Lundy (Continued)
...and the passengers disembarked.
There
were seven hundred passengers.
Except for me, they were excursionists who would
pass the afternoon in Lundy and return to Ilfracombe on the paddle-wheeler. I am
utterly unable to account for such an extravagant number of them, and, after
studying their behavior at close range in Lundy itself--they looked at one or
two pigs there, had a beer, and that's all--I find it even more mysterious. A
tourist's lot is a hard one almost anywhere, but in Lundy his adversities are of
epic proportions. Many of the seven hundred were seasick; the drizzle fell on
them, and the ocean slapped over the flimsy wooden pier, soaking their skirts
and trousers. A man fell into the water, and a middle-aged lady who had endured
some unknown misfortune on shore was carried back to the paddle-wheeler all
bloody, as the rest of us were getting off it. Most of these tourists, I
gathered, had been enticed to Lundy by a small yellow handbill, circulated in
Ilfracombe by the paddle-wheeler company, which said, in no uncertain terms,
that a voyage to the island is something "which every holiday-maker should
make…an excursion which is unrivalled anywhere." Lundy itself does not
advertise, although it did once, sticking the signs recover
your poise on lundy all over the London Tube. That was in 1939, when very
few people in London had any poise left; scarcely two of them had recovered it
on Lundy, when the war broke out.
The seven hundred tourists bore their crosses stoically. Huffing and hawing, they climbed the palisades by a steep, switchback trail and hurried to the island's only gay spot, the Marisco Tavern; they pressed inside like subway riders, and they were given beer furiously by a gaunt, eminently harried man whom I took to be Mr. Gade. Mr. Gade was afforded no quarter by the tourists: as postmaster he was being called on for postage stamps, as grocer for fig newtons and crumpets, as bartender for beer, and all the while his assistant, Audrey, was being hectored for puffin bookends, puffin ash trays, and plaster puffins of no apparent utilitarian value. The tiny tavern was full of smoke and noise: of men calling for beer, of plaster puffins falling to the floor, of a boy crying, "Buy a pennant, Mommy, so they'll know we've been to Lundy." ("Hush, dear, we already have a puffin.") I surveyed the Dore-like scene for a minute or two, and then I pushed outside for a breath of air. The drizzle had stopped, and the sunlight was falling in party streamers; the island of Lundy dried beneath it, a desolate plain of scrub, stones, and faraway gray sheep. The color of everything was gray--the stones, the gray abandoned lighthouse, the Marisco Tavern and the ashen houses near it, the church--an island that was built of rain clouds. I strolled to the edge of the cliff and saw the sunlight's glare on the water, a hundred yards below. And then I returned to the Marisco Tavern; the tourists had left, and Mr. Gade, Audrey, and two or three islanders were sitting quietly in the darkness, desperately trying to recover their poise.
Now the Marisco Tavern was a friendly, easygoing place, and these people made it so. Mr. Gade, using all the slow deliberation of a bartender pouring a pousse-cafe, had filled his pipe, and he was leaning against the gray stone wall, cheerily smoking it; the others were sitting with beer mugs in their laps and talking idly of the unimportant, important things of life. They were dressed in plaid shirts and disintegrating pin-stripe suits; their faces were stubbled, weather-beaten. The Captain and Charlie, who ran the boats at the waterfront, came from there in black turtleneck sweaters, nodded for a beer apiece, and started throwing darts at a raggedy bull's-eye, beginning each of their games with an esoteric cry of "Middle for diddle!" or "Muggs away!" A few others drifted in, and every now and then the gathering raised its glasses, toasting itself with enthusiasm: "All the very best!"
"All the very best," cried Charlie, at the dart board, "and muggs away! "
It was a friendly crowd, and I saw that everyone was liked by everyone else. Afterwards, I learned these dozen or so fulltime residents work at the tavern, like Mr. Gade and Audrey, or at the waterfront, like the Captain and Charlie, or at the new north and south lighthouses; or they are retired and never work at all. They call themselves the "islanders," as distinguished from the seven hundred "trippers," or "bluebottles," who just had left. (A bluebottle, my dictionary explains, is a Calliphora erythrocephala, a pesky insect that flies about in circles, going buzz.) A third category, halfway between the "islanders" and the "bluebottles," are the members of the Lundy Field Society, who migrate there when the birds do, and of the Lundy Lodgers, who vacation there for several weeks at a time and whose rites of initiation into the L. L. are a dreadful secret that wild horses couldn't drag from them. These people--islanders, ornithologists, Lundy Lodgers, and occasional bluebottles who missed the boat--gather every night at the Marisco Tavern. Saturday night is an especially gala one; the tavern is open until all hours, something unheard-of on the neighboring island, and the rules of admittance are "sing, story, or shake"--sing a song, tell a story, or shake your pockets empty.
It was such a Saturday night a few days later. By eight o'clock, the Marisco Tavern was full of every variety of person: dart players, bird watchers, Lundy Lodgers, lighthouse keepers, small fry, old salts, brothers-in-law of Mr. Harman, authors, all of us drinking beer and getting along fine. Audrey, the girl who sold puffinware, sat herself at a piano, and we all sang "Home on the Range" and "The Whiffenpoof Song"; then, "What d'ya say you jive it, Audrey, up a bit?" cried Charlie, and we all sang "Tavern in the Town," "Oh Landlord, Fill the Flowing Bowl," and two choruses of "The Halls of Montezuma." It was sing, story, or shake time at ten o'clock; a retired sea dog with a vivid, animated face began it, singing the ballad of Alfonso Spugoni, a bullfighter who had behaved in the same caddish fashion as the man on the flying trapeze:
When I catch Alfonso Spugoni, the toreador,
With one mighty swipe I will dislocate his bally jaw,
I'll fight the bullfighter, I will,
When I catch the bounder, the blighter I'll kill,
He shall die…
Whenever the old sailor came to this particular point, he swiped himself on the
jaw. Next, Mr. Gade was called upon, and he maintained the toreador theme by
singing "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton" in a voice that occasionally is
heard in Spain, emanating from mortally wounded bulls. I, being an American, was
asked to get a fiddle somewhere and call a square dance, and after many
remonstrances on my part, all unsuccessful, I agreed to do a Charleston instead,
with Mr. Harman's sister. She ducked out of the room and reappeared soon
as a flapper, and she stood at the bar, kicking her heels. The children took
part, too. Dressed in bed sheets and hideous masks cut from the back of Corn
Flakes boxes, they swooped down on the tavern, said "Whooo! Whooo!"
and then, in a precise, English accent, "Have we managed to frighten
you?" A birthday cake for Mrs. Gade was brought in, a happy birthday was
sung, a good time was had by all, and there were cries until early in the
morning of "All the very best!"
Lundy seemed like such a delightful place to be that I wondered, naturally, how the Harman family had managed to come by it. I asked about this the next day, and I learned that the late Mr. Harman--Mr. Harman I, or "M.C.H.," as his subjects knew him--had set his heart on Lundy when only a bluebottle, aged eighteen, and finally had bought it in 1925 for eighty thousand dollars, a thousand times what it went for in the Mariscos' days. Until then, Lundy had been owned and operated by the Reverend Mr. Heaven, and it was known as the Kingdom of Heaven, of course, while the voyage to Lundy was known as Purgatory. The island, I also learned, has gone by many other names historically, but all of them sound decidedly like Lundy--Landy, Londi, Londey, Londay, Lounday, Lunday, Lundeia, Londia, and Londai--and scholars have just as many explanations of the word, one of the more extravagant being that of Westcote, who suggested, in 1646, that it was "island" backwards. Other scholars say it's the Norse for "grove," although there is scarcely a tree in sight; the truth, apparently, about the word "Lundy" is that it's from the Icelandic lundi, meaning puffin, and ey, meaning island, and so it means Puffin Island. Etymologically, then, we must note that "Lundy Island" is a tautology, and that a resident is properly a Lundyskeggi, two or more of them being Lundyskeggjar. The late Mr. M. C. Harman was in the forefront of the battle against the ungrammatical use of "Lundy Island," and, a few years before his death, he wrote an impassioned letter to the Lundy Field Society about it, saying, "The uninitiated often refer to Lundy as Lundy Island, forgetting that lundi means puffin and y or ey means island. I hope members will help me to combat this practice. As the British Post Office insist on perpetuating the error we shall never quite succeed, but we can at least do our best." It is not recorded, however, that Mr. Harman ever called himself a Lundyskeggi.
Another battle in whose forefront Mr. Harman invariably was, was that for Lundy's continued independence. He wrote to the Lundy Field Society about that, too; the British, it seems, had put some of the Lundyskeggjar on their voting rolls, and he furiously penned the following: "They just don't want the vote. They want to be left alone. I ask for the support of the members of the society in the resistance I propose to offer to having these unwanted votes forced down our necks." In other years, Mr. Harman had ordered the British coast guard off his island, ordered the British postmaster off, ordered three officers of the British army, navy, and air force off and demanded, and was given, a formal apology from the War Office for their having been there, and, of course, issued his own, non-British money and postage stamps. Mr. Harman's stamps are still the tangible sign of Lundy's independence. The original ones, whose value could be determined by adding up the puffins, or partial puffins, thereon, have been succeeded by four more imaginative sets portraying such eminent non-puffins as Eric Bloodaxe, Mrs. Graham in her aerial balloon, and Betty Brown, a horse; a complete set is worth about one hundred and twenty dollars in philatelic circles. The stamps will get a letter from Lundy to the dock at Ilfracombe, and anyone who hopes to see them gotten farther must stick on British ones, too. The British stamps, or "postage," are put on the front, and the Lundy ones, or "puffinage," are put in back, something that would relegate them to the status of tuberculosis seals if they weren't dutifully canceled by Mr. Gade, the country's concurrent postmaster and puffinmaster.
So
much has been said, on these pages, of non-puffins, half-puffins, puffinage,
puffinware, and puffinmasters that a word or two about the puffin itself seems
to be called for. Puffins... More
