Where the World Ends - Geraldine McCaughrean's second Carnegie winner

In an interview that you can watch on her website Geraldine McCaughrean described the origin of her book Where the World Ends which won the Carnegie Medal in 2018. Her daughter had visited St Kilda and returned with a head full of anecdotes about the island archipelago, the most remote in the British Isles. One of those anecdotes concerned something that happened in 1727. A small party of boys and men had crossed from the main island, Hirta, to a sea stack called Stac an Armin which is also known as the Warrior Stac, to catch wild fowl. They were ferried across on the island's only boat and expected to be picked up again after three weeks or so. But no one came, and they were marooned there for nine months with no idea why the boat had not returned to take them home.

In fact, as Geraldine McCaughrean says in the interview, this anecdote consisted of only two sentences. No one knows what actually happened on that entirely barren spike of rock during those nine months, other than that eight boys and three men were marooned there and survived. And out of those two sentences and the imagination of the writer came this extraordinary book.

Stephen Hodges / Stac an Armin / 

CC BY-SA 2.0

You can see from the photograph that this is not a comfortable place to spend nine months. The main island of Hirta is just visible in the distance beyond the lumpy shape of Stac Li. It's only four miles away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the planet as far as the marooned boys were concerned. However, the St Kildans were uniquely well-equipped to survive in a place like this. For a start, they were accustomed to live on birds. Here's the book's first sentence:

'His mother gave him a new pair of socks, a puffin to eat on the voyage, and a kiss on the cheek.'

As first sentences go I think that's right up there with Rose Macaulay's opening to The Towers of Trebizond:

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return to High Mass."

I suppose that opening sentence makes sure that anyone who's likely to be upset by the entirely practical attitude of the islanders to birds will not read much further. If they do they will discover that the whole purpose of the expedition to Stac an Armin is to kill as many puffins, gannets, gannet babies (known as gugas), storm petrels and fulmars as possible. This is how the islanders live. The birds are both the staple of the islanders' diet and a valuable trading commodity - the only one they have. This leads to some truly striking images, such as a cave lit entirely by the light from candles made from headless storm petrels with the oil in their stomachs burning.

The re-creation of life on the sea stack is so detailed and realistic that it's hard to believe that the author has never been anywhere near St Kilda, but Geraldine McCaughrean is someone who's accustomed to travel in her imagination, who can turn the facts of the islanders' lives as reported in books into something vividly real, and with that background established, her imagination goes to work on the events.

When a group of boys is marooned on an island the reader naturally thinks of Lord of the Flies, and Where the World Ends was originally going to be a sort of counterpoint to that earlier novel, where the boys from St Kilda would create an island Utopia. What we ended up with is something rather easier to believe in - not the complete breakdown of civilised values that happens in Lord of the Flies, but a kind of intensification of character as the survivors face their own demons and try to deal with the enmities and conflicts and friendships that inevitably develop in such a situation.

The children in Lord of the Flies were children as we would recognise them today, accustomed to all the trappings of civilisation—shops, comfy beds, clean clothes, baths and showers . . . The boys in this story, growing up on St Kilda in the early part of the 18th century are actually young men. They've passed the initiation test that allows them to go birding on the cliffs, walking out onto an exposed splinter of rock and bending down to touch their toes. This birding is hard and dangerous work, and while the boys may be physically young, and still missing their mothers and dogs and homes, they are not like the children we know today. They work to stay alive, both back on Hirta and here on Stac an Armin. But both men and boys share one childlike attribute. They have an absolute, literal belief in God and heaven and angels, and in the words of the Bible, and they are ready to believe almost any well-told story. Little Euan, 'soulful, solemn little Euan whose voice had not broken yet, and who said colours had tastes, and that holy words were magic,' has what seems to be a kind of fit one evening. He cries out that he knows what has happened, 'they are all gone up.' And everyone, men and boys alike, is prepared to at least half-believe him. He is saying that the last day has come, the day of judgement, and the angels have taken up everyone in the world, everyone on Hirta, but have been unable to find the birders on the barren sea stack so they have been left behind. After all, what else could have happened?

The central character in this book is Quilliam, or Quill. A name like a bird and feet like a bird's feet—as with all the islanders his feet are adapted to climbing the cliffs. In so many ways the St Kildans are like the birds that keep them alive, and Quill has a strange, half mystical connection with a great auk (garefowl) which frequents the rocks. When, in one of the book's many dramatic scenes, Quill falls from a cliff while attempting to rescue Mr Farriss, the depressed and suicidal schoolmaster,  Geraldine McCaughrean says this:

'Every Kilda man is part bird, because he knows how it feels to plummet out of the sky towards the brightness of the sea. He has seen it in his imagination a thousand times over. He has known friends and kin who spent the last moments of their lives making that plunge.'

Quill is a storyteller. He has words, and he has acquired more words from a visitor to Hirta, Murdina Galloway, the beautiful niece of Mr Farriss. She has told him stories of a world with trees. She has sung 'lullabies and laments and love songs' that 'sent shudders through the minister'. 'She even carried words around with her - there were never fewer than two books in her pockets.' Quill is, of course, in love with her, and his visions of her support him in his isolation. Quill's stories support the other boys, but he's cast out of the upper cave by Col Cane, the island's sexton and Minister's assistant who has appointed himself as a stand-in Minister on the fowling expedition. Quill is accused of consorting with a sea-witch by the sea's edge. The 'witch' was the great auk. Quill takes shelter in the lower cave (there's not much shelter there) and one by one the other boys secretly defy Col Cane for the sake of Quill's stories.

Thirty years before this book won the Carnegie, Geraldine McCaughrean had won with A Pack of Lies in 1988. That book, too, was about the power of stories and was a kind of sampler of different literary styles—a cleverly linked collection of short stories. In Where the World Ends we have another book about the power and importance of stories, but this time those stories are woven seamlessly into a larger narrative. They are part of that narrative and they comment on it. There are many layers of meaning here—and just as many sources of reading pleasure because this book is so beautifully written. The combination of action and vivid description is wonderful:

'No one with a morsel of sense moves about the cliffs at night. But Quill did. He slid and scrambled downwards, hoping to meet Farriss or Don and plead for help. But they were nowhere in sight. The sky was seeded with birds - some furtive, fearful breed that only flew home after sunset. They sped inshore so fast that they seemed to hurl themselves into extinction against the solid rock.'

I opened the book at random to choose that quote. I could have opened it to any page and found something just as good. I love that reference to extinction that just helps to remind us that the great auk that is so lovingly depicted in this book will be extinct not much more than a hundred years later.

Mike Pennington / Great Auk
 (Pinguinis impennis) specimen, 
Kelvingrove, Glasgow / 

CC BY-SA 2.0

There's only one previous Carnegie winner who wrote anything comparable to this, and that's William Mayne. I mention him here, despite his ultimate disgrace and imprisonment, because I see so many echoes of his work in Geraldine McCaughrean's. He set his stories in far-flung places, as well as in his native Yorkshire, and wasn't afraid to create with his imagination places and societies he had never seen himself. He wrote books that were idiosyncratic and sometimes difficult, but always beautifully written. And his books were hugely influential on children's literature, especially in the UK. It's not Mayne's Carnegie winner A Grass Rope that is closest in feel to what Geraldine McCaughrean has done here. I'm thinking more of stories of survival like Antar and the Eagles, where a small boy is abducted by eagles and brought up by them, or Drift, where a boy wanders away from a settlement in North America and thinks he's being pursued by Native Americans, who are really trying to keep him safe.

But where William Mayne could be difficult, Geraldine McCaughrean is most definitely not. Where the World Ends is a tremendously readable adventure story that transports the reader to a world most will never experience directly. It has tragedy and humour, thrills and moments of silent meditation. There is far more in it than anyone will pick up on a single reading. I've just read it twice and I will certainly read it again. This is one of the best of the many Carnegie winners and deserves to be considered a classic of children's literature.

I love gannets. There isn't much that's more thrilling than watching gannets fishing, diving into there sea at 100kph. But recently avian flu has been causing terrible losses in gannetries around Scotland. I've just been reading Kathleen Jamie's new book, Cairn, which I recommend. Well, I'd recommend anything she's written. Here's part of a piece about the Bass Rock, 'the greatest gannetry on earth.'

'Last winter it (avian influenza) was on the Solway, killing migrant geese. This year it hit the Bass at peak breeding time. There is drone footage of gannets lying dead on their nests, next to chicks and partners. They're hanging dead from the cliffs, floating dead on the water. They're washing up dead on the beaches, all down the coast. Not only the Bass, but the other gannetries too: Noss and Hermaness, Sula Sgeir, Stac Li and Stac an Armin, Ailsa Craig. These colonies are ancient - who knows when they were established.' 

That was in 2022. There are some signs that the colonies may be starting to recover, but it's too soon to tell. Back in 1727 those men and boys thought the birds were provided by God for their use. Like the herring they could be harvested for ever and they'd keep coming back. Now we know different. And the devastation of those gannet colonies provides a clue to what happened on St Kilda three centuries ago. The population there recovered, but life became impossible in the twentieth century and the last St Kildans left the island in 1930. Here to end are some of Scotland's gannetries. Last summer we also visited a gannetry in Brittany where we learnt the French name for these birds— Fou de Basson.

The Bass Rock
(zoom to see a sky full of gannets
and the stairway to the lighthouse)

Fair Isle

Hermaness

Powell and Pressburger made a movie based on the evacuation of St Kilda. It's called The Edge of the World and was filmed on the island of Foula in 1936. Powell had been dreaming of making this film since he'd first heard of the evacuation five years before but, having secured the funding to make the film, he was denied permission to film on St Kilda. Foula is 200 miles northeast of St Kilda, and west of Shetland. It's very remote, but is still inhabited today. You can watch a great little documentary about the making of the film for free on BFI here. BFI also have a free film of gannets feeding in Lerwick harbour in 1946. It's a must for gannet lovers! The Edge of the World is also on BFI but you need a subscription to watch it.

Originally published on ABBA July 2024