We did have a piece of paper and a pen though, so we wrote down all the ways we could think of to make a living on a very little remote Scottish island.
It was not a long list and as we got to know the Hebridean weather the list got a lot shorter. We crossed out all the jobs that involved going out of doors.
So we chose the most obvious one.
We became weavers, not from any arty-crafty love of weaving, but because the Outer Hebrides is where Harris Tweed is made. We bought a second-hand loom for £80 and an old weaver taught us what to do and every second week or so the mills in Stornoway brought us work. Every other week we had to get the dole.
The Harris Tweed loom has no motor. It’s the regulations and is like riding a very heavy bicycle underwater and the week we made the tweed we had one pound more than the week we got the dole. This was not a career with any prospects, beyond exceptional thigh muscles.
I drew this picture a couple of years later and probably made more money selling prints of it than I ever did weaving.
After two years we went back to our list.
We crossed out idea after idea until there was only one left.
Pottery – this also not from any arty-crafty love of ceramics, but because it seemed like quite a good idea, or at least a better idea than any of the others, and it looked quite easy.
‘How hard can it be?’ we said as we read our way through the Penguin Making Pottery book.
It did look pretty easy, especially when I thought about the people I’d seen at art school making pottery, who were obviously not very bright or they would have been doing fine art like I was.
So we worked out what we needed and made a list and then found out we could get development grants to create jobs in the remote bits of Scotland and we persuaded our bank to lend us the same amount of money.
We even got a grant of £400 to blow up rocks and build the road to our house. So we bought two electric potter’s wheels, because my thighs still hadn’t recovered from weaving the tweed, two electric kilns and bags and sacks and jars of all sorts of stuff that looked like it might either be very useful or interesting.
Then we set to work.
And that was when we discovered the secret the book had not told us about.
Making pottery is really, really difficult.
But I did get quite good at shooting, as the bottom of our garden became littered with the remains of all the pots I stood on our fence posts and shot to bits with my BSA rifle.
We bought another book about pottery, but all that one taught us was that lots of potters are very pretentious and all their glazes have Japanese names. We named our glazes after birds with nice names and appropriate colours. Our best one was Sandpiper.
The money seemed to shrink away, but before it ran out completely people began to turn up wanting to buy our pots. We were the only pottery in the Outer Hebrides and they wanted souvenirs to take home.
‘But they’re awful,’ we kept saying, which is a professional ceramic term for ‘They’re crap.’
But they still bought them.
Our two daughters sat in their playpen eating lumps of red clay while we kept practising. Fortunately we were young and enthusiastic and naive enough for it to never occur to us we might fail.
And we didn’t.
I made this kitchen dresser too, and at every trade show we went to, I could have sold dozens of them.
We stuck at it and got better and kept on getting better until we were actually quite good at it and Heather ended up being able to throw sixty mugs an hour. We imported a couple from Glasgow with a mobile home who came and worked for us and no matter how many pots we made, people wanted more and we sold them all over Scotland and the top bit of England.
It was very hard work, but wonderful.
One night at 2 a.m. at the end of 18 hours’ work, I saw big black beetles crawling all over the white bricks inside the kiln. There were dozens of them and they were real, except they weren’t there. I was amazed that you could be so tired and not fall over. My brain knew they were a hallucination, but the beetles didn’t and when I finally closed the kiln and set the controller and crawled up to bed, they were still there sitting in the dark wondering why it was getting so warm.
Even though there were quite a few more 18-hour days, I never saw the beetles again, which was a bit disappointing.
Then eventually the remoteness got too remote so we moved everything, except the couple from Glasgow who had gone native and stayed behind, to Denton Fell in the top bit of England near Hadrian’s wall and a fantastic, solitary three-hundred-year-old derelict farmhouse
shaped like a seven with only one visible neighbour across the moors. The Isle of Lewis Pottery became Cumbria Pottery. We chopped down the ivy and put glass in the windows and stayed there for over twenty years.
I thought I had found paradise and would never leave it until I died.
(But then in 1995 I went to the other side of the world for a week – and stayed there.)
1942 – OCTOBER 18TH
This is my mother, Kathleen Lillian Muntz, and my father, Edward Alfred Willment. From a technical point of view, this photo would have benefitted from a longer exposure, but my parents weren’t together long enough for that.
They were divorced when I was too young to remember my dad. My mother then went through all her photo albums and cut out every single picture of him. So I didn’t even know what he looked like until I got my grandmother’s albums.
Having been brought up to believe my father was the Devil Incarnate and the nastiest child-hating creature in the universe, it was wonderful to be told by my cousin Sheila, who I met for the first time many, many years later, that my father had been a lovely man and she had adored him more than her own father – my father’s only brother, Uncle George. It was so nice to hear that, but it was too late to undo all the unrelenting damage my mother had done.
1942 – I SHOULD HAVE
BEEN SUSAN
My grandfather wanted a son and had three daughters. My mother and her identical twin sister were never known by their real names, but were always called ‘Bill’* and ‘Jim’. Their younger sister was just called Pamela.
My mother wanted a daughter, but had a son.
My Aunt Bill sent this photo of herself to my mother when she was expecting me. As you can see from the message, I should have been Susan.
It wasn’t until years later I realised that people must have looked at us and thought, What a strange family.
But then we did have friends called Bunny and Tristram and Bertie and Torquil – names that nowadays people use for dogs and budgies, not humans – so maybe we didn’t seem so strange after all.
In case you can’t read it, the writing on the photo says:
To the grandest person in the world.