Shetland comprises an archipelago of some 300 islands and skerries situated roughly half way between London and the Arctic Circle. Stereotyped by many outsiders as bleak and somehow ‘on the edge’, according to the poet Jen Hadfield’s stylish memoir – about her 17 years of living there – it can be more illuminating to see these places as somehow central to everything.
Visiting Foula, Hadfield overcomes her vertigo, finding the island ‘peaceful and dreadful’ all at once
Storm Pegs is as much an account of the author finding new personal bearings as a series of magic lantern slides about insular life. The title alludes to a traditional piece of perforated wood used by mariners to keep track of their whereabouts: you stuck the peg in a hole and navigated accordingly. The subtitle stresses that she is an incomer (a sooth-moother). She arrived in her twenties for a literary festival, and now dwells in a precarious caravan, mentally mapping her position in the busy flow of the world.
The story – in 32 loosely seasonal chapters – opens on a turbulent January day when Hadfield is violently seasick aboard the ferry crossing from Orkney. For someone leery of the sea, fearful of depths and heights (to say nothing of gales, drinkers and dogs), making a home on West Burra might not seem like the obvious option. It is a hardscrabble new life – ‘I look quite a lot like Worzel Gummidge,’ she writes, as she forages for whelks or spoots (razor-clams). But for all the setbacks and winter ‘darknesses’, she manages to make it intriguing (though I still cannot share her enthusiasm for folk festivals or Icelandic stockfish).
There are some wonderful, cannily observed set pieces: a skyfall shower of small fishes; the hunt for a rare tuber (roseroot, used by Sherpas to lend stamina at altitudes); the honing of a scythe; a night-time swim/dance in the bioluminescent surf (da mareel); and even her spell in a marine lab examining farmed salmon poo, which is full of micro-monsters.
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