Orkney Diaries (I) A Little Noise
In 1975, my late father - who had previously spent time in the Canadian Arctic studying the behaviour of eider ducks, and had also been a lecturer at Oxford and McGill University - found himself teaching biology in a school in Gloucestershire. Peter Driver was different to the other teachers, but popular. He often wore a purple velvet jacket, and carried a big leather and canvas bag full of things he’d foraged from hedgerows and verges for his lunch. This kind of eccentricity was something that one of his pupils in particular - a teenage schoolgirl, bored and stifled in her otherwise ‘ordinary’ suburban existence - was especially drawn to. Over the course of a year, a teacher-student relationship developed in secret. My mother maintains that she started it.
Whatever the truth, it’s very difficult - especially by today’s standards - to understand how my father could have thought that starting a relationship with one of his pupils - who was more than thirty years younger than him - was even an option. Today it would be illegal, and even back then it was very much frowned upon. To add to this already complicated soup, he had several teenage children from two previous marriages. There’s no way around it - I wouldn’t be here if not for some extremely questionable decisions.
Eventually the secret between my parents became too big to conceal, and despite the understandable objections of friends and family, and with very little money, they eventually set off in search of a new life. Following the birth of my eldest sister, they packed their possessions into an old ambulance and drove towards the northern-most tip of Scotland. Looking across the Pentland Firth, Orkney was just about visible, hovering above the British Isles like a storm-battered halo. One short boat trip, and eight years later, I was born on the western side of the islands, the last of my mother’s four children (I have four half siblings from my father’s previous two marriages).
By the time they settled in Orkney, my father - a person who carried many scars and could be utterly terrifying as well as funny, warm, and charismatic - had become increasingly disillusioned with life’s conventional paths. Partly for this reason, and partly through necessity, both their lives and ours became something of an experiment. We lived without electricity or television, without formal education, and with little access to popular culture for the best part of two decades. Instead, my siblings and I spent most of our time exploring our natural surroundings or helping with the growing and hunting of food. With neither of my parents working in a conventional sense, we were extremely poor. I remember them worrying that we hadn’t grown enough food to last the winter, and things like dad buying a Mars Bar and cutting it into six pieces as a weekly treat. On the other hand, we were nature-rich. During long summer walks, dad - grey beard, trademark bandana, and braces holding up his jeans - would provide us with the names of birds. “Great Skua!” he would cry, pointing a finger to the heavens.
Mum absolutely embraced the self-sufficient lifestyle, gardening, milking goats, serving up delicious home-cooked food, and teaching us all to read and write. She still loves doing many of those things. Most days, she would undergo a miraculous transformation, going from milking scarf, rubber boots and overalls in the morning, to something like a 1970’s catwalk model in the afternoon (the 70’s were her last real point of reference).
As winter closed in, the days grew shorter and the weather more wild. In the midst of a storm the house would creak and groan like a glacier slowly on the move. Trapped inside, we took refuge in our imaginations. My eldest sister Fiona - always neat, disciplined, and organised - threw herself properly into music long before I did, and spent hours on end practicing traditional Orkney tunes on the fiddle (she has gone on to become one of the most prolific composers of fiddle music in the UK). In the evenings we often sat around the fire listening to old episodes of the Goon Show, or records by the American satirical singer, Tom Lehrer. The firelight and flames of flickering oil lamps threw shapes across the walls, and across the many strange objects that we had in the house. These included two human skulls, a whale’s penis, and the entire skin of a lion - complete with head. Sometimes, when I got bored of fire-watching, I'd try and embody the lion, lurking under the kitchen table and waiting to pounce on the nearest pair of ankles.
While these kinds of entertainment were satisfying enough, there was extra excitement when my mother bought a second-hand cassette recorder. It looked like a flattened brick, with a big red “RECORD” button shaped like a big block of Cadbury's chocolate. My brother and I were soon recording our own amateur radio shows. One of our programmes was called “Southerland's Cocky Noises” – an assortment of strange and exotic sounds. It was never quite clear who “Mr Southerland” was, or what made his noises ‘cocky’. I rediscovered some of these recordings several years later. At one stage I explain how I picked up a little noise while "trodding along the south banks of Africa". This noise had been “looking sort of distressed”, and so I’d picked it up and comforted it. “It stayed in my pocket”, I went on, "and this is a recording of it". What followed was an inhuman cacophony of squeals, chirps, and growls. This effect was achieved mainly by pushing on the pause button with varying amounts of pressure as we recorded. In this way, our voices would be slowed down, sped up, and generally distorted beyond all recognition. At another point, my brother imitates the sound of a "typewriter who's just come home from the seaside and is very depressed because his funnel has just broken".
As with the arrival of television in the house about six years later, the appearance of the cassette recorder changed our lives. With my sibling collaborators, I recorded my first ‘songs’ and found a new way to channel my imagination. Previously our parents would have to bribe us with exotic delicacies like crisps and Coca Cola if they wanted us to stay quietly upstairs for any amount of time. Now all we needed were four AA batteries.
(A version of this piece was first published in the Journal of Wild Culture in 2013. Illustration by PM Driver)