Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey

  Then, one bright cold morning with the ground beneath my feet hard with a late and unexpected frost, I arrived to see my silver swan enthroned at last on her nest, her cob proudly patrolling the loch close by.

  I knew there were foxes about even then. I had heard their cries often enough echoing through the night. I had seen their footprints in the snow. But I had never seen one out and about, until now.

  It was dusk. I was on my way back home from the loch, coming up through the woods, when I spotted a family of five cubs, their mother sitting on guard near by. Unseen and unsmelt, I crouched down where I was and watched.

  I could see at once that they were starving, some of them already too weak even to pester their mother for food. But I could see too that she had none to give – she was thin and rangy herself. I remember thinking then: That’s one family of foxes that’s not likely to make it, not if the spring doesn’t come soon, not if this winter goes on much longer.

  But the winter did go on that year, on and on.

  I thought little more of the foxes. My mind was on other things, more important things. My silver swan and her cob shared the sitting duties and the guarding duties, never leaving the precious nest long enough for me even to catch sight of the eggs, let alone count them. But I could count the days, and I did.

  As the day approached I made up my mind I would go down to the loch, no matter what, and stay there until it happened – however long that might take. But the great day dawned foggy. Out of my bedroom window, I could barely see across the farmyard.

  I ran all the way down to the loch. From the lochside I could see nothing of the island, nothing of the loch, only a few feet of limpid grey water lapping at the muddy shore. I could hear the muffled aarking of a heron out in the fog, and the distant piping of a moorhen. But I stayed to keep watch, all that day, all the next.

  I was there in the morning two days later when the fog began at last to lift and the pale sun to come through. The island was there again. I turned my binoculars at once on the nest. It was deserted. They were gone. I scanned the loch, still mist-covered in places. Not a ripple. Nothing.

  Then out of nothing they appeared, my silver swan, her cob and four cygnets, coming straight towards me. As they came towards the shore they turned and sailed right past me. I swear she was showing them to me, parading them. They both swam with such easy power, the cygnets bobbing along in their wake. But I had counted wrong. There was another one, hitching a ride in amongst his mother’s folded wings. A snug little swan, I thought, littler than the others perhaps. A lucky little swan.

  That night the wind came in from the north and the loch froze over. It stayed frozen. I wondered how they would manage. But I need not have worried. They swam about, keeping a pool of water near the island clear of ice. They had enough to eat, enough to drink. They would be fine. And every day the cygnets were growing. It was clear now that one of them was indeed much smaller, much weaker. But he was keeping up. He was coping. All was well.

  Then, silently, as I slept one night, it snowed outside. It snowed on the farm, on the trees, on the frozen loch. I took bread crusts with me the next morning, just in case, and hurried down to the loch. As I came out of the woods I saw the fox’s paw prints in the snow. They were leading down towards the loch.

  I was running, stumbling through the drifts, dreading all along what I might find.

  The fox was stalking around the nest. My silver swan was standing her ground over her young, neck lowered in attack, her wings beating the air frantically, furiously. I shouted. I screamed. But I was too late and too far away to help.

  Quick as a flash the fox darted in, had her by the wing and was dragging her away. I ran out onto the ice. I felt it crack and give suddenly beneath me. I was knee-deep in the loch then, still screaming; but the fox would not be put off. I could see the blood, red, bright red, on the snow. The five cygnets were scattering in their terror. My silver swan was still fighting. But she was losing, and there was nothing I could do.

  I heard the sudden singing of wings above me. The cob! The cob flying in, diving to attack. The fox took one look upwards, released her victim, and scampered off over the ice, chased all the way by the cob.

  For some moments I thought my silver swan was dead. She lay so still on the snow. But then she was on her feet and limping back to her island, one wing flapping feebly, the other trailing, covered in blood and useless. She was gathering her cygnets about her. They were all there. She was enfolding them, loving them, when the cob came flying back to her, landing awkwardly on the ice.

  I heard the sudden singing of wings above me. The cob!

  He stood over her all that day and would not leave her side. He knew she was dying. So, by then, did I. I had nothing but revenge and murder in my heart. Time and again, as I sat there at the lochside, I thought of taking my father’s gun and going into the woods to hunt down the killer fox. But then I would think of her cubs and would know that she was only doing what a mother fox had to do.

  For days I kept my cold sad vigil by the loch. The cob was sheltering the cygnets now, my silver swan sleeping near by, her head tucked under her wing. She scarcely ever moved.

  I wasn’t there, but I knew the precise moment she died. I knew it because she sang it. It’s quite true what they say about swans singing only when they die. I was at home. I had been sent out to fetch logs for the fire before I went up to bed. The world about me was crisp and bright under the moon. The song was clearer and sweeter than any human voice, than any birdsong, I had ever heard before. So sang my silver swan and died.

  I expected to see her lying dead on the island the next morning. But she was not there. The cob was sitting still as a statue on his nest, his five cygnets around him.

  I went looking for her. I picked up the trail of feathers and blood at the lochside, and followed where I knew it must lead, up through the woods. I approached silently. The fox cubs were frolicking fat and furry in the sunshine, their mother close by intent on her grooming. There was a terrible wreath of white feathers near by, and telltale feathers too on her snout. She was trying to shake them off. How I hated her.

  I ran at her. I picked up stones. I hurled them. I screamed at her. The foxes vanished into the undergrowth and left me alone in the woods. I picked up a silver feather, and cried tears of such raw grief, such fierce anger.

  Spring came at long last the next day, and melted the ice. The cob and his five cygnets were safe. After that I came less and less to the loch. It wasn’t quite the same without my silver swan. I went there only now and again, just to see how he was doing, how they were all doing.

  At first, to my great relief, it seemed as if he was managing well enough on his own. Then one day I noticed there were only four cygnets swimming alongside him, the four bigger ones. I don’t know what happened to the smaller one. He just wasn’t there. Not so lucky, after all.

  The cob would sometimes bring his cygnets to the lochside to see me. I would feed them when he came, but then after a while he just stopped coming.

  The weeks passed and the months passed, and the cygnets grew and flew. The cob scarcely left his island now. He stayed on the very spot I had last seen my silver swan. He did not swim; he did not feed; he did not preen himself. Day by day it became clearer that he was pining for her, dying for her.

  Now my vigil at the lochside was almost constant again. I had to be with him; I had to see him through. It was what my silver swan would have wanted, I thought.

  So I was there when it happened. A swan flew in from nowhere one day, down onto the glassy stillness of the loch. She landed right in front of him. He walked down into the loch, settled into the water and swam out to meet her. I watched them look each other over for just a few minutes. When they drank, they dipped their necks together, as one. When they flew, their wings beat together, as one.

  Five years on and they’re still together. Five years on and I still have the feather from my silver swan. I take it with me wherever I go. I always will
.

  islands of inspiration

  That story was inspired by the landscape of Scotland where I go to visit my younger brother. An island plays its part in it. I’m forever writing about islands; I love islands. I recently discovered a possible reason why. I learnt that my very first nursery teacher in London had devised her own method of crowd control. To keep us from clambering on top of one another, she cut out small pieces of lino (one each) and whenever she wanted control she sent us to our “islands”. I must have loved even that island. She’s got a lot to answer for!

  Some years ago I was in New Zealand on a reading tour of schools and colleges. Bright-eyed and barefoot, the children in front of me were full of searching questions. One class had been reading a book of mine called Why the Whales Came. One small boy piped up: “You must have a really good imagination to have invented all those islands. Why did you call them Scilly? And how did you make up all those places and names, like Bryher and Samson, and Droppy Nose Point and Hell Bay and Popplestones and Sinking Porth and Rushy Bay?”

  For just a moment I confess I considered lying to him. I longed to confirm his heart-warming opinion of me as some kind of imaginative genius. But I just couldn’t do it. In the end I had to tell him that Scilly was in fact a real place, a scattering of little islands off the coast of Cornwall known as “the Fortunate Isles”, that I had made nothing up except the story, and even some of that was true. A cloud of disappointment came over the upturned faces in front of me. Then I told them about Scilly, about the real place, and how I’d been on holiday there and discovered a place where every rock and wreck had a story to tell, many of them true stories, some apocryphal perhaps, but all of them just waiting for me to steal them away and weave them into stories of my own.

  Let me tell you about Scilly, because it’s been very special to me. My wife, Clare, loved it as a child, loves it now. So do I. I remember the moment I first saw Scilly from the helicopter. A cluster of distant rocks lying in a translucent green sea, hurled there maybe by some defiant Cornish giant to sink a fleet of invading ships, or out of pique perhaps because someone had enraged him by climbing his beanstalk. The tide was way out that first time, so neither we nor our luggage could be offloaded at Bryher Quay. Instead we were landed on the rocks by Rushy Bay and had to be taken with our luggage in a wheelbarrow across the island to Marion and Keith Bennett’s bed and breakfast cottage.

  We spent the first couple of days exploring Bryher, our island – I was already feeling a kinship. The smallest of the five inhabited islands, you can walk round it from Green Bay to Rushy Bay to Droppy Nose Point, to Hell Bay, up through the “town” of twenty or so houses, in about an hour. But who was hurrying? Everywhere we stopped and simply stared. On one side of the island dunes and gently shelving soft white sand, the sea lapping listlessly; on the other the grim grey cliff faces of Hell Bay where the sea surged and seethed, only waiting for the next storm, it seemed. We could have tea in Vine Café, an ice cream for the children at Fraggle Rock and a glass of wine on Green Bay as the sun set, watching the oystercatchers taking off, or a gig rowing up the Tresco channel.

  I didn’t want to leave Bryher at all, but Tresco and the Pentle Beach of Clare’s childhood beckoned across the water. And there were boats going off to take visitors to see seals at the Eastern Rocks, boats to St Agnes, St Martin’s and St Mary’s. We felt the need to explore. So we did. Tresco first. Pentle Beach was as long and as lovely as my wife remembered. We swam and swam in clear cold water, then we walked the length of it from the lushness of the Abbey Gardens to Cromwell’s Castle, the sand whiter and finer than I’d ever imagined possible. We explored the ruined castle, walked through heather, lunched at the New Inn. Tresco is a more manicured place, tidier than Bryher, more beautiful perhaps, but less real as a living community, and so for me less appealing.

  We went over to St Agnes on a wild wet day and ate the best pasties in the world at the Turk’s Head Inn overlooking the little harbour, before setting out over the island. The lighthouse that dominates the island is perhaps the handsomest building on Scilly, and out beyond it, as we came past the tiny school and the church, we saw Annet where the puffins live and the hundreds of jagged rocks, some skulking just on or below the surface, waiting to ambush any unlucky or unwary ship that sails too close.

  St Martin’s, the island out beyond uninhabited Tean (which had once been a leper colony), has a tiny school like St Agnes – there’s a bigger one on Tresco for the children of both Bryher and Tresco – and a cricket pitch with unquestionably the best view in the entire world looking out over the sea towards the Eastern Isles and St Mary’s.

  My first visit to St Mary’s after a week on the islands was a shock. Cars! A bus! Even a policeman! But there was a fascinating museum which explained the history of Scilly from the Bronze Age to the present day. Here I first learnt that Scilly had once been one large island, until a couple of thousand years ago the sea broke through – a tsunami, perhaps an earthquake – and made it into the archipelago of islands and rocks we know today. Here I discovered how pirates had come and pillaged and gone, how the Royal Navy had lost two thousand men in one night when the fleet foundered on the rocks in the eighteenth century, how Sir William Hamilton’s ship had gone down and all his treasures had been lost. Poor man, he lost his wife, Emma, to Nelson, and then his ship to the rugged rocks of Scilly. I learnt too how Henry VIII, then Oliver Cromwell, had built defences around the islands, and how it had been fortified later against Napoleon. Flying boats came in here during the Second World War to search the Atlantic for submarines. Scilly has always been a far-flung outpost of defence.

  And after every visit there was the boat home to Bryher, fast over the sun-dancing sea, or slower in the shallow channels gazing down to the seabed, or riding the huge waves out by White Island, the boatman enjoying himself hugely at our expense as we all did our best to hide our terror.

  It was strange. On every other island I felt like a visitor. Back on Bryher I felt I really belonged. I knew at once I was going to write a story about this place, about the rugged and robust people who lived there, who had lived there for centuries before. But I had no idea what that story might be – until the second week of our holiday.

  I needed a quiet place to work on a short story I was trying to write. “Samson is quiet,” Marion said. “It’s an uninhabited island. You’ll just have rabbits and terns for company. We’ll drop you off if you like.”

  So I found myself alone on Samson, an island of two hills covered in head-high bracken. On the beach I looked for the cowrie shells I was told I would find. I found no cowries, but I did see a peaty-black track leading up through the heather. I at once abandoned any resolve to finish my story. I would explore instead.

  The track led me to a ruined cottage. No windows, no doors, no roof, just a chimney, four walls and a fireplace. I found a broken clay pipe on the floor, a rusty knife, a scattered midden of limpet shells outside. I followed the track higher. If there was one cottage, there would be others, I reasoned. There were, and a well too, in the middle of the island. I found myself at lunchtime in the highest and best-preserved cottage on the island. It was as I was sitting down eating my picnic by the granite fireplace that I felt for the first time I was not alone. I heard footsteps outside. Rustling. I went to look. No one was there, yet there was someone. I could feel it. Eyes were watching me, I was quite sure of it. By the time Keith picked me up later in his boat I was feeling very uncomfortable indeed.

  It was only on my return to Bryher that I learnt how hunger and tragedy had driven the people from Samson one hundred and fifty years before, that there were stories of ghosts on Samson. I was not the first to feel their presence. I heard stories too of whales being washed up, of drowned sailors found on beaches during the First World War, of oppressive preventative officers – customs officials. A story was beginning to weave itself in my head. I wrote it before I came to Bryher the following year and called it Why the Whales Came. Within five years a
film had been made. It was made on Bryher and starred Paul Scofield, Helen Mirren, David Suchet and David Threlfall. And Gracie, one of the children in the story, was played by an island girl, Helen Pearce.

  Shortly after filming we discovered a leatherback turtle dead and gull-pecked on Samson, which sparked off the idea of my second Scilly book, The Wreck of the Zanzibar, a story of gigs and wrecks and the struggle to survive in the nineteenth century. Gigs play a huge part in this story, as indeed they do and have done in the life of Scilly. Wonderfully graceful, these seagoing rowing boats performed a vital role in the economy of the islands. Each island had (and still has) its own gig. The islanders would be on the lookout for sailing ships in need of pilots to navigate the treacherous waters of the English Channel. The first island gig to reach the ship got the job. This was lucrative work too, much needed and sought after by each island. Gigs were also used, of course, to row out to wrecks, and often played a heroic part in rescuing sailors stranded at sea. One such dramatic rescue involved the Bryher gig that put to sea in a storm so violent the gig couldn’t be rowed out around Samson, so the crew had to carry her across the spit of the island before launching her again – an incident I used in The Wreck of the Zanzibar. But gigs were also used to go out to wrecks to claim them. An old Scilly prayer went something like this: “Dear God, we do not wish there to be a wreck, but if there has to be a wreck, then let it be near our island.” Such wrecks must have brought some brief respite from the abject poverty and hunger Scillonians suffered in the days of the great sailing ships.

  And the island gigs are rowed to this day: Serica, Shah, Menavaur, Emperor, Golden Eagle and Czar, the Bryher gig. Every Friday night they race each other into St Mary’s, cheered on wildly by fiercely partisan tourists like me. Incidentally, why does Czar never win?