“Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland” by Jen Hadfield: an extraordinary journey

She was the youngest-ever winner of the T S Eliot Prize and one of the judges, writing in the Guardian at the time, revealed the notes he’d made about Nigh-No-Place:

Overall:

(1) sheer joy of poetry
(2) raw, fresh; nothing overcooked
(3) wit; wry and emphasized by the delight of the beauty
(4) she knows when to stop.
(5) courage
(6) 21st century in her language, syntax, diction, without any loss of historical reference
(7) deep understanding of words and musicality

This would be one hell of a winner.

Storm Pegs isn’t a book of poetry, though it is often poetic; and it’s infused with all the qualities that Tobias Hill recognised back in 2009. The use of language is inventive and bold, often breathtakingly so, but it’s always accessible. It’s entertaining, too, and there are moments when readers will almost certainly laugh out loud.

At the heart of the narrative is a boundless respect for, and curiosity about, the distinctive language of Shetland; dialect words are italicised in the text and listed in a glossary. Each chapter is prefaced by one of these words, its meaning to be explored in what follows, but the exposition uncovers links with Scots, English and Scandinavian tongues. And that distinctiveness of Shaetlan, central to Jen’s fascination with her adopted home, illuminates a recurring question, raised by someone wishing to understand every facet of a place so very different from that of her upbringing, in which surprise is a constant: where am I?

The question is first posed as Jen, insomniac following over-indulgence in a kindly neighbour’s catch of herring, takes a very early morning stroll in the “faint rain”, her coat and boots covering her pyjamas:

There is enough light to see the wallabies at The Outpost, where the Tasmanian flag is flying. We consider each other: they, in their light, rain-pearled fur, neat peerie hands folded over their chests, reminding me, for some reason, of nuns. In the next enclosure, two towering emus pace slowly over to the fence, and I do a double-take – Wallabies? Emus? – at how Shetland defies easy definition. And so I blink awake every morning, like a patient coming round from an anaesthetic, and ask, bewildered, ‘Where am I?’

That isn’t a question, she acknowledges, with which Shetlanders are likely to have much difficulty. As she points out, the Shetland Times bookshop’s shelves overflow with volumes about every conceivable island topic: “Of all the places I have lived, I’ve never bade anywhere that talks about itself so much”. And that observation is tied to another of the book’s themes:

We are so accustomed to hearing our islands described as ‘remote’, ‘inaccessible’ and ‘disconnected’. But in my experience, Shetland is a place that really knows its place in the wider world…Historically, the isles have been globally connected by necessity and restlessness and curiosity and, above all, by the sea-skill of the Shetland men, which was prized by press-gangs, whaling outfits and the merchant navy alike. Shetlanders live in worldliness because we are constantly tickled by the shared and sharing sea…We are connected to the rest of the world by tides and birds’ migration paths, by international visitors, both creaturely and human, by sea-roads plied by vessels of all sizes, by twice-daily tidal transfusions, by flotsam carried to us from Europe, Newfoundland, the Amazon, the Arctic, Siberia…Remote? How can it be, when Home is a place of folk and creatures constantly coming and going?

But although the thread of resistance to that label runs through the book, the antidotes are just as clearly conveyed. Weighing much more heavily are the consciousness of place and the role and richness of language that help to create and sustain it. Jen worries about the loss of these things and about other erosions of the things that make Shetland what it is. She muses, too, on her own experience. Does she live in a half-Shetland? “Am I only half here? Because I want to bide here as fully as I can, the thought haunts me.”

Jen’s efforts haven’t yet entirely dispelled the notion of remoteness. Commenting on the excellent reviews that Storm Pegs has received, she wryly observed:

Maybe 10 years’ work and 368 pages of Storm Pegs on why Shetland is NOT remote ..and grateful as I am for ALL reviews, time and time again the word 'remote' appears in descriptions of the book and place ...It sure is hard trying to change perceptions ...

Those philosophical thoughts are spun into a web of wonderfully engaging detail and anecdote. We learn about Jen’s early years in a rented cottage in Burra, and the immediacy of her fascination with the language of local custom and micro-geography: the distinctions between inby land and the ootadaeks, the common grazing beyond the drystone wall that separates the two. She muses, too, on the metaphorical use of ootadaeks in the contexts of inclusion and exclusion; and she contrasts this new, permeable environment with the one she left behind in the north of England:

From the village I grew up in, with its footballers and their wives, with its offices offering Wealth Management, with its double-parked Porsches and security patrols and high, wrought-iron gates, my gran asked why I had chosen to leave what she called ‘civilisation’. I couldn’t begin to tell her how much was wrong with her question. Because it’s heaven, I protested, helplessly…Though my gesture was entirely pagan, I used the words ‘heaven’ and ‘Eden’ over and over again, a born-again, feeling, the whole time, that my use of the words was lazy and inadequate.

Indeed, it's impossible to overstate the sense of excitement and discovery that Shetland stimulates for Jen; and that makes for wonderful reading.

The practical aspects of Jen’s life include earning a living at the Marine College, where she identified and examined sea worms; there is much more fun in this than you might imagine. That prompts parallel thoughts about her discovery of the smaller components of Shetland, each holding its own revelations:

Every loch, gyo, burn, cliff, skerry, every Lerwick closs, has its own life, its own set of mysteries. You would not believe who lives here; you would not believe what’s around the next bend.

Shoreline discoveries fascinate her: a message in a bottle; a tangled gannet awaiting (successful) release; and her obsession with sea beans, tiny numbers of which make the journey here from the Amazon. That obsession demands that she look for them closer to their source and, in an entirely unexpected but delightful digression, we’re briefly transported to Mexico.

In due course, Jen decides that the time has come to make a permanent home in Shetland, rather as a limpet finds a ‘home scar’. With the help of an architect neighbour, plans are prepared and permission is obtained, though for some years her home is to be a caravan adjacent to the house site.

Caravan life in a Shetland winter has its downsides. She endures force 11 – a “violent storm” in the nomenclature of the Shipping Forecast.

I got to sleep after a while; sleep of sorts, waking every hour or so to check I wasn’t in Norway, with my hands scrunched up into fists under my shoulders…the next day, I was spaegie from clenching my muscles in my sleep, but knowing a deep gladness. I have dropped anchor, and it has held.

There are storms at sea, too, on the northbound overnight crossing, when every mile can seem like an eternity until sleep eventually overwhelms:

Sometimes the whole sea plays at sliding it, this soft, little animal, down towards the end of the bed, with just my heels, dug in, anchoring me. She smears me around on the mattress.

There have been few more evocative descriptions of Shetland weather; and not just bad weather, all weather, because its variations and transformations – mist magically disappearing as it rolls down the whale-backed Clift Hills, the evolution of a heat haze – entrance her. So do images of the sea: seen from the summit of those hills, it

...looks hot, smouldering behind Foula like a sheet of blue metal heated to a shimmer, bruised with the tenderest lilac cloud-reflections.

In quieter times, there’s much neighbourly interchange of food, conversation, stories; there are birds and a fascination with their migration, and with space exploration. There is a garden to create, a dyke to repair. There are short boat trips, on one of which your reviewer must declare an interest as boatman, and longer ones, around Noss and to Papa Stour and Foula, and there is fishing. There’s the Shetland Folk Festival and there are the trials of lockdown.

Through it all, there is the search for the answer to that question: where am I? And there is a search of a different kind, too, as she chronicles her exploration of the islands’ dating possibilities: I must avoid spoilers in relation to both searches, but to invoke Tobias Hill again, the approach to the second one is very 21^st century.

It’s no wonder that reviewers have been generous. For the Daily Telegraph, it’s

…a bewitching book, tactile and immersive, riven with salt winds, alive with human oddities and loud with the cries of seabirds.

The Guardian celebrated a:

…magnetic memoir…a book as exhilarating as a dip in wild winter waters.

It's impossible to do justice to Storm Pegs in a brief review; there are insights, surprises, imaginative delights on every page, far too many to encapsulate here.

It's an utterly compelling journey through language, place and consciousness. It really is extraordinary.