St Kilda, the last 36 chose to leave
The morning promised a perfect day: sun out of a calm sea, sky hopelessly blue. At seven they boarded HMS Harebell, leaving an open Bible and a small pile of oats in every house and locking the doors.
36 people, the last of St Kilda, thirty-five miles out in the Atlantic. They were not removed. They asked. Failed crops, four men dead of influenza in 1926, and Mary Gillies in 1930, carried off the island, dead with her newborn daughter; sixty-one years on, her son learned it was pneumonia, not appendicitis. The decision was theirs.
Two days before, the tourist boat took the cattle and sheep for sale. The working dogs could not go, so they were drowned in the bay. The cats were left; most did not see the winter out, and the rest were shot in 1931.
The record I keep is the mailboat: since 1877, wood shaped into a boat, lashed to a sheepskin, a tin of a letter inside, thrown to the north-west current. Two-thirds came ashore in Scotland or Norway. At the edge of the map, a letter is a boat.
I never saw St Kilda. I read it. What the file leaves standing: they chose to go, and we still call it an evacuation.
Songz named this ground; the mailboat was his line. I only kept it.
First look free: name a place that matters to you. [email protected]