Bows down and shoulders hunched, St Helena St Helena rammed her way around the island, which was illuminated by sudden shafts of sunlight, instant rainbows, and over which streamed veils of cloud. We reached the southern edge-a cape where the three-masted barque rammed her way around the island, which was illuminated by sudden shafts of sunlight, instant rainbows, and over which streamed veils of cloud. We reached the southern edge-a cape where the three-masted barque Italia Italia had been wrecked in 1892, bringing the surnames of Repetto and Lavarello to the island, where they still survive-but the wind refused to calm. In fact, as we pummelled our way further and further around, it became clear that this, unique among all islands I have known, is a place without a lee-there is nowhere to shelter. The gales either blow around the island in some devilish spiral, or else pour as a katabatic torrent up and over the mountain, striking anything below, no matter at what quarter of the compa.s.s. had been wrecked in 1892, bringing the surnames of Repetto and Lavarello to the island, where they still survive-but the wind refused to calm. In fact, as we pummelled our way further and further around, it became clear that this, unique among all islands I have known, is a place without a lee-there is nowhere to shelter. The gales either blow around the island in some devilish spiral, or else pour as a katabatic torrent up and over the mountain, striking anything below, no matter at what quarter of the compa.s.s.

Without doubt the little green schooner in which I had been planning to make the voyage would have suffered terribly in the storm. Had we been under sail, and north of the island, we could barely have escaped destruction; had we tried to run downwind we would have been blown miles away, quite possibly dismasted, probably overwhelmed. The only escape would have been to hack the halyards with knives and get the sails down in an instant, and run before the weather under bare poles. But I fear we would have reacted too slowly: Tristan weather has a speed and a force to it that is terrifying, and even the old master of our ship, well-found and solid though the vessel was, scratched his head in disbelief and wonder as the winds began to die and the barometer to climb back. Even he had never seen anything like it.

We spent the remainder of the day tacking gently to and fro off the Edinburgh coast-coming in to the anchorage, steaming ten miles out to sea, returning to home waters, and back again. We had a couple on board, the Robinsons, who were hoping to see how their son David, the island doctor, lived, but who now knew they would never be allowed to land, since Mr Robinson was too old, and his wife had her leg in plaster. The islanders had radioed across that only those who were fit and fleet of foot could hope to make it safely to sh.o.r.e, if the swell ever did die down; the couple called their son on the radio, and he promised to stand and wave to them from the green in front of the Administrator's house. But they never saw him: whenever he was waving, the ship was steaming the wrong way, and during those moments the ship was close enough and pointing in the right direction their son was on the radio, or dealing with a patient. 'Everyone here's got a cold,' he explained. 'It must have come from the QE2 QE2. Some of our people went aboard her, and once one brings a germ ash.o.r.e it goes round like wildfire. So I'm pretty busy, like it or not. I sometimes wish ships didn't call at all. They may bring the mail, but they bring all sorts of illness, too.' But he added that he was, after all, being paid to deal with illness, and a good epidemic kept him from being bored.

The replacement doctor, Paul Kennaway, with whom I was sharing a cabin, had brought along the Medical Research Council papers with the results of the detailed studies of the islanders that had been made during their exile in Britain after the eruption. Nearly half of them had asthma-'hashmere' being the local word-and almost as many had a plague of parasitical worms. There were signs of inbreeding, too-there had been no new blood injected into the island stock since the early part of the century, and there were problems with eyes, for instance, that owed much to the too limited genetic pool. Asthma was still a serious illness on Tristan, it seemed. Few of the men left home without a Ventolin 'puffer'-even the hardiest of seamen were afflicted-and when the wind was from the east, and sulphur fumes from the volcano were wafting over the settlement, the sound of wheezing and coughing drowned out even the crash of the surf and the howling of the gales.

The night pa.s.sed quietly, and the wind dropped to the merest breeze. The settlement was a cl.u.s.ter of lights until ten o'clock exactly, and then the generators at the crawfish factory were switched off, and every light died. I thought I could make out a few windows lit by flickering oil lanterns and by candles, but it might have been imagination: the community seemed to have been snuffed out of existence, and all around was the impenetrable blackness of an overcast night at sea.

Next morning the surf was still running high between the tiny moles of Calshot Harbour-great breakers would regularly crash between them and wash right over the ma.s.ses of concrete dolosse blocks (said to have been shaped after the design of a sheep's anklebone, and at the core of all new harbours constructed in the southern hemisphere, and to have made their South African inventor millions of rand). But the islanders seemed to think a landing might be possible later in the day, if the weather held. By nine, with the wind now just a gentle and fitful wafting from the south-east, we heard the putter of an old Lister engine, and a blue-and-white boat, flying the Union Jack defaced with the great seal of the colony of St Helena, made its way out towards us. A few minutes later the Colonial Administrator, and the first seven Tristanians to be permitted out of harbour, were standing on our foredeck.

The islanders were tall and tough-looking, with long-jawed faces and olive skins, tanned by years of exposure to the winds and the sea. They wore identical blue boiler suits, and though some were blond and Nordic, and others dark and Mediterranean, their faces all had a strangely similar look, as though they might be close cousins. Their similarity-of dress, of face, of mannerism-they were all given to broad smiles, to courtly politeness, and to an air that managed to be at once proud and deferential-was vaguely frightening, as though these were aliens from a different planet, making their first contact with what they called 'the houtside warl'. One, an immense man who was known to all as Lofty, had an oddly deformed left eye; but he had an almost childlike air of fun about him, and was joking and laughing with all around so that I was minded to compare him with Lenny, in Steinbeck-a gentle giant, slightly out of step with the rest of humanity.

All these islanders, indeed, seemed to step to a subtly different drum-they spoke a pure, though oddly inflected English, they flew the colonial flag, and they carried pictures of the Queen and her children. But there was a difference about them, as though they were detached by more than mere distance and stormy sea from the mainstream of human society. They were British in name alone: before all else they were, without a doubt, Tristanian.

The Administrator, in sharp contrast, looked as though he had stepped out from the members' enclosure at Cheltenham racecourse. Roger Perry, a naturalist, a writer, a specialist in llamas, the flora of the Falkland Islands and the animals of the Galapagos, had been on Tristan for six months. He had come out for the morning's journey, and the first formal greeting with his Governor, in cla.s.sical British dress: a brown trilby, a tan suit, stout and brilliantly polished brown shoes, a silk tie and a silk pocket handkerchief. He needed only a pair of binoculars and a form guide to complete the picture.

The Governor stepped into the waiting boat, was joined by two Whitehall officials, the Administrator, the seven Tristanian boatmen, and I climbed in just as Lofty cast off and we were whirled out on to the waves. We chugged towards the harbour and waited, the boat turning in small circles until one huge wave raced in towards the land: the steersman, his jaw set firm, his hand clamped on to the tiller, gunned the engine, rode on to the crest of the wave and shot through the harbour entrance six feet above the levels of the moles.

It was all over in five seconds. The water was still and calm inside, and there were dozens of helpful hands reaching down to haul us up. A minute later and, my legs unsteady from all the days at sea, I was standing on Tristan soil, watching an Imperial ceremony of great familiarity, played out in touching miniature. The Tristan Boy Scouts and the Tristan Girl Guides, dark youngsters in the brown and blue uniforms sent down from Buckingham Palace Road, stood at attention. A bugle was blown, a banner was raised, a salute was made, an anthem was played-and the Colonial Governor of St Helena was formally welcomed on to the tiniest and loneliest dependency in the remanent British Empire. I found I was watching it all through a strange golden haze, which cleared if I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand: the children looked so proud, so eager to please, so keen to touch the hand from England, from the wellspring of their official existence.

They all looked as though they were trying so very hard to be British, out here in the middle of nowhere. I found it deeply affecting. I wasn't alone. I looked around, and saw a young woman behind me, wiping her eyes with a tissue. She was a teacher's wife, she said later: she had never seen anything quite so touching in all her days. It was proof positive, she said, that there was some good in the old country yet, if the youngsters were still so keen, and had arrived on the quayside without being told, or ordered. 'They just knew they had to come down and salute him,' she explained. 'They've been looking forward to it for ages.'

Ahead of me stretched the village-a cl.u.s.ter of houses, some roofed with tin, some thatched, all with gable ends of soft basalt. All of them had a split front door, the upper half open, the lower half shut to keep out the chilly breeze. The small number of expatriates sent out to help run the island-two teachers, the doctor, the South African padre, the Colonial Treasurer and the Administrator-lived in wooden prefabricated houses, painted black with creosote. There were hedges of flax on all sides, which helped break up the wind, though the Union flags fluttered briskly, and it was better to keep walking than to stand around in the cold.

But the village was clinging to the edge of a monster. Behind, like a stage set, was a sheer wall of grey, the great basalt cliffs rising to the island summit. The wall was 2,000 feet high, and it was evident that stones were falling with terrible regularity-indeed, one ma.s.sive section of the cliff had broken away at the time of the eruption, and the pale grey scar, with millions of tons of debris spilled in a fan below, served as a potent reminder of the power of the land, and the weakness of those who dared cling to it. Wisps of cloud floated along the upper reaches of the cliff, and all above was invisible, cloaked in thick grey mist, wet and inhospitable. A few sheep clambered up the crags, and cows wandered on the village outskirts. Once I saw an old woman sitting sidesaddle on a donkey, riding back along the colony's only road from the Potato Patches, two miles from Edinburgh to the west.

I walked through the village towards the new volcanoes, towards the house I had been told was home to a middle-aged lady named Emily Rogers, about whom I had once read a touching story. Derrick Booy, who had served on Tristan as a naval radio operator during the Second World War, and who has written perhaps the most sensitive of all the few accounts of Tristan, fell briefly, but hopelessly under the spell of a girl then called Emily Hagan:

The night air was an enveloping golden presence as we stood at the break in the wall. I was conscious of bare, rounded arms, and the fragrance of thickly cl.u.s.tered hair. The lingering day was full of noises. As the sky darkened to a deep umbrageous blue, speckled with starlight, and the village was swallowed by darkness at the foot of the mountain, from somewhere in that blackness came the throaty plaint of an old sheep, like a voice from the mountain. From that other obscurity, silver-gleaming below the cliffs, came the muttered irony of the surf.

The girl waited only a few minutes before her full lips breathed 'Good night' and she slipped towards the house.

'Shall I come to see you again?' I called softly.

She may or may not have answered 'Yes'. If she did, it was probably from politeness.

Derrick Booy saw her many more times, and they held hands before the fire in the Hagans' old house, Emily's face bright in the guttering light of a bird-oil lamp. And then, as war so often demands, the young sailor had to leave, suddenly, and with no notice and no alternative. A ship arrived to pick the party up, and the pair-if such they ever could be called-were forced to say farewell:

The watchers on the beach were all very still, the women sitting again in their gaily dressed rows, as if waiting primly to be photographed. None of them waved or cheered. They just sat watching. All looked very much alike, young and old. But there was one at the end of a row, in a white dress with a red kerchief, bright red, over smooth, dark hair. She sat perfectly still, staring back until she became a white blur. Then her head went down, and the woman behind her-a large one in widow's black-put a hand on her shoulder.

Emily Hagan married Kenneth Rogers ten years later, and the BBC once broadcast a programme from the island, and included her voice-a woman with 'a nice face', the interviewer remarked. I wanted to complete the story by talking to Emily, and made my way to her house. Kenneth, a bluff, kindly man who pours beer in the island's only pub, knew what I wanted the moment I stepped up to his neat, fresh-painted door.

'You'se wanting our Hem'ly,' he said. 'Well, I don' wish to be unfriendly, sir, but I'd be grateful if you'd respect our wishes and forget all you'd read in that book. It hurt us all. It was all a long while 'go, and we'd jes' as soon fergit.' He was gracious and polite, but firm. And other islanders told me the same story-about 'our Hem'ly', and about themselves. They did not care for people writing about their private lives, and publishing the detail in 'the houtside warl'. They-the 300 Swains and Hagans and Rogers, Greens, Repettos, Lavarellos and Gla.s.ses-were an intensely private people, who wanted their privacy protected. There was no hostility towards the curiosity of outsiders-far from it; the friendliness of the islanders is memorable, their hospitality to their tiny annual crop of visitors has become an ocean legend-but they all wished it would never happen. And they knew I was there to write: there are two ham radio operators on Tristan, and they knew all about me and the purpose of my voyage, long before I had even flown to Tenerife. 'Mr Winchester-you'll be careful with us now, won't you?' one man said, when I recounted Mrs Rogers' reluctance. 'We'll have to live with what you write for years to come. We'll read your words a thousand times. So be careful, for our own sakes.'

I went back aboard the ship that evening to collect some night things, and had a brief encounter that reinforced the notion that the Tristanians are a uniquely private group, uneasy with too great an outside interest. I had arranged to spend the night ash.o.r.e, and was about to climb down the pilot ladder into the dinghy, when a powerful arm stopped me. Albert Gla.s.s, the chief islander and the colony's only policeman-though he is unneeded as such, except for ceremonial tasks, since there is no crime on the island-wanted to know where I thought I was going. Ash.o.r.e, I said. 'Oh no,' he said. 'I'm not letting anyone ash.o.r.e. We have limits. We have rules.'

I was dismayed. All this way, and not even a night on the island! And yet he was so reasonable and kindly about it, I felt I had no option but to do as he had said, and try and get back the following morning. But at that moment there was a strange interruption of the Fates. A strangled cry came from the dinghy below, and a shout went up, for the doctor.

One of the islanders, it seems, had drunk a few beers too many, and had staggered backwards off the gunwales and into the freezing sea. I started at this news, since only a few minutes before I had seen a hammerhead shark cruising hungrily around our ship, looking for such morsels as a six-foot Tristanian in non-resisting mood. The man had been crushed briefly between dinghy and ship's side, and was unconscious when they hauled him out of the water and dumped him on the decking.

The ship's doctor, resplendent in what the daily circular had called 'Red Sea Rig', with black tie and black c.u.mmerbund over a crisp white shirt, was down beside him in an instant, pumping his chest, clearing his throat, resuscitating, injecting, bandaging, warming. I pa.s.sed some things down for him into the heaving dinghy, and got a grin of thanks for my little help-and Albert Gla.s.s suddenly relented. 'Hall roight,' he said. 'Foine for you'se to go. But make sure you'rs careful with us. No nonsense. We won't forget you, you knows.' And off I went, thumping over the swells in the night, visiting the drowned rat in hospital (he had no more than a couple of cracked ribs, and a stiff warning not to drink again while on such seas as this), taking drinks with the islanders at the Prince Philip Hall, and listening to the padre and his wife, and the teacher and his, recount innumerable tales of Tristan life. No one, it seemed, had a harsh word to say.

Tristan makes a profit-and a very handsome one indeed. The crawfish-frozen and sold to the Americans as rock lobster-fetch more than two hundred and twenty dollars a case, and with sixty fishing days a year, and eighteen boats that go fishing, and each boat pulling in a hundred pounds of the crustaceans a trip, money comes flooding in to the island.

Two islanders meet each morning at the pier head to look at the weather and decide if this is, or is not, a fishing day. If it is, they ring the 'bell'-an old gas cylinder suspended from a gantry near the village hall-and all those men who are designated fishermen take the day off whatever other work they may be doing, and set out with the longboats for the fishing grounds. If that makes for some inconvenience to those islanders who remain behind-perhaps a plumbing job goes unfinished, or a vital letter pa.s.ses untyped-no one seems to mind. The crawfish bring in the money, and money, despite the isolation and other-worldliness of the place, is a much-respected commodity in the colony.

Perhaps the most unexpected-and, I have to say, most dismaying-result of the comparative wealth of the island is that, since 1984, there is an island television service. Most houses have a cable providing them with programmes from a small video tape centre (our ship was bringing a new amplifier, which was greeted with considerably more enthusiasm on the dockside than were any of the visitors, rams included), and at seven each Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday evening the ca.s.settes begin to unroll, and the delights of the 'houtside warl' begin to pour into the little Tristan houses. At seven each Sunday the island is quite immobilised: Dallas Dallas is being shown-and the islanders watch every frame with adoration, amazement and delight. (There is even less worthy fare than this: the proud, private, fearless Tristanians, heirs to the traditions of egg-gathering on Inaccessible Island, and bird-collecting on Nightingale, now watch shows like is being shown-and the islanders watch every frame with adoration, amazement and delight. (There is even less worthy fare than this: the proud, private, fearless Tristanians, heirs to the traditions of egg-gathering on Inaccessible Island, and bird-collecting on Nightingale, now watch shows like Mannix, Jabber Jaws Mannix, Jabber Jaws, and Fraggle Rock Fraggle Rock. To that small extent Tristan Island is beginning to resemble Staten Island, and it somewhat saddened me to find no real opposition, anywhere, to the trend.) But there are other, less questionable benefits of the wealth. Every islander is allowed to keep, and slaughter, two cows a year, and ten sheep, and so there is fresh meat, and lamb, and milk the whole year round. Tristanians, however, have a loathing for fillet steak, and any new expatriate finds himself weighed down by pounds of prime fillet given free in exchange for chocolate, or cigarettes, or tumblers of brandy which some island women drink during colder weather as though it were lemonade.

Women have an unusually prominent role in Tristan society. True, they spend much time in the traditional island pastimes of carding wool, knitting 'ganzeys' for the fishermen, or socks (adorned with bands of colour for a man to give the girl he is courting, the more bands signifying the more ardour), or mittens. But the island shop manager is a woman, and the day I arrived it was announced that Jean Swain had been appointed Colonial Treasurer-one of the few 'natives' anywhere in the remaining Empire to hold such a post, and certainly the only woman.

There is, I was a.s.sured by one of the island men, a rational explanation for the influence of the women. All office jobs on Tristan are cla.s.sified by the Government as permanent, which means that men who regard themselves as fishermen are not allowed to take them, lest they have to drop pen and paper and take off in the longboats every time the village bell is chimed. Most office jobs are thus held by women, who can a.s.sure the Government they will remain in harness, whatever the weather, however low the swell.

But for all the slow changes, the introduction of television, the peculiar division of labour between the s.e.xes, the introduction of money to the colony (thirty years ago all trade was by barter, and the local stamps were given a value in potatoes), the temper of Tristan life remains unaltered and, I would like to think, unalterable.

The size of the population remains much the same: in 1984 there were four births, and three deaths. There are almost exactly 300 islanders. In 1961, when the volcano forced the evacuation of the entire island, there were 264 of them. As an embarra.s.sed Britain well remembers-and much of the rest of the Western world too-all but five of them eventually decided to go back to Tristan. They didn't care for the pace or the style of 'civilised' life; as the Daily Mirror Daily Mirror was to remark as their ship pulled away from the quay to make the long journey home, their decision was 'the most eloquent and contemptuous rebuff that our smug and deviously contrived society could have received'. was to remark as their ship pulled away from the quay to make the long journey home, their decision was 'the most eloquent and contemptuous rebuff that our smug and deviously contrived society could have received'.

There was, however, a coda to that story. The majority of Tristanians did, indeed, go back to Tristan in 1963. But over the next ten years a number who had evidently found a taste for a faster life during their sojourn in Britain, left Tristan again and headed back up north. About fifty have abandoned the island at the time of writing, although some of those have indeed returned yet again, an ebb and flow of humanity-now little noticed by the press, to the islanders' relief and delight-that displays the uncertainty and indecision that exposure to the 'houtside warl' brought in its train. A sociologist, Peter Munch, has noticed that many of those who returned to England had the surname Gla.s.s, and speculates on the possibility of an unspoken schism between the Gla.s.ses (not that all people called Gla.s.s belong to the same family) and the other leading island group, the Repettos. But whatever the reason for the tidal movement within the community, the total population-300-remains fairly constant. This ebb and flow, which was a feature of the late Sixties and early Seventies, can no longer continue, however. The British Nationality Act, pa.s.sed in 1982, saw to that. Tristanians, like St Helenians and Bermudians and Anguillians and all the rest (but not, as we shall see later, like the people of the Falklands and Gibraltar) are barred from permanent residence in the United Kingdom. A Tristanian who arrives at the immigration counter at Southampton docks might, for all his loyalty and distant patriotism, be a Mongolian, a Uruguayan, or a Turk. Any man from Tristan who feels like a spell in the industrialised world has only South Africa for a temporary home; and then, to his certain dismay, he will find himself cla.s.sified as coloured, and will suffer all the indignity and ignominy of being on the wrong side in the system of apartheid.

Their language remains strangely accented-a sonorous amalgam of Home Counties lockjaw and nineteenth-century idiom, Afrikaans slang and Italian. 'Gie us a pound o' happles,' a woman will say. 'I gone done shopping today, Harn'ld,' she will report, when back home. They may eat 'German's nuts'-a kind of potato pudding-drink 'Old Tom', a rough cider made from the apples they'll pick round at Sandy Bay, and finish off with 'pot-of-all-kinds', a fruit salad. They will wear 'ammunitions', or heavy boots, upon their feet, 'ganzeys'-pullovers-on top, and hope to keep 'fresh', and free from 'brocks'-healthy, and with no broken bones. 'Hashmere' is still the main ailment; even a young man, a 'blow-up' as he is known, may be susceptible, especially when the volcano is puffing out its sulphurous fumes.

The old Tristan Times Tristan Times appears a few times each year, usually to coincide with the boats that arrive three or four times a year. There are messages from Buckingham Palace, notes from the Administrator, and small items of news that will almost certainly have become established gossip for many weeks before: thirty people went on a bird-collecting trip to Inaccessible Island; the radio station (from which the island sends a daily signal to Cape Town by morse code, a.s.suring the world it and its people are still there) needs a new roof; a cattle egret has been spotted on the cliffs near Hottentot Point; the newspapers for last December have just arrived in the library (it is now April); the swimming pool is well under way, and children are warned not to play near it until it is filled with water; the cost of hiring the government launch goes up by forty per cent. appears a few times each year, usually to coincide with the boats that arrive three or four times a year. There are messages from Buckingham Palace, notes from the Administrator, and small items of news that will almost certainly have become established gossip for many weeks before: thirty people went on a bird-collecting trip to Inaccessible Island; the radio station (from which the island sends a daily signal to Cape Town by morse code, a.s.suring the world it and its people are still there) needs a new roof; a cattle egret has been spotted on the cliffs near Hottentot Point; the newspapers for last December have just arrived in the library (it is now April); the swimming pool is well under way, and children are warned not to play near it until it is filled with water; the cost of hiring the government launch goes up by forty per cent.

The St Helena Governor brings two pieces of legislation with him: a const.i.tutional amendment allowing for an election for chief islander, to be held in three months' time; and the new motor vehicles law, which calls on drivers of all cars to keep to the left on the only road-the law had to be introduced since, a few weeks before, a new car was landed on the island, bringing the total number to two, with the possibility of collision. Rules, the British believe, are the essentials of an ordered society.

There is a message from the ship: bad weather has been forecast, the harbour will be closed by eleven, and the anchor will have to be weighed at noon. Those few islanders who are leaving Tristan begin to scurry down to the quayside, carrying cases and boxes, and talking excitedly of the first visit-perhaps for years, quite probably the first time ever-to the outside. The post office opens, and a last few letters are posted, and sacks of mail are tied up and bundled on to the back of the island tractor, to be trundled down to the dinghies for transfer to the waiting ship.

Morning service at the church of St Mary the Virgin is taken this day, as it has been every Sunday for the last two years, and will every Sunday for the next two, by David Pearson, the bluff, bearded padre who gave me dinner the night before.

The church, a long, blue-and-white painted hut with a tin roof, is the repository of many of Tristan's most cherished mementoes. Here is the picture of Queen Victoria, signed personally by her and given to the islanders' chieftain in 1896, as a tribute towards the Britons, surviving in so merciless an environment so very far from home. There, beside the altar, is the island flag, 'presented to HMS Leopard Leopard for the safe keeping in the evacuation, 19th October 1961, returned by HMS for the safe keeping in the evacuation, 19th October 1961, returned by HMS Apollo Apollo to the islanders of Tristan da Cunha, 13th April 1973.' to the islanders of Tristan da Cunha, 13th April 1973.'

The organ, upon which Mrs Repetto plays so very nicely, was given by our present Queen. The Bible was given to the island by the son of a woman lost on the good ship Blenden Hall Blenden Hall, wrecked on Inaccessible Island in 1821. There are plaques to missionaries and other worthies, including the Rev Dodgson, who served in the late nineteenth century, and memorials to those who died-nearly all the island men-in the great lifeboat disaster of 1885.

The congregation is all women, aside from Johnny Repetto, that fine-faced man who, when finer and younger than now, came back with five others in 1962 to make the island habitable again after its desertion, and has been regarded as a hero ever since. All the women wear headscarves and long skirts, and sing and pray fervently, especially when they intone the customary requests for the protection and preservation of Her Majesty the Queen and all the royal family, for Her Majesty's ministers in London, and for those who, like all their husbands and brothers and sons, go down to the sea in ships and conduct their business in great waters.

And then it is time to go. The sun is shining outside, and the women hurry back to their homes, and their Sunday lunches of roast beef-the like of which few in the mother country can now ever afford. I walk back down to the harbour, past the canvas longboats-the British Lion British Lion, the British Trader British Trader, the British Flag British Flag, each painted white, with blue and red stripes, symbols of the membership of an ancient and a proud Empire.

I say my farewells to the islanders who are at the quay, and to a young British couple, Richard and Margaret Grundy, who stand, windswept and bereft and tearful, knowing it will be fully four months until they see outsiders again, or hear first-hand news from their homes. There are no flags, nor Scout parades. The cliffs loom behind, st.u.r.dy in their grand indifference. The mist is swirling in fast-flowing ribbons, and fresh swells are crashing between the piers. I jump into the boat-Lofty is at the tiller, smiling warmly-and we roar out into the sea. Within seconds the water is too deep beneath the prow even to think of a return: it took months to reach here, it will take years before I could ever think of coming back, and I feel a sudden stab of sadness.

And then we b.u.mp against the rusty hull of the RMS St Helena St Helena, and clamber up the ladder, and the dinghy turns away with a whoop and a wave from the men aboard. And, with a speed and a suddenness that is as kind as it seems brutal, we sound our valedictory sirens, the telegraphs clang to full ahead, and the island, a tiny cone of rock set in a wild and heaving sea, recedes to a mere shadow in the sky, and then a speck on the horizon, and then but a memory.

Behind us, night and day, gale or calm, for a thousand miles and more flies a great white albatross, a bird that was probably born in the Tristan islands, and is amusing herself by following us, her adopted, sea-bound friends below. But then as we draw near the African coast she suddenly turns and wheels away, and soars up into the leaden skies, back to the lonely mysteries of the South Atlantic, to her companions of the colony set far from everywhere, and utterly alone. And when she has vanished in the great empty skies, I know all my links with Tristan have been severed, and that the most difficult and longest of the journeys is done.

4.

Gibraltar

'This dark corner of the world', Lord Nelson had called Gibraltar. It was a prophetic remark, for it was to Gibraltar, and to the old circular harbour at Rosia at the southern tip of the peninsula, that the Admiral's body was carried after Trafalgar. He had been pickled in cognac, because there was not enough rum on the Victory Victory, and the barrel blew up in the October heat: so at Gibraltar the Navy repaired the damage and loaded his remains back on board his flagship which then, to the beat of m.u.f.fled drums, set sail again for the sad pa.s.sage to Greenwich, and the January funeral and the burial in the crypt of St Paul's.

All the elements of the Rock's use and meaning are encapsulated in this sad vignette from Imperial history. Gibraltar was, and is, a naval base. Without Gibraltar Britain would quite probably have lost Trafalgar, and Napoleon might have made the British Isles a part of his own French Empire, and never been forced to the ignominy of exile on St Helena. It was, and is, a place for repair, for the treatment of injury, the destination of the dying and the dead. It was, and is, a place of miserable weather, of heat and humidity, of distemper and ill-health. It was, and is, a place of necessity rather than of glory, a place to use rather than to like, a symbol of might and power and domain and steadfastness, a place all utilitarian, and not at all romantic.

And above all, as Nelson scribbled in his log, and as others have noted since, it is a brooding, frowning place, its character delineated and dominated by its towering atmosphere of darkness.

Laurie Lee had it perfectly. He had walked there in the Thirties (all the way from the Cotswolds, in fact) and first saw Gibraltar from the top of a hill behind Algeciras.

Africa, Spain and the great sweep of the Bay all shone with a fierce bronze light. But not Gibraltar; it lay apart like an interloper, as though it had been towed out from Portsmouth and anch.o.r.ed off-sh.o.r.e, still wearing its own grey roof of weather. Slate-coloured, aloof, surrounded by a scattering of warships and fringed by its dockyard cranes, the Rock lay shadowed beneath a plate of cloud, immersed in a private rainstorm.

One recent summer's day I made my own plans to visit the Rock, which involved approaching it over much the same route, through the hills and on the clifftops of Andalucia. From London I telephoned the Governor's office at the Convent, Gibraltar (the exchange was called, appropriately, 'Fortress'). A date was suggested, teatime said to be most suitable, punctuality said to be important since the Governor was a navy man. I flew to San Pablo airport in Sevilla, drove to Cadiz and, after arming myself with a compa.s.s, a sheaf of Spanish army maps, a canteen, a stout hazel stick and a foot repair kit, set off to march around the most southerly bastion of Europe to see Britain's only remaining colony on the Continent. (Britain's European possessions have never been numerous, despite convenience and closeness. She had Heligoland in the North Sea, and from Port Mahon in Minorca the Royal Navy ran the Balearic Islands. There were the Ionian Islands, and Malta, of course, and Cyprus (though hardly a European possession). And the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which are not colonies, but direct dependencies of the Crown and lie outside the United Kingdom. Gibraltar is the only unquestioned European colony that remains, and is definitely the only British Imperial possession that there ever has been on the continent of Europe itself.) It took the best part of a week to climb up from the valley of the Guadalquivir to the limestone mountain chain of which Gibraltar was an outlier. I had to pa.s.s through tuna-fishing villages, where I would sip ice-cold fino fino and discuss the price of albacore; I stopped for half a day to inspect the great lighthouse at Cape Trafalgar-where it turned out that only one of a dozen Andalucians I questioned had ever heard of Nelson, or Villeneuve, most Spaniards evidently preferring to linger on Spain's victories rather than her defeats. I climbed to the Moorish town of Vejer de la Frontera, and looked down across the fog-filled Straits to see the brown rumps of the Rif mountains, in Africa; and then came closer still to the great continent by marching along the mole in Tarifa, and thus becoming briefly the southernmost inhabitant of Europe. But then I was stopped and turned back by a menacing-looking Spanish soldier; the Campo de Gibraltar, along with the Balearics and the Canaries, is one of Spain's three princ.i.p.al military zones, crawling with soldiery who are there to show Spain's determination to protect the vital Straits, and to remind the British that the Crown colony of Gibraltar long has been, still is and always will be claimed by the people of Spain. I was sorry to have to leave the quayside, for there was a most dramatic ill.u.s.tration of the separation of the waters of Atlantic and Mediterranean; on the western side of the mole the water was green and wind-whipped, rose and fell with a long oceanic swell, and looked quite cold; on the eastern inner side the sea was blue and calm, looked warm, and was littered with all the floating debris of the little town. and discuss the price of albacore; I stopped for half a day to inspect the great lighthouse at Cape Trafalgar-where it turned out that only one of a dozen Andalucians I questioned had ever heard of Nelson, or Villeneuve, most Spaniards evidently preferring to linger on Spain's victories rather than her defeats. I climbed to the Moorish town of Vejer de la Frontera, and looked down across the fog-filled Straits to see the brown rumps of the Rif mountains, in Africa; and then came closer still to the great continent by marching along the mole in Tarifa, and thus becoming briefly the southernmost inhabitant of Europe. But then I was stopped and turned back by a menacing-looking Spanish soldier; the Campo de Gibraltar, along with the Balearics and the Canaries, is one of Spain's three princ.i.p.al military zones, crawling with soldiery who are there to show Spain's determination to protect the vital Straits, and to remind the British that the Crown colony of Gibraltar long has been, still is and always will be claimed by the people of Spain. I was sorry to have to leave the quayside, for there was a most dramatic ill.u.s.tration of the separation of the waters of Atlantic and Mediterranean; on the western side of the mole the water was green and wind-whipped, rose and fell with a long oceanic swell, and looked quite cold; on the eastern inner side the sea was blue and calm, looked warm, and was littered with all the floating debris of the little town.

It was before dawn-deliciously cool, and the best time for a summer's walk through Andalucia-when I breasted the hill above Algeciras. The old port's lights twinkled and blinked below, and there were p.r.i.c.ks of riding lanterns on the ships at anchor in the Roads. The bay, I could just make out, was a vast semicircle, the lowlands and the refineries to the left, the open sea, and a dusty glimmer of Africa, to the right.

And on the far side, rising like a long and ragged wall of steel, battleship-grey and ready for war, was the Rock. It was indeed, as Laurie Lee had noted, dark and separate from the land beside-rather sinister, rather magnificent. And then, just at that moment, sliding up and over it like a Barbary corsair's scimitar, was the morning sun. As it rose so the colours changed, from deep burnt orange through gold to the bra.s.sy yellow of a Spanish summer day. And as the sunlight became ever more intense, so Gibraltar faded into a rising heat haze, her grey and forbidding aspect becoming muted and pale, and then vanishing altogether into the background blue.

It was a little after seven, and tea at the Convent was at four o'clock sharp. I marched down into Algeciras, crossed the two small rivers, de las Canas and Guadarranque, hurried under the belching pipework of the refineries at El Mirador and, with the immense wall of the Rock rearing white above me-a Union flag fluttering, proud and familiar, from a summit pole-walked past the shops of La Linea to the frontier.

My watch said almost three, the sun was very hot. But by my reckoning I was now only about two miles from my destination-the old Franciscan friary that had been counting house and Governor's residence from the first days of Imperial occupation. (It is called 'the Convent', but has never housed nuns. King Edward VII thought it an undignified name and had it changed to 'Government House' but in 1943 his grandson, George VI, ordered it changed back.) It should have been no problem.

But the couple of miles turned out to be considerably longer, and more costly, than I had supposed. The eccentricities of global politics took over at this point, and what I had expected would be simply a matter of frontier formalities turned into a protracted and amusing farce.

The border was marked by a gate-two pairs of gates, actually, parallel, policing the same entrance, and no more than three inches from each other. The inner gate was clearly the British gate-it was made of black iron, and had limestone pillars, topped with cannonb.a.l.l.s. It was wide open.

The other gate-the nearer to Spain, and thus nearer to me-was more modern, made of green-painted steel. Festooned with a ganglion of bolts and padlocks, it was very firmly closed. Beside it was a platoon of Spanish soldiers, and a detachment of the Policia Nacional.

Beyond the two gates lay a territory that was manifestly British. There were two policemen, kitted out exactly as their colleagues in Kensington and Chelsea. The Gibraltar Police, I had read, are the oldest colonial force, formed soon after Robert Peel raised the Metropolitan in London. They have been quite severely criticised by the Gibraltarians for being too timid and gentle. There was a flagpole with a large Union flag, lazily undulating in the warm breeze. Beside it were two bra.s.s cannon, and polishing them a group of half-stripped British infantrymen-members of the Duke of Wellington's Regiment; a couple of their colleagues, in full uniform and holding rifles, stood to attention outside the sentry-posts. Every few moments one would stamp about loudly, and there would be great clatter and drama as he paced out his brief ceremonial route. Then the site would fall silent, except for a murmur of grumbles from the soldiers polishing the guns, and the distant whine of jet engines as a fighter, or perhaps a civil airliner, readied itself for take-off from the runway close behind.

Teatime was near, and I beckoned to one of the policemen. I gave my name, explained that I had an appointment with His Excellency in half an hour, and suggested he might check. He disappeared into his blockhouse, and returned a moment later with a grin. Yes, he said, the Convent was expecting me; the kettle, he implied, was on. Fine, I said-can I come in?

There was a cough, and an embarra.s.sed silence. Policemen looked at soldiers, at me, at the Spanish soldiers-who lounged around, stretching and scratching themselves, and yawning, until every few minutes, when an officer would bellow some unintelligible order and the squad would fall in, brace themselves and march up and down before the gates, their feet clattering unevenly in amiable disagreements over the step. The constable was indeed both gentle and timid in his reply. Yes, he ventured, I was most welcome, and a car would be provided to hurry me into town. But there might be problems with this gentleman approaching. And as I looked round a tall fellow in the brown and black of the National Police was advancing; he smiled warmly, and begged my pardon (he had trained as a hotel manager in Brighton, it seems, before joining the force), but could he possibly have the pleasure of seeing my pa.s.sport?

Since my arrival at the gate and the attempt to pa.s.s through had been in the nature of an experiment I cannot say I was surprised by what happened, though, since I was quite footsore and eager for a cup of tea, I was irritated. The policeman told me firmly that as a British pa.s.sport holder I could not, he was sorry to say, cross into the colony by road. If I wanted to visit this charming corner of Spain-he would not accept that its occupation was anything more than temporary-I would have to trek back to Algeciras, take the next hydrofoil to Tangier, and take another similar (in fact, as it turned out, the very same) craft back from Tangier to Gibraltar. In other words I could travel the three inches with pleasure, but only after having made brief obeisance in a third, neutral country, in Africa. It all suddenly seemed rather ludicrous, and I was cross that I was going to be late for tea. (Afternoon tea is not the only British custom still rigorously maintained in the colony. The author Nicholas Luard once met a formidable British nanny near Algeciras. In spite of the heat she was dressed in a severe grey coat and skirt, and wore a grey felt hat, and very sensible shoes, in which she was clumping towards La Linea. Luard offered her a lift, and asked where she was going. 'Gibraltar,' she replied, in tones impeccably Home Counties, 'to buy a reliable kipper.')

In the event, the excursion was pleasant enough, even though the bullet-like craft only narrowly escaped being run over by a tanker in the thick fog-the cotton-wool-like taro taro-that hangs almost perpetually over the Straits. Our captain, a fat and unshaven Moor, weaseled his machine deftly under the approaching bow, and let fly a string of colourful imprecations at the wall of rusty steel above us. The fog thinned, the roar of the motor settled to a dignified chug, and out of the haze ahead, below the crouching-lion shape of the Rock herself, was the stone magnificence of the old dockyards-the former home of the Royal Navy's Atlantic Fleet, built for the Admiralty by Messrs. Topham, Jones and Railton, to be the undisputed and ostentatious guardian of the Straits, the Mediterranean, and the route to the Orient. While Bermuda guarded the Atlantic, Simonstown and Trincomalee-'Trinco' to the sailors-looked after the Indian Ocean, and Singapore, Hong Kong and Weihaiwei were home to the China Squadrons, so Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria and Aden preserved the integrity of the most vital of all Imperial waterways-the route to India. Small wonder, then, the sound of bugles from the dockside barracks sounded like a declaration of Imperial intent to any pa.s.sing strangers: What We Have, they seemed to say, We Hold.

From Trafalgar to the Falklands, from the Malta convoys to the Suez invasion, the dockyards of Gibraltar have long been vital for naval a.s.sembly, organisation, coaling, victualling, the loading of munitions and the making of war. Every fleet and every warship of naval note has been there-the Hood Hood, the Nelson Nelson, the Rodney Rodney and, of course, the and, of course, the Victory Victory on her mournful mission. When the Home and the Mediterranean Fleets met in the harbour in 1939, as they would do for spring manoeuvres every year before the war, the bay was an almost solid ma.s.s of grey steel, and 200 funnels belched smoke into the sky. on her mournful mission. When the Home and the Mediterranean Fleets met in the harbour in 1939, as they would do for spring manoeuvres every year before the war, the bay was an almost solid ma.s.s of grey steel, and 200 funnels belched smoke into the sky.

But on this summer morning I could only see the funnel of a single frigate, and the upperworks of another naval vessel, even tinier, buried deep in one of the drydocks. A fellow-pa.s.senger, a Gibraltarian, told me that the fleets made little use of Gibraltar now ('though it was very exciting during the Falklands War. Just like the old days!') and at the beginning of the Eighties the Admiralty, in a decision that had caused bitter anguish among the Gibraltarians, had decided to sell the dockyards. A private firm, which had promised to employ most of the workforce, was going to try to turn a profit from commercial ship-repairing, but no one was very optimistic. (Gibraltar is now suffering the consequences of a 'one-crop' colonial economic policy, common to so many parts of the Empire. The sea lords stopped having their ships mended in the Mediterranean, and the economy, not being based on anything else, went to pieces almost overnight. How much more generous, and how wise it might have been for the home Government to have developed an alternative-some kind of engineering, perhaps. Colonial government, however, is not generally blessed with either generosity or wisdom, and never with foresight.) The dockyard-protected by the north and south moles, and the long and crucial 'detached mole'-slipped astern, and we berthed close to the airstrip (built where the racetrack used to be, just inside the frontier) and the Royal Gibraltar Yacht Club, the oldest outside Britain (it was founded in 1829, and its members regularly race against Spanish sailors from La Linea Yacht Club, making the border regulations seem all the more needless).

The customs and immigration men were as bleakly unwelcoming as in any British possession, and searched diligently for any illicit imports of the products for which Morocco is well known. A thump of rubber stamp and, some twenty-four hours, 200 miles and one extra continent after being turned away at the double gate, here I was in the Crown colony itself-a red telephone box on one side, a pillar box labelled 'ER'-for Edward VII, not Elizabeth-on the other; policemen in shirt-sleeve order, soldiers in khaki drill, customs men in tropical shorts, advertis.e.m.e.nts for Watneys and Hovis, Rocola shirts and Tootal ties, and fleets of Morris Minors, Austins and Land-Rovers on the roads. (But there is one signal difference: in Gibraltar, alone of the remnant colonies, traffic drives on the right.)

Gibraltar is, and long has been, Britain's smallest foreign possession. (Ignoring, that is, such infinitesimal outstations as Diamond Rock, near Grenada in the Caribbean, granted in the Napoleonic Wars and given the preface 'HMS' the next smallest inhabited colony is Pitcairn, two square miles, compared to the Rock's one and seven-eighths. Pitcairn, as we shall see, belongs to the Crown still.) Gibraltar is three miles long, three-quarters of a mile wide and, at the Rock Gun, a third of a mile high. As perhaps the only colony it is practicable to express in terms of its weight-about 1,500 billion tonnes of Jura.s.sic limestone, plus a few million tonnes of shale-it looks almost identical to that odd-shaped protuberance on the Dorset coast, Portland Bill, and geologically, it is.

It is the only present British colony that was known to the ancient world. The Romans called it Mons Calpe; it was twinned with Mons Abyla-the Mountain of the Apes-on the African side of the Straits, and the pair were known, so it is generally accepted, as the Pillars of Hercules, the limits of the known and navigable world, and beyond which lay Atlantis. It was a part of the Gateway of the Hesperides; and some scholars will claim, rather more fancifully, that Gibraltar was Scylla, and Abyla was Charybdis, and the Straits of Messina had nothing to do with the story at all. (Since there is no whirlpool in either Strait, Charybdis remains very much a mystery, amenable to all sorts of claims.) Tarik-ben-Zayed, Moor and Mussulman, brought Islam into Europe and gave Gibraltar its name-Jeb'el Tarik, or Tarik's Rock-in AD 711. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the Rock, without being noticed, from the Visigoths (though for good measure he went on to kill their king, Roderic, near Tarifa, and began a march of Mohammedanism that was to trundle northwards for 400 years and reach almost to the gates of Paris). He was a military man of considerable prescience, and realised at once the strategic importance of his peninsular conquest-the keystone, as it were, to Spain. But neither he nor his successors, who ruled Tarik's Rock as an Islamic extension of the Moroccan Rif for the next six centuries, laid down constructions to denote their rule: today there are the ruins of a wall, fragments of two mosques, and the keep of the Moorish Castle, part of which is now used as the Gibraltar Prison, and which the Howard League for Penal Reform have denounced as 'grotesquely primitive', and its inmates as 'zombie-like'.

The Spaniards briefly regained Gibraltar in 1309, when the Archbishop of Sevilla, his soldiers armed with catapults, drove the thousand Moors of the garrison back home to Morocco. The Moors recaptured the Rock soon after, and the Spaniards attacked again soon after that; over the next century and a half of the slow and painful-but never-to-be-forgotten-Reconquista, Gibraltar changed hands eight times; Don Alonso de Arcos, who finally succeeded in stamping out the Moor for ever, marched across the isthmus in 1462: his tomb in Sevilla, which every Briton and modern Gibraltarian should perhaps take trouble to see, records the fact with due eloquence: 'Aqui yace sepultado el honrado caballero don Alonso de Arcos, alcaide de Tarifa, que gano a Gibraltar de los enimigos de nuestra Santa Fe.' ('Here lies buried the honoured knight Don Alonso de Arcos, Governor of Tarifa, who wrested Gibraltar from the enemies of our Holy Faith.') It would be as well for Whitehall to remember that in Spain's eyes, today's occupiers-the Protestants of England-are every bit as noisome and villainous a bunch of usurpers as were the Moslems of Fez; the spirit of the Reconquista Reconquista is still a powerful motive force-some might say the only motive force-in the continuing diplomatic wrangle over when Britain will abandon her own claims to sovereignty. is still a powerful motive force-some might say the only motive force-in the continuing diplomatic wrangle over when Britain will abandon her own claims to sovereignty.

Spain managed to hang on to Gibraltar for only two and a half centuries, and her invigilation was neglectful, if not downright malign. The place went to ruin: nothing of note was built, it was peopled by convicts whose sentences were suspended while they lived there, it was a hotbed of religious intolerance (the Jews were all thrown out in 1492), it degenerated into a dreary wasteland of wrecked buildings and wharves, where undisciplined soldiers waited for a Moorish attack that never came-and for pay that never came either-and watched without understanding the steadily increasing number of ships from other nations that sailed on trading missions between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

The British had their Imperial eyes upon it from early on. Cromwell l.u.s.ted after it as fortress and strategic base. 'Gibraltar, if possessed and made tenable by us,' he said, 'would be an advantage to our trade and an annoyance to the Spaniard.'

And yet when finally it did fall to British guns, and to the naval cannonade of Admiral Sir George Rooke, it did so not precisely on Britain's behalf, but rather on behalf of the Hapsburg Pretender to the Spanish Throne, Charles, the Archduke of Austria. And to add further complication to the story, Rooke was aided in his conquest by the Archduke's agent, the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, who is still remembered with affection by Ulster Protestants for having been wounded at the Battle of the Boyne by the same ball that hurt King William.

The cannonade must have been terrifying, and overwhelming to the Spaniards, who could muster only eighty trained soldiers, 470 peasant militiamen, 1,000 civilian territorials and twenty working heavy guns. Rooke's forces, which he deployed over the first weekend of August 1704, included seventy-one warships, 26,000 artillerymen, 9,000 infantrymen and 4,000 cannon. His attack, which began at dawn on Sunday, 4th August, needed only a few hours; he poured 15,000 b.a.l.l.s on to the tiny city, cl.u.s.tered above the docks and on the comparatively gentle slopes of the Rock's western flanks. Barely a building stood the onslaught-one reason why so little of historical importance remains in the colony today.

Rooke's men landed at daybreak, and by midnight the last of the Spaniards emerged from their foxholes. The Spanish Governor, Diego Salina, surrendered and marched the remains of his garrison and almost the entire population of 6,000 civilians northwards, and to La Linea and San Roque. Gibraltar was now, in fact if not in law, British. In fact the Prince of Hesse, installed as first Governor, first raised the Spanish flag, on behalf of his Pretender's claim; and even when Rooke tore this down, and protested that the peninsula was British, a second Governor was installed who was most definitely Spanish-a General Ramos. Then Archduke Charles himself was brought to Gibraltar in 1705 and formally declared King of Spain, which must have seemed very odd, given that there were no Spaniards there at all except Ramos, and a population of what were called 'shacombe filthies, raggam.u.f.fings and scrovies' from Rooke's seventy-one warships.

Total British dominion began in 1707, when Colonel Roger Elliot took office as Governor; and finally, on 13th July 1713, the doc.u.ment that confirmed it all-or didn't confirm a thing, depending upon your nationality and persuasion-was signed by Queen Anne and King Philip, and a host of other European monarchs besides, in the small town of Utrecht, on the banks of the Crooked Rhine, in central Holland.

The Treaty of Utrecht, which brought to a formal end the War of the Spanish Succession, spread Europe's Imperial tentacles across the world. It dealt with Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Hudson's Bay and the island of St Kitt's (with France handing them over to Britain); it recognised Frederick of Prussia's claim to Neuchatel; it said that the Duke of Savoy could rule Sicily and Nice, permitted Portugal suzerainty over the banks of the Amazon, and cut back French territory in Guiana. Spain gave to England the exclusive right to supply her colonies with Negro slaves; and it gave her Minorca, and, in the famous Article X, it gave her Gibraltar, too.