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1968 – OVER THE HILLS AND...

When I was twenty-four we went to live in the eighteenth century.

We travelled there by van, a very cheap old sort of furniture van, hired for the single job of taking us and our sort of furniture away from London – six hundred miles north by road, fifty-three point seven miles west by sea and a final twenty-five point nine miles by road to the far, far away extreme west of the Outer Hebrides.

We were so happy to discover the world wasn’t flat even when you went to the very edge. That night, the sea loch next to our house froze over and in the morning when the tide went out it left big sheets of ice draped over the rocks.

We had taken a time machine to another world and another age.

The next day, my oldest friend Mike, who had driven the van, took it back on the ferry to the twentieth century, leaving me, my very, very pregnant second wife Heather and a dog from Shepherd’s Bush market ready for the next bit of our Good Old Days. The day after that an ambulance took my wife back across the island to Stornoway Hospital, where she was told to go into labour for almost twenty-four hours and Hannah, the 0.99 per cent person who had been conceived in Mallorca and seemed so huge, came reluctantly into the world, very small and as white as a china doll with her mother’s red hair that she could eventually sit on.

So there were three of us and the dog in the croft house with its own tiny beach we had bought for £400 that I had borrowed from Robert Graves with the instructions to pay him back ‘when it rained gold’.

Robert had given us another instruction – that we should call our son Danté. Except our new son hadn’t been paying attention when Robert had spun Heather’s wedding ring on a long red hair over her stomach and the one-hundred per cent guaranteed boy was a girl and so not Danté, but Hannah. Nor was her sister Alice twenty months later.

We grew potatoes and caught fish and mussels and backache and chickens with a rooster who died of a broken ego, but left us with some tiny chicks who had to live in the kitchen because the weather was unimaginable unless you lived in the Outer Hebrides, which we did.

So we learned to lean on the wind and not fall over.