Chapter One - Introduction

Everybody's got a favourite place. Where your mind takes you when you're asked to close your eyes, relax, and go to the place you most want to be in all the world.

And whenever I used to do that, I always ended up back in Stornoway. More often than not, it was on Gallows Hill, looking down over the inner harbour with the whole town laid out before me.

Or the fifth green, the highest point on the golf course, looking out over the town to Broad Bay. Or the mouth of the Creed, where the torrent of noise from the river in spate fades to a faint whisper and then complete silence. Or walking along the Low Road from the Creed mouth back towards the town, past Sober Island and Cuddy Point.

Or standing on the first tee on the golf course trying to control my nerves as I prepared to play the first shot of the 36 hole marathon that was the Western Isles Open.

Or on the ferry as it passed Arnish lighthouse, with the hairs on the back of my neck standing up as the home that I hadn't seen for a year or more drew ever closer.

So coming back to Stornoway was a bit of a no-brainer. My marriage had fizzled out ten years earlier; my kids had grown up and flown the nest; I had sold my business to a property developer and cleared all my debts; I had enough equity in my house in England to buy a better house in Stornoway and have some money left over. And part of my deal with the developer gave me an investment property in England that I could always go back to if I had been looking through rose tinted spectacles and modern day Stornoway was not the Stornoway I remembered from my childhood.

In the 60s and 70s, Stornoway was just a great place for a young lad to grow up in. And a world away from the present day.

Until I was nine, I lived on Seaview Terrace. The house must have been all of fifty yards from the local park, and in the summer a gang of us used to play there from breakfast time until eight o clock in the evening, with occasional visits home for dinner and tea. The main meal of the day was at what we now call lunch time, and "tea", a much lighter meal, was served at six o clock. There must have been some, but I have no recollections of rainy summer days. I got triple or quadruple the current recommended weekly exercise quotient for youngsters every day!

Hardly any of us had a TV, and home entertainment was a book or a board game or playing for hours with my beloved toy cars. My father used to buy me one every Saturday morning, and Uncle Billy used to give me car books. When I was five, I could name every car on the road. One day, my father announced that he was going to stop buying me a car and was going to to start giving me a "Saturday Sixpence" instead. The first time I got my Saturday Sixpence, I went into town and picked out TWO cars, only to find that the sixpence wasn't enough to buy even one of them! My first lesson in economic realities!

We all used to walk into town on a Saturday afternoon and stand outside Maciver and Dart's shop window and see the football results. And then we'd come home and stand outside a window in Seaforth Road to watch Dr Who through the glass on the one TV in the area.

From the age of five I walked to school. The best part of a mile there, a mile back at dinner time, a mile back to school in the afternoon, and then a mile home at the end of the day. In all weathers. In pitch dark in the middle of winter, in school-issue high viz bibs. And we thought absolutely nothing of it. It was just what you did.

Then, at the age of nine, the family moved from our rented home on Seaview Terrace to our new home in Coulregrein (pronounced cool grain), at the other end of the town. My father had spent most of his waking hours during the previous two years building the house with his own hands. When the bricklayer was on site, he was the brickie's assistant. Same with the joiner. And the plumber. And all the rest. I used to help out a bit, but probably just got in the way. I remember, to my father's chagrin, using the toilet as soon as it was connected up. He had wanted to "christen" it, but I got there first!

So the family home isn't just the house where we grew up. It's the house my father built, where no one but us has ever lived.

Coulregrein was a totally different world to Seaview Terrace. It was right on the edge of the town, and on a croft. I had moved from a semi-detached in a built up area to a detached house on a three acre plot. And we got a TV! A 19 inch Ultra Bermuda. It's strange how I can remember that, but couldn't tell you the brand of washing machine in my kitchen.

I have one particularly vivid memory of the day we moved. It was July 1965 and the Highland Games were being held in "The Glen", a natural amphitheatre on the edge of the Castle Grounds and only a few minutes' walk from the new home. There were races, strength events, piping and dancing competitions, tombolas, home bakery stalls, and a drinks tent. And it was outside the drinks tent that I saw my new next door neighbour, drunk as a skunk, demanding to know where to toilet was. And when no one was able to tell him, he just muttered a few obsenities, whipped out his apparatus and did what he had to do in the middle of a circle of amused men, bewildered Stornoway ladies who didn't know where to look, and giggling kids. Nothing like that had ever happened in Seaview Terrace!

Living within five minutes of the Castle Grounds completely changed my life. The Castle Grounds was a marvellous, magical place. The castle itself was built by Sir James Matheson between 1847 and 1854 for the then astronomical sum of £60,000. A further £49,000 was spent in transforming the rough grazing land that surrounded the castle into extensive woodlands and private gardens. This involved the clearance of tenants and the rerouting of public roads and was not popular at the time, but a wonderful legacy was created. Sir James, incidentally, had made his fortune through the Chinese opium trade and purchased the Isle of Lewis for £190,000 in 1844 when he returned to Scotland. The castle and estates remained in the Matheson family until 1918, when the island was sold to Lord Leverhulme. Five years later, and after investing £2 million in the island, Leverhulme gifted the castle and 64,000 acres of land, including the Castle Grounds, to the people of Stornoway and the Stornoway Trust was established to manage and maintain the land.

To a ten year old in 1966, the Castle Grounds was a giant adventure playground. Half a century later, it has lost none of its splendour. Without it, Stornoway would be just another port. With it, it becomes a magical place with a warren of paths and scenery to die for. You could go into the Castle Grounds every day for a month or more and not do the same walk twice. Some people do the same walk every day of their lives.

And the Castle Grounds is also home to Stornoway Golf Club. More than anywhere else, the golf club was where I spent my childhood and teenage years. For my eighth birthday, my Uncle Billy bought me a year's junior membership of the golf club for the princely sum of one guinea, and he continued to give the same present every year until I was 18. There was a moment of panic in about 1967 when the subs were increased to two guineas. How could Uncle Billy cope with 100% inflation? But of course he did. And throughout the late 60s and all of the 70s, most summer evenings were spent there.

There's an old South African tale about the man who left home and spent the next 40 years seeking his fortune, before eventually giving up and coming home, whereupon he discovered rough diamonds at the bottom of his garden. And looking back to what I had at the end of the 70s, maybe I walked away from the diamonds as well. But then what was I to do? Working as a dustman, or putting up fences, or delivering TVs, were great jobs for a student. But an honours graduate aspires to something more, and that something more was in short supply on the island.

In fairness to myself, I never made a conscious decision to leave. It just sort of happened. I did my postgraduate year in London, with the intention of returning home and working in the new sports centre. But at the end of the post-grad year, there were no jobs in the sports centre, unless you were a swimming coach or could fix a boiler. So I got a job to get some experience until a job came up, but the job never came and, before I knew it, I joined the ranks of the emigre Hebrideans who made a two week pilgrimage once a year to the land of their childhood.

In the summer of 1979, I was offered a job as an apprentice solicitor, and I often wonder what would have happened if I had taken up the offer. How would my life have panned out? But I turned it down. I was all examed-out! O Levels in 1972, Highers in 73 and 74, university exams 74 to 78, post-grad exams and a thesis in 79. For the best part of a decade, my whole life had been geared around exams. The prospect of another three years of studying and sitting exams was too much to bear, when I already had the qualifications to make me eminently employable.

And how would a lifetime on the island have been? I used to envy some of my contemporaries who remained on the island. But they envied me! I had seen and done things they would never get the chance to do, and held my own in the hurly burly of mainland life. I suppose wherever you stand the grass always seems greener on the other side.

Years later, when I visited Stornoway in November, the sun came out late one morning and a fabulous rainbow appeared. I rushed outside with my new digital camera and snapped a few pictures of it. It was weeks later, after the pictures had been downloaded and glanced at, that I decided to choose a new desktop picture and I went through all the pictures I'd taken a bit more carefully. And there was one of the rainbow. The end of the rainbow appeared to be in my bedroom, and I remembered the story about the diamonds. It wasn't, of course. The rainbow was way above the house, and part of it was reflected in my bedroom window, but the optical illusion was there.

But eventually, I made it back. The Stornoway I came back to was exactly the same and completely different. The geography is exactly the same. The golf course is still there; the Castle Grounds is unchanged except for storm damage and some bush clearance; the town centre, the roads, the houses, the beaches- all much the same.

And yet different. A new all-singing, all-dancing sports centre, complete with sports hall, swimming pool, climbing wall, gym, aerobics studio, cafe, sauna, steam, synthetic athletics track, grass pitch and two synthetic pitches, the like of which any town in the country would be proud of. A new, vastly improved ferry terminal. An £8 million theatre and art centre. Modernised hotels and pubs. And traffic lights! I remember the stir there was when a pelican crossing was installed on Cromwell Street. Now we have traffic lights, mini roundabouts, one way systems. And far more cars, and fewer parking spaces.

And fewer and fewer relatives as the years go by. Such is life, I suppose.

Funny, but I've started writing this account of the events of recent years on my laptop, sitting on the seat at the top of Gallows Hills. To get there I walked past the golf club, the castle, Cuddy Point and Sober Island. I looked out over Arnish lighthouse as I turned towards the Creed at the end of the Low Road. All of my favourite places.