Ardnamurchan: The Distance Between Us.

And so, after half  a century, I finally make it back to Ardnamurchan. It is both a moment of triumph and a moment of disappointment. Part of the disappointment is due to misreading the website for the lighthouse. The daily opening times are quite clear, but the dates between which those opening times apply are not. Even internet travel sites were confused declaring it open, even as we arrived to find it closed. 

This, in and of itself, doesn’t matter. I went to see the lighthouse and relive a cherished holiday memory. The lighthouse was closed, but it was the being and feeling that was important.  A tour followed by lunch at the cafe would have been nice, but neither thing was part of the holiday I was remembering. They are of the now, not of the then.

There were so many things I had forgotten about this remote headland: the walled bay that submerges on the high tide; the water so tropically clear, the inky horizon partially obscured by Rhum, Eigg and Muck; the deeper water, indigo and silver, the outcrop that we swam out to, climbing onto its mussel and sugar kelp slick, proclaiming ourselves kings of the world. It can’t have been more than six or seven metres from the shore, but seemed dangerous and a Herculean triumph at the time.

The biggest upset, though, was that the campsite we stayed at has, in the intervening decades, been converted to a static caravan site. Gated and locked for the off-season, it cut off the access to the beach we played on, making the supposedly inaccessible outcrop truly inaccessible.

I had to be content with looking at the beach from the other side of the bay through the camera on my mobile phone. With maximum magnification, and a steady hand, I could see the rock pools where we attempted and failed to catch sand eels. Behind it, the hill we ran down each morning. To the right, as I looked, were the rocks that held winkles and sea anemones. Harvesting winkles for tea while dodging the squirting of angry anemones became something of a talent.

But something unexpected happened. I made a connection. I put two and two together and came up with the biggest four imaginable. 

It’s no great secret that I do not get on with my brother. I haven’t spoken to him since I was sixteen and haven’t seen him since I was eighteen. He has contacted me twice in that time. Once, to tell me he didn’t want me at his wedding, his reason being that ‘a lot of important people would be there.’ By implication, therefore, I wasn’t. You don’t really recover from that. 

The next time he contacted me, I was suspicious as I’d recently signed a lucrative contract while working in the music industry. The timing made me wary, but the letter that was intended to ‘bridge the gap’ was insulting. All of his transgressions and bullying were, somehow, my fault. 

And that was the moment that two plus two before a radiant four. There on the beach across the bay was the last time I recall active, unforced kindness from my brother. A small moment of fraternal love, never to be repeated. 

Was my longing to get back to Ardnamurchan really a longing to feel my brother’s love again? I’m sure Freud would be salivating at this point, but I’m not really prepared to delve much deeper than this here. The damage done in the intervening years is terminal, but the loss still stings.

As part of my PhD, I wrote a piece about my relationship with my brother. It has some bearing, so I’m presenting the whole piece here. 

Treasure

i

“My brother is an irredeemable bully. I usually got the brunt of it and learned very early on that with him being stronger and faster, the best course of action was to take the punishment he dealt out and not retaliate. Any attempts at fighting back meant a more savage beating in response; more torture; more bruises to hide.

I learned to anticipate his moods, although not with 100% accuracy, and when the signs that a beating may occur presented themselves, I would take a long, long walk and stay out of the way. Past the playing fields, the derelict cottages and even further past the railway bridge was a small stretch of woodland. A small beck ran through the centre of it. The beck, running underground until it’s sudden appearance in that woodland, had carved a deep bank, some three metres deep. And in that bank, I found the means of my salvation.

The bank was treacherous with mud and slippery moss as an unexpected storm had funnelled the contents of an entire cloud into that small area of woodland. Slipping and then putting my hand out to break my fall, I noted – with a squelch and a thud – that a small area of the bank I had fallen into was not as solid as it appeared. Investigating and desperate to shelter from the unexpected rainfall, I found myself in a cave. Despite the rain and proximity to the beck, it was dry and noticeably warmer than outside.

I spotted its potential immediately and, after thoroughly inspecting it while sheltering until the rain stopped, planned my next move. I set about moving things in to make the space more comfortable. Some plastic sheeting left over from when my friend Richard and I had been obsessed with making kites; an orange crate, cadged from Jack at the corner shop; a waterproof cash box to put important things in. The box was then hidden in a hand-dug hollow – not easy in hard clay soil – and then hidden by a rock. I brought a shopping bag that was filled with Cresta and Corona pop, crisps, sweets, some books, comics and a flat, square ‘Ever Ready’ torch I had bought on holiday in Ardnamurchan, Scotland, for walking the moorland at night. The batteries were expensive but worth every penny if it meant I could hide in my cave. I decided not to tell anyone about it. Not even Richard. This was to be My cave. My refuge. My Fortress of Solitude.

The beck never looked particularly healthy and gave off a faint sour smell. The water was not clear, and colours shone on the water’s surface, swirling, psychedelic, kaleidoscopic. It ran through an industrial estate that was depositing chemical waste upstream from the cave. I found a stick and poked at the stream’s bed once, stirring up the most foul-smelling grey slime. Reeking of rot and something between creosote and stink bombs, it flowed in spirals along the currents. Not graceful and passive but rather as if it was fighting against the eddies in fear of its life.

In Brokes Wood on the other side of town, the beck waters were clear, and we would catch sticklebacks and minnows, but here the water, though beautiful – and having been so thoughtful as to provide me with a refuge – was polluted and dangerous. I never crossed the beck. Having seen the sticky grey slime, I knew that one foot in the wrong place would render me immobile. If I couldn’t move – the water was shallow, there was no real danger of drowning – and someone was sent out to search, my secret hideout would be lost. I couldn’t risk that. In the back of my mind, there was also the ‘Spirit of Dark Water’ public information film and I liked to think I was a sensible kid.

Although it saddened me that I couldn’t look for sticklebacks or see kingfishers or shrews, I revelled in having a safe house. That was enough.

When we moved away, I mourned the loss of my refuge. The need for it was less urgent as my brother was now working. School holidays were much less traumatic, but I missed the solitude my cave provided as well as the feeling that something was just mine. I didn’t know my new village well enough to have found a similar place, so spent my time locked in my bedroom instead.

ii

Fast forward forty years and I’m visiting the town for the first time since leaving. I walked past my old house, along the playing fields and past the still derelict cottages and the railway bridge. The industrial estate had grown, but there was still a small patch of woodland lining the beck that was now clear and flanked by bullrushes. It didn’t coruscate with chemical effluent. I missed the colours but noted that the faintly sour smell had vanished in favour of the clean aroma of healthy earth, leaf mould and the bright sparkle of aerated water. I was surprised that I even remembered the smell, and very slightly resented that everything is not how it was.

I walked along the bank and found the hollow. The path seemed narrower. I thought it might be just because I was forty years older, taller, wider. But it was the bullrushes and erosion that had conspired to make me feel unnaturally large.

After a moment or two of pulling back brambles and rushes, parting the grasses, I found my cave again and squeezed through the foliage to a forlorn time capsule.

Untouched.

Unfound.

The plastic sheet and crate were still there. Time has made the plastic stiff and friable, and the crate probably wouldn’t have been able to bear much weight, being damp and covered with mould and moss. I smiled as I kneeled and reached for the rock that hid the hollow. I pulled the box from the earth and lamented briefly that I no longer had the key. The lock, though, was rusted and the box weakened by age.

I snapped the lid off with ease to find the treasures of my youth preserved in a plastic freezer bag. A set of cardboard Doctor Who figures, given away in packets of Weetabix; a whistle ring that came free with one of the many IPC comics I bought, 27p in pennies and tuppences, saved for an emergency; a picture of my first celebrity crush, cut from the TV times and a pet rock with stuck-on googly eyes that my brother had constantly tried to steal. I don’t think he wanted it; he just didn’t want me to have it.

This was no Viking Hoard, no Saxon burial chamber or Egyptian reliquary. This collection of childhood ephemera was much more precious.

I spent an hour, moist-eyed, breathing happily erratic, reminiscing, and playing with the priceless cache. But however delightful it was to be reunited with my treasures, the reasons for them being there tainted the reunion. With sadness and no small amount of reverence, I wrapped the relics in their plastic shroud and placed it back in the cash box, then returned it to the hiding place behind the rock, never to be seen again.

Sometimes treasures, however precious, need to stay with the past.”

And so it is, I learned, with Ardnamurchan. I got what I went for, although the shock of what that actually was phased me for days. I’d assumed I just wanted to recapture an idyllic holiday, but it was deeper than that. I was there to finally mourn the loss of my brother. 

The distance between us; between me and the beach; my brother and I; between then and now was better observed through the faltering lens of my camera. I can’t relive those days, but I can look at them from afar, as I have done for decades, and remember that moment of sublime beauty; that moment of fraternal love and caring. That moment of ozone and iodine and the last moments of a brother’s love.