Candia McWilliam - What to Look for in Winter

With great patience, Jinny and Euan allowed me to tag along on all adventures and duties, or to absent myself from them. Katie has also been a lifelong task giver. One summer we were in the fruit cage, collecting gooseberries for jam and bottling for the winter. It was a boiling day and we were in swimsuits and shorts. Little Emma was with us and it was on that day that she told me that the feel of damp grass on her bare feet gave her an occasional sense of nausea. I knew she was a pea-princess then. We had several heavy baskets of red, furry goosegogs and a couple of trugs of harder green ones. Suddenly I made a noise. Katie had trained me to sneeze soundlessly and never to cough, even if I felt like it. But this was a loud noise and Katie didn’t approve of it. We went on picking among the prickly bushes under the net in the walled garden. About ten minutes later I tried to talk and found that I’d lost the capability. I made some more noises. Katie was bent over her picking. She is an efficient and excellent gardener, cook and household manager. She very much dislikes being touched suddenly, but I had to get her attention somehow. I tapped her hand with mine and poor Katie turned round to find me not quite doubled in size and gagging. I can’t remember what happened after that. Someone found some old Wasp-Eze in a cupboard and squirted it on to where the sting was still sticking out of my cheek. I love gooseberries and love picking them, like most gardening chores and especially doing them with Katie, but that time was nearly fatal and now I carry the syringe and pills that the terminally allergic wasp-stung need.

The best of the wasp incident was that every day Papa would say, ‘Claude darling, are you sure you’re all right, you seem to have got bigger.’ So, yet again, he made a comforting repetitiveness that when I started to deflate meant that the other children could tease me painlessly by pretending to be Papa. Later, we discovered that I was also allergic to Wasp-Eze, allergic both to the attack and to its prescribed redress.

The length of the summer days in the North, and the delicious light that lingers, retreats and is reborn, fills my memory with summer evenings when we smoked the mackerel we caught or made moules marinière in a bucket. The sea in summer can be purple or it can be aquamarine and so it is with the sky. Coming back from long days on a beach with one’s young children in a flotilla of boats, watching the kittiwakes and chugging into harbour with the remains of a picnic and piles of sandy tired children has become part of my deep life. One day, we were at sea in a small chunky boat, about eighty years old, like all Papa’s boats an orphan. We were just off a bay named Balnahard where the mackerel crowd. We had our darrows down and were waiting for fish. As a child I loved the gutting and it used to be my job to gut at sea, but since having children I can’t do it. Suddenly everyone’s darrows were leaping and on each hook were not one but three or sometimes five mackerel and then we found ourselves witness to what might have been an illustration of the food chain. From the sea leapt a sparkling cloud of colourless, minute fishlets, followed by a jacquard silver-and-blue arrow of mackerel followed by three perfect, classical dolphins as though posed upon a vase and then, enormously, slowly, holding back time with its size, the huge bridge of an emerging basking shark, three times the size of our boat.

Sometimes Papa might be persuaded, if the evening was flat calm, to take us, as children, and later with our own children, through the strand between Colonsay and Oransay, but at low tide so there was a danger of going aground. The benefit, however, was that when he turned the engine right down and steered as he can by feel, we were among seal families, for it is just off Oransay on Seal Island that the seals go to pup and we could watch them suckle and kiss and roar and chat and sing, the mothers so confident (so long as we kept quiet or did nothing but sing rather than talk) that they did not flop into the water leaving their babies but stayed with them on the kelpy rocks. We have been no more than six inches from those white baby seals with their awful cat-food breath and their black marble eyes. The sea on nights like that was like milk and, going home, there might be phosphorescence in our wake. We would tie up the boat in the harbour and unpack the box full of gutted fish, the exhausted picnic, Papa’s bottle of pink wine and our beach bags, a different colour for each child, with our names embroidered on. I was proud when Jinny said I could sew mine.

I cannot calibrate what the value of this family, and of its home, is to me; perhaps that is what having real siblings is like, but I think not, because I am conscious that it surprises me and delights me constantly, therefore I cannot be expecting it, therefore I surely don’t take it for granted, as one perhaps does the love of a sibling. I also feel that I am more use to them semi-detached than attached and homogenised.

Katie and her second husband William, who have been married for almost thirty years, grew tired of London. Katie is a country girl and needs to hack and dig to make a day feel lived through. William is extremely adaptable. They and their three children moved to a house on the Firle Estate near Charleston. They rented Bushey Lodge, a house that Cyril Connolly and his wife Deirdre had lived in. With driven application they commenced to become organic market gardeners just before the idea had caught on. Katie and William’s market gardening produced aesthetically pleasing vegetables in magnificent abundance. Katie loved the names; she was especially fond of a floppy lettuce called Grande Blonde Paresseuse. They grew purple potatoes and Japanese artichokes and cardoons, tigerella tomatoes, yellow beetroots, rainbow chard and a host of products that the supermarkets have now made familiar. Their project foundered on an unready market and perhaps too much generosity when it came to the accounting. There had also been an element of using hard physical labour as an anaesthetic, for at this point there was a shadow of unhappiness over each of their lives.

Enduring town life but not attached to it, Katie was delighted to be asked by her brother Alexander to come and live on Colonsay and work with him. I told her she must keep a diary. Colonsay isn’t like anywhere else at all. There’s an adventure every day. You could write a poem every morning and every night. I would like to live there for a good stretch of my life. I began to worry that Katie would get sad when the days got shorter and darkness came down at three, but she has the great gift of Arachne, and every minute is filled. William has now followed his wife to the island. He works as woodman, binman, soothant, impresario, baker.

The topography of the island offers all terrains in little, as though it were an ideal or invented place. It has its great peak, just under 500 feet, its isolated lochs, its whistling, golden, silver, black and pink sands, its cowrie beach and its fulmars’ crags; it has its deserted blackhouses and its wild flags, its own orchid, Spiranthes romanzoffiana , its fairy rings, its Viking burial ship, its standing stones, its overdressed choughs that look ready for town; it is the only place where herons nest on the ground and it has a pair of nesting golden eagles. Its turf is dense and full of wild flowers, including the smallest rose, the pimpinellifolia.

The islanders peopled my childhood, my growing-up, my middle age; some have left, many more have died, several tragically, needlessly. Some, over the years, have been brave enough to dance with me, or even come south to toast my wedded bliss. From the residents of Colonsay I have received steadiness, grace, jokes, music, irony, continuity in the sort of quantity that I would hope to offer a child, or, for that matter, a dumb animal. I have been privileged in this.