ISLES OF HOME: Seventy years of Shetland By Professor Gordon
Donaldson.
Scottish Academic Press, #14.99 (pp 212)
THIS is a sad book; sad in its unfulfilled yearning for a personal
homeland, in its sometimes peevish nostalgia for older, quieter times,
and in the rather faltering, frail tone of its writing. Saddest of all
is the fact that Professor Donaldson died before this revision of his
earlier Isles of Home: Sixty years of Shetland could be published.
Gordon Donaldson was Professor of Scottish History at Edinburgh
University between 1963 and 1979 and authored over 30 books. An
historian of international repute and editor of the massive Edinburgh
History of Scotland, his mind and body may have been devoted to a
mainland career, but his heart was Shetland's. His paternal
grandfather's birth in the islands led to childhood holidays beginning
in 1921, and a further 80 trips north (''all carefully noted'') until
1992.
These visits ranged from summer-long student idylls to fleeting
weekends snatched from the demands of academic life. Shetland seems to
have been a drug to which Donaldson was hopelessly addicted; yet he
never settled there, even in retirement, preferring instead the more
accessible, gentler climes of the West Highlands.
Therein lies this book's central conundrum; it is an obsessive,
occasionally ranting work; allowances for its writer's age
notwithstanding, it is not a Shetlander's book; it is by a
Shetlandophile, a collector of experiences, yet an emotionally involved
one (''I was completely obsessed with anything to do with Shetland'')
whose trainspotter-like devotion to noting down the minutiae of every
visit, the timings of ancient steamers, the make and model of outboard
motors used in the past, signifies an enthusiasm which becomes in the
end wearying.
An entire page is given over to a dissection of the name Donaldson and
an attempt to give it Norse roots, rather than cave in to ''daft
Celtomaniacs who want to claim me as a member of the Clan Donald''; this
is followed by an illustrated, six-generation family tree showing that
Professor Donaldson and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont
-- born in Lerwick of a Shetland mother and southern surgeon father --
share a third cousin, and the lofty announcement that ''I count myself
fortunate that I have no personal relationship with a man who, by
mispronouncing his name, tries to efface his northern ancestry and turns
good Norwegian into bad French.''
One wonders whether a little jealousy of Lamont's much more direct --
and openly acknowledged -- relationship with Shetland and Shetlanders
may have crept in here.
In fact ''daft Celtomaniac'' concerns with transatlantic Gaels' ''the
blood is strong'' ancestral research seems somewhat similar to Professor
Donaldson's determination to prove himself a Norseman and Shetland a
throroughly Scandinavian place. With place names and physical
characteristics wielded in a rather disturbingly cavalier, if not
Viking, manner, Shetland's Scottishness is bypassed in the single-minded
search for Norsemanship.
The book is strong on personal reminiscence and gives a good flavour
of crofting life, particularly on the island of Yell in the 1940s. But
Donaldson's dry detailing of long and frequently tedious boating trips
dwells too much on his own achievements (''I must surely have looked a
competent sort of chap'') and his evident love affair with the little
Shetland Model he had built in 1933 is tempered for the reader by a
truly bizarre attention to what he spent on it.
In six years of ownership he calculates a mileage of 900 (''about two
thirds with the outboard and a third with oars''), and thanks to keeping
''precise notes of expenditure of every kind'', including petrol, an
overall cost of #28 5s 1d, after taking into account the sale of boat
and motor for #14 10s and ''an unexplained discrepancy'' of 2s 2p.
Perhaps this is what makes a good historian of a man.
There are sideswipes at the revolting youth of today's Lerwick and
grumpy comments about the scars left on Shetland's landscape by
quarrying and road improvements. But nowhere is the question most
prominent in the reader's mind answered: if he loved the place so much,
why didn't he settle there, or at least buy a house where he could spend
the summers, instead of these continual flying (though always seaborne)
visits?
Perhaps the answer is all too simple: Gordon Donaldson's Shetland
isn't real. It is a fantasy world of childhood, where everyone is a
Viking at heart and in ancestry and the backbreaking travails of
crofting without proper roads, ferries, electricity, or running water
inculcated a purity of spirit lost to this oil-rich, accessible island
age. Gordon Donaldson's isles were never his home, and perhaps he knew
that if they had been, he would have been unable to celebrate them and
himself in as partial away as he does in the book.
There is no seasickness in Donaldson's travels to and from Shetland, a
matter in which he takes great pride. ''The approach to Shetland by sea
is something that never palls,'' he writes. All I can say, as a
non-Shetlander resident in these frequently infuriating islands, is that
the sea voyage from Aberdeen more often than not appals.
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