When I was very small, we lived on the shores of Loch Laxford, in a house called Trefoil. It sat near Scourie, in Sutherland, Scotland. A weather worn place hidden between water and rock. The the wind howled in off the loch like an animal.
We had barely any television. The signal crackled like sea foam, dissolving into nothing. So we turned outward. To the hills. To the bracken. To ourselves.
I have a twin sister, Kirsty- nine minutes younger. Catherine came next, and Jamie, our older brother led most of our wild schemes. We ran like creatures across the boggy heather, dressed in wool jumpers, boots too big, and snowsuits that turned stiff with frost. We played in all weathers, as if the land was ours to conjure.
Our mum fed us tofu she made from scratch- a sacred food, we believed, until we discovered sweeter things at the neighbour’s house. Wilma. She was enormous and wonderful, driving a tiny Suzuki car like it was a ship. Her husband, George, was drunk most days and so thin that my mum could lift him like a child and place him gently back outside when he was a nuisance.
Once, he tried to get his sheepdog to round up a plastic basin washed up on the shore. He thought it was a sheep. We watched from the hill, laughing till we fell over.
Robert McCall was our postman and also a fisherman. Sometimes he’d leave an octopus on our doorstep, as if it were a letter. We’d sprint down the slope to his shed by the loch, stealing bamboo canes and floating them out to sea like offerings. No one ever asked for them back.
My dad worked on a fish farm on Loch Laxford. At the end of the day, we’d watch his boat bob into view- a tiny dark shape moving steadily toward the shore. We’d race down the hill to meet him, four pairs of wellies sliding through wet grass and sheep shit, yelling like angry gulls.
Sometimes we brought buckets and gathered mussels or winkles from the rocks. We knew where to look. The sea gave up its gifts quietly, if you asked the right way. Back home, we’d boil the winkles and dig them out with pins, eating them like sweets. We loved them; briny, rubbery, defiant little things.
My dad would gut fish in the sink, peeling back silver with stained fingers. The smell of it filled the kitchen: salt, blood, sea. Scales clung to the plughole like glitter. We crunched pearls in our mussels and believed we’d found treasure. And maybe we had.
We weren’t taught to create.
We were taught to notice.
To hold things in our hands.
To get dirty.
To pull life from water and know what to do with it.
There were lizards by the woodshed- quick little things that shimmered like fish scales. On boiling days, the ants would boil over too, busy and black, dragging their eggs like ghosts when we poked at their nests. We were children. We didn’t understand the havoc we caused.
I’d lie on a ragged sheepskin in the heat and feel the world hum around me. Everything buzzed: the air, the grass, the slugs slicking across the single-track road. We found hairy caterpillars in the bracken and let them crawl along our arms, believing they were lucky. Everything was magic, if you looked at it long enough.
There was a woman called Gisela – a German hitchhiker our parents picked up once. She stayed for what felt like years. She was part of us. I thought she had magic powers because she could take her teeth out. I’d never seen such a thing.
We wandered miles down winding roads, through sheep fields and bog, past beat up signs and bent gates. People used to dump cars into the loch…just tip them in and forget. We found pieces of them rusting on the beach, the bones of machines, and took great pleasure in pulling them apart. A rustic, metallic dissection on the shore.
One Mother’s Day, we tied a rope round our brother’s waist and lowered him down a cliff to pick a flower for Sal. He swung, small and grinning, the flower clutched in his fist.
Inside the house, the weather changed.
My dad, once a drummer, would crank up Led Zeppelin on speakers taller than we were. He drummed on biscuit tins like they were snares, knees bouncing, denim splitting under the beat. His jeans wore holes from the music. Not fashion, just rhythm.
I remember the sound filling the room like water. Big. Feral. Alive. My brother loved it so much he used to crawl into the speakers, trying to live where the noise came from. He’d sit there, quiet in the womb of it, while my dad kept time with the walls.
That was music, then- not gentle, not background. It faced us head on and we swam in its wake.
It was air.
It was parenting.
It was percussion for our play.
The house shook with it, and so did we. It wasn’t chaos. It was initiation.
This is where my making began.
In the freedom.
In the nothing on tv-ness.
In the salt and the mud and the mischief.
In the strange tenderness of George and the postman and Wilma and the wind.
In bashed biscuit tins and Led Zeppelin.
In ripped denim and seaweed.
In silence and thunder.
Midgies and rain.
These were my first materials.