen in need of rest and relaxation. The hall was jam packed with people from age about ten to about ninety, all rocking and highland flinging in wild abandon fuelled by wine and whisky and beer in plastic cups. Good home baked cakes as well as traditional neeps and tatties (mashed up turnips and boiled potatoes - delicious!) was on offer.

At about one a.m. Dee realised there had been no Auld Lang Syne, linking of hands, stomping in and out etc. Most puzzling until, the following night, we took Max and his Ava to my favourite Badachro Inn. The party seemed to be still going strong there. We got into conversation with a young soldier on leave, a lad from a local family. Dee asked him about this lack of a midnight Auld Lang Syne. Where were you? he asked. Aultbea we said. He shook his head; On no, that's a Jacobite song. You won't here it over there. Of course none of us realised that Rabbie Burns, who wrote the famous song, were supposed to be secret Roman Catholics - or for that matter that Aultbea was a strongly Protestant village. I still don't entirely believe it. But neither would I disbelieve it.

I had set to with much vim and vigor to make Peace Cottage our home. By that first Christmastide we were well and very comfortably settled. Time then to find a way to bring in the pennies and the pounds if we were ever to lift ourselves above subsistence.

Ashes and new fires

In September 2001, for the second time of my life, I had crashed down to earth. My businesses in the Middle East were in ruins - I would claim through no fault of my own. But inevitably it's all down to oneself, whether fortune be smiling on your 'baby' or the opposite.They do say that to be a really good businessman you have to bankrupt yourself at least once in a lifetime. I had not actually achieved such a distinction but had come uncomfortably close to it! I had learned at an early age that crying over spilt milk really is for babies and have often been heard to say that none of us deal all our own cards; it's just about how we go about playing them. Besides, we had enjoyed  thirteen mostly good or very good and profitable years.

After a month back in Laundry Cottage from the Middle East I had a phone call from one of my most important Saudi clients; another Arab gentleman who I would certainly have called my friend. Would I care to join him for breakfast in Dusseldorf at the Packaging Show? Of course; just send me £4,000 I responded, figuring that I work for money like everyone else and nobody wants to drag me out to Germany unless he's after something. Anyway, no problem with the money and Mr Obeikan spent most of the time trying to persuade me to go back to Saudi - even Bahrain - for a meet and make up with my ex-sponsor, Faisal. Well, no way. Firstly because I don't enjoy being the second bite of anybody's cherry, second because I would rather have hired a hit man for the cost of the air fare and third, most important of all, because our new and better life was just beginning. Unless something fairly juicy happened for Bibs-industry in the UK we would be migrating to the northern Highlands of bonny Scotland. Whatever happened I would never again set foot in Arabia, a region where I had close-up knowledge of the majority of hotels, airports, cities and towns and no special wish whatsoever to renew my acquaintance with any of them!

In the event nothing overly good did happen for me over that post- Middle East twelvemonths in the UK. I had a few little touches and some promising nibbles but nothing to divert us from our vision of life in the Highlands. Tell the truth I wasn't really trying. In July 2002 we placed an advertisement in the Gairloch and District Times ...  'Wanted to rent. Cottage close to the sea for Writer, his wife and two well-behaved dogs ...  We had three replies so we entrained for Inverness, hired ourselves a little car and drove across the hills in search of our new home. One place proved to be ridiculously small although had the saving grace of being close to a hotel and bar, one was OK but we didn't much like the sound of the owner (anyone who ever mentioned Mrs Thatcher's iniquitous short term rental contract was at once kicked into touch,) and the third was Peace Cottage in Mellon Charles, just along the coast from Aultbea. A lot dilapidated compared with our Headbourne Worthy home of thirteen years but capable of much low cost upgrading and beautifully situated in the middle of a sheep croft close to the sea-Loch Ewe.

Having done the deal with the cottage's owner, Brenda Peace, we returned by overnight bus (a salutary experience all by itself) to Portsmouth via Glasgow and London. Back at home it was clear that we had accumulated far, far too much in the way of furniture and accoutrements over our years in Laundry Cottage and before, so we had a couple of very successful garage sales plus our very first excursions into the exotic world of the car boot sale. I'll not forget in a hurry being directed to our 'pitch' by a very large lady who might have done extremely well as an Auschwitz prison guard. The minute said woman moved off a host of rapacious looking gents turned up to inspect our stock with eagle eye. One of them offered us twenty quid for a box of books. Delighted with such an early success Dee took the cash, whereupon Mrs Auschwitz   came running or waddling back, loudly accusing Dee of 'trading before opening time' - a crime of which we were ignorant (but guilty as evidenced by my lady having the offending twenty clutched in her hand!) Dee was very frightened. How come? Well, she was being physically pinned up against a brick wall at the time and she hadn't even said a word! Me, I was too astonished to raise a finger, a fact that later got me into trouble of my own.

Poor Delia! Her precious household goods and chattels being whittled away for cash in hand. She didn't actually wave them a tearful goodbye but I know she would have felt like it.

Removal day came: September 1, 2002. Stuart and his friend Fraser had rented a seventeen metre furniture pantechnicon for us, which just about made it through Laundry Cottage's gateway if only after some necessary tree surgery. The stuff we had calculated would fit into Peace Cottage was quite literally squeezed into this massive vehicle and our two young men (only one of whom actually had an HGV licence!) set off on the seven hundred mile northbound trek. I gave them a three hour start, figuring we would overtake them somewhere near Glasgow. At last Dee had finished cleaning the house to her satisfaction, the dogs were safely bedded down in the back of the Grand Cherokee and we said goodbye, not without some emotion to our home of thirteen turbulent, wonderful years. I pressed the starter button. Nothing! Dead battery. Eventually I summoned our neighbours and friends, a pair of retired doctors blessed with a set of jump leads. Finally we were off up Bedfield Lane, Dee and I not knowing whether to laugh or cry, scared that the engine would stall on the first roundabout. It didn't. That engine was to remain active until next mid-morning when we pulled up outside our new home. Needless to say, the boys with truck had been there for hours and had by then piled almost all of our stuff willy-nilly into the cottage. They set off back to Hampshire as soon as we arrived, getting there, I was later told, at crack of dawn to return a presumably exhausted vehicle to its owners.I shudder to think of what superspeed record they must have set up.

In silence we looked around at the mess. My heart sank. l'm just going to walk the dogs on the beach, Dee said, then, Oh, my lovely Laundry Cottage. The Jeep actually started and away they went. I set about clearing enough space at least to sleep, convinced that my wife would before the day was closed be demanding an immediate return to the south. It was raining a light rain and the midges were up. When Dee and the dogs returned she looked at me, smiling. (Funny how the insect life barely troubled her) She'd been chatting to a New Zealand lady on the beach. Come on, Bryan, she instructed; Let's go into Gairloch for some fish and chips. In that cafe we made friends with another couple who, that very same day, had 'migrated' to Aultbea from, I think, Manchester. From the cafe window we looked out over a classic multicoloured Wester-Ross sunset. For us it might have been a sunrise. Without saying so there and then we both knew within ourselves that nevermore were we to live anywhere other than in this place.

We had five thousand two hundred and ten pounds in our bank account and a couple of quite small pensions for income. But we had zero debt, our two dogs Sorosh and Mati, a whole new and beautiful world full of wild provender for those who would seek it out, a whole new and beautiful life, some kind of long-frustrated talent to write and to paint - and we had each other. And that, my friends, is one hell of a lot.