The Sea All Around

CHAPTER ONE

Staffa

I FIRST LANDED on Mull a lifetime ago. I was about 25 years old. If you discount childhood and college years, your adult life starts around that age. What to do with one's first bit of earned, disposable income. I had a bad back at the time and had planned a walking holiday in Northumberland, to explore Hadrian's Wall. Walking was out of the question, so I carried on driving and arrived in Oban.

A friend later described Oban as 'a one-horse town', but I fell in love with it and have holidayed there many times since. Oban is a harbour town. There are fishing boats, trips-to-watch-the-seals boats, visiting yachts and ferries to the islands. The marketing people call it: 'Gateway to the Isles'.

Using a bit more holiday money, I booked a day excursion with Bowman's Coaches to Staffa. The outing included return tickets for the Caledonian MacBrayne's steamer crossing on board MV Caledonia to Craignure, Isle of Mull; a ride across Mull to Ulva Ferry on a Bowman's classic 1950s coach; and a zip across the sea in a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) to Staffa.

'You'll have 90 minutes ashore on Staffa,' we were told on disembarkation at the Clamshell Cave landing rock. 'Fingal's cave is to your left and you can visit the top of the island up those steps,' the skipper said. I visited Fingal's Cave by walking along the tops of hexagonal basalt pillars that form an easy walk, like the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland. (Pillars with three, four, five, seven and eight sides are also available on Staffa, but six is the most common.) The two sites are similar, because they belong to the same geological phenomenon, namely volcanic activity. Staffa is what's left of a volcano that erupted around 56 million years ago. The basalt lava was cooled by the sea water and solidified into the hexagonal columns we see today. Some columns continue up the side of the island, forming dramatic, vertical cliffs. One such cliff is hollowed out to form the famous cave. Atop the columns is a formless cap of volcanic tuff supporting 80 acres of good grazing. The island of Staffa is 80 acres, 10km west of Mull and 9km north of Iona. There's an equally beautiful collection of tiny islands surrounding it: Dutchman's Cap, Lunga and others.

Leaving the tourists in the cave, I climbed up to the top of Staffa. (I have never considered myself to be a tourist when in the islands since that date. Something happened to me on Staffa that meant I could never again be included in their ranks. I am separate from them, observing them as part of the fauna of whichever island I happen to be visiting at the time.)

I strolled about on the top, poked around in the meagre ruins of the shepherd's hut and sheep fank; wandered down to the beach at Port an Fhasgaidh in the west; and then back up to the east cliff to make my way back to the boat for the return to Mull. The trouble was, I had entered a dream-like state. I had never seen anything to compare with what I was seeing. Staffa was the most wonderful place I had ever been.

I saw the boatman waving, with some urgency, for me to speed up but I had only had 75 minutes of the promised 90 at this point. I was not going to miss a possible second. I did make it to the boat within the allotted hour and a half, but I was not flavour of the month. Something was muttered about tides, ferry schedules and coach departure. I heard all this as if through a fog, or a daze, or a dazy fog.

The RIB bounced its way back to Ulva Ferry and I was still in the trance (I'm not kidding, that was the effect Staffa had on me) when I walked up the slipway from the boat. I looked up to see the classic Bowman's coach was just leaving. The group leader had, clearly, had enough of me and they left to catch the ferry back to Oban.

By chance, a lady in The Most Battered Land Rover in the World arrived (no, really, it had a window sticker proclaiming 'The Most Battered Land Rover in the World'). I think it may have been a classic, like the coach I had just missed, either that or it was simply old and battered.

'I've missed the coach back to Craignure,' I said, my mind returning to some kind of normal function. 'Never mind, hop in,' she said, 'if you don't mind sitting on the floor with my dogs.' I wondered why she would expect me to sit on the floor but soon discovered it was because there were no seats, apart from the driver's. There was scattered straw and three (at least three) Collie dogs plus assorted agricultural paraphernalia. My rescuer drove me back to Craignure, where we arrived in time for the ferry. It's only just occurred to me now, whilst writing this, 50 years later, but the people from the coach probably whispered, one to another: 'There's that chap who almost made us miss the tide, and the ferry, I wonder how he got here?' 'Yeah, it would've served him right had he missed it.' It would indeed.

It is 50 years ago, but I remember it as though it were yesterday, especially the feeling in the Land Rover. I don't think I had ever been so happy in my life up to that point (except, possibly, when Liz Blackburn had said she would go out with me when I was 20). There have been relatively few such occasions since. I had discovered Scottish islands and the course of my life changed. I was still just starting out as a schoolteacher, that didn't change, but the stuff of my dreams would never be the same again. The thing I would spend a big proportion of disposable income on became travelling to Scottish islands, not golf equipment, model railways, rare stamps or hang gliding. I'm 73 as I write this and I'm still at it. This book will be my last, but I still love a blank sheet of paper and the first sentence of a new island story - so I'll keep supplying the magazines for as long as they'll keep taking my stuff.

Had it been golf, ballroom dancing or Spanish beaches (everyone wondered why I went to Scotland two or three times a year. 'You could fly to Spain for what you're spending,' they said), I may have met different people and had a different family. I may even have won trophies for the quickstep and been on Strictly. I wouldn't change a thing.

At the start of my teaching career a colleague had introduced me to youth hostelling. We took groups of children out of London for the weekend to sample the countryside. Our favourite was a hostel called Tanner's Hatch, near Dorking in Surrey: deep in the woods, with no electricity but with the most brilliant warden who understood inner-city kids very well. It's true that, back in the '70s, cleanliness was not brilliant but the experience the children had was incomparable. Most had never been out of the city: 'Look, sir, a bus stop, right out here,' 'Look, sheep,' 'Look, cows.' The arrangement was that you took kids from your form group - as many as could scrape together the necessary, very small, payment or whose parents could be persuaded to give permission. A typical group might be 15 or so. I always needed a female teacher to go with me to chaperone the girls and vice-versa. We teachers helped each other out in that way. It was a popular thing in the school and, during one memorable month, I went to Tanner's Hatch three times! (I make it a rule never to use exclamation marks in my writing, believing that if a statement is shocking enough it will speak for itself - but I felt one was justified here.) I cannot believe, at this remove, just how much energy we had in those days.

I put two and two together and realised the ultimate field trip would be a party of Inner-London school children on Staffa. I approached the head teacher with my plan and she said, 'put something in writing.' I typed out two paragraphs and handed it in. One paragraph included the sentence: 'There are no elements of civilisation, whatsoever, on Staffa; in the event of a medical emergency an evacuation by helicopter would be required, but I'll be doing a first aid course.' Health and safety hadn't been thought of in the 1970s, so the plan was approved without any further explanation or questioning. I was in the early years of teaching and had never done anything like this before (apart from Tanner's Hatch). By the way, I did the first aid course and also a one-week, residential mountain leadership course in Wales which stood me in good stead.

Three other teachers came with us and we borrowed a radio from HM Coastguard. We took 19 children, ranging in age from 13 to 17. One or two were veterans of the youth hostel trips: 'What is Fingal's Cave actually for, sir?' and 'You'd think they would have it floodlit, sir.' Keith*, who had more than his fair share of problems in his home life, was always the first to put his name down for any trip that was going. He had no suitable footwear, so I gave him an old pair of boots. He didn't say much during the week but, on the train home to Euston, he told us he had been the first in the group to set foot on Staffa. I often wondered whether he had planned that and manoeuvred himself to a position in the boat to achieve it. Vernon* had ended up in our school after his mother fled an abusive man in Leeds. On the train north we caught him taking more than his fair share of snacks from the provisions we had (they were boxed up, with boxes labelled for opening on each day). He was hoarding them up his jumper. I explained there was enough...