The Other Hebrides

Harris and Lewis, Scotland

Some people—including my daughter whose mother comes from there—claim that Lewis is the loveliest island in the world.

She has a point—if you include Harris. The two islands are joined. The two islands are so different: Brooding Lewis with its bleak but beautiful treeless uplands and amazing beaches that no one sees, and Harris with its equally brooding mountains rocks and stunning scenery.

I suppose my view of it was tempered somewhat by my in laws, though they have long since gone to that great Free Kirk in the Skye.

Stornoway, the small capital of the island, has its own attraction. Its granite streets; its harbour lined with fishermen in yellow oilskins, heaving nets and chatting in Gaelic; its street signs in Gaelic.  Actually, my wife claimed she did not speak English till she went to school. I believe her. Since she learned to, she has rarely stopped.

The food: no wonder most of the locals look over fed; most anyway: my mother in law barely ate: she got her nourishment from the Free Church Bible. No wonder she was so thin. But the food? Ah yes! Smoked mackerel, scallops, salmon, herring and hake. Not much wine if those days, but it was there. Rather it was something called whiskey.

‘And what do you drink with your whiskey?’ I asked my father in law.

He glared at me. It was 11 am. He had started downing them two hours earlier.

‘You drink whiskey with whiskey.’

End of story. Which of course raises the issue of spelling. Whisky or whiskey? The Americans and the Irish prefer ‘whiskey’ and the Scots, Canadians and the rest of the world prefer ‘whisky’. Apparently this started during the 19th century when Scotch whisky was of poor quality. The Irish, who thought they had a better product, decided to differentiate theirs from the Scots especially given their close ties with and export trade to the USA; thus they added the ‘e’ to mark the crucial distinction.

Of course, today, Scotch whisky has become one of the world’s greatest spirits but the spelling still differs depending on who you are and where you are. On mass, Americans still spell their spirit with an ‘e’, though for importation and legal registration it is spelt ‘whisky’. But them Americans on mass is a horrible thought.

 But back to the islands. I will never forget my first drive out of Stornoway, west across Lewis. The road crosses vast bogs where peat is cut for fuel, reminding me of the peat-bog burials of Ireland and Denmark, where ancient people believed these water lands were a meeting point of Heaven and Earth. Perhaps they were right.

The road becomes a single lane twisting among lochs and hills to a wild shore—Uig Beach. This is where Britain ends. Next stop: Greenland. We park on the cliffs overlooking the sweeping sands of the loveliest on Lewis. I see a beach ball on the shore. The wind is howling from Greenland via Iceland. I am rugged up against the ice.

I shout in delight and race down the sand dunes. I tear across the beach.

I hear nothing but the roar of the wind and the waves. I am totally exhilarated. There is no one else on the beach: I am totally alone. My family are waving at me from the car—rather urgently it seems—but t my focus is the beach ball.

I kick off my shoes. I race to the ball. I take a might kick and fall over in intense pain.

It is not a beach ball. It is a beached buoy, and probably weights two tons of solid steel.

Being a quick thinker, I leap to my feet (actually, hobble, my toes were all broken) and stagger down to the ice—stagger down to the sea. I run in. Immediately the pain vanishes. My feet are frozen.

Amongst the terms my brother in law and other worthies used I detected what as I passed out sounded like ‘idiot Australian’, ‘nincompoop’ ‘fool’ and the like.

We tried again the next day on the understanding that I would not kick any more beach balls. We drove to the Butte of Lewis (actually, I did not drive. My toes were bandaged. Sore. Slightly.) We called in to visit relatives who still lived in the famous black houses. The brass piss pot still stood at the door for dipping the tartan in to ensure the colours stayed. The black houses look like Hobbit homes, half-sunk into the ground to escape the winter gales, their thatch held down by ropes.

There was peat in the hearth, and Bibles on every shelf. My aunty still made the tweed. She sat every day at the clattering monstrosity of a loom pedaling away.

Then off to the Butte to stare out over the sullen ocean from where centuries earlier, Vikings came on their marauding missions. It was so cold. We did not stay long.

There was far more interesting history back down the road at Callanish, where the grandest prehistoric site in Scotland rivals Stonehenge. High on a hill, above a lake ringed by sacred sites, Iron Age farmers built a magnificent stone circle 5,000 years ago. It is guarded by a line of granite slabs twice the height of a man. The stones seem to be twisted by the wind.

At its centre is a huge monolith. Beneath it is a pit. I climb into the hollow and look back up. I see the grey stones. I see the grey sky. In the distance I see Cailleach na Mointeach, the Old Woman of the Moors; a mountain so names because it looks like a woman lying asleep.

Leaving Lewis you enter a different world. Harris seems wilder and far more foreboding. Mountains squeeze the road into an even narrower track. We drive round a sea-loch and into Tarbert, the hamlet where we stop for a drink. Bonnie Prince Charlie also had a drink here. Goodness: for that reason it is a Royal House? At last: a reason justifying royalty.

We drive on past Leverburgh: Lord Lever of soap fame, once had ambitions to become the laird of these lonely islands. Leverburgh was his idea of Utopia. It actually looks as if it would not be out of place in Siberia. At least he left his mark in Stornoway Castle, now a technical college.

At Luskentyre, after checking for beach balls, we walk on a beach that may be the finest in Britain, if not the world. Some say Australia has the world’s best beaches. I have never forgotten, as an Australian, ho the beaches of Harris and Lewis amazed me. Beautiful but frigid.

A bit like the people.

Rascals

Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

Port Moresby has a bad reputation. This is sad. I lived there twice from 1970 to 1972 and then for three years from 1980. We were aware of the problems, but nonetheless we enjoyed our stay there. Artistically, musically, theatre wise, it was great for us.

My son Robin started school at Ela Beach Primary School and you could not fault the school for quality. We had good friends. We went out into the country: Sogeri, Kokoda Trail, Loloata and further afield to some of the villages along the coast both east to Kwikila and west to Hood Bay and Lee Lee. In the rural areas we were relatively safe. It was in the city itself that we had to be careful.

Most people I have spoken to over the years think that there is something inherently intimidating about Papua New Guinea’s capital. They have good reason. The city is amongst the top five in the world for murder rate per population, in line with Caracas and Cape Town. Everyone blames the rascals, and again, with good reason.

These rascal gangs began operating in Port Moresby in the mid 1960s as loose groups of poor young men involved in harassment, vandalism, and petty theft. The early gangs aim was to get access to food, beer and cash. By the late 1960's, the gangs became more permanent and engaged in more complex activities.

In the 1970's, the gangs focused on robbery in residential areas. Many more youths—mainly those not wanted in the village—migrated to Port Moresby to join the gangs. It became a calling. Over the years the same pattern emerged in other cities and towns such as Lae and Goroka

In the early 1980's when I returned to Moresby with my family, inter-gang violence was rampant. The similarities between mafia and turf wars were apparent. Some gangs ran black market beer operations, other focused on car theft while yet others gradually involved themselves in drugs.

People continued to pour in to the capital from all over the country. Sadly, employment opportunities for the untrained and often ill educated poor are almost non-existent. Unfortunately people do not ‘make it’. Unemployment exceeds 70%.

What to do? Many joined the gangs. They turned petty crime. They steal your car: mine was stolen twice—once with my son Robin in it. That horrific event occurred one weekend when friends visited. We needed ice cream for afternoon tea. I offered to drive down to the Steamships store in Ela Beach which was very near our house in Koki. Robin wanted to come with me.

I fixed him in to his safety seat and we drove off. When I arrived at the store I drove into the car park and parked the car right at the entrance steps. I turned to Robin.

‘I’ll leave the air conditioner and just pop in for the ice cream. I will only be a minute.’

He nodded. I was longer than a minute. I got the ice cream. When I came out, the car was gone. I was dumbfounded. I was also stricken with the greatest dread one can have: the car—and my son—had been stolen and it was my stupid fault.

How could an old hand be so idiotic as to leave the car running, with keys in it—and a four year old—and expect that, in Port Moresby—all would be well?

As luck would have it, a taxi pulled up. People—all locals, bless them--had seen what had happened and were pointing towards Boroko.

‘They went that way’.

One offered to come with me. He was an off duty policeman, or so he said. We got into the taxi. The road outside Steamships was one way. The policeman ordered the driver to drive against the traffic as quickly as he could. That saved a kilometer of road and I appreciated it. There were hardly traffic jams in those days. As we drove, I prayed desperately and promised god that if I found Robin safe I would never drink again.

We had driven only to the next intersection when we saw a crowd spilling on to the road. We pulled up. There was the car. The driver’s door was open. A body lay on the road, beaten to death.

Robin? I looked frantically around. The crowd opened and an old meri (Papua New Guinean lady) walked out smiling and holding my son. He was nonchalantly nibbling on a packet of Twisties that someone in the crowd had given him.

You can imagine how I felt. We were surrounded by hundreds of smiling, whooping people all glad to have foiled what could have turned into something tragic.

‘We saw the car spin out of control on the corner, saw the white baby in the back and knew something was wrong, so we rushed the car as the driver was trying to start it again. And we killed him.’

‘Thank you for what you did,’ I said, and I meant every word.

Robin was fine. We had many Papua New Guinean friends and for him there was nothing unusual in being surrounded by them. I debated whether to tell my wife the exact details, but as I walked through the door of our home, I broke down.

‘Have a gin and tonic,’ said John thrusting one into my hand.

My promise to the gods was forgotten. We were lucky. Our best friend’s husband and Robin’s godfather (a Papua New Guinean) was held at knifepoint when intruders broke into his house and raped his daughter in front of him, his Australian wife and their three other daughters. Rape was endemic. Horrific. Car theft? You could buy a new car, but if my thief had gotten away? I still turn cold when I think of it.

With all this going on around us, security was tight. All hotels, businesses and ‘upper class’ houses and compounds have high walls with razor wire, electronic security alarms and regular security patrols: the city’s biggest industry.

It sounds terrible, does it not?  Yet those of us who lived there enjoyed it. It is like living with a volcano. You are aware of the danger so you are constantly on the lookout. Heightened tension? A little. More common sense. It is not really as bad as it sounds. Indeed, the violence was more serious for the locals. With locals, serious violence usually accompanied the robbery. Locals tended to resist. With the expatriate, there was more of a sense of: here you are, now piss off! If you robbed an expat and did not harm them, the police did nothing.

They would get involved if there was injury, so the rascals and the expats played a live and let live game. As for the locals, the issue was: police? What police?

Loss

When my son drowned in 2006, the devastation I felt was overwhelming.  Shock, disbelief, numbness, denial and confusion: it is hard to tell which emotion ruled in the swirling kaleidoscope of grief. I dealt with it. I was not alone. My then wife. My daughter. I needed them. I think they needed me. I realised that I had to be strong for myself and for those I loved. They responded similarly—but all the time I felt that it was all a terrible mistake. I felt that some time soon, Robin would ring or walk through the door. This was all some sick, surreal fantasy.

I write this in 2015. What happened? Time passes. Other emotions take over. Some change. Some simply shear off. New ones always replace them: anger, guilt, regret, loneliness and despair—the journey never ends. I moved on, but I never move far enough away. When you lose a child you never get over it; you just have to work through it.

I still run the gamut of what passes for empathy from well meaning people. I deal with platitudes. Some criticise me for not letting go. How can I? Some accuse me of trawling for sympathy. Ultimately, this kind of loss is my own deeply personal burden. When I do bring it up, it is for one reason: I miss my son. My daughter and my ex wife grieve in their own way. So do I. Let everyone be true to what they are and what they feel. There is no selfish ownership: there is only a one on one relationship that now has a different form.

Living in Asia, I am struck by how differently varying cultures and societies deal with loss. When Robin died, my Caucasian friends and relatives were kind and gentle, talking things through—almost ad Nauseum. I sometimes cringed when they said things like: he has passed on, he is eternally at rest, he is at peace, it must have been quick, he would not have suffered.

I bit my lip when those blinded by religious monomania assured me that my son was safe in the arms of Jesus. They had their parameters: they responded within the restrictions of those same parameters. I appreciated that.

When Robin died, my Asian friends barely mentioned a thing. At the time I thought this was harsh and unfeeling. Then I began to see, as I shared their own losses, that they simply accept what has happened. Karma. Move on. Why discuss what cannot be changed?

I attended several wakes. I sat with my friends who had lost a parent or a relative. We spent the time talking about so many things: none of them related to the deceased. Friends would come up and greet the bereaved. A brief nod said all that needed to be said.

Is it a case of one being better equipped to deal with loss than the other? Ultimately, it is what we are that sets the parameters we use to deal with what happens to us.

I have long since stopped asking the gods: why? Why did I stop asking? Because there is no god apart from a human need to have one. Like Robin, Jesus died. End of story.  But… Does Robin live on? Yes. Of course.  

My parents are long dead. Are they still with me? Yes. Indeed they are. Each day of my life. So is Robin. In that sense, anyone could say the same of Jesus. Why stop there? What about ‪Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim and Siddhārtha Gautama and Hitler and Attila?

Wordsworth almost got it right in Ode to Immortality. .                     Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;	75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

What did I learn from Robin’s death? That we grieve alone but yet we are not alone. It is in the conflicts of sharing within different parameters that I tried to learn to appreciate intent and deal with sometimes jarring execution.

Ours was a broken family. I broke it. When Robin died, for one brief moment, we were a family again. Our love for Robin overcame our dysfunctional, broken past. We were, momentarily, united in grief.

At the same time, as we stood on that beach in Timor, we focused on ourselves. We stared at the ocean. We closed our eyes and shook our heads: we barely said anything to each other. We were lost in our own world.

As my daughter sang a Gaelic song at the edge of the great sea that had taken Robin, my ex wife and I held each other. She sobbed on my shoulder. I stared beyond the sea and wished things had been different: all things. Maybe I am wrong. It is not for me to speak for my daughter or for my ex wife; but I sensed that we put rancour to one side, for in that one tragic event, we recognised what really mattered: Robin

Does it last? No. We are complex beings. We share. We support. But we remain ultimately selfish. We wallow in our grief. Ultimately, we grieve alone. When the moment passes, we return to our own lives.  We return to deal with the raw emotions.

Guilt and regret? These are the worst of it. I went through an endless list of questions: If only. What if I had…? Did he understand how much I loved him? Did I love him enough?

I fought the feeling that somehow I was responsible for my son’s death. Over bitter time, I tried to forgive myself for my shortcomings. I tried to accept that it was not my fault, but I could never escape the feeling: had I not been to Dili, Robin would have never gone there. Had he not gone there, he would not have died. I tried to deal with it, to resolve it. I still have not succeeded.

Did grief affect me physically? Indeed. I could not sleep. I did not want to eat. I lost concentration. I was irritable. I wanted ongoing empathy and when it came I fought the resentment I sometimes felt when it came out in a way that conflicted with my own selfish limitations.

I re-examined my own priorities and questioned my beliefs. I wondered if I could ever rediscover—or re-espouse—the confidence of those who find strength in faith. Over time, I realised that, as with all tests in life, any succor or comfort comes only from within myself. Any answers lay within my own inadequate soul.

Then I realised that my son was helping me—simply because he was. In the weeks after his death, when all I could feel was injustice and anger, it was hard to imagine ever smiling, laughing or finding joy again. Over time, I saw that grief was an ongoing, long journey. The pain eventually softened. I shifted my focus away from Robin’s death toward his life. I saw that others kept him alive. I learned to do the same.

I visited a cousin in Australia. She had planted a grove of native trees as a memorial to him in a forest she tends in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. She named it: Robin’s grove. She suggested I plant some trees there. I did. They now grow tall and proud facing the rising sun. I visit them when I return to Australia and I remember Robin.

Occasionally I hear from complete strangers who knew him. They admired him. I smile. I know that they speak the truth. I saw tributes to him on the net. I realised that he contributed so much. I feel proud. What he did lives and matters.

I learned to deal with the things people said and did which rankled me. It made me a better person, albeit that the making is an ongoing process far from complete.

When Robin died, I was in hospital in Singapore. I have rods in my spine and they had just been replaced and my lower vertebrae re-fused. He died the day after my operation. I was scheduled to stay in hospital for two weeks while I recuperated.

My mobile phone rang. (Yes, we were allowed to have our phones in the hospital). It was an Australian Government employee in Canberra.

‘Your son is missing in East Timor’, intoned the functionary.

‘What do you mean, missing?’ I asked.

‘All I can say is that he is missing’.

I rang Robin’s mobile. His partner answered. They had been free diving off Cristo Rei beach east of Dili. A huge statue of Jesus—a gift from Indonesia during its brutal occupation of that benighted country—stands on the point overlooking the Wetar Deep where they were diving. Fat lot of good that. Robin simply went diving. By himself. How foolish. How irresponsible. How Robin.

They found his body next day. I had visited Robin and his partner a month earlier and taken him—at his request—a pair of outsized flippers. Yellow. Those poked out of the silt on the seabed. These the searchers saw.

We greeted the hundreds of guests at his memorial on the beach near Dili. I remember well the gist of what my then wife said at the ceremony.

‘Far be it from me to feel distraught at the loss of my son’, and she paused and looked at quietly listening Timorese standing round on the grass under the trees as the beautiful yet demonic ocean that had claimed Robin clawed at the beach behind her.

‘You have suffered far more than I have. I know that here today are countless women who have lost their sons. You understand loss far better than I’.

It was a selfless comment and one which made me realize that, had things been different, what we once found in each other that was compelling, was still there, albeit irrecoverable. My own words were far more mundane.

‘When Robin visited me when I lived in Dili, he was known as my son. Now I come back and I am known as Robin’s father. That makes me immensely proud’.

Robin was 29 years and two months when he drowned. Is that relevant when one loses a child? I think not. My nephew lost an infant son in the same week Robin died. One of Robin’s schoolmates also lost a child two weeks earlier. Both came to see me when I returned to Australia. 29 years, 29 days or 29 minutes: it makes no difference: no matter how long we live or what we achieve or do not achieve is not the issue: loss remains.

Who really understands death? I had seen it ‘as an observer’ in violent countries in which I had lived: Pakistan, Indonesia and especially East Timor. I saw too many bodies: eviscerated children, decapitated adults, women with their babies ripped from their wombs, teenagers lying peacefully on a slab looking as though they were simply asleep; atrocities it is hard to comprehend. Even though I was in homes with grieving families, shoulder to shoulder, or jostling at the site of a massacre, I watched as if from afar. For the East Timorese, it happened with deadly regularity. It became a morass of unending grief from whose tentacles you never escaped.

Robin’s Timorese friends attended his memorial. They attended despite the foment in the city, the guns firing in the street, the violence that saw Indonesia finally expelled—by a vote. I got a tiny inkling of what understanding really is. They understood and you could feel that. For them, there was no detachment: they lived grief.

When I returned to Singapore, I went straight back to the surgeon’s office. The sister came over and put her arm around my shoulder.

‘How are, Mr. Lansell?’ she asked kindly, well aware of what had happened.

I burst into tears. She fetched me some tea and I settled down, still sobbing. Sitting next to me was a plump, middling aged, bejewelled and multi-bangled Chinese Indonesian lady. She leaned over and said: ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. Is everything all right? What happened?’

‘My son died last week’, I said quietly.

She nodded, and settled back into the sofa. ‘I know exactly what you are going through’, she said. ‘My little doggie died on Wednesday’.

Initially I was reminded of Shakespeare: ‘Methinks thy face could be improved by the application of my fist’. I looked at her, bewildered. Then I realised that she was being genuine. Perhaps her pets were her life. I understood that. I appreciated her words. I smiled—I hope sincerely—and, bangles jangling, she reached over and patted my hand.

People try to show they care, and that is what I learned to appreciate, regardless of what I see—rightly or wrongly—as the occasionally clumsy and sometimes formulaic manner of their words. What I learned to value was the attempt.

After all these years, have I put it all behind me? Of course I have moved on. I have accepted. I now smile. I laugh. I love. I live. What else can I do? I do not consciously set about grieving. Grief still surprises me. It lies in wait: in a vision. In an experience. In a fleeting image. In a memory. I might see someone in a shopping center or on a train, holding their child to them. I can sense the love; and it all floods back. I see Robin as a boy with his blue suit and his red hat kicking his tiny feet whilst tied into his white baby carrier. I see him as a grown man teasing me as he often did. I read a critique of my work and I see Robin: his forthright stare; his insight: his standards: his anger: his love. I see him.

I watch a program on TV about diving. I turn it off. It is too hard to watch. Drowning scenes? I cannot bear to watch them. Swimming? It is yesterday’s joy.

People ask now how many children I have. I reply: ‘Two. My son and my daughter’. 

Robin is with me. Both my children are with me. That is what counts.

Am I a better person? That remains a work in progress.