Review: Vivien Horler
The Place of Tides, by James Rebanks (Penguin)
Before we all had duvets, some of us had eiderdowns. These were comforters stuffed with feathers that perched on top of our blankets (and usually slid off in the night).
The term comes from the soft breast down of the eider duck, which was traditionally used to fill the comforters. These ducks are found on remote coastlines and islands in the far north of Europe, Siberia and north America, all close to the Arctic circle.
Today the filling in comforters is more likely to be either synthetic or from domestic poultry breeds, according to Wikipedia, but the collection of down from eider ducks continues. Duvets and pillows filled with eider down are considered luxury items.
The use of eider down is sustainable – the female ducks pluck the down from their own breasts to line their nests, and after the ducklings have hatched and followed their mother into the sea, people collect and clean it.
Some 10 years ago the writer and farmer James Rebanks, who lives in Cumbria in the UK, was researching how to protect wild and fragile places from the growth of global tourism. One day his boss asked him to go to the Vega Archipelago, off the coast of Norway. The Norwegians took conservation seriously, said the boss, and Rebanks could learn from them.
The journey to Vega, the largest island in the archipelago, took two days, by air, train and boat. “With every transfer, the gates required longer walks from the heart of the airport and the planes got smaller.”
After a couple of days of presentations by the local tourism board in Vega, Rebanks and the group he was with were taken out to an island whose name translated to “place of tides”, where duck women still worked each spring. These rocky islets were even more remote than Vega and had nothing in the way of amenities – no shops, electricity only when the fired up the generator, and no permanent residents.
Rebanks writes that he had no great love of the sea, nor did he find the idea of islands romantic (as I do). But the group arrived on what he called “a strange, watery planet”, one that was beautiful.
The group spent about an hour on the island, and were given tea and pancakes by a solitary old woman called Anna.
While the others talked, Anna took Rebanks out to a dilapidated collection of old hen huts, lifted the wing of one of the nesting ducks and showed him the eggs and ducklings beneath. The duck clearly trusted Anna.
After this brief visit, Rebanks went home, and over the years became increasingly depressed and “unmoored, like a piece of timber adrift on the current”. He could no longer see the point of his work when everything seemed so broken. He wanted to escape.
He also kept thinking about Anna, who had “something alive in her that had died in me”.
He wrote to her and asked if he could join her on the island for the spring – a period of about 10 weeks. She agreed, and said he should come very soon – she was battling ill health and this would be her last eider season.
So he went, and this book is his account of those weeks with Anna and her younger friend Ingrid, of the wild weather they encountered, and the hard work of building and restoring protective nests to be ready for when the ducks came ashore.
The idea was that the women – and Rebanks – would protect the ducks from predators like skuas and minks and otters, and build up the birds’ trust so that they would continue to come back, season after season, leaving their down behind.
He describes how Anna, who had spent summers on the islands as a child and later worked as a cook in a care home on Vega, had decided she wanted to be a duck woman, and then spent years gaining the ducks’ trust so that they once again felt safe on the island of tides.
He speaks of the gentle rhythm of the days, when the weather would keep them indoors and the women would knit and tell stories, of the work on the nests, and then the quiet time when, nests built, they waited for the ducks, keeping their appearances outdoors to a minimum to avoid frightening off the skittish females.
After the ducks had been and gone came the work of collecting and cleaning the down for sale.
And in the course of that spring, Rebanks found he was shedding his sense of ennui, and finding himself and the value of life once again.
This is a gentle and beautifully written book about what was thought to be a disappearing way of life, but which is still thriving on dozens of islands in the archipelago. And it is also about a woman who was determined to preserve something she valued, and who has passed this love on.