An Island Rooing

In April 1931, a young English sailor was sitting in a café in London, attempting to persuade a documentary film-maker that she was the perfect assistant for a stint of filming on a remote Shetland islet. Joan Grigsby was the applicant, with boat-handling skills and sterling practical capacities. Jenny Brown (later Gilbertson) was the film-maker, beginning her first shoot in a beloved location. Grigsby got the job... An Island Rooing documents not only this brief early summer stay on the Isle of Stenness, but also Grigsby's further solo adventures right through the season: staying with a crofting family in Heylor, and sampling the period of calling the sheep in from the hills, lambing, removal of their fleeces by hand (the rooing of the title); setting the tatties for the new crop, and hearing many stories around the fire at night about Shetland history and major events, including several tragic accounts of shipwreck; heading to Lerwick to explore the knitwear and fishing industries, including first-hand experience of being part of the crew of a drifter seeking their next big catch; befriending the gutting women onshore and learning that deceptively difficult skill. Grigsby's style is fluent, adventuresome and direct, both in terms of how she treats the world, and how she writes. This freedom and honesty shapes, in this her second book, a narrative full to brimming with vigour and character. An Island Rooing was first published in 1933.