STORM PEGS: Kevin Saving discusses Jen Hadfield’s new book, containing reflections on life in Shetland
Storm Pegs, A Life Made In Shetland
Jen Hadfield
Picador
ISBN: 978-1-5290-3802-6
pp 338 £18.99
It is an awkward thing to stand between (or atween, as they say up here) two cultures. The multi-award winning poet, Jen Hadfield, has been venturing to the Shetland archipelago since 2005 and has lived there for the past seventeen years, successfully incorporating words from its idiosyncratic vocabulary into her work. (Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place {2008}, won the T.S. Eliot prize and she is, newly, a recipient of the Windham-Campbell disbursement). This, her latest publication, is both a love-letter to these Northern Isles and an impressionistic hymn to their flora, fauna, topography and – more questionably! – the climate. It is also the non-linear calendar and verbal-pictorial slideshow of a life conducted side by side with the sea.
Hadfield’s memoir, with its deft descriptions and selective personal revelations, will serve as a welcome corrective to a popular – but increasingly far-fetched – Police-procedural TV series. These B.B.C. Productions (not exclusively “Shot” on the islands) purport to chronicle a community riven by violent criminality and, more latterly, prone to the cultish desecration of sheep (!) They have undoubtedly put Shetland “on the map”, but (Hosannas sing!) it is now a map, as Hadfield informs us, (since The 2018 Islands {Scotland} Act) which must be drawn to scale and in its geographically correct position –no longer the squared-off enclosure situated somewhere to the upper-right-hand-side of John O’ Groats.
Storm Pegs circles the occasionally vexed question as to whether Shaetlan words and phrases (which many long-term Shetlanders celebrate and wish to preserve) constitute a distinct language or “merely” a “dialect”. My Concise Oxford Dictionary encapsulates the latter as “1. a form of speech peculiar to a particular region 2. a subordinate variety of a language with non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation or grammar”; but this definition could, conceivably, be ruled “inadmissible” – an exercise in sooth-moother neo-colonialism. Personally (and as a voluntarily displaced Englishman who first visited the isles a quarter of a century ago, living on them only since 2023) I enjoy Shaetlan and make a sincere, but undeniably token, effort to understand it. Irredeemably a sooth-moother myself, I still tend to call a tammy norie a “puffin” and, upon encountering a certain aquatic mammal – as I not infrequently do, the isles boasting the highest lutrine density in Europe – might occasionally have been heard to remark that I’ve glimpsed an “otter” -rather than a draatsi. People (fock) generally know (ken) what I mean. I strongly suspect that the coup de grace to colloquial Shaetlan will be administered, not by a heinous English linguistic imperialism, but by the insidious inexactitudes of the American sit-com.
Hadfield writes movingly of her Edenic island home on West Burra – linked to the “mainland” of Shetland since the nineteen-seventies by bridges (or brigs as she sometimes elects to call them). She declares that, upon first arrival, she “was still of the view that my accidents and emergencies were mine to bear alone, which is a mindset that Shetland has cured me of, over time”. After a period in rented accommodation she discovers an old (red) wheelbarrow in a byre and builds what is to be her home nearby – following a further interval ensconced in a caravan. Here, she finds real friendship and a re-purposed identity. As William Carlos Williams affirmed, “All art begins in the local”.
Though its focus remains squarely on the Northern Isles, Storm Pegs features discourses on lunar exploration and a detour expatiating on beachcombing in Cancun, Mexico. Hadfield treats of this activity/pastime with a quirky precision worthy of Gavin Maxwell himself. She describes unselfconsciously – and in a manner only a generation younger than mine can truly carry-off – a courtship via “Tinder”. She vividly evokes a “frogmarching” wind experienced on Papa Stour and castigates the environmental destruction engendered by the recently-built “Viking Energy Windfarms” – commissioned in partnership with the Shetland Island Council. She visits the local Up Helly Aa – where squads of hairy men wearing skirts and impractical hats {my words!} incinerate a dainty longship- and, as they say in the United States, “what’s not to like?”
Storm Pegs is suffused with thought-provoking meditations on Place, Remoteness, Belonging and the nature of “Heaven”. You squirm alongside its author as she shivers in her caravan, rocked by equinoctial gales. She questions herself, rhetorically “Do I belong? Maybe. Yes. Sometimes. No. Does it matter? {…} What I do feel is kent, known; part of the story”. I don’t ken Jen Hadfield myself but she is now, indeed, “part of the story”. If she has been lucky in her discovery of Shetland, then Shetland is fortunate to have claimed a writer of this stature.
The water is bright as a polished blade: my gaze skims it like a skipping stone, before foundering in the scumbled channel between Havera and Houss Ness.
There are a few longueurs to be found here and some of the Shaetlan words utilised (e.g. bankled, greetin, pleepse) are neither explained in the text – nor replicated in the book’s glossary. Storm Pegs might be a better book still after a more rigorous edit but, then, love-letters are notoriously difficult to bring to a satisfactory conclusion…
Seeking to conclude what has itself been an overly discursive review, I pause and glance up from my note pad. Across the voe, the lights from our friends’ hoose are observable. I consider how he’s a genuine, bona fide, fully-paid-up Shetlander and how she always professes not to be (although living up here for nigh-on fifty years). And I find myself thinking how we are, each of us, akin to the Ophelian fronds of kelp lying near the bottom of our frigid and much-dumped-upon harbour; tugged backwards and forwards in an immemorial, tidal waltz. The Northern Isles are a place where one might witness all four seasons in a day (but only in summer!). And I think how – for all their sometimes painful beauty – these islands will inescapably mean different things to different people at different times. Both welcoming and inhospitable, Shetland is, was, and always will be, a place apart.
Aug 22 2024
Storm Pegs
STORM PEGS: Kevin Saving discusses Jen Hadfield’s new book, containing reflections on life in Shetland
It is an awkward thing to stand between (or atween, as they say up here) two cultures. The multi-award winning poet, Jen Hadfield, has been venturing to the Shetland archipelago since 2005 and has lived there for the past seventeen years, successfully incorporating words from its idiosyncratic vocabulary into her work. (Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place {2008}, won the T.S. Eliot prize and she is, newly, a recipient of the Windham-Campbell disbursement). This, her latest publication, is both a love-letter to these Northern Isles and an impressionistic hymn to their flora, fauna, topography and – more questionably! – the climate. It is also the non-linear calendar and verbal-pictorial slideshow of a life conducted side by side with the sea.
Hadfield’s memoir, with its deft descriptions and selective personal revelations, will serve as a welcome corrective to a popular – but increasingly far-fetched – Police-procedural TV series. These B.B.C. Productions (not exclusively “Shot” on the islands) purport to chronicle a community riven by violent criminality and, more latterly, prone to the cultish desecration of sheep (!) They have undoubtedly put Shetland “on the map”, but (Hosannas sing!) it is now a map, as Hadfield informs us, (since The 2018 Islands {Scotland} Act) which must be drawn to scale and in its geographically correct position –no longer the squared-off enclosure situated somewhere to the upper-right-hand-side of John O’ Groats.
Storm Pegs circles the occasionally vexed question as to whether Shaetlan words and phrases (which many long-term Shetlanders celebrate and wish to preserve) constitute a distinct language or “merely” a “dialect”. My Concise Oxford Dictionary encapsulates the latter as “1. a form of speech peculiar to a particular region 2. a subordinate variety of a language with non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation or grammar”; but this definition could, conceivably, be ruled “inadmissible” – an exercise in sooth-moother neo-colonialism. Personally (and as a voluntarily displaced Englishman who first visited the isles a quarter of a century ago, living on them only since 2023) I enjoy Shaetlan and make a sincere, but undeniably token, effort to understand it. Irredeemably a sooth-moother myself, I still tend to call a tammy norie a “puffin” and, upon encountering a certain aquatic mammal – as I not infrequently do, the isles boasting the highest lutrine density in Europe – might occasionally have been heard to remark that I’ve glimpsed an “otter” -rather than a draatsi. People (fock) generally know (ken) what I mean. I strongly suspect that the coup de grace to colloquial Shaetlan will be administered, not by a heinous English linguistic imperialism, but by the insidious inexactitudes of the American sit-com.
Hadfield writes movingly of her Edenic island home on West Burra – linked to the “mainland” of Shetland since the nineteen-seventies by bridges (or brigs as she sometimes elects to call them). She declares that, upon first arrival, she “was still of the view that my accidents and emergencies were mine to bear alone, which is a mindset that Shetland has cured me of, over time”. After a period in rented accommodation she discovers an old (red) wheelbarrow in a byre and builds what is to be her home nearby – following a further interval ensconced in a caravan. Here, she finds real friendship and a re-purposed identity. As William Carlos Williams affirmed, “All art begins in the local”.
Though its focus remains squarely on the Northern Isles, Storm Pegs features discourses on lunar exploration and a detour expatiating on beachcombing in Cancun, Mexico. Hadfield treats of this activity/pastime with a quirky precision worthy of Gavin Maxwell himself. She describes unselfconsciously – and in a manner only a generation younger than mine can truly carry-off – a courtship via “Tinder”. She vividly evokes a “frogmarching” wind experienced on Papa Stour and castigates the environmental destruction engendered by the recently-built “Viking Energy Windfarms” – commissioned in partnership with the Shetland Island Council. She visits the local Up Helly Aa – where squads of hairy men wearing skirts and impractical hats {my words!} incinerate a dainty longship- and, as they say in the United States, “what’s not to like?”
Storm Pegs is suffused with thought-provoking meditations on Place, Remoteness, Belonging and the nature of “Heaven”. You squirm alongside its author as she shivers in her caravan, rocked by equinoctial gales. She questions herself, rhetorically “Do I belong? Maybe. Yes. Sometimes. No. Does it matter? {…} What I do feel is kent, known; part of the story”. I don’t ken Jen Hadfield myself but she is now, indeed, “part of the story”. If she has been lucky in her discovery of Shetland, then Shetland is fortunate to have claimed a writer of this stature.
The water is bright as a polished blade: my gaze skims it like a skipping stone, before foundering in the scumbled channel between Havera and Houss Ness.
There are a few longueurs to be found here and some of the Shaetlan words utilised (e.g. bankled, greetin, pleepse) are neither explained in the text – nor replicated in the book’s glossary. Storm Pegs might be a better book still after a more rigorous edit but, then, love-letters are notoriously difficult to bring to a satisfactory conclusion…
Seeking to conclude what has itself been an overly discursive review, I pause and glance up from my note pad. Across the voe, the lights from our friends’ hoose are observable. I consider how he’s a genuine, bona fide, fully-paid-up Shetlander and how she always professes not to be (although living up here for nigh-on fifty years). And I find myself thinking how we are, each of us, akin to the Ophelian fronds of kelp lying near the bottom of our frigid and much-dumped-upon harbour; tugged backwards and forwards in an immemorial, tidal waltz. The Northern Isles are a place where one might witness all four seasons in a day (but only in summer!). And I think how – for all their sometimes painful beauty – these islands will inescapably mean different things to different people at different times. Both welcoming and inhospitable, Shetland is, was, and always will be, a place apart.