Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Maps

1 After Tuin

2 Attempting to Settle

3 Accepting the Inevitable

4 Rocky Start

5 Discoveries and Disappearances

6 The Hepworth Story Begins

7 Tropical Routines

8 The Sailing Years: 1947–1957

9 Current Contrasts

10 Arrivals: 1957–1959

11 Farewells: 1998

12 1959–1964

13 Dreams

14 Disasters: 1964–1971

15 Excursions

16 1971–1976

17 Lessons in Magic

18 1976–1981

19 Cyclones

20 The Mid-1980s

21 Initiations

22 Bressin Becomes Ben

23 Complicated Recipes

24 Tom at Eighty

25 Sunshine and Showers

26 Burial

27 Final Farewells

Picture Section

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

Also by Lucy Irvine

Copyright

Faraway

Lucy Irvine

For my sons

About the Author

Lucy Irvine was born in 1956 in Whitton, Middlesex. She ran away from school very early and had no full-time education after the age of thirteen. She has been employed as a charlady, monkey-keeper, waitress, stonemason’s mate, life model, pastry-cook and concierge. She has also worked with disabled people and as a clerk at the Inland Revenue. Lucy Irvine is the author of a novel, One is One, as well as Castaway and an account of her early years, Runaway. She has three sons and lives in the Highlands of Scotland.

About the Book

‘Writer seeks wife for desert island’ read the small ad. Lucy Irvine applied and got the job, living – and nearly dying – for a year on Tuin Island off the coast of north-east Australia with the much older Gerald Kingsland. Castaway was her classic account of this adventure.

Sixteen years later, in 1999, Lucy took her three children to the farthest corner of the Solomons to live for a year on remote Pigeon Island. This time the invitation had come from an intrepid eighty-year-old, Diana Hepworth, who, in 1947, set sail from England and embarked on a hazardous journey to find a faraway paradise where she and her husband Tom could raise a family.

Lucy – wild child turned passionate mother – wanted to give her sons the island experience; Diana – former Vogue model – wanted Lucy to write her and Tom’s story. Faraway is the fascinating consequence of these two ‘wants’, a tale of two extraordinary worlds in which tragedy, heroism, danger and pure joy combine in one remarkable story.

Faraway is a classic of travel and adventure by a writer who has dug deep into her psyche to illuminate the darkest reaches of our own.

Author’s Note

The identities of some people in this story have been disguised to protect their privacy. Certain events have been described differently, by different individuals, in diaries, letters and verbally. Where this has happened, I have done my best to descry fact, by seeking substantiation from as many sources as possible. Extracts from diaries and letters have been, in parts, paraphrased, and the recreation of some scenes has required a degree of liberty with dialogue and description where neither I nor a direct source of information was present. Both the contemporary and historical sections of this book are, however, based closely on actual occurrences and real people.

Place names in Reef Islands change and spellings are numerous, so I have opted, in the text and on maps, to use spellings aimed at assisting pronunciation. The names of individuals are also spelled phonetically. The meaning of Pijin English words and phrases is often clear from the context and from their sound, but for ease of reference a glossary has been provided at the end of the book.

1

After Tuin

TWO WEEKS AFTER leaving my Castaway island, I stood in sunshine at a bus stop on the outskirts of London, very brown in white shorts. I’d woken early, as always, missing the sound of the sea, but happy to wander round a waking suburb at dawn for the sheer novelty. Everything I did held little excitements; reason for sudden joy. I’d sung as I washed in water that ran out of a tap that morning, sighed with pleasure as I drank real milk, and now anticipated a nostalgic jaunt to the local library to borrow a book on one of my mother’s tickets. I’d no desire to register for my own because my home address still felt like Tuin Island, Torres Strait, where I’d lived for the past year. It may have been half a world away, but to me it felt close, and in some ways more real than the pavement beneath my feet in their unaccustomed shoes. I carried the island’s image and memories of the life I’d led there like snapshots in a wallet, facts in recent history temporarily more comprehensible and familiar than much of what I saw back in ‘civilization’. It was exciting, but how real was it? The mood of people at the bus stop, none smiling on this pretty day when anything could happen, baffled me.

‘Late again.’

‘Time they did something about it.’

‘That’ll be the day.’

But a bus is going to come! I wanted to cry. Isn’t it a miracle? You wait here a while, then a big machine comes and takes you where you’ve chosen to go. (I’d forgotten, perhaps, that many people lead lives they haven’t chosen.) I rocked impatiently on legs strong from striding down to the sea over Tuin’s moonscape of sandhills. I felt wonderful. I had clean hair. On Tuin I hadn’t been able to wash it for four months, we were so short of water.

‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’ I burst out.

The woman nearest to me took no notice but one beyond, flicking through a pension book, looked round.

‘Only hope it lasts.’

A bus came but no-one got on. It was stopping at a terminus.

‘That’s the third.’

A man in an open car drew up.

‘Anyone going up to town?’ he asked the short queue generally. No-one seemed to be. They all looked straight ahead until I responded enthusiastically, then they all craned round to stare.

I hadn’t been going up to town, but why not? Did no sense of caution make me hesitate? I had had bad experiences with strangers in cars before. But this man just looked as though he were enjoying the pretty day too. Besides, the car was open and we travelled for the most part in a traffic jam, surrounded by crowds. Everything amazed or amused me: shops, advertisements, people’s expressions and clothes. I exclaimed, pointed, laughed.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked. He was in his early thirties, an army officer recently in the Falklands, on leave.

We speeded up a bit, and I called into the wind: ‘I’m from the land where the Bong Tree grows!’

He joined in my laughter.

‘Where are you going?’

I decided on the spur of the moment: ‘The British Library.’ One up on the local, and a publisher interested in the idea of a book based on diaries I’d kept on the island had issued me with the requisite letter for a pass. I didn’t take the idea seriously, but wanted to learn about the history of the Torres Strait anyway. I agreed to have lunch with my chauffeur later.

‘But you’ve got to wear a ra-ra,’ he said. It was 1982, year of the ra-ra skirt. Gerald, my husband on Tuin, had liked me to wear stockings painted on with charcoal from the fire. He’d stayed on the island I loved longer than he wanted, because I agreed to such whims. ‘I would, but haven’t any money,’ I said. The man gave me some, and I quickly found a silky blue number before settling down to study the findings of Alfred Cort Haddon’s Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898. I found his account so compelling – descriptions of the ‘natives’ took me back to when their descendants helped me survive on Tuin – that I phoned the publisher and an appointment was made. Then I drank champagne and ate gloriously rich steak pie in a smart restaurant with the man in the open car, who liked my ra-ra floating so lightly over my thighs. Soon my still brown breasts wanted to be bare, too.

‘You really do come from the land where the Bong Tree grows, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

I’d come home to find both my mother and sister as unhappy as they had been when I left for Tuin over a year ago. They were both still living in the shadow of our family’s break-up. Nothing seemed to have changed for them, but everything had for me. Avoiding the sadness of the house, I accepted more invitations from the ra-ra man but refused a lift to the publishers. This was a new direction I wanted to explore alone. I had no confidence about writing, but did know what had happened during my year away, and the idea of revisiting the island by describing it was attractive, so I accepted a small advance, then hitch-hiked to Bristol to consult my greatest friend, Addie, whom I’d met when I was sixteen, during my Runaway days. I was twenty-six now. Addie had drunk too much at my wedding to Gerald (we’d had to marry or the authorities wouldn’t stamp our visas), grabbed my newly wedded husband by the throat and told him to look after me. He’d also bet that if anyone was going to write about the island it would be me, which I didn’t believe, but I loved Addie’s faith in me. (Gerald, the originator of the modern ‘year on a tropical island’ idea, did in fact write a book, a collage of island experiences.) When I read Addie passages from my diary – how strange to sit in a city and describe spearing crabs for bait – he was matter-of-fact: ‘Just do it, Lucy.’ I’d never told him about my habit of lucrative escapism with strangers, but I think he knew and saw no happy future in it. I set off back along the motorway fired with purpose. It was another beautiful day, and I had a plan. When a man who gave me a lift asked me to lie down under a barbed-wire fence for money, I said no. When he insisted, I did something I’d never done before: I got angry, and swung the little leather suitcase containing my Tuin diaries threateningly. ‘No!’ He drove off and I had to walk eleven miles before I got another lift, but I didn’t care.

I wrote Castaway in a converted smokehouse overlooking the Summer Isles, in Scotland. Another island setting was ideal as a backdrop for reliving Tuin days. Everything was simplified again, reduced to sea, sky and one main aim. On the island, the aim was to survive; now I just had to record how that was done. My father, running his hotel nearby with a new wife, popped in sometimes, but otherwise my existence was pleasingly solitary. Discipline, after the rigours of life on a desert island, was no problem. I produced pages without pause. But the publishers, when I sent a sample, weren’t impressed. Why was I talking about starvation and tropical ulcers, and using rude words? Where were the romantic beach scenes? ‘We had in mind a coffee-table book,’ they explained. Weren’t people interested in reality? I was staring for the last time at the rejected pages when a phone call came. ‘Is that Lucy Irvine?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The Lucy Irvine?’ ‘Pardon?’ ‘I’m going to publish your book. Don’t change a word.’ My sample had been passed under a table to this godlike stranger, and I was off again. Why was the subject of life on an uninhabited island with a man I hardly knew so potentially appealing? ‘It’s something people dream about, you see,’ he told me, ‘but few do. You’ve done it.’ I saw, or thought I did – although Tuin had felt more like a thorny personal challenge than the stuff of dreams most of the time I was there. The next challenge was how to cope with life in civilization, a feat of which I yet dream.

Fame sits strangely on the shoulders of a young woman still in the habit of regarding fresh water and electricity with reverential wonder. Castaway was to be sold in fourteen countries, and I was to be the chief marketing tool. After a windswept walk to say goodbye to the Summer Isles, I glanced at my oilskinned figure in a mirror. ‘Chief marketing tool,’ I said aloud, and wondered what exactly this meant. What was I supposed to be like? I made the mistake, perhaps, of not asking myself what I wanted to be like. I’d lived naked, inside and out, on a mile-long atoll in the Coral Sea. Now I was to be a celebrity. Moving to London, I experimented with images – county type; vamp; ragamuffin – none seemed more or less apposite than another, but it was fun trying, and a new experience not having to worry how I was going to pay – or ask men for favours. Addie sent blasts of Bach to soothe me in the high hype, jetset world I was about to enter as ‘the Castaway girl’.

In New York, my hotel suite supplied a beribbonned welcome basket of fruit three feet high. Nervously, I nibbled a cherry and stained my immaculate designer blouse, causing a publicity escort to dash out for another. I soaked in a marble bath, more cautiously eating a banana, while I waited for it to arrive. I was soon to address an audience in Washington and rehearsed my lines: ‘I can’t tell you how extraordinary it is to be here.’ It was truthful, but would it do? Apparently it did, backed by slides on a giant screen of dear, familiar Tuin. In Cincinnati there was a blizzard and, missing a plane, I had to appear on TV having had no sleep, make-up plastered on like Polyfilla (who was that in the mirror?); in Chicago I got lost and ended up in a ‘swing’ bar, where women fondled women; I cried with exhaustion in a queen-sized bed with satin sheets in Boston, and laughed over a whole chicken served in a pineapple on a silver platter, when all I’d asked for was a sandwich. On Tuin, I’d sometimes had to manage on one precious cup of carefully caught rainwater per day; now I could drink a bottle of pink champagne on my own if I liked. It was fun being fêted, but also bizarre. In Milan, after being dressed in leather and given a trident to flourish for photographs, I was taken to Capri and psychoanalysed in public, in Italian, of which I understood not a word; Castaway in German was called Eva und Mr Robinson which put a new slant on it. A Swedish Braille edition came out. After a while, even discussion about my adventures in English began to seem foreign and I realized, as the novelty of plentiful food and any number of images dimmed, that I needed a place to call home. Also a question I was always asked: ‘Why did you do it?’ needed more than a one-line answer. Back on a flying visit to Scotland, I briefed a lawyer to find a property ‘Generous for one, with no neighbours’ and, after an Australian tour, began writing Runaway, the book which explained to myself, never mind the rest of the world, why it had seemed so natural to take the step of going to live on an uninhabited island with a stranger.

It didn’t take long to find a cottage. After living in a tent for a year, then a smokehouse, I wasn’t fussy. An elderly woman was wiping an ancient wood-burning stove when I viewed the home I was to buy. ‘Will you manage the logs alone?’ she asked. ‘Oh yes,’ I answered airily. What could be difficult about living in a place with a roof and walls after surviving on Tuin? The stove – a Rayburn – was the only piece of furniture left when she went, and I loved the bare rooms with their echoey floorboards, open fires and views over moorland ideal for lone wanders. The name of the place was irresistible too – Inchreoch, meaning heathery island – and I bought a car and learned to drive on single tracks near the west coast so I could move in as soon as possible. It was while negotiating a bend under a mountain one morning that I spotted a figure in a fishing jersey, hitch-hiking, who was to be the link between me and Pigeon Island years later. While I concentrated on not driving into lochs, he talked about his experiences in fish farming. He’d seen an article about a tropical island and hoped the owners, an elderly British couple, might find his knowledge useful. He’d love to go there.

‘And did you know that the woman who wrote Castaway is supposed to live round here? I’d love to meet her. She should hear about this other woman on this other island  . . .’

I kept my eyes on the road, not letting him know until I dropped him at Ullapool harbour that he’d been travelling with Ms Castaway. If people had learned where I was living, now was the time to move.

At Inchreoch, I slept on the floor and used a wooden fishbox as a desk. I also sat on fishboxes, built shelves with them, and stored everything from pine cones to potatoes in them. When I came back from another tour, of South Africa, and found I was expecting a baby, I reckoned a fishbox would make an ideal cradle, too. But the impact of being no longer one carefree individual didn’t hit home fully until my shape changed. I’d bought a bed by then, a double. When I wasn’t busy writing Runaway or striding on the moors, I cried in that bed. And as I grew larger, with full breasts for the first time after being so skinny on Tuin, I felt no longer exotic but womanly, and vulnerable. And I wanted strong arms around both myself and my child. Leaving my unfinished manuscript in a safe place, I took myself back, one snowy night when five months pregnant, in search of what seemed so painfully missing.

I was instantly at ease in the vastness of an African landscape. I recognized the sensuous sting of the sun in the day, and the huge, cool moon lighting up the mountains at night. The red-earthed karoo with its twisted trees and flash floods and the hot, sparse plains of the Homelands to the north awed me equally. I drove miles along bright coastline and root-strewn interior tracks; stopped for tea at Afrikaner homesteads where toilet rolls were concealed beneath the skirts of dolls, and bought peaches the size of cricket balls from Zulu women under trees. When I lost my way in a black township, women touched my belly. ‘Where is the father?’ they asked. ‘I’m looking for him,’ I answered, and they looked at me with grave eyes, as if they understood.

In Transkei, I abandoned my car in the Mkambesi river as it slipped over the edge of a ford. I had then to walk, surprising herds of striped kudu with rubbery mouths, and feeling both fear and attraction as the bare veldt filled with shadows in the dusk. A Xhosa horseman found me, and lifted me onto a tall mare. Fifteen men plucked the car from the river and slowly it dried, steaming in the sun. When I left Transkei a week later, a woman gave me sheets of preserved peaches scrolled like charts, and hundreds of tiny apples. There were fresh peaches on the dashboard too, and it is the image of all this fragile fruit tumbling and smashing that’s remained in my mind over the years, from when the wheels locked suddenly and the car went into a long diagonal skid on shale downhill and turned over three times, to land on its roof in a barren field.

Now I was shaken; no longer cruising through Africa in a dangerous, yearning dream. I hung, swaying, in my seat belt. The windscreen was shattered, roof and doors buckled, making my escape route, through the front window, slim. I eased out, hair gathering glass, and wormed away. The ground was scattered with apples, split flesh bathed with juice like sweat, under the sun. I took a handful, and moved towards the road. Apart from the hill I’d crashed down, it was a flat landscape, little but sandy fields and bleached blue sky. I sat by the road, one hand on my belly, where I could feel nothing. My watch was smashed but the sun said midday, then three o’clock. I kept feeling for movement. Kicks I’d grown used to seemed to shout their absence into the air; a small voice but, to me, loud. I didn’t want to be alone again. At last I heard real sounds – singing – as, like something out of a cartoon, a carload of Afrikaner policemen, all chewing boerwurst, appeared. They stopped. ‘Where is the father?’ ‘Why are you travelling alone?’ A doctor, fifty kilometres away, asked similar questions as he zoomed a machine over my skin from breasts to groin. ‘Did you say you felt movement before?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Definitely?’ ‘Definitely.’ ‘Well, I’m not getting any heartbeat now.’ When it was discovered I wasn’t married, I was reprimanded like a schoolgirl. ‘I can feel something!’ I cried, interrupting. ‘You can? Maybe it’s this bloody machine.’ He put an old-fashioned ear to my belly, with a cupped hand. ‘So OK, you’re lucky, if that’s what you want  . . .’

It was what I wanted, and even though, when I met him two days later, it was plain the father couldn’t envisage a child in his life at that time, I was clear about the future. I’d been jolted into reality. Hope and hormones had made me yearn for protecting arms around me, but if I couldn’t have them I’d manage anyway.

Magnus Irvine came six weeks early in the summer of 1985. ‘Are babies meant to be that small?’ asked my brother, who’d now taken over the Summer Isles Hotel from our father. I didn’t care. Bundling my sparrow into a blanket sewn into a bag, I took him everywhere. He watched me through the mesh of a plastic laundry basket when I chopped wood; flopped about with his head like an apple on a string on my back when I walked the moors; lay across my lap when I typed. And he grew. By the time he was four months old and we went to Helsinki where Castaway was being launched, he was robust and determined in his demands. He came with me to London where I went for discussions about the film based on the book. When I met director Nicolas Roeg, and Amanda Donahoe who played the part of Lucy, I got only halfway through lunch at Le Caprice before I felt I must phone the babysitter to check that Magnus had had his  . . .  I was happy that the film should be someone else’s interpretation of the story. Roeg wanted a vehicle for the exploration of a relationship between an older man and a younger woman and the island setting was ideal. Fine. I put the money away for my son’s future, and returned to the Highlands to complete Runaway. Magnus was a red-cheeked country child when the book came out, and people asked: ‘Don’t you worry about him getting into trouble, like you did?’ I did. More than anything else in the world I wanted his upbringing to be secure; his family, even if it was only me, absolutely stable. He mustn’t have a messy background, like mine.

So why did I capitulate when, after two happy, busy years, a lonely stranger wanting arms around him appeared? The answer must be that, for all my independence and purpose, my body was lonely too. Now, so content before in all but the body’s cyclical hunger – I’d stopped crying at night after Magnus was born – I rediscovered some of the confusions that had first sent me to a desert island for its blessed simplicity. I regretted my impulsive action fiercely, but there was no going back. I’d conceived again, and hope grew in me again, hand in cuff with the resultant flood of hormones, so that not one more child arrived but two – Joe first and then, two years later, Benji. All this despite my inability to give up my solitary emotional ways. Books were born between babies, and Inchreoch, described as ‘generous for one’, suddenly became, after a brief and mutually painful spell in which I tried and failed to share its roof with the younger boys’ father, a ‘cosy’ nest for four.

The year Magnus turned eight, Joe six and Benji four, the one adult I felt close to as a friend, Addie, died suddenly. No more Bach through the letterbox, and no-one to receive odd lines of poetry I never had to explain. The possibility of an intimacy not just based on the body had been offered, for he’d asked if it wasn’t time we got our children together, now that we were both free; but I was still in shock from recent failure and said no. I didn’t want to risk losing his friendship and in fact decided then to become celibate. Mourning perhaps a double loss – for there was no hope now of the stable father figure I longed for in the children’s lives – I planted, numbly, clump after clump of snowdrops and daffodils on hillocks, under trees and lining the area designated as a football field in our wild third of an acre. The boys played round me, erecting stockades and firing salvos from deep hiding whenever a car passed. We dug in as a family, but sooner or later we’d have to come out from behind our barricades and accept a degree of contact with the confusing outside world. I might have been content to become a hermit, but it would be wrong to impose such a way of life on children.

My method of re-emerging was fairly drastic. In the winter of 1994, to prove that life was still an open door and anything could happen to those willing to risk what was on the other side, I transported my sons to the west coast of Africa. Compromising on the safety front initially by placing ourselves under the auspices of a travel company, we caused raised eyebrows by finding a local driver, lining his battered jeep with mattress foam meant for sun loungers and taking off into the bush. I needed another glimpse of Bong Tree land.

Magnus gazed at the potholed red earth, bullocks languid under a thousand flies and bulbous baobab trees. He’d seen mud houses only in books before. Alligators and mangrove swamps were new too. (None of us knew we’d one day spend a year amid comparable poverty and heat, but somewhere considerably more remote, with no jeeps.) We made friends with a young Gambian and ate fish out of a communal bowl. A Marabout gave Magnus a protective juju in exchange for my gold watch, in which I placed less value. That we both wanted to believe in the juju – who doesn’t want to protect their children by any means? – made it worth keeping, but I talked to Magnus about the beliefs of the ancient Greeks and Christians too. I’d given him a globe that Christmas, and a history book. I wanted him to be equipped to make his own choices later in life. Brought up without the distraction of television, he was already a keen reader. Together, in Africa, we read about the slave trade, and visited sites where men, women and children once stood in chains. It was enlightening for us both, a lesson in our good fortune to be who we were, and when. But Magnus also swam in the Kamby Bolongo with dolphins, danced the limbo, laughing, and caught crabs on the beach with Joe, Benji and African friends. He was going to become, as well as a beloved son, a friend. But my job now was to ensure he had the best of childhood. Over wild boar and yams, we discussed the possibility of his going away to school. If there weren’t to be men in my private life, he must find good examples elsewhere. The plan was he’d stay in the village school at home until he was eleven, then go to an outward bound establishment we both fancied – if he succeeded in gaining a scholarship. It was a high-risk proposition to put to an eight-year-old. He’d have to be prepared to work. He was.

Joe, on discovering birds in Africa to be even more exciting than the robins and wrens he courted for his table at home, and that there were colourful lizards too, dreamed away hot days with his eyes always on the trees or under a bush. He adored the sight and sound of Atlantic rollers crashing on hot black sand. He drew pictures of animals, in silence, for hours. I was only beginning to realize then how hard this quiet middle son found it to hear normal speech clearly. His deafness was not profound, but enough to make him retreat a little. Benji was happy so long as I gave a nod to the routine the male nanny I’d employed the last year I was working had wisely imposed – stories after lunch and cuddles after baths. When Magnus and I went on a trek in the African heat that was too strenuous for his younger brothers, a beautifully coiffured woman from Mali looked after them. Benji told me, with fascination, that after lunch she’d ‘taken her hair off and eaten twigs’ (removed her wig and cleaned her teeth, presumably), and asked if he could stay with her again. On the night before we left, a wizened old Gambian sat up a tree to guard Benji when Magnus asked me to watch him dance. Benji thought this so novel, he wanted the old man to be his new nanny. ‘You don’t need a nanny now,’ I said, ‘you’ve got me.’

I won’t pretend our African excursion was a great adventure, but it served its purpose. Once we were caught in a sandstorm when driving along a crazily rutted track at night. I used every piece of cloth I could find to make a covering for the boys on the padded floor of the jeep, and tied a scarf over my own eyes. When we stopped, abruptly, and I took it off, men with guns and torches were poking at the lumpy pile at my feet. ‘Babies!’ I blurted, and peeled back the coverings on three sleepy heads. There were instant smiles, and one of the men, in a military-type uniform, helped tuck the rags back round the boys. ‘Where is your husband?’ he asked. ‘I don’t have one,’ I said, and by then I could accept both Addie’s death and the death of hopes I’d harboured for a permanent relationship. But there was no sense of hopelessness any more. United as we were by this mini voyage of discovery together, the future alone with my family seemed an adventure in itself. And I didn’t need my heart flung into my mouth by any more military checkpoints to make it exciting. From now on I would be happy to pursue the lessons Tuin had taught me and learn more, in the Scottish countryside, with my sons. Or that’s what I told myself.

2

Attempting to Settle

OVER A DECADE after my first desert island experience, I was still more conscious of not wasting resources than anyone I knew, and my sons grew up understanding that if we wanted a bath, first we had to check there was enough water in the burn at the end of the garden, then heat it, which meant splitting logs. I gave Magnus his first axe when he was nine. In winter, when the pipes froze, he brought buckets from the burn on a sledge; Joe half a bucket; Benji a kettle. I wrote a story for the boys about children on an island who found a gecko in their catchment barrel. They nodded seriously; pollution would be no laughing matter, but they also wanted the gecko rescued and made up more stories of their own in front of the fire. In the morning, I swept out the grate; Joe emptied the ash; Magnus replenished the peat, and Benji towed a real log behind a toy tractor. We all contributed, and nothing was taken for granted – except the solidarity of family love.

Springtimes at Inchreoch came with a mass of daffodils which sprang up, regardless of snow, in March. My benumbed planting spree when Addie died had been worthwhile, and as soon as there was a hint of warmth in the air we ate outside. Sunday lunches consisted of a hunk of lamb chucked in the Rayburn at the same time as stoking it first thing, a homemade loaf and fruit. It meant a celebration if we had crisps as well because, although we loved treats, I wanted the children to learn, as I had, that luxuries feel more rewarding if deserved. Magnus, for instance, only took four biscuits with his milk if he was satisfied with his training run in the woods. Out of one careless night in Africa had come an arrow shot from the bow of my desire, now speeding beyond me.

My other little arrows shot upwards, and celebrated summers with wild games in bracken and competitions to see who’d brave the cold of a loch first. Anxious to make the most of fine days, I bossed the boys to organize themselves, feeling it important they begin life with the attitude that some responsibility would always be theirs. But once we had arrived at our destination – a bluebell-filled valley or a sliver of beach along a river glittering with speckled stones – we relaxed completely, and the boys demonstrated that they needed no teaching in the art of ‘living now’. The lessons Tuin had taught me came naturally to them. But I did sometimes think, lying padded with jumpers on a cool Scottish rock, eyes to the sky as I listened to their happy voices, what perfect desert island dwellers these boys would be.

Summers could be blissful, but winters were hard, and one year the struggles with buckets didn’t end when the thaw came. I’d known since Magnus was born that our burn water failed environmental health tests, and we collected washing water off the roof and drinking water whenever we were near a reliable source. This was usually a toilet at a garage miles away with a tap at a suitable height. Every avenue was explored to obtain a good supply closer to home but it was fruitless, and we had to accept that, although we could enjoy deep brown baths and the benefits of a flushing loo, we must live with plastic drums for other purposes. Then an accident among forestry workers filled the burn with urea-flavoured sludge. The owners of the estate where this happened offered the use of a river on their land, but by then more stringent EEC standards prevailed and all analyses labelled the source ‘unsatisfactory’ on a number of counts. The home we loved was pronounced technically uninhabitable, and now all water had to be carried by hand.

To compound the impatience I felt with this, I had pressure from within. A novel I had shelved to care full time for the children was calling, and with Benji now at school I should be able to return to it. After delivering the boys to the school bus stop, I took to locking the front door and disappearing onto a fictional island, forgetting everything until an alarm ordered me to leap back into the car.

‘What’s for supper, Mum?’

‘When can we next go swimming?’

‘Give me a minute! I’ve just finished work  . . .  I can’t think  . . .’

Often we had to dash to the nearest town for water straight away, and I took – crossly – to buying convenience food. The pressures of a ‘90s pace of living had reached even my hideaway existence and we weren’t geared up for it. The boys, however, thought the new tempo and its concomitant treats exciting. ‘Pizza? Great! And it’s good, Mum, because there’s hardly any washing up.’ The laundry, by then, was being taken in by a woman who thought our life extraordinary. She filled squash bottles to pop in with the clean clothes, and told me I was getting thin and always rushing, but I smiled, grabbed the bottles and dashed on. By now Magnus was in sole charge of log-splitting, but somehow, in the midst of our faster routine, we still managed to read poems together and practise General Knowledge over meals. He was my number one helper, but it wasn’t right so much fell on his shoulders, and when I dropped him off for his scholarship exam I realized that, praying for his success, I was, in effect, wishing him away from my intense, isolationist ways. Warmth, love and shelter had been enough when he was little, but now he was ready for ‘general knowledge’ of a kind not available in books. He needed to learn to mix – better than I had – with his fellow men.

One night in the spring of 1995, I was trying to mend the Rayburn, sitting with legs braced either side of it and applying a claw hammer, when violent pain, radiating from a point in my lower spine, sent me reeling backwards. I curled up and nearly screamed; tried straightening my legs and did scream, but in my head. On my knees, nauseous and scared, I shuffled to the stove, flung in a log, then walked, still on my knees, to the bathroom, where I hung over a bucket, sweating but cold. I must have pulled something; at worst, it was a slipped disk. But I was wrong. It was bone that had slipped. In lay terms, I had a step defect, a congenital abnormality of the spine, that had presented under pressure, threatening my spinal cord and the balance of the whole column, and a surgeon I saw wouldn’t operate because of the risks. Pain could be controlled to a degree but I must accept that my spine would never be normal. I tried to face this and, alone, I might have succeeded, but accepting what it did to my sons seemed impossible. There were no family picnics by rivers that summer, no sledging together in the winter, and the prospect of a miserable mum in a wheelchair ahead. Happiness to me – to us all – was a very physical thing. I asked to see another surgeon, and he said that if I accepted the risks – death or paralysis if things went wrong – he’d do it. I was to go home and be prepared to be called at anytime.

Being prepared for open spinal surgery meant organizing round-the-clock childcare for months ahead, getting the house ready to close up, and making a Will. This last brought everything home to me. I wrote that I wished the funds remaining after my death to be used imaginatively with regard to my sons’ care. Allowing for adventure and learning from real life seemed as important to me as more conventional education. I was trying to build ‘desert island’ space into their futures. My brother was supportive. Everyone would rally round if the worst happened. If only Addie could have been among them. But, holding on tightly to a blue sock containing three precious locks of hair and a plastic tiger donated by Benji for courage, I went ‘under the knife’ in 1996 as determined as possible to emerge not only alive and unparalysed but with a far brighter future. I wanted to be on that – so far only notional – sunny island with my boys. I regained consciousness to the sound of the surgeon shouting for me to waggle my feet. If I could, I was going to be OK. Through a fog of drugs, I made an almighty effort and believed I was paddling the air in arcs. In fact my feet moved only slightly, but that was enough and I passed out again smiling.

To be an utter invalid was at once a remote and intimate experience. Out of technical interest, since I was celibate, I asked the surgeon when I’d be fit enough to make love. It seemed a good example of all-round physical exercise requiring a degree of flow that, in my puppet-like state, must be very distant. Although he laughed, his answer was shrewd: ‘You can do just about anything you want, when you feel ready.’ These words boded well for the future. Wound into layers of cotton wool like a straitjacket and strapped flat, I was transferred by ambulance to a cottage hospital near the boys, and there exercised feeble hands by sewing nametapes onto rugby boots – for Magnus had achieved his scholarship. He cycled over, balancing lollipops on his handlebars, to celebrate, and we looked at each other steadily. He’d been shocked when he first saw me after the operation, gulping down Ribena as an adult might throw back brandy, but we could say definitely now that some things in our lives were going perfectly to plan.

Joe was first to take me out in my wheelchair, negotiating kerbs breathlessly, while Benji yelled warnings about dogs. If my spine was jolted in its protective brace I didn’t say, but maybe my face registered something, because when we were back in the hospital Benji lay silently beside me on the bed with his arms round my neck and Joe asked: ‘When are you going to get properly better, Mum?’ With the novelty of borrowed dads, other mums’ cooking and television wearing off by now, they wanted desperately to go home. So did I. A local girl, Jeanie, had charge of Inchreoch at this time, admitting water technicians and keeping the place aired. My wise doctor, generally easy-going over the idiosyncrasies of my home life, wouldn’t discharge me until a shower was installed, as it would be a long time before I could use a bath. Also, I must be stronger.

Visitors came, among them the boys’ piano teacher, Steve, who brought mail. I looked through the letters, and one, from the Solomon Islands, puzzled me. Who was this Mrs Hepworth, making an extraordinary proposition with such throwaway elegance? ‘My late husband and I came to Pigeon, a remote tropical island, in the 1950s and raised our children here  . . .  People tell me it’s very beautiful  . . .  I understand you have some previous experience of island life, and wondered if you might be interested in living in my home while I am travelling next year.’ She’d been given my name by someone I’d apparently given a lift to in the Highlands, years ago. I searched my memory until a young man in a fishing jersey, talking about an elderly couple on an island, came up. The same young man who’d talked about ‘the woman who wrote Castaway’. What a wonderful far-flung connection, but what hopeless timing. I’d been told recovery could take a year, and even after that I’d have to be ‘sensible’. Nevertheless this woman interested me and I wanted to help. Next time he visited, I asked Steve if he fancied whisking his wife to Paradise for a month or so, gratis, in return for caretaking duties. ‘Are you joking?’ he asked. ‘No, I’d go myself if I could.’ He said yes before consulting his wife. It was to be a surprise. Heartened by a compromise that would give pleasure all round, I wrote back to Mrs Hepworth from my hospital bed, throwing in a copy of Castaway.

–