Chapter 01

Even in a society where, for over a century, its people had been brutalised by the difficulties of surviving in extremely harsh conditions, the sight of a human body swinging gently in the early morning breeze, its head stuck out at a strange angle and its neck stretched grotesquely long, was the most shocking thing 14 year-old Clive Walsher had ever seen. The year was 2180 and in contrast to the hideous sight confronting the lad, it was an unusually beautiful February morning on the island of Hirta, the largest and only inhabited island in the St Kilda archipelago. Clive had just arrived down at the jetty from where he intended doing some early morning fishing when he discovered the body. It was hanging from the rusty old derrick that, for generations, had sat in the middle of the jetty. The derrick, like the jetty itself, was a reminder of the islanders’ distant past.
Weather-wise, February was a notoriously fickle month, and with no forecast to guide him when he had made his plans the previous evening, Clive had been resigned to a cold and possibly wet outing. The unexpectedly good weather conditions he met when, minutes earlier, he had stepped outside his parent’s squalid little cottage were a big bonus and the young lad, not usually given to romantic introspection, had been revelling in the unexpected peace and tranquillity of the morning; a peace and tranquillity so different from the mean and overcrowded conditions within the confines of his parent’s cottage. But such high-minded notions were banished by the horrific sight that now met Clive’s eyes. If anything, the beauty and serenity of its surroundings made the sight yet more dreadful.
The tide was in and small waves lapped gently against the pebbles on the shore. Across the bay Ruaival and the island of Dun were just beginning to emerge from an early morning mist, their reflections clear in the mirror smooth surface of the bay while, behind the lad, the wild, bare mountains of Oiseval, Conachair and Mullach Mor were still deeply shrouded.
Even though youngsters grew up quickly on Hirta, Clive was still a boy and his first reaction was to look wildly about for help. But no one else was in sight. It was too early. Then, as a new thought struck him, his mood momentarily lightened. He remembered telling his friend, Mickey Armstrong, about his planned fishing expedition and how he had tried to persuade Mickey to join him. But his pal had refused saying it was too cold and too early for him. Everyone knew Mickey was a notorious practical joker; had he planned this trick Clive wondered? Was what was swinging there no more than a dummy cleverly made up by his friend to look like a real person?
Clive looked carefully about him, half expecting to see Mickey grinning back at him from behind a rock or from one of the nearby buildings, but he saw no one. Still unsure and unwilling to make a fool of himself by reporting a dead body when it was just a dummy, Clive approached the body with faltering steps. The closer he approached, the more certain he became that it was indeed the body of a man and, by now, he was full of fear and dread. He desperately wanted to flee but an awful fascination made him continue his approach. All the while, the body continued its slow swing. When he was no more than ten feet away, the breeze that was gently agitating the body slowly turned it to face the terrified child.
Horrified, in an instant, Clive recognised his next-door neighbour, James Walsh, or Jimmy, as everyone knew him. Many a time Jimmy Walsh had sat the infant Clive on his knee to teach him a song or a magic trick. Indeed, he had been like a second father to the growing boy and Clive now had to force himself to look at the once kindly, and oh so familiar face; a face now bloated and discoloured almost out of recognition. What was obvious, even to someone who had never before seen a dead body in such frightening circumstances was that there was no life left in it. Suddenly overcome by the enormity of the situation and needing to put distance between himself and the swinging cadaver, Clive raced back to the nearest house, which just happened to be the manse where the Minister lived.
‘He’ll know what to do,’ was in Clive’s mind as he raced back the way he had just come.

Some generations earlier, because he felt like the island’s champion, the then minister had added an extra “h” to his name and Andrew Champion, like generations of Campions and Champions before him, was now minister to the isolated St Kildan community. He was a fine-looking, if somewhat shallow and vain man. As well as having a fine appearance, he also possessed a beautifully sonorous voice; a voice he loved to use. When he wasn’t practising his vowels or honing his presentational skills, Andrew spent a great deal of time making sure he was as well turned out as the limited facilities on the island allowed. By comparison with Andrew, the other villagers were sad, dirty and dejected examples of humanity. Where the other villagers dressed themselves in wool and skins, which they obtained from their flocks of goats and sheep, Andrew still dressed in the remains of the cloth the original settlers on the island had brought with them over one hundred and thirty years earlier. His clothes were nowhere near as efficient at keeping out the rain and biting winds that swept the island as were the clothes worn by the common villagers but, fortunately, unlike them, he was not required to work out of doors in all weathers. Indeed, he tended only to venture out in when the weather was fine and when there was no danger to his health. He was very fussy about his health, was Andrew. His traditional black minister’s suits were threadbare and mildewed, but were still immediately recognisable as being made of cloth, a much-prized commodity on St Kilda and, of course, they set him apart from everyone else.
It was important to Andrew that everyone should immediately recognise that he was not like the ordinary islanders. As well as being the Minister, he was also the undisputed leader of the community and in case there might ever be any doubt in anyone’s mind on that score, his position was helped and reinforced by the wider Champion clan and especially by his younger brother Sam. Being the younger son, Sam had never been groomed for high office. Indeed, his primary function was to make sure that nobody ever questioned his brother’s rule. He had received a basic education in case anything should happen to his older brother but had never received the sort of education that previous ministers had always lavished on their eldest sons. Sadly, as facilities to provide that education dwindled, so too had the quality of that education. So, even though by comparison with the other villagers Andrew Champion was considered to be a highly educated and refined man, he could still barely read or write. Sam, on the other hand was a well-fed, coarse, stupid brute of a man. He was also the most-feared man in God’s tiny, north Atlantic colony.
As a consequence of his elevated position, the everyday rules and regulations that applied to everyone else did not apply to Andrew Champion. Theoretically, he could do almost anything he wanted. In his defence, it must be said that he tried not to abuse his privileged position more than was necessary. That said, he had already proved he was prepared to bend the rules in his favour when it suited his purpose. When he had decided he would like to take a second wife, he had simply married the woman of his choice. No other man on St Kilda was allowed to do such a thing, especially when women of childbearing age were in such short supply, but the other villagers dared not raise an objection.
After bearing him three children, Rebecca, his first wife, became more shrivelled and shrew-like with each passing year. When she lost what passing interest she ever had in sex, Andrew, a man with many appetites, just as quickly lost interest in her. He then married the young and shapely Grace Peters who, at the time, was half his age.
For a time Grace had been a wonderful new diversion for Andrew and even Rebecca had welcomed the young woman into the house, if for no better reason than Andrew ceased pestering her. Unfortunately, Grace was quite unable to adjust to the sudden change in her fortunes. Whereas previously her life had been one of hardship and deprivation, her new life was one of ease and plenty. She had contributed a daughter to the already large Champion household but with all the food she could eat readily available to her and with no need to work or to take exercise, her once alluring curves had quickly disappeared beneath mounds of unhealthy-looking flesh.
The contrast between the minister’s two wives could not have been starker. Where Grace was fat and somewhat foolish, Rebecca was gaunt almost to the point of emaciation, but she was as sharp as a dagger. The many differences between the two women were a source of secret amusement to the other villagers who, god knows, had little enough to find cheerful in their everyday fight for survival. It must be conceded, however, that their humour was tinged with a certain malicious pleasure that the minister’s excess had backfired on him in so spectacular a fashion. Of course, their amusement at his predicament had to be private because, like his father before him, Andrew did not welcome criticism and would not have reacted kindly should he discover the villagers regarded him as an object of ridicule.
All that had come to end a year earlier when, appropriately some thought, Grace had choked to death on a fish bone while tucking into a second helping of fish pie. Her death particularly affected Andrew. She might have ballooned to almost twice the size she’d been when he married her nine years earlier, and while he might not have missed her less than scintillating conversation, he did miss making love to her. Unlike Rebecca, she had understood his needs and had done all she could to satisfy them. Andrew tried not to let other people see it but, a year later, he still missed her terribly.
Unaware of his limitations, the Minister considered himself an educated man; hadn’t he been taught the basic principles of reading and writing? Adam Champion, Andrew’s father, had tried hard to teach his son all he knew but because old Adam had only ever received an incomplete education from his own father, he had never properly mastered the skills himself and could only pass on the little he knew. In his turn, Andrew, too, had attempted to teach his son the rudiments of the two techniques but, as in the game of Chinese Whispers, he was only ever able to pass on a corrupted form of the bare basics to his eldest son who had little interest in learning them.
Following the death of the founder and original leader of the community 120 years earlier, the then minister had become the new, leader of Hirta and, ever since, the role of minister and leader was one that was jealously handed down from father to son. Those early ministers soon recognized that education and information represented power. So, not surprisingly, they did all they could to keep both weapons for themselves and their heirs.
When the original settlers moved their families to St Kilda, they did so in order to isolate themselves from a world that appeared to be heading, pell-mell, towards disaster. They were fully aware that the island would present them with many challenges but, even so, compared with what they believed the mainland would become, St Kilda promised to allow them to bring up their children in a simple, loving environment, free from the cares and scares of so-called civilization. They had planned for a long stay, perhaps even as long as two generations, during which time they hoped the world would sort itself out. What they never imagined was a stay of very much longer. If anyone had told them that their descendants would still be living in miserable isolation on the island eight generations later, they would have been horrified.
When they decided to begin their new lives miles away from the mainland of Scotland in the paradise of the harsh but disease free environment of an isolated, rocky, north Atlantic island, events at the time proved those original settlers had made a wise and timely decision. Not too long afterwards, the uncontrollable viruses and violence that were threatening all countries in the world finally took control. Worldwide famine and, though unknown to the islanders, even two nuclear wars centred in the Americas and the Far East, quickly followed the terror of complete anarchy. Throughout all this, the St Kildans were left unscathed while the rest of the world was brought to its knees. In just two years, humanity was taken to the very brink of extinction. And all the while, safe in their island stronghold, the new St Kildans congratulated themselves on their good fortune while mourning the loss of the loved ones they had been forced to leave behind.
Their removal to the island had been fraught with many difficulties and dangers but in their third year real disaster struck. Their yacht, which was their only safe link to the mainland and their only means of escape from St Kilda, had been destroyed in a freak summer storm. Recognising the vulnerability of the craft to severe winter gales, they always used to take their yacht out from the sea at the end of each summer, and had done so in previous winters on the island. They were, however, quite unprepared for the violence and suddenness of the storm that swept the island in their third summer. In one disastrous evening the storm reduced their only means of escape to so much flotsam and since that time, their refuge had also become their prison.
Through the radio and satellite television systems they had installed, those early settlers could monitor conditions on the mainland as well as in the rest of the world. The news was always uniformly bad and, gradually, with television stations being the first to disappear, but eventually radio stations as well, the world stopped broadcasting. Safe on their island, those early settlers had no desire to return to the extremely dangerous place the mainland now was and so they gave little thought to providing themselves with an alternative means of escape. They would face that problem when they decided it was time once more to return to the mainland. In fact, it had never been regarded as a very serious problem since the more practical among them knew they could always cannibalise doors and window frames to make some sort of craft should the need ever arise. Unfortunately, when eventually it might have been prudent to strike out for the mainland, two generations of new St Kildans had already lived and died and the island and those remaining now had a very healthy respect for the dangers that existed out on the open sea. Consequently, nothing was done. A further two generations later, St Kilda was well and truly under the control of its minister who revelled in the power and authority he exercised. As king of the heap, even such a pitifully small heap, he had no desire to leave. And so it had continued, with generation following generation. Eventually, after the passage of 130 years and eight generations and the loss of any proper written record of the past, neither the present minister nor the ordinary villagers knew any other life than the one they presently lived. By that time, the healthy respect their forbears had for the sea had grown into an irrational fear. While some of the dangers they imagined were real, far too many were imagined. When they had first planned to live on St Kilda, the original settlers had been mindful of the need to continue to educate their children. After all, one day they expected to return to the mainland so it was important that their children should be well prepared and should know as much as possible. To that end they had brought a wealth of old-fashioned books as well as a computer-aided learning system with them. As expected, the computer system had functioned only as long as suitable power had been available to power it but more surprising was the fact that the books had lasted scarcely any longer. Damp and the island’s ubiquitous mouse population, which latter no amount of effort from the islanders could control, least of all exterminate, had reduced their libraries to mildewed lumps of unpleasant pulp or into nesting material. With no computer systems and no books available to them, their children’s wider education was eventually brought to a complete standstill. Later, when the school had closed its door for the last time to make way for a larger church, it became the responsibility of each of the families to do what they could to educate their children. Without paper, pencils or books to help them and with little interest shown by the children, it was a battle they eventually lost.
Nor had the task for the ordinary villagers been helped in any way when one, now long dead, minister had commandeered the last of the island’s books for his own as well as for his family’s private use. With them he and his successors had managed to continue to educate their oldest male offspring for a few more generations and it was now the policy of the ruling family to teach younger brothers the basics of reading and writing alongside their older siblings as well, in case anything should happen to the older brother before he had produced a male heir. That was why, by the time it became the turn of Andrew Champion, the present minister, to be indoctrinated into what was by then the arcane ritual of reading and writing, his father had only been able to pass on to his two sons little more than the bare alphabet. In his turn, Andrew, had already passed on what little he knew to his two sons, Alan, now 19 years old, and to 17 year-old Ian.
Alan had been named after the first minister on the island. Unfortunately, the boy had displayed little interest or talent for learning or for practising the art of reading. Having gleaned so little himself, it was unlikely he would ever be able to pass anything of value on to any offspring he might sire. Ian, the younger brother, had at least managed to grasp to essentials of the system but with no opportunity to practice he too quickly forgot almost everything he had been taught.
It was only the regular storytelling sessions given by the minister each Sunday that reminded the islanders of why they were where they were. With each minister adding his own interpretations and theatrical embellishments to those early events, the story now bore little resemblance to the truth. They now had no idea that a possibly better, more comfortable world existed outside their present, inhospitable island and until God, through his minister, told them otherwise they now firmly believed that what they had was all there was to have. It was little wonder they were all so miserable.

It was prune-faced Rebecca Champion who opened the door to Clive’s urgent knocking and her initial reaction was one of irritation that anyone should dare knock on her door so persistently at so early an hour in the morning. Her attitude to young Clive softened slightly, however, when she gathered from the boy’s almost incoherent babbling that he had found a dead body down on the jetty and off she went in search of her husband. Clive was left looking longingly into, what to him appeared to be, the spacious and orderly interior of the minister’s house.
‘Now, what’s all this about a dead body Mrs Champion tells me you’ve found?’ Andrew boomed when eventually he arrived at the door.
‘It’s Mr Walsh, your reverence,’ Clive blurted out, his eyes rolling in fear and excitement. It wasn’t everyday he spoke to the minister. ‘He’s hung up down there on the jetty just like one of our sheep and he’s dead.’
‘Dead, you say.’ Andrew stroked his beautifully shaped beard. Curiously, in spite of the horror of the moment, the minister’s action made Clive wonder why all the other men on the island had such wild, unruly beards. ‘Are you sure?’
‘He were hanging by his neck and his face were all sort of blotchy, your reverence. Yes, I’m sure he’s dead.’ The youngster nodded his head to emphasise the point.
‘One moment young man while I put my overcoat on. It looks as if it might still be a bit cold out there. I’ll be back in a moment and then you can show me what you’ve found.’
Ponderously, Andrew turned and went back inside leaving young Clive standing on the doorstep for a second time.
Five minutes later Andrew was able to confirm for himself that James Walsh was indeed dead.
‘Right, you can make yourself useful again, my lad. I want you to go on up to Mr Champion in the Factor’s House and ask him to come on down here to me, will you. Then go on up to Mrs Walsh’s cottage and tell her what’s happened. Now, look lively lad.’ With the minister’s words echoing in his ears, and with fear and trembling in his heart, Clive rushed off to do as he was bid.
The Factor’s House was the second biggest house on the island and it was always reserved for the second most senior Champion. Samuel Champion, the minister’s younger brother lived there with his wife and their 21-year-old son, Patrick. If Clive had been worried about knocking on the minister’s door, he was terrified he might have to speak to Sam Champion.
Andrew might be the acknowledged head of the village but it was Sam the villagers feared most. The Champions had always been in charge and it was unthinkable that would ever change. By himself, however, Andrew would not have lasted long. He was lazy and was a comfort-loving dreamer. But while he had his brutish, unpredictable brother by his side, no one thought to usurp his power. Andrew believed he was loved and admired by the villager little realizing that it was fear of Sam that kept the islanders under control.
Sam had always been a bully and was never happier than when he made his neighbours tremble with fear. In theory he was Andrew’s second-in-command but he rarely referred to Andrew before making a decision. It was his job to smooth out problems as they arose or, better still, to make sure they never materialised. Another of his tasks was to make sure the other islanders never gave Andrew cause to question the affection and esteem in which he believed he was held. And while the minister and his family continued to lead lives of ease and plenty in the impoverished community they called home, Andrew was prepared to turn a blind eye to his brother’s excesses.