Georgia

1993

The eight-seater, inter-island plane banks sharply right before its final descent. Georgia stares down at the tiny strip of tarmac laid across the only flat field of her family’s coastal farm, and feels her stomach turn for more reason than one. 

Her Grandfather had created this airfield with nothing much more than his own toil and sweat way back in 1947. On his return from France after the war George Grahame had been determined to bring his Hebridean family farm up to date and had set about it with gusto. Working all the hours God gave was, so George said to whoever was around to listen, his way of giving thanks for his miraculous escape from death on the numerous occasions when those around him fell. It was also, although he didn’t tend to say this, George’s way of blocking out the thoughts and images of those terrible war years.

For a decade or more the airstrip had remained a private affair, for use by the Grahame family and whichever friends and neighbours asked nicely enough. By the time the island council took it over in 1959 it was used by everybody in the 1500 strong island community, from relatives and officials wishing to visit the island to old Mrs. McGinnty from the village post office going to Glasgow to get her bunions seen to. Had George Grahame looked up from his farm work for long enough to think straight, he could have set up his own little commercial airline and made some good money. As it was he just flew folk onto and off the island whenever they asked.

The day came when the council decided that the airstrip, not to mention George’s plane, failed to meet certain, newly drawn up, safety regulations. They informed George, by way of an officious letter, that he would have to stop landing there. They followed this up with an offer to buy the field in which the landing strip and the rickety tin shack jokingly referred to as the ‘Terminal Building’ sat. George was a fatalist. He shrugged and accepted the small sum offered and looked on with mild annoyance and an amused appraisal of his own knarled hands, as heavy machinery was ferried to the island to build a new airstrip and building.

Georgia grew up on the farm. Her Grandmother, Mary, had died in childbirth. The child in question had been her father, known island-wide as Wee Georgie Grahame even once he had grown to his full 6’2”. Wee Georgie had farmed alongside his Dad until the old fella dropped off his perch – the tractor seat in his case – in 1979. Georgia was nine at the time and an only child. Her Mum, Shelagh, had been a teenage bride to Wee Georgie but had, truth be known, been a lot closer to George senior than she had to her husband. It had been social convention that bade her marry the young George rather than the older one. When she bore him a daughter she told him he had better carry on the family name in this wee girl, because she would definitely not be going through with that whole rigmarole again, however much he wanted a son. Hence ‘Georgia’.

The plane lands with a resounding bump and Georgia shudders. She hasn’t been here for nigh on ten years. And now she’s here, in this place she still calls home, with a big weight on her young shoulders. Her emotions are running high.

After old George had died things had gone down sharply at Westerby Farm. Wee Georgie had never had the work ethic of his father and had let the old man do most of the work and all of the thinking behind it. Shelagh had enjoyed living at the farm because it meant she stayed close to her father-in-law. With him gone, her marriage became exposed as the sham it really was and within two years she was packing to leave.

Georgia steps off the plane and walks across the field with the other seven passengers. A couple of them have given her odd looks, but nobody has ventured to speak with her. Ach well, they’ll all figure out who she is soon enough: just as soon as she turns left, away from the airfield’s car park and up the track to Westerby Farm and its empty farmhouse.

When Shelagh decided to leave Wee Georgie she knew she could not just move down the road. In this old fashioned island community wives leaving husbands, however bad the marriage, was much frowned upon. No, Shelagh knew she really needed to get away and she had made her decision to emigrate to Australia, where she had cousins, almost as soon as old George had died. The intervening two years had been necessary just to stash enough money and organise the relevant documents. And she had done all this without telling a soul. The day of travel dawned with neither Wee Georgie nor young Georgia suspecting a thing.

Twelve year old Georgia thought they were going to Glasgow to do some shopping.

Twenty-three year old Georgia, now climbing the final stretch of hill to her house, dwelt upon her mother’s treachery. The whole clandestine plan may have worked out perfectly for Shelagh – she was now happily re-married to a dentist in Melbourne and they had three children – but it had been tragic for young Georgia. She’d loved her Dad and she’d loved the farm. It was her world and she’d been unwittingly whipped away from it. In the subsequent screaming matches between her and her Mum, she had hotly refuted that he was a hopeless, lazy drunk and had asserted the truth, in her eyes; that he was a poet, a romantic, an artist, with a love of the land that went beyond just working it for food and money.

Westerby Farmhouse stands at the top of the final incline of the island’s main, single track, road. This is, as Georgia’s Great Grandfather George perceived it to be, the perfect place for a house. A hundred years ago he had decided to move the original seventeenth century homestead up the hill – it had been right down on the north shore, level with the sea – and had employed most of the island’s able bodied men to move the house, stone by stone, to its new position. At the time everyone thought he was daft: think of the wind whistling though the windows on that exposed spot. Looking down at the shoreline now Georgia realizes what a good decision he made; for the original house site is now covered by every high tide.

Georgia walks through the cobbled yard at the back of the long, imposing building. She notes the weeds pushing through the cobbles, the rusted corrugated tin roofing flapping off the nearest cow byre and the collection of abandoned vehicles – Landrovers, tractors, bicycles and even a combine harvester – buried among rampant nettles by the side of the byre. She can see that things have gone to rack and ruin. Poor Dad, left to his own devices he must have struggled to manage. Georgia pushes at the back door and it swings inward with surprising ease to 45˚ whereupon it comes to rest against a sizeable pile of black rubbish bags. Have the neighbours begun to clear out the house? Georgia briefly wonders. But the bags stink: they’ve been here awhile.

The small back porch opens into a huge room. Georgia gasps. Childhood memories course through her blood. Before her lies her lost world.

For a traditional Scottish farmhouse, Westerby is unusual in its layout. The entrance porch gives on to this main room, which must measure 10 yards in length and maybe four or five in width. Windows all along the far wall look north over the Atlantic Ocean. Under them are set, with no particular thought as to layout, a sink, a cooker, a fridge and a higgledy variety of food cupboards. The whole room is clad in unvarnished oak wood panelling. The floor is of earth laid with huge slabs of black slate. The ceiling is low-slung and unevenly plastered. Positioned at one third and two thirds along the length of the room are two sturdy tree trunks, each making a valiant effort at propping up the ceiling. Despite all its windows, this is a dark room.

To the right is a door through to another surprising room – a wood clad and book-lined library. From within this room a set of modest wood stairs rise to a tiny landing off which are two single bedrooms. These have always been known as the maids’ quarters, although Georgia has never known there to be maids in them.

To the left of the main room a doorway leads through to a more generous hallway off which are three rooms (a bathroom, a TV den and the farm office), a sweeping staircase, and the front entrance. This goes out to the front garden and the quarter mile slope of hill that leads down to a pristine beach and wild ocean. Upstairs are five lovely big bedrooms, each with a fireplace and a view over ocean or coastal hills.

Georgia moves into the kitchen with small, shuffling steps. She looks around her at this ghastly parody of the place where she grew up. The sink is piled with rubbish. The Rayburn stove doors hang open and drip damp rust. Chairs lie maimed, their limbs roughly stacked by the fireplace. The old rough-hewn kitchen table that she grew up playing under, climbing upon and eating at, has gone. In its place is an oval of Formica, patterned with jaunty black on white squares. Great flakes of plaster are peeling from the ceiling. A sofa that she does not recognise sags in a corner, its innards coming out in tufts where the green nylon cover has ripped.

There’s a note on the table, ‘call when you’re here, John-the-Post, 657’.

It’s the island habit to call folk by their role in the community: Archie-the-Pier, Mary-the-Fish. Georgia doesn’t even remember John’s real surname, but she remembers him vividly. It used to be her job to run out to greet him in his wee red van whenever the dogs barked to let her know he was on his way up the final hill. It was John who had telephoned them last week. He’d even gone to the trouble of working out the time difference so that he could phone them at a decent hour to let them know that Wee Georgie had died.

Twenty-three year old Georgia has a lot to take on board. Her Dad is dead. Her Mum is living a new life in a Melbourne suburb. There are no other living relatives in the Grahame family. Westerby, all four hundred acres of it and in all its current decrepitude, is hers.

©Julia Welstead