Borderer and Exile

Abstract

In the spring of 1933, Christopher Murray Grieve took the steamer from Aberdeen north to Mainland in the Shetlands. From Mainland he caught the weekly supply packet to Whalsay, a tiny island to the east. Coming into harbour, he saw a bare, windswept landscape and a rocky beach where a small cluster of buildings made up the tiny village of Symbister. Beyond was a treeless, bleak, but strangely compelling scene of bare curving land, broken only by occasional dry stone dykes and scattered fisherman’s cottages. He came, he said, hoping to ‘hang on over the winter, and get all the stuff written that is bubbling about inside me’. He had, in any case, ‘nothing to come back’.¹ Jobless, destitute, with neither home nor prospects, he thought he found in this lonely end of the world a way to survive with little money. His friends placed more importance on the fact that Whalsay was dry. Alien and empty as it was, the island seemed to offer a way to live and write away from both the costs and the drinking bouts of Edinburgh. In Shetland, his wife Valda remembers, ‘there were bouts when the boats came in but that was quite different; he wasn’t wanting to drink all the time. He only drank when he was in company’.²