The island that always waved back

My mother's sister's husband was a minister on Scalpay, from 1965 to 1975, and as a very small boy I was often taken there.

A long drive. We would leave my grandparents, by Stornoway; double-track road stopped round Ballallan; and beyond Tarbert grass began to grow in the middle; and the road to the ferry was fearsome - there were braes so awful that I have since learned of some who would stop car, in the dark, and walk to blind summit with torch, to be sure not only that road continued; but that it turned left rather than right; that plunge to sea was this way and not that way.

On the last occasion, standing on the ferry, being eight years old and, tiny bookworm, sure I knew everything, I turned to my father - as hands cast off ropes from slipway - and said, ''They're all just country bumpkins here - aren't they, daddy?''

My father turned, and declared - with passion verging on the vicious - ''The people of Scalpay, boy, are amongst the toughest and cleverest on earth, and you never say a thing like that again . . .''

That, 23 years on, I mind. And that he, little older than I am now, a good Wee Free minister, helped to turn the stiff, heavy turntable car-deck of the ferry, pushing and sweating.

I have one other memory. Driving back that night, through Kyles Scalpay, we drove by a thatched house; there was a woman standing by its door, to whom I waved, and she waved back.

It was 1985 before I saw Scalpay again. And again I was driven home, past that house; and a woman was still by that door; and I waved; and she waved back.

The last thatched house in the whole of Lewis and Harris was in Kyles Scalpay. It was modernised - slated - in 1988; and it was 1991 before I passed again.

I often think of that woman. I still drive by that home. She was to me the whole history of a

people.

SCALPAY is off the east coast of Harris, separated by the narrowest of sounds, a rocky, hummocky island torn by coves and harbours, a place of mini-hills and mini-glens.

Her own island. Until 1964 she enjoyed weekly calls from MacBrayne's Lochmor, slow stately mailboat that voyaged, from Mallaig and Kyle, round a host of Hebrides twice a week. The Lochmor went, and big car-ferries came, which did not call at Scalpay at all.

A fishing-boat made passenger runs for a while, and then in May 1965 little slipways were finished at Scalpay and Kyles Scalpay, and MacBrayne delivered Scalpay's first car-ferry. She had begun her career at Ballachulish. She was timber-hulled, painted bright red, could carry all of four cars on her turntable deck, and was simply called Scalpay. In May 1965 there were but a half-dozen cars on Scalpay. In 1966 (away for some weeks for compulsory Board of Trade overhaul) that wee ferry was relieved by a fishing-boat.

In 1967, this happened again; this time the Scalpaich screeched of lack of car ferry-service.

Racks of bus-runs from ferry to Tarbert were laid on in 1965. Within months they were taken off. All had cars.

During a 1968 overhaul MacBraynes chartered a Kylerhea ferry to relieve the regular boat. Car-ferry service has run continuously, since.

A bigger, steel-hulled, turntable twin-screwed Scalpay took over in 1971 - refugee from Kyleakin; she in turn retired in 1977 for a succession of hi-tech bowloading boats: the Morvern, the Kilbrannan, the Canna, and this year

the Rhum.

Until Tuesday.

The bridge opens at last to traffic. High steel concrete roadway sweeping over the narrows to marry, at last, Scalpay and Harris. And the Rhum will chug her aged, battered way to the Clyde to come no more.

THE land of Scalpay is poor; peat, bog, stone. As a community, then, she is most modern. Until islanders turned their hearts from corn to fish there was little attraction to Scalpay. She was a ''tack'', a rented farm, supporting one or two families; the most famous tacksman was Donald Campbell, who in the summer of 1746 gave Scalpay shelter to Charles Edward Stuart.

In the 1840s, the Clearances came to Harris, and green Atlantic shores were swept of people. Most vanished to the Americas, to Cape Breton.

Some were jammed into the bleak bays of East Harris. And 20 families were settled on Scalpay, in 1843; 20 more were settled in 1848, including some cleared from Pabbay.

She became overcrowded - by 1921 there were 621 Scalpaich - but the land little mattered by then, for they had made themselves masters of the sea.

By the fifties they were widely recognised as the best fishermen of the West Highlands. By the height of the herring-boom in the sixties, Scalpay had the highest per capita income of any community in Britain.

''Say 1965,'' remembers one, ''there were boats catching, oh, 200 cran of herring a week. Now a cran would then sell at #5

anyway. #1000 a week, cash, between three or four men, week upon week, and this over 30 years ago . . .''

Same contrast with Kyles

Scalpay, on Harris side, with tin houses or thatched roofs (in the seventies, mind) and outside toilets and general rural poverty.

You caught the ferry. Five minutes later you were in the double-glazing capital of Scotland. Even today the Scalpaich have better houses, bigger cars, and smarter everything than any other island community I know.

She is still populous, supporting some 300 people - double the population of Raasay, not half Raasay's size.

The tiny townships - suburbs? - of Scalpay: Aird an Aiseig and Ceann a Bhaigh; Rubha nan Cuideagan and Aird na Cille; Aird Aghanais and Laggandaoin . . . North Harbour. South

Harbour. Park Terrace. Falkland Terrace. The Black Caw. The Red Caw.

The Village. Biggest of all, knowing no other name. The Village snuggles the narrow neck of land between Scalpay's two great harbours. Here are the school, the nurse, the grocer, the petrol-pump, some council housing, some sheltered housing, the manse.

The Village is the essence of Scalpay, so different.

Harris is sheep. Scalpay is fish.

Harris is Church of Scotland, Free Presbyterian; Scalpay is Free Church.

In Harris few under 40 are fluent in Gaelic.

In Scalpay few under 40 are not.

In Harris, more stay inside than go to church on Sabbath.

In Scalpay, church attendance exceeds nine-tenths of able-bodied population.

Tarbert is the shopping centre of Harris.

Stornoway is the shopping centre for Scalpay, and if you see Scalpaich in Tarbert at all it is at speed, shooting for town, in purr of turtle-waxed Audi.

There is little love lost between these halves.

In your schools you tell Irish jokes. In the Tarbert school they tell Scalpay jokes.

There is a dark saying, hereabouts, that ''the people of Scalpay would steal the milk out of your tea.'' In Scalpay, they say, ''The wogs begin at Kyles.''

In the Tarbert pub the Scalpaich have their own corner; and talk but to themselves.

We'll be seeing much more of each other.

Do we look forward to it?

GENERALLY, they're darker people than us; almost Spanish in appearance. They have rich,

curious accents, and distinctive Gaelic, dominated by the words of the sea.

The ferry has always been my gateway to Scalpay, sometimes gliding over a glasslike sound, sometimes bouncing as easterly comes hard against the tide. Umag or D A on the bridge; Domhnall Cheit, Murdo on deck. You have to reverse on, for the Rhum has one ramp.

(Trust a bridge to open when I was just getting the hang of it.) D A tells terrible jokes. Domhnall mocks my driving. ''Menace!'' he says as I lurch perilously near bulwark, near locked round, eyes glazing; and an imperious fist thumps roof when I have backed far enough.

I cannot blame him. I once ran over his foot.

Murdo is quiet; he smiles, but never laughs. He is so like President Clinton in looks.

Angus, uncle, patriarch, is a church elder. He is the last of the original crew of 1965. He has the sea in his eyes and has known heartbreak. A good man.

Ferry dominates all. If you are on Scalpay as a visitor, you must not miss the last ferry. If you are from Scalpay, up in town, the ferry timetable clicks at the bottom of your mind like a clock. An hour-five minutes to Kyles jetty. The 16.40. The 17.20. The 18.15 . . . Point of no return: five o'clock.

Ferry is drawbridge. When authority must meddle with Scalpay, it comes by ferry.

There are the police. There is the TV detector van. There is the fellow that comes looking for illegal engines on the looms, and so on. Their visits seldom bear fruit. The officials cannot figure it out. It is as if everyone knew they were coming.

(In most Scalpay homes, crackling, occasionally boiling in fluid Gaelic, sits a live VHF radio.) The ferry is lifeline;

burden. Return trip for car and passenger is now #10.90. You can buy five-journey tickets, and discount a little, but it is an imposition the Scalpaich would thole no longer; and since the late eighties they have clamoured for a fixed link to Harris. The new bridge is free.

I suppose when you go to Scalpay it is to see the place and people. There is not much, by way of landscape, to look at on Scalpay, but there are wonderful views from Scalpay. From its summit, Ben Scorravig, you can see south by Harris, the Uists and Benbecula to Barra; the Outer Isles unfurl as the tail

of a kite.

You see north to Sutherland, Lewis, Skye, the Cuillin, the

Torridon hills. You can even see the Atlantic, as a blue line west of Tarbert's low portage.

You can see great Harris hills. Scalpay is a most central point of view in the Hebridean sea; which is why, in 1788, Robert Louis Stevenson's grandfather came to build, at Eilean Glas on Scalpay's eastern extremity, the first lighthouse in the Hebrides.

It still burns, that light.

On Scalpay itself, there is much to see in the work of man. Its narrow, winding roads, all magnificently banked and walled in drystone. There is the ancient wreck of a steam-drifter, bare at low tide by Cabha Dearg, boiler still intact amid ribs of rotten hull.

There is new wreck, off Aird Aghanish by Stilamair, of the mighty Golf Star: this large bulk-carrier grounded mysteriously in 1995, and has never been salvaged.

At Outend, the only crofting hamlet, there is still neatly tended soil; rigs of potatoes, rooting pigs, fussing hens.

There is the ''cement boat'', a hulk of ferro-cement pre-War shipping which Captain Cunningham towed to Scalpay in hope of grounding the carcass as a functional pier. (She grounded in the wrong place.)

And everywhere glorious clutter, the clutter of working men who go to sea in ships; creels and trawls and boats in all stages of repair and decay. And the Village. The Village always has this

tension in the air; the vibrant feel of community, of intense, near-claustrophobic social interaction.

In Scalpay, no-one lands; nothing moves, without notice or comment.

A minister once took me to the manse window, with dry malice, to point out a dozen curtain-twitching hands, the eyes trained on him at all times from homes surrounding on each side.

Houses are jam-packed close in the Village, many without wall or visible boundary. Other houses have grown over decades, extended to back or side, as a patriarch's riches grew and his family married and expanded under his firm control. There are communal washing greens. There is something most urban about the Village.

They are gloriously inquisitive, so hospitable. There are parts of Scalpay you dare not walk, knowing that as you pass every other house a door will fly open to call you in for tea.

There are so many children, yet. So many young men in

yellow wellies.

AND the darkness of

Scalpay. Beyond general religiosity there is sin, tension, squalor, as everywhere. The island is ''dry'' - no licensed shop or drink outlet of any sort - but alcohol is a problem, as everywhere in the Hebrides.

Drink used to be smuggled in; perhaps it still is. You could tell many a funny Whisky Galore tale about booze on Scalpay, but that is to diminish the horror of sad old bachelor brothers obliterating themselves in a five-day bender, or lads still in their twenties visibly ruined by alcohol.

A place from time to time riven by vicious feuds. One bad division went as high as the

General Assembly of the Free Church.

The imprisonment of Scalpay. A fishing culture; a living jail. Young men who should have time away, time in Glasgow or wherever in private freedom to chart their own course in life, are raised or brainwashed or plain terrorised into cheap labour on the family boat.

They are infantilised. If the patriarch lasts a long time, they may never marry; in any event, almost all young women leave.

The desperate appeal of the bottle.

The mystery of Scalpay.

What is that strange electrified installation out on the peat-road, surrounded by chain-link and barbed wire, its blank steel of military green?

No-one on Scalpay knows. Once a year anonymous short-spoken men come from mainland to service it.

Why does this lady, or that man, known to have tens of thousands of pounds laid aside, live in squalor and poverty?

He said death would come to that house - he has ''the sight'' - and within the week it did. Through two decades they saw from Scalpay a house on the Harris mainland, as it were on fire - smoke, flames, the works. Sometimes the brigade were called out - always to false alarm. The day came in the early seventies when it burned to the ground.

The hilarity of Scalpay. It is such a pity, for instance, I cannot tell you of the wee boy who got a taxi daily to school.

Until the council said it was too expensive, and perfectly safe to walk.

Until his people spoke to their friends. And invited council officials to come for themselves and see most dangerous busy road.

And did fool not come? Did not fire engine happen to be out? And this truck, and that lorry? And every car you could imagine? And after dread half-hour of passing-place reverse, of emergency stop, did not official go back stuttering to Stornoway of the perils of that road? And was not daily taxi fast approved?

She got by with a little help from her friends.

I wish I could repeat that story, and more.

Like a crate of washing-up liquid the Deacon collected in Stornoway for nefarious friend.

''There you are,'' he barked, unloading the box from car, ''though it's the first time I've heard Fairy Liquid clink.''

The people of Scalpay are the tightest, strangest, flyest, most sleekit, most Gaelic, most in old Highland paths of any

community in Scotland. From Tuesday, we are part of them. For good or ill, Harris an

Scalpay, bound for life.

They insist they are the better for the bridge.

Life?

Thirty-five years ago, this month, a trawler, Boston Heron, was wrecked at Stilamair. She lay on jagged rocks under the pounding of a full-blown sou'westerly gale.

Six Scalpaich saw, and headed out in a small open boat, and rescued three men - one found clinging frantically to a rock.

The heroes were duly honoured. But an old voice said simply: ''Our men were brought up in the school that taught them that life was precious and that the soul was priceless.''

Perhaps that strangest of men, Gavin Maxwell, said it best, writing of shark-hunting days after the Second World War.

''Scalpay was not quite unknown territory to us . . .

''Rather I had thought of it as a place of beauty so great as to distinguish it even among that long chain of which every individual island is a brilliant jewel.

''I was never there for long enough to know well the community that inhabited it; they must, like every human herd, have had their ugliness, their strifes and their despairs, but these were not evident to the outside eye.

''Here was a small pastoral community, every visible phase of whose life had a minute and individual duty, whose every activity enhanced rather than detracted from the wider beauty of their surroundings.''