Ness 3

Hubris  i.e. (extreme haughtiness, pride or arrogance.)

A few years back two of my Lewis friends took me to a (short-lived) restaurant that perched over the harbour at Port of Ness.

They were accommodating me and my eccentricities for 3 or 4 days, So I said that if we went eating somewhere good, I would pay for the meal.

It was a very good meal.

The main waitress serving us was, I guess, about 19-yrs-old or so. When I asked for a coffee at the end of the meal, she said “What kind: espresso, cappuccino etc?” I said “When I lived here 40 years ago, cappuccino was unknown in Ness”. She said to me “I think that you will find, sir, that quite a lot of things have changed in Ness in the last 40 years”

When I then picked up the tab at the end of the meal, I said to her “The last time I paid for fish at Port of Ness it was a half-crown for a bucket of fish. I see prices have gone up a little bit since then”.  She smiled benevolently and was totally unphased as she took my MasterCard.

Not a form of currency that could have been used in the Lionel bothan in the 1950s

Ness 2

I spent my first ten years living down in Lionel; and was heartbroken to leave it in 1958.

The winds came in fiercely on many evenings.

But none so fierce as the evening of 31 January 1953 -which I remember well, cowering as I was in my bed, with the Lionel schoolhouse wracked by savage gusts. In the morning, we discovered the Clan MacQuarrie had gone aground in Borve: all the crew were saved by breeches bouy rescues from the shore.

But that news was a bit dwarfed on the BBC Home Service the following morning by the news that, out on the Irish Sea, the Princess Victoria had foundered in the atrocious weather conditions with the loss of 133 lives

Ness

I dream of things that were, but are no more;

And things that might have been.

Ness in the early 50s:-

1. There were far fewer fences. Some said the fences now in Ness were a result of fencing grants. I do not know if that is correct.
2. As a result, the village of Lionel employed a shepherd in summer months to keep the cattle and sheep away from the growing crops.
3. The crofts were heavily cultivated: a mixture of oats, potatoes, turnips and some barley. The last time I looked at cultivation in Ness (in the 70s) most of that had died away (except right down near the Butt – where the crofts, while small, are of course very fertile indeed).
4. The gugas, at least in some years, were taken back to Ness unplucked: and great fires were lit on the breakwater walls in Port of Ness harbour to singe them and unpluck them.
5. Ness had a district councillor (and the Ness correspondent of the Stornoway Gazette) who was English. She advocated putting park benches on the Ness machair so that cailleachs from the village could stroll down there on summer evenings and sit knitting on the benches while they gazed over the tranquil Atlantic scenes. This was not a strategic vision that acquired wholesale approval in Ness.
6. The bothans did a flourishing trade on Friday nights. I used to visit my Dad’s deputy head on a typical Saturday and was very puzzled why (unlike my Dad) he usually only got out of bed about 1 p.m. on a Saturday and then entertained his kids and my dad’s kids (including me) with an accordion recital (while still in pyjamas and dressing gown). I could not understand at the time why my parents slightly disapproved of this form of entertaining.
7. Lionel was dominated (in a pleasant sense) by a man called Tormod Plo. He was janitor of Lionel school, a skilled mechanic, a weaver, an electrician and an expert on child psychology. And he was the guy who is immortalised in John Macleod’s book as the man who (about 7 years old) told Lionel about the Iolaire : “They are all drowned, all dead”.
8. Tormod was a wonderful man: any object that required subtlety rather than brute force was feminine. So when he taught my father to drive (which he did in 1957), his frequent advice was “Give her just a little bit more throttle, John”.
9. It was a big issue in Ness then (as it still is, I understand) how far one should go away from Ness. Merchant Navy was a big occupation then; and notably going off whaling to South Georgia. But lots of parents were unwilling for their kids to go the Nicolson even if they had passed the qualifying exam. More were willing for their kids to go at 14 to the (then new) Lews Castle College.
10. One guy e-mailed my brother Alasdair in Sussex when he had appeared on BBC South East saying "There were familiar things about your appearance and your accent. Was your father once head teacher in Lionel School?” He was a Niseach who had done well from sailing
11. And of course the machair was a wonderful place in summer. And the beach at Port of Ness.
12. But, in the wintertime, the mists came in – with the fog horn going from the Butt lighthouse. And one felt very secure in bed when the Force 10 whipped in from the wide Atlantic.