Clift Hills Crofts – a story of Shetland

CLIFT HILLS CROFTS
By John Barnabas Leith

I wrote this story just after I wrote the Clift Hills, Shetland poem.

Lollie was late. He always was. All he had to do was come up from Hamnavoe, stop by the green gate of the old school yard, and let me step into his ancient Renault van. No big deal. I’m always on time and he the opposite. Well, that’s how we are and he’s still my best friend in Shetland.

It’s not easy being an incomer, a sooth-moother as they say in Shetland – because incomers sail into Lerwick harbour through its south (sooth) mouth. I’m not used to being an outsider. Interesting, isn’t it, that coming in to a place makes one an outsider. Anyway, it’s an interesting challenge to teach English, as I do, to children whose dialect of English is quite different from mine. Scalloway Junior High School is a tough place, fishermen’s sons who cannot wait to get out to the fishing, slow-speaking crofter’s daughters who know they will marry and drudge and feed caddie lambs their life through.

And then there’s Jackie. Bright, articulate, rebellious daughter of an absent father and drunken mother, she looks after her younger brothers and sisters, comes to school, learns quickly, questions every teacher’s word, will go far or sink sadly into utter loss.

It was Jackie who told me about the ruined Crofts on top of the Clift Hills, which I can see from my kitchen window on Trondra. The Clift Sound that runs below the house is a deep arm of the Atlantic that separates Trondra and its thirty people from Shetland’s mainland. The Clift Hills, bare and dun-coloured, rise steeply from the Sound and their rounded tops are sometimes shrouded in low cloud, sometimes clear in sharp winter sun.

Like today. It’s one of those rare days when there’s not a breath of wind. The sea is mirror-calm and the Clift Hills have inverted twins in the Sound. There’s snow up there and on the scattald land behind the School House. I think this may be a short calm interval, because further snow showers from the north were forecast this morning on Radio Shetland. Jessie from Grindadale, a mile or so down the road, was sure there’d be more snow when Joanie and I took the bairns to see her last weekend, and Jessie is better than any fancy meteorologist in Bracknell when it comes to Shetland’s weather.

I look up at the Clift Hills. The two ruined crofts are there today. They’re not always there; they come and go in different lights and different weathers. Two families lived up there, Jackie told me, in the last century. The women farmed the croft lands, growing some oats and neaps, running a few Shetland sheep for the wool and the meat from the lambs. The men fished for Jamieson, the Scalloway fish merchant. Each year, during the season, they rented gear from Jamieson and, with their teenage sons, rowed down the Sound and out to sea to trail their baited lines for the herring that were so much in demand to keep busy the girls who gutted and salted and packed at the herring stations on the shores of Scalloway harbour.

The Clift Hills men fished all season, landing their catches in Scalloway, rowing thirty or forty miles out to sea – rowing Foula down, as they used to say, rowing until the island of Foula out to the west was below the horizon – hauling their lines and sailing their sixareens, their six-oared open boats with brown dipping lugsails down the wind until they reached home again.

At the end of the season the merchant totted up the rent of the gear against the value of the landed catches and found, each year, that the men owed him more money than he owed them. Next year they would have to fish for him again to discharge their debt. And their sons, too, as they grew in strength would fish for merchant Jamieson.

One of the Clift Hills men had a son, Ertie, whom he loved very much. When Ertie was fourteen, he went to the fishing. One fine summer’s day, the men and their sons climbed into their boat. Young Ertie was the first to clamber in, proud now to be among the men. His father pushed off from the beach and they took up the oars. The women had spent the whole of the past two days baiting the lines, which now lay coiled in a box on the boat’s bottom planks. For hours they rowed, leaving the mouth of Scalloway harbour, and creeping past the islands and out to the far haaf.

For two days they fished. They slept what little sleep they could through the cold nights on the boat’s tafts. The third day started fine and calm and again they trailed their lines. By ten of the morning clouds came up from the south west and the wind began to blow. By ten fifteen it was blowing a full gale and the sea, which only half an hour before had been calm, thrashed and rolled, and drove the sixareen towards the land.

They fetched up at the Point, near Port Arthur. Young Ertie’s body was never found.

The merchant sent men to tell the women they had lost their men. And their homes.

The straw thatches were stripped from the roofs, the grieving women and their young bairns came down and lived in penury with unwilling relatives in Scalloway. One of the bairns was Jackie’s grandmother.

I looked south to Wester Quarff’s white houses huddling, almost at sea level, with the dark steep hills at their back, facing out towards East Burra. Behind me, a fulmar mewed over the Wharls. A car passed on its way to Burra. I thought of all the lives that had been eked out on this difficult soil and on the dangerous sea.

I felt a cold air on my left cheek and looked north towards the bridge and Scalloway, but the first of the snow squalls, funnelling down the Tingwall valley had already veiled the castle, houses and fish factories from my view. As I looked, the wind hit me and the snow hid the bridge and swept on down the Sound.

Lollie’s van came over the brow of the hill on the road from Burra.

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