Norman John Gillies

摘要

Plumped on his mother's lap, a woollen cap on his head, he looked as well set up as any child in Britain. It was the other elements in the photograph that cast doubt. The face of his grandmother, Annie Gillies, was tanned dark by sheer exposure to howling winds and seas and, in summer, a pitiless sun untempered by the shade of a single tree. The box she carried was perhaps full of gannets' eggs, and the lumpy sack would hold a dead seabird or two for dinner. Both women wore shawls of hand-woven wool to keep their hair in order. When not burdened with bundles, or babies, both would have been working at a spinning wheel to make yarn for the tweed that they bartered with the laird on the mainland. Within four years, however, the smiling young mother would be dead of appendicitis that was flagged up too late to one of the few boats that passed. And within five years, in 1930, everyone on the island would have decided that life on St Kilda, 110 miles out in the Atlantic off the Scottish coast, was too hard for them.