As Tuesday marks the passing of another winter solstice (or the shortest day of the year), many people will wonder why I yearn to be spending it in my adopted homeland of Orkney. Friends in London envisage glaciers and icebergs up here near the Arctic Circle. I tell them that, because of the surrounding sea, winter is not especially cold on Orkney, but yes, it is bereft of light. What many people do not realise is there are extraordinary compensations to be experienced during these brief days and staggeringly dark nights.
Like all northern climes, Orkney has special markers, festivals to remind us that all this gloom will pass. So it is as the year slides down towards Christmas, the old yule, and the more obviously pagan Hogmanay. At midnight in Stromness, if you turn off the radio and television, you will hear the boats, ferries and tugs blow their whistles in wild cacophonous release. Blown away on the wind, they seem an assertion in the face of it all. We are not only still here, we are celebrating.
It’s a moment of solidarity with the distant dead as well as the living. The prehistoric peoples of Orkney who built the intricate dwellings of Skara Brae also engineered the chambered tomb of Maeshowe, the largest and most perfect in Europe.
The long tunnel to the central chamber is precisely orientated. This Tuesday, islanders will gather to watch the setting sun, which — if by a miracle it isn’t obscured — should drop right behind the solitary Barnhouse Stone and shine up the entrance tunnel to bring into the central burial chamber the promise we crave: the return of the light.
You can’t help feeling that the Vikings would have approved of the Ba’ Game in Kirkwall (indeed as the last of the island-wide tradition of mass ball games at Yule, it probably does go back to Norse times). On Christmas and New Year’s Day, nursing colossal hangovers, two teams of young men — the Uppies and the Doonies of the town (the bishop’s men and the earl’s men representing the old struggle between sacred and secular power) — meet to contest the possession of a one-off, handmade leather ball.
It is pagan, pointless and not really a spectator sport. It is also a communal enactment of local rivalry, a great way of keeping warm, exercising into sobriety, then having a reason to celebrate or commiserate all over again. The passage of another northern winter.
During my first four years in Orkney, I would arrive in mid-October then leave in late March just as the cavalry of light was starting to gallop over the horizon. It gained me considerable credibility. There’s a sense that only by staying through the winters, can you claim to be in any way part of the northern isles.
My first winter was spent at Stenigar, a long low house that had once been a sail-loft, which stands alone outside Stromness. Like many of the old Orkney houses, it has a massive sandstone slab roof. When November came I found out why — nothing less could resist the week-long gales that tear in from Newfoundland, Iceland and the Faroes. The plate glass bulged in the conservatory.
Shouldering the door open into the wind, then forcing a way to the shops in the midday half-light brought a sense of dramatic struggle to what further south is simply a dismal time of year. People passing in the street, tacking sideways like drunks as the blast hit, would exchange nods. There is no point trying to speak above the natural pandemonium.
And you, the newcomer, are part of it. You are no summer bird of passage, come and gone with the bunting. You are here with the hard core and you receive and give those nods that say, “We’re hanging in”.
In winter there are short-lived, astonishing, near-surreal effects of light and dark. I’ve seen columns of grey-black hail twisting down Alfred Street like 50ft-tall Ringwraiths. Against leaden skies over Scapa Flow, a cone of light settles on Graemsay, turning it lime-green. In one brief, devastating winter blizzard I set off across the golf course in full climbing gear, stumbling near-blind into the whiteout when I was passed by a golden figure shooting silently out of the storm, heading towards the sea. The improbable skier — how long had he waited for this opportunity? — was then swallowed up into a glittering tunnel of sun, snow and the rainbow that had opened up into the Sound of Hoy.
A week later I stood in the astonishing silence of a windless afternoon by the giant standing stones of Stenness, one side thick with snow glowing pink in the setting sun, while behind them over the loch a flight of swans flickered yellow, red and silver as they vanished into the clouds.
And, of course, there’s the northern lights. During my first winter I saw them regularly. Like milky lasers soaring into the dark, propping up the pulsing corona over our wondering heads, they alone repay spending winter in the north. The visual feast is not the only compensation. On Orkney, employment is centred round fishing, farming and tourism, all of which go quiet in winter. So it is the social season.
Though the days are short and folk only go out when they must, there is a lot going on. It was at my first Stenigar party — a stramash of talk, drink, dance, guitars and fiddles — that I made the friends who are the other reason I live there as much as possible.
Some of the best readings I’ve ever experienced have been at the Pier arts centre in a packed little room with an open fire banked with burning coals and the windows shaking in the wind. Our winter gatherings are intensified by the struggle to get to them that renders the little island of human warmth and company even more precious.
Sometimes in the depths of winter we get flood warnings and the council hastily delivers sandbags. The wind from the wrong quarter pushes up the top of the tide and the sea starts to rise.
I live across the road from the lowest house in Stromness, and I have seen several feet of water in what used to be the kitchen. It was on one such night in my novel In Another Light that a flakey, impulsive female character, unable to get home from an out-of-control party because of flooding, blunders into the bedroom of the beleaguered hero Eddie to seek shelter. And so another Orkney story is in motion. Indeed, I’d be curious to know what proportion of Orcadians are born in September and October; it is another way we keep ourselves warm through the dark months.
So, I tell my friends that of course wintering in Orkney brings days when it never seems to get light, nights that go on too long, and winds that have forgotten how to stop. But I am sure to tell them of the high jinks, gatherings and the natural beauties that occur alongside them.
Andrew Greig’s novel, In Another Light, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson at £12.99 and is the winner of the Saltire 2004 award
