Diary of a Shopkeeper, 30th October

This weekend has seen the welcome return of the Orkney Storytelling Festival, always an entertaining and educational series of events. Storytellers, local and far travelled, shared tales both tall and true. Some, like Nela Scholma-Mason’s account of Lady Burroughs, were firmly rooted in reality as we experience it in our daily lives. Others, teeming with ghosts, magical books and singing selkies, were far from everyday existence. Nonetheless, their images and rhythms tapped into some deep part of the brain, and connected in mysterious ways to another kind of reality.

It’s in this spirit that I now pass on a story that’s been handed down to me through the generations. How much of it is ‘true’ is impossible to say. For a start, it takes place on an island called West Ronaldsay, which, despite its name, clearly has nothing in common with either North or South Ronaldsay. So where is it?

One or two of the happenings recorded in it echo events we might remember from history books and old newspaper clippings. Yet the story’s version of them is different, starker, stranger. Which version to believe?

Maybe the lesson is Believe the Story. Trust the Tale. It may not be ‘true’, but it could be ‘real’ in a way mere facts often fail to be. This approach has worked for many of our highest profile politicians of recent years, who have successfully sold us fanciful stories rather than dull actuality. So why not for a tale of island life…

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

The low-lying island of West Ronaldsay has no burns or rivers, and only one small loch, which is known to the inhabitants of the North End as the Peerie Sea, and to Southenders as the Peedie Sea.  Arguments have raged for centuries about the correct name for the piece of water, with each side accusing the other of bringing in a fallacious foreign term. 

So fierce did this argument rage in the late 1930s, that one summer an artificial ayre of beach stones and turf was constructed across the middle of the loch. It was the minister’s idea. The Reverend Wersh suggested that the Northenders could have their Peerie Sea, and the Southenders their Peedie Sea, and peace would reign forthwith.

Unfortunately, at the opening ceremony on October 30th 1939, the eldest Northender, the patriarch Isaac Budge of Northness, expressed his admiration for the new North Peerie Sea and South Peerie Sea, and Gideon Brass of Southness replied with a toast to the North Peedie and the South Peedie Sea.

In the furore that ensued, the islanders who had spent three months labouring to construct this great revetment immediately started destroying it with great efficiency. 

Such was the farcical prelude to a truly tragic incident.  Fully occupied with tearing down the embankment, the men of the West Ronaldsay Home Guard failed to spot the approaching flight of German bombers coming in low over the North Sea. 

Even more tragically, the Nazi bomb aimers mistook an argument about Old Norse etymology for a work party creating anti-invasion defences, and dropped an estimated seven tons of bombs on the island.

This did accelerate the demolition of the loch divider, but it also killed Isaac Budge of Northness. His tragic death united the island in grief, and two days later the entire population met to mourn his passing at the funeral in the Old Kirk. 

Or, as the Southenders call it, the New Kirk.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 2nd November 2022. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.