My grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson: "I've got another activity in view: three tiny Hebridean islands for sale, advertised in the Daily Telegraph today, 600 acres in all. 'Very early lambs. Cliffs of columnar basalt. Wonderful caves. Probably the largest bird colony in the British Isles. Two-roomed cottage.' Do you wonder? I have written to the agents for full particulars and photographs. They cost only £1,750."
She sent those details to my father, Nigel Nicolson, who was then at Balliol aged 20, having just inherited some money from his grandmother. He was as drawn to them as Vita had been and that summer he visited them for the first time. His mother would not let him stay the night, frightened that he would he trapped there by storms, and so he had a single day in which to make his decision. He fell in love with them on the spot. As he wrote in his autobiography, Long Life:
I loved their remoteness, isolation, grandeur. Was it romanticism or melancholy? Both, added to an atavistic desire to own land in the Hebrides (the Nicolsons were originally robber-barons in the Minch), to have an escape-hole, to enjoy nature in the wild . . . On me the difficulties of access to the Shiants acted as a magnet, on others as a deterrent.
There would be some danger in total isolation - cliffs, tides, illness - when there was no form of communication to summon help. Of this I would boast, magnifying the risks. Looking back, I recognise an element of arrogance in my island mania. I would be different from other undergraduates. I would be the man who owned uninhabited islands and marooned himself there alone.
He would, in other words, be The Man Who Loved Islands, as I have been and no doubt as my son Tom will be. It is not, I think, something to be ashamed of. The growing sense of your own capacity to survive and thrive in a difficult environment; to handle a boat in strange and disturbing seas; to look after yourself with no crutch to lean on: all of these experiences are wonderful for the kind of young men my family seems to produce. But one grows out of it and moves on to other things. Perhaps, I now think, the love of islands is in fact a symptom of immaturity, a turning away from the complexities of the real world to a much simpler place, where choices are obvious and rewards straightforward. And perhaps that can be taken on another step: is the whole Romantic episode, from Rousseau to Lawrence, a vastly enlarged and egotistical adolescence? And one last question: is this why women tend not to like the Shiants? Because they are so much more adult than men?
At a loss of a hundred pounds to their then owner, Colonel Macdonald, the Shiants were finally transferred to my father and he spent the month of August 1937 there on his own. He nearly drowned, when a collapsible canoe did indeed collapse half-way between Eilean Mhuire and Garbh Eilean but that wasn't the only catastrophe. His supplies had been sent up by train from Fortnum & Mason - it was a different world - in smart, waxed cardboard boxes. They were delivered to the quayside in Tarbert. From there they were loaded onto the fishing boat and on arrival at the Shiants offloaded onto the beach. My father waved goodbye to the fishermen, who said they would return in a fortnight's time, carried the boxes to the house and began to open them. As he folded back the cardboard flaps, he found a neatly typed note from the Manager: Dear Mr Nicolson,
Please find enclosed the supplies as requested. Unfortunately, due to Railway Regulations, we are not permitted to dispatch flammables by rail and therefore have not been able to include the safety matches you requested. Trusting this will not be of any serious inconvenience, we remain,
Yours etc . . .
Faced with the prospect of a month without a fire, my father dismantled his binoculars and with one of the lenses managed to focus a few rays of the watery Hebridean sun onto some dry bracken. Somehow a flame sprang up and he carried it between cupped hands to the fireplace in the house.
For the four weeks he would have to nurture the fire like a dying lamb, returning to it at least once every two hours to see that its heart still beat. All went well, until one day returning from a walk on the heights of Garbh Eilean, he was horrified to see from above that a yacht had anchored in the bay and a party from it was picnicking on the beach between him and the house. If he was to get back to the fire, whose thin grey thread of smoke he could just see trickling upwards from the chimney into the sky, he would have to pass the picnickers. That in itself would not have been so bad if he had he had been wearing any clothes. He wasn't. It was a 1930s habit to walk about in wild places undressed.
Unobserved from the beach, he waited crouched behind a rock for the picnickers to leave. They were having a marvellous time. Sprinklings of laughter came drifting up to him. The young men and women in their yachting skirts and blue jerseys lay back on the warmth of the shingle. The hours went by. The trickle of smoke from the chimney had thinned to invisibility. There was nothing for it. Dressed only in what he describes as "an apron of gossamer fern" my father strolled with as much dignity as he could past the picnickers and on to the house where with flooding relief he could dress himself and restore his faltering fire to life.
The following year, he invited a friend from Oxford, Rohan Butler, to the Shiants and although Vita never came to the islands, his father Harold and his brother Ben hired a ketch to visit them. Harold wrote in his diary that night:
We cast anchor. We get into the dinghy, and hum along the placid waters, and all the puffins rise in fury. As we approach the beach, two figures run down to it. Nigel and Rohan. We walk round to his little shieling. Niggs is glad to have a day like this to show me his romance. It is like a Monet, all pink and green and shining. I have seldom in life felt so happy. After lunch, we go round the islands in the dinghy. The cliffs are terrible and romantic. We sing for the seals and they pop up anxious little heads. It is lovelier than can be imagined.
The Shiants have never quite been what others have imagined. "Islands in Scotland", mentioned like that in London, the words tossed away at a party, as the cigarette ash is brushed from the sleeve, always sound too comfortable. You can see the illusion in your listeners' eyes, the warm air, the distant horizons, the polychrome sunsets; they are imagining a glass of old malt in a deep armchair, bannocks in the tin beside the bed, a blue tweedy atmosphere, perhaps a hint of Scottish baronial. Anyone who has persevered this far will know by now that the Shiants are not quite like that. And the rats don't help.
It seems at times my father may have suffered from this very delusion. It came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1946. He had decided to invite two of London's most glamorous girls to the Shiants. Both Lady Elizabeth Lambart and Margaret Elphinstone, the daughter of an Invernesshire grandee, were beautiful. Both were grand and both would be bridesmaids at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth the following year. Margaret Elphinstone was the niece of the Queen. What can have been in Nigel's mind?
He arrived a week before they did to tidy up. The weather was filthy. "I found the house in quite a good state," he wrote bravely in his diary, as the rain slashed around him. "There are a lot of holes, some made by the rats and some by the weather. You can see right through the ceiling and roof in the other room and the door is off its hinges. The stove has rusted to bits and has been thrown outside."
Day after day he washed, scrubbed and painted. The sound of scurrying rats accompanied his "scrubbage programme", skittering across the rafters, sliding down between Compton Mackenzie's panelling and the wall [Compton Mackenzie was a former owner], stealing his cheese at night. The clean-up was not a success. "Scrubbing is a beastly job," he wrote in the diary. "One makes circular sweeps with the brush, expecting to clear a path of cleanliness with the soap, but all it does is leave a soapy smear, and soon one's other cloth becomes so dirty that it simply re-dirties the floor. I clearly haven't got the technique right." The rats were so disturbing that he decided to erect a tent in which the girls would be put to sleep at night. He turned for consolation to Harold J. Laski on Liberty in the Modern State, reading about the coming disintegration of the capitalist system by the light of a guttering flame.
Malcolm MacSween had forgotten to put a tin opener in with the supplies. He tried opening the cans of soup with an axe, but it spoiled both axe and soup. Within three days, the fresh meat, bacon and eggs started to go bad. Nigel threw them away. That left him with "potatoes, oat-meal and bread as my main diet. There is enough of all of this to last a fortnight." No doubt the girls would love it. He started to poison the rats and within a day or two thought that the poison was working so well that the girls could sleep in the house itself, If they noticed the holes in the skirting board, he would tell them that once, many, many years before, there had been a plague of rats. But wasn't everything lovely now?
Doubts continued to haunt him. What if the grown-up rats had died, leaving their little babies behind who would spend all night squealing for their mothers? What if the grown-up rats had died but in the house? The girls would never have been exposed to such smells. Everything else, apart from the weather, seemed to be all right. He had washed all the pots and pans again, boiled the cloths, painted the windows and laid a small gravel terrace outside. At least at first sight, Number One, The Shiants would look welcoming. But behind this sweet faτade lay the terrible anxiety. He should never have asked them.
The night before the girls were due, he thought he should sleep in the room he had prepared for them, if only to accustom the rats to the idea that this was not their playground hut a place fit for human habitation. He woke up in the early hours, as the summer light was leaking in through the window. A rat was sitting on his bed looking at him. "I shall simply have to warn the girls."
They arrived. He toured them round the sights. He gave them some of his oatmeal, bread and potatoes. They went to bed at midnight. At half-past three in the morning, Nigel, on the camp-bed in the other room, heard them screeching with horror. A rat had got inside the chest of drawers he had installed for their change of clothes in the morning. It was running up and down the nearly empty drawers like a tap dancer in paradise. Nigel - social mores were different then - asked through the door whether he could do anything to help. "No, no!" they shrieked. "If you let it out, it'll run all over us." They spent the rest of the night awake, shaking, hidden under their blankets.
The calamity wasn't yet over. The wind and tide had got up in the night. Nigel, in his anxiety, had forgotten to tie the dinghy to the mooring ring in the rock on the side of the beach. (It happens to us all: I have lost two boats like that; Hughie MacSween lost one, which he watched floating away from the islands, only for it to be picked up by a fishing boat and delivered back to him at the end of the week.) No such luck for my poor father. The dinghy had been swept away and then smashed on the rocks of Eilean an Tighe.
When the fishing boat arrived to pick them up the next morning, there was no way of reaching the boat from the shore. Nigel entered the freezing waters of the Minch, swam out to the boat and returned to the beach with a rope. Elizabeth and Margaret stood waiting in their floral prints. Nigel tied them on, one by one, and they swam out towards the herring drifter, speechless with cold, while their skirts spread like peonies around them.
Nobody knows when the rats arrived. In 1925, Malcolm MacSween told Compton Mackenzie that they "came ashore from a Norwegian ship" 20 years before, but there was no wreck on the Shiants then. In January 1876, the Newcastle barque Neda had been wrecked on Eilean an Tighe and on 13 February 1847, the Norwegian schooner Zarna, of Christiansund, was wrecked here, perhaps on Damhag, en route to Norway from Liverpool with a cargo of salt. The crew somehow managed to get ashore, salvaging two sails, "with which the Seamen contrived to make a tent for Shelter". The rats may have come on either of those ships, or neither. They may have been here ever since ships began to ply these seas in any number in the 18th century. "Since the great rat took possession of this part of the world," Dr Johnson heard on Skye in 1773, "scarce a ship can touch at any port, but some of his race are left behind. They have within these few years began to infest the isle of Col."
Twentieth-century life on the Shiants has certainly been intimate with the rats. Bullet Cunningham, lobster fishing here before the war, was staying in one of the old bothies:
You saw the old thatched houses we were staying in? Some of the walls are up yet. The rats there, I was dead scared of them. My father and the others, a very regimental man he was, he went out one day to lift the creels and left me to do a bit of cooking. And I was going to cook potatoes and some herring for dinner for them coming home. I boiled the herring, the herring was ready and all things like that and I was just going to get the potatoes ready and I saw a rat coming through the holes in the walls - a rat like that - and as soon as I saw that I got dead scared and I just ran out of the house and left the pot on the fire. My father came home and of course none of the dinner was cooked and I told him what had happened, do you know what he said? "There's not a rat in the world quite as rat-like as yourself."
The rats have a reputation. Tell anyone in Lewis or Harris that you are going out to the Shiants for a week and a distant, quizzical note enters the voice. "Ah yes," they say carefully, as if you had announced that your next holiday was to be in Broadmoor, "and what are you thinking of doing about the little creatures?" Malcolm MacSween put some cats on here, but it is said in Harris that the rats ate them too.
The rats are certainly horrible things, mostly, I think, for their lack of fear. When the house has been full of shepherds, I have slept on the floor and woken up with one a yard from my face. It looked at me quite undauntedly, even when I jumped and shooed it. We have poisoned them consistently, year in, year out, but only around the house and that has had no effect on the wider population. They are on all three of the islands and are thought to number about 3,000. They can breed when they are three months old and produce four or five litters a year, each with between six and 22 babies. The reproductive potential is spectacular. With an unlimited food supply, the 3,000 Shiant rats at the beginning of the year could, mathematically, have multiplied to something like 1.8 million by the early autumn. They don't because life here is a desperate struggle.
They are not the rats you find at home in the barn or the sewer. Those are brown rats, Rattus norvegicus, relatively large, relatively aggressive and relatively horrible. These are Rattus rattus, the ship, black or plague rat, originally from south-east Asia and now one of the rarest mammals in the United Kingdom. Because the brown rat is bigger and stronger, there are very few black rats left. Only on the Shiants and on Lundy do they exist in any number.
This is a glamorous status. The Shiant rat is now infinitely rarer than, say, the puffin, which may well be Britain's commonest sea bird. As a result, a string of rat investigations have been made in the last few years. Margarine-coated sticks have been stuck in the soil at intervals across the islands to see where the rats lived. (A nibbled stick meant a rat.) The unsurprising result was that every stick was nibbled. Rats have been caught to see what was in their stomachs. (A mixture of things from shoreline crustacea to moss and grass.) Most eccentrically of all, an English biologist received a grant to find out where the rats went on their nocturnal wanderings.
The interesting question, though, is how the rats and the birds manage to coexist. Why haven't the rats wiped out the birds? The answer is a vindication of the puffins' strategy. The birds are here only from early April to mid-August: four and a half months. While they are, the rats make hay. (Evidence from elsewhere has shown that a rat can kill an adult puffin.) But it seems as if the rats can't make sufficient impact on the bird population before they leave for the Atlantic. Come late August, the rats are suddenly proteinless and in all likelihood the population crashes. It is just then, incidentally, that the pressure of the rats on the house, which they seem to neglect for the summer, becomes most intense. Winter starves hundreds if not thousands of the black rats and so keeps their predation on the birds to a level at which a kind of equilibrium is reached. It has been different where the bigger brown rat has preyed on sea birds. On Ailsa Craig, and other brown rat-infested rocks, the rate of predation, which must be slightly higher, has sent the bird numbers irrevocably downwards. So the Shiants have a rat-puffin balance, if a fine one. We shall never rid the islands of the rats and the rats will never rid the islands of the puffins. It wouldn't take much to change this, though, and there is one thing everybody dreads: the arrival of a pregnant mink. It might kill the rats but it would also decimate the birds.
(c) Adam Nicolson 2001