AFFABLE multi-instrumentalist David Allison’s solo show arising from an earlier project, The Island Tapes, featured two wonderful old films unearthed in the Scottish Screen Archives, ‘St Kilda’ and ‘New Way to A New World’, with additional footage and live music played on guitar, sampler, a supersonic ukelele and a 100-year-old zither.

Such was the demand for tickets in Inverness that a second, earlier showing was scheduled – even so, the OneTouch was sold out for both. On the strength of this screening, it could become a regular fixture in the Highlands.

Here was documentary evidence of the central theme of the Homecoming celebrations, the Scottish diaspora. Here was life aboard a boat bound for New York – deck quoits, ‘cockfighting’, dancing, sipping tea – while the long days’ voyage whiled away. Here were the eager emigrants stepping off the boat onto the quays of the New World where who knows what adventures awaited them amongst the crowded streets of New York?

How strange to see the Empire State Building towering over the rest of the city when it is now dwarfed by the rest of the skyline. How strange to see everyone wearing suits and ties, even on the remote islands of Western Scotland. Archive footage is the nearest thing we have to time travel, and it is always enthralling.

The theme of the diaspora was made intensely personal by the telling of Norman Gillies’ story. Now aged 84 and living in the South of England, he was born on St Kilda but left, aged 5, along with the rest of the “timid but strong” inhabitants, following the death of his mother.

We’d earlier seen his mother in the documentary in which the camera had lingered on her face a she sat spinning wool from the island’s sheep. Norman’s voiceover described his last sight of her, waving from the boat that was taking her to the Glasgow hospital where she died; a sight he has never forgotten.

In June this year, Norman returned to St Kilda, flying by helicopter from Benbecula on a clear sunny day to where the perpendicular cliffs of the island rear suddenly out of the Atlantic to dizzying heights – 1400′ (427 metres) at their highest.

He walked the Main Street, now grass-grown – the Main Street we had earlier seen in black and white, thronged with islanders. He stood in the house and looked out of the window, stood on the shore where he had waved goodbye to his dying mother. It was a moment of pure poignancy, as well as an extraordinary dramatic closure. How lucky that a long-ago cameraman singled out Mrs Gillies’ at her spinning wheel, and enabled this link across the decades….

David Allison’s beautiful music enriched without detracting from the films. His and Norman’s meditations on what we mean by “home” were thought-provoking. For thousands of years, St Kilda’s islanders lived a simple, independent life on their remote archipelago, cut off from the rest of the world for nine months of the year.

A life marked, as Norman said, by ‘sharing and caring for one another – that’s how they survived’. Wise words, worth pondering in today’s Scotland.

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

Links

• The St Kilda Tapes on MySpace
• Jennie Macfie