Hell's Bells, the wind, the wind

“...CATEGORY TWO SMALL HURRICANE PAULA EXPECTED TO TURN TOWARD WESTERN CUBA SOON......EYE CLEARLY SEEN ON CANCUN AND WESTERN CUBAN RADARS......STILL PACKING 100 MPH WINDS...”

 

Hey, Holiday Girl, This Means You... Talked to your mum last night - she said you wouldn't give a monkey's. Too busy having a proper holiday. Quite right. Being a born and bred Shetlander, you’ll be used to this kind of wind, on average three times a winter.   As was I, though not the born and bred bit. You can hear the roof sort of singing, but can't judge what’s really happening until you step outside and get flattened against the wall. Or the 3–stone boulder on the coalhouse roof gets flung on top of the porch. (This is me. Of course I weighed it.) 

New Year’s Eve, 91/92, everybody was partying and guizing as usual to begin with (guizing = dressing up as 6 foot banana, or similar, wandering round to folks’ houses to share bottle of whisky from banana back pocket). The worst I ever did see was the Man-in-a-dustbin-being-carried-on-the-back-of-someone-else. Weird one that. Couldn’t get your head around it. A one person costume with a rubber head mask. Hideous. Especially when it sat down, didn’t speak, not a word, drank a few tots and left. Never did find out who it was. (I think it was the postman.)

So that New Year's Eve the wind got up, and up, and up......  until it was getting just a bit strange. A bit beyond our ken. Not your normal hurricane. People gave up partying around eleven instead of the usual nine in the morning. Archie was clinging to the hydro pole in his garden, feet off the ground doing windsock thing, trying to work out how to get to his house and whether to let go or not. Someone else’s family linked arms in a communal crawl to the door. I was sitting up for a while with a log fire which couldn’t keep a flame on it, being sucked into a furious ember. I made a few Happy New Year phone calls. Machine gun rain on the window. Couldn’t get a wink of sleep for the noise.

Slates which had not been nailed over at both ends like all good roof slates up there, were flying through the air to be embedded for their length in the ground, or were decapitating telegraph poles. No people were decapitated. That’s because they knew a Good One when they saw it and scurried home. Their cars suffered instead. Dustbin bags for windows, shops running out of tape for stoved–in headlights, and the entire roof of a large Lerwick church shifted sideways by 9 inches. Greenhouses? Forget it. Hen houses going past the window. It is customary for garden sheds to be set in concrete or lashed down year–round, to 3 foot heavy metal staples buried deep. Such sheds, unable to walk away, retaliated by imploding. Bang. That's next door's gone. Bang. Shit. That was mine.

You do get used to parking your car a certain way, so you can actually get out of it, on the lee side, so to speak. Nevertheless you qualify, eventually, for your very own Shetland Door, a well known island feature. This is when you open car door, it is immediately wrenched from your grasp, thrown back on its hinges, and never shuts properly again. And usually has that giveaway dent in the side. “Aaah”, they say, winking knowingly at each other as you drive up. “Got yourself a Door, then.”  As in Silly Bint. How long you been here? Fifteen years, which made it so, so shaming. 

Pilots of the Paraffin Budgie between Scotland, Orkney and Shetland would taxi to take-off and halt, waiting for clearance, pointing into the wind. Only at the very last second would they turn to face the runway. Took off in twenty yards flat.  We passengers had made a wide straggling curve, doubled over, trying to get to the plane in the first place. Any time walking bent at 45 degrees into the wind, you pray it won't drop suddenly, because you will be flat on your face and looking really, really stupid.

Anyway, the Night of the Big One, I left for work at seven in the morning. Things had started to die down a bit. A bit. It was still an amazing drive, debris all over the shop, humungous seas and no people. Not even a lost Banana.

I radioed the Muckle Flugga lighthouse as part of the usual Sunday morning communications checks around the Coastguard district. (That’s in the days when they were manned, these lighthouses…. don’t get me started.)

He said he was fine, “but you know that big radar up here ? The RAF dome ?”

“Yeeeess…..” 

“Well it’s not there. There’s nothing there.”

No wonder the RAF bailed out and left the key under the mat at 3 in the morning, about the same time the Coastguard night watch took cover under the radio desks, expecting the gable end window to blow at any second. You actually got used to watching glass flexing in and out all the time, and in your own house. At work, you could spend many a happy hour staring down at the carpark, watching your car bumping its way into the next spot, taking bets on how far it could get. Out of the gate and down the road, maybe. Actually one did get into the gateway, but you'll not believe me.

The authorities checked out a report from the Brent Delta platform, not far off Shetland, where they’d hit 194 knots in those early hours of New Year’s Day. (Hurricane force starts at 64 knots. This is wind-in-a-straight-line up in these parts, not going round an eye.) The instrument not only lived to tell the tale but the Met Office verified it. Accurate. Blimey. That’s 224 mph.

And I miss the wind, still miss it nine years on. A bit of a gale and a rumbling in the chimbley, my spirits lift and I feel instantly energised. Wonderful stuff, wind.

As long as you’re not in a boat shouting Mayday. Which is what the Coastguard’s for, mostly.