I had a dream, I achieved that dream but I had to leave it behind. My story is about finding joy / fear, love and loss, heart and soul – trapped and free over the duration of 14 months.
Capturing that year is too big a task. So, I am trying. Many people write about their dream to leave the city and to move to an island life – few write about the reality of that seismic change and the decision to leave the dream, of leaving behind hopes, love, dreams, can be read as failure – but only to those who have never tried.
I tried my hardest and here are the remains of that massive attempt. This is the story I created, then broke down with hardly a word to say for it.
THE HOUSE OF TWO WOMEN
Dear Susan.
Synopsis
‘I stand for a second to take in the moment, to look at the old plank-board door with a square wooden knob, which I finally turn sharply to the right. The simple mechanism lifts a wooden latch inside. Human touch has left tangible traces of every hand that has opened this door before me. The hollow sound of the sneck – a door latch hitting its casing – is what I will always remember of this place. I understand that it is a unique sound to this house, one that will forever embody a simple place of great beauty. In this exact moment, I am sold on the sound of a wooden latch and the view of the stone flag floor in the empty room in front of me. Before the agent has even arrived, I know that I will not pull out of this crazy unfinished deal to buy this house and change my life forever. I won’t admit to the agent that it is the sound of the sneck that sealed the deal, but it is.’
This book is my story: a single, 57-year-old Yorkshire woman who dared to follow a dream against all odds; to sell up and risk all to move lock, stock and two cats from a small city flat to a home facing the sea, in the northernmost reaches of Scotland, the islands of Shetland. It is a love letter to Shetland and its extreme elemental landscapes; to an old croft house and three generations of the same family who lived there for more than 140 years, knitting and landscapes. It is an accumulation of impulses. This is also the story of hope and desire and of demise and leaving.
Here, are the bones of my life of one year on an island and the letters I wrote to Susan Halcrow, a woman that once lived in the house, from 1876 to 1960. It unfolds in monthly instalments, beginning on the very first day I visited the house, and heard the sneck, in August 2020, to my last sunrise in October 2021, when I walked away, never to look back again. I dreamed of living on the island to be closer to nature, creativity and a life less ordinary, with my knitting practice at the heart of every day; of moving through slow travel across sea and natural beauty, to come to a personal understanding of both inner and outer landscapes. I never dreamed I would want to leave to return to the city.
I hope to share how emotionally challenging it is to make such a seismic life-change from city to island life and how my being an incomer, made it hard to find community both with some islanders and with some other local incomers.
The full book, written entirely from the islands of Shetland, ending abruptly in October 2021, offering an insight into island life and, finally explaining the reasons why I had to sell up and leave, to never look back again. Here, I draw out the bones of it in letters to Susan.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver.
tracey doxey 