This is a sensual love letter to the beautiful island of Shetland

Picador, £18.99

On the morning after a storm, Jen Hadfield is often seen “nit-combing” her nearest beach, foraging for seaweed-entangled treasures that have washed ashore. Past trawls have uncovered a can of Korean hairspray; a tub of Soviet-era grease; a creepy doll’s head with a barnacle-pocked face; a message in a bottle inviting the finder to “be a devil and write to me”; and a mysterious lump of wax that may have time-travelled from the days when clipper ships carried barrels of tallow in their holds.

But perhaps the most unfathomable piece of flotsam to have washed up on Shetland’s shores is Hadfield herself, a Cheshire-born poet who grew up in a village full of footballers, Porsches, security patrols and high, wrought-iron gates. Having first visited these islands “on a kind of pilgrimage [aiming] to write a poetry book that was like a road movie”, she found she couldn’t leave.

Now, after 17 years and several more books, she has written a kind of love story about her relationship with Scotland’s northernmost archipelago. As a university student enamoured by Ian Hamilton Finlay and George Mackay Brown’s island poems, Hadfield had yearned to become “a poet with a washing line adjacent to the sea and a practical day job where I could learn something about where I was”.

And so it turned out. After finding work in a local fishmonger’s and renting a cottage with a coastal washing line (complete with all-important storm pegs), Hadfield began building a life for herself on the island of West Burra, eventually becoming a full-time author and creative writing tutor.

Jen Hadfield (Image: FREE)

What Storm Pegs doesn’t mention is that all the while, its author was garnering literary acclaim, winning the TS Eliot and Edwin Morgan poetry awards and, most recently, the six-figure Windham-Campbell Prize. But her gloriously inventive wordsmanship speaks for itself. Ploughing through choppy nocturnal waters, the North Boat “gives a few, deep lurches, as if the sea is trying to swallow a bone stuck in its throat”. A gannet entangled in fishing tackle goes “off like a firework” when freed. And on a vertical cliff on Foula, a colony of fulmars “file themselves like books in a library”.

The prose is bejewelled with Shaetlan words. Though a “soothmoother” (incomer), Hadfield revels in what some call “da language o’ da hert” and she feels crestfallen when locals attempt politeness by lapsing into formal English in her company, fearing she might unwittingly be playing a part in the language’s demise. “Perhaps,” she speculates, “it’s when we lose our voice, that we risk becoming defined as ‘remote’.”

The notion that Shetland is “remote”, a place “on the edge of the world”, clearly rankles with Hadfield, who relishes the strong sense of connectedness she encounters in the place where she now bides. In a profound sense, Hadfield feels at home in West Burra and she joyfully compares herself to a limpet – a creature that somehow always finds its way back to its own “home scar” on the rock’s surface.

After locating a plot of land on which to create a garden and, eventually, a house, Hadfield thinks she has stumbled upon her own home scar and is now anchored there by kind, friendly neighbours. Does she feel accepted in Shetland, she is sometimes asked. No, she writes. “What I do feel is kent, known, part of the story” among a community that is both welcoming and outward-looking.

Read more

Scots killed 15 times as many witches as England - weather to blame?

'While others fought, the French ran, then cosied up to the Nazis'

“Shetlanders,” she writes, “live in worldliness because we are constantly tickled by the shared and sharing sea” – an ocean traversed by shipping lines, migrating birds and industry. In recent decades, the archipelago has been a hub for Eastern European “Klondykers”, for the oil and gas industry and for the huge cruise ships that, for a few hours at a time, swell Lerwick’s population by 5,000 souls.

Most recently, it has become host to a spaceport on Unst, and the massive, 103-turbine Viking wind farm. Although mindful of the need for fossil fuel alternatives and conscious of the spectre of “nimbyism”, Hadfield is haunted by the scale of those colossal turbines, by their potential impact on communities and migrating birds, and by the fact each one requires 700 cubic metres of concrete to be poured into precious peatland she and other locals have been working to restore. Visiting the under-construction site, she is grief-stricken to realise that after walking for three hours along its tarmac roads, she has only covered a fraction of its range. Suddenly, for the first time in 17 years spent in Shetland, she feels she is somewhere “remote”.

Over the course of her book, Hadfield explores several islands by car, ferry, kayak, on foot and occasionally, while swimming. Being unfamiliar with Shetland’s geography, I have to make frequent use of the included map and, given Storm Pegs’ unconventional structure, I occasionally feel a peerie bit adrift, trying to assimilate the timescale and trajectory of Hadfield’s island life. But by the end, I have been captivated by her lyrical, often witty prose, and her astonishingly vivid observations of landscapes, seascapes and the myriad creatures - humans included - who inhabit them.

Hadfield approaches her surroundings with all of her extraordinarily acute senses, allied with a storyteller’s imagination. More than one of her beachcombing “finsters” (finds) get cautiously licked; a half-empty Lucozade bottle inspires reveries about the storm-weary yachtsman who dropped it overboard. Meanwhile, a glimpse of the recently decommissioned Ninian North oil platform provokes speculation about the lives of those who lived, worked and slept among its metal ribs and windowless cabins, listening to “the endless whetting of the wind”.  

In Storm Pegs, Hadfield takes readers on an elemental journey, one that plumbs emotional as well as nautical depths. A whisper of melancholy wafts in on the breeze when she hears a song about the sole survivor of a shipwrecked Orkney fishing crew, a single man who laments that none of those watching anxiously from the shore is waiting for him.

The line feels “close to home”, observes Hadfield. By the book’s end, however, the wind has changed, and the byssal threads anchoring its author to her Shetland rock appear stronger than ever.