Page 25 of Second Chance Summer
‘Of course you believe that,’ Lily said wickedly, secretly entranced by the idea of a mythical landscape.
Sam frowned. ‘Of course. Doesn’t everyone?’
She laughed.
‘Let’s head down the hill towards the pest house,’ he said.
As they walked, Lily’s curiosity was well and truly piqued. ‘Have you lived on Bryher your entire life?’ she asked.
‘Apart from when I went to uni and a year of travelling around after.’
She noticed he didn’t say ‘we’ again so if he’d had a companion on his gap year, that person had now been erased from the narrative.
‘You said Elspeth has never left at all?’
‘Only for holidays and not too many of those. Travel to and from here is expensive. Young people tend to go away and either don’t come back or try to return a decade later,but making a living and finding a home in any rural spot is hard.’
‘Did you ever think of making the cottages into homes for the islanders?’
‘I did but there are only six ruins left and I wouldn’t want to build on the natural landscape. By developing the retreat, I can provide jobs and I’ve created two studio flats above the hub for my live-in staff. Who I will be recruiting very soon,’ he added pointedly.
‘I’m glad to hear it, otherwise you’d end up needing a retreat yourself. Now, can you show me this “pest house”? It sounds horrifying and fascinating at the same time.’
‘It’s both of those things. Come on, we need to go down and up again.’
Annoyingly, Lily was puffing a little by the time they’d trekked down one hill and up another. Sam stopped again so she could look down on the western end of the island where the pest house was situated well away from the cottages of the Island Retreat. There were also a couple of ruined buildings behind a beach on the northern coast.
‘The retreat was one of two settlements with a handful of dwellings,’ he explained. ‘Each of its cottages originally housed a different family, though most of the inhabitants were related in some way. That was another reason for life on Stark being unsustainable. People tended to stay in one place their whole lives and it’s obviously not great for people’s health when generations keep on marrying their cousins.’
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, realising the implications.
‘However, the main reason they eventually had to leave was that the well dried up. My first job here was to find a new water supply. Without that, there would be no retreat.’
‘You said the well was themainreason people left?’
‘There were others. Generally, the place was too tiny and too isolated to be viable. Stark is wild, windswept and not terribly fertile. For a few decades, the inhabitants made a living harvesting seaweed for fertiliser, and they had a rowing gig that was used to pilot visiting ships safely to the other islands. They lived on potatoes and limpets and kept a few sheep, cattle and goats.’
‘It sounds a very hard life.’
‘It was bad enough in summer but in the winter they could be cut off for weeks. The community only had one rowing gig between it and that was wrecked one winter. No one could afford to buy another. Food was in short supply, the well was running dry and the young people all left. Eventually in eighteen fifty-five, there were only two families clinging on and it was decided by the Cornish authorities that they should be evacuated to Bryher.’
‘Surely that was better for them?’ Lily said, finding it hard to imagine how any sane person would want to live in such harsh conditions, always on the brink of starvation.
‘In one way it was, because life on Stark had become unbearable. However, one of the families still didn’t want to leave, even though they were practically starving. There are documents about the mother, Mabel, having to be led away forcibly from her cottage, cursing the men sent to evict her. While being dragged from her home, she cursed anyonewho ever set foot on Stark again.’ He smiled. ‘I didn’t tell you that before.’
‘Thanks!’ Lily said, forming a picture of Mabel, screaming as she was carried away from her home in a tiny boat, with her few possessions, never to return. ‘The poor woman. It must have been traumatic.’
‘Apparently so. My aunt found an old newspaper cutting in the Scilly Library describing the scene. She was Elspeth’s great-great-great-grandmother.’
Lily gave an audible gasp. ‘Oh, my God. No wonder your aunt has such a strong connection to the place.’
‘Yes, Stark – its inhabitants – are literally in her blood. Talking of which, shall we visit the pest house?’
They walked on, to a lower, flatter area of scrubland facing the Atlantic coast. The roofless stone building was situated at the edge of the island, well away from the cottages, and surrounded by gorse bushes and wildflowers. As they approached, Sam told her about its history.
‘It was built in the mid-seventeenth century as an isolation hospital for sailors with the plague. They were dropped off here by ships sailing for Scilly.’
‘That’s awful,’ Lily said, beginning to think that Stark had a very sad history, despite its idyllic location. ‘I’m surprised you wanted to rebuild anything on here.’
