John o'Groats, Scotland: PoW Wow!

July 25, 2015

Scapa Flow, once full of warships. It gave me a shiver to see it

LIKE most sons, I wish I'd spoken more to my father. It was decades after his death that I discovered the astonishing things he'd done in the war. He never spoke about it, avoided contact with other old sailors. Relatives couldn't understand how he could live only a street from the British Legion and its cheap beer and yet never go.

Now, I understand. There was more to my father than I could have guessed. This gentle man, self-effacing man, steadfast in his support for the downtrodden. How could he have done all that?

Well, for much of the war he was based here, in a huge natural harbour called Scapa Flow. He detested it. There wasn't a man in the Navy who felt otherwise. It was cold, bleak and remote. There was nothing to do. Nothing.

From there he sailed on more convoys than any man could reasonably survive. He sailed in a destroyer the size of an estuary ferry on almost all the Murmansk and Malta convoys. He sailed on Atlantic convoys. Statistics said he should never have lived. Let alone survive all the other things he was ordered to do as well.

And so, for the first time, today I gazed at Scapa Flow. It was an odd feeling, calm, banal but unnerving at the same time. I looked at it across the concrete blocks dumped there, to seal the access through the islands through which a U-boat had sailed in 1939 and sunk a battleship. You may remember the ship's bell was in the cathedral at Kirkwall.

The causeways had roads added after the war and made escape from the islands easier

They laid roads on the concrete barriers after the war and for the first time people who lived on the islands could escape them without sailing.

But there were more than British servicemen here. The little island of Lambholm was a prison for captured Italians. They must have found it even more miserable. When Churchill demanded causeways, the Italians did the donkey work for the engineering company, Balfour Beatty.

Lambholm chapel, astonishing beauty from two metal huts

Then Italy strung up Mussolini. Men once prisoners were now allies. They had freedom and they were paid properly. The commandant gave them permission to build a chapel, allowing them two Nissen huts.

They were to find for themselves everything they needed. So they used wood from a wrecked ship to make a tabernacle. They fashioned scrap metal into a rod-screen and into the gates enclosing the sanctuary. They lined one end with plasterboard to make a sanctuary, and they made an altar, altar rail and holy water stoop from concrete.

The walls aren't tiled. They had no tiles. So they painted them instead

They worked on and on, creating a beauty now visited by thousands of people a year. But the barriers had moved even faster. When the blockades were ready, the prisoners were shipped off in September 1944. The chapel had been used for only months.

Nothing remains of Camp 60 now except those extraordinary huts. The Italian flag flies permanently outside. Domenico Chicocchetti, the artist and sculptor who found the workers and designed the project, stayed to finish the work. Then he vanished and was found only with the help of an appeal on the BBC.

We rode on, by way of a hilly rural road, to the ferry port. On the way, we interrupted a sturdy woman and an even heftier man sheering sheep. We'd seen defrocked lambs as we rode. Then we found the cause.

"You're not disturbing us," the woman consoled us. I think she was proud that others took an interest. "I had a busload stop earlier on. Any more and I'll have to start wearing make-up."

We watched the few minutes it took to denude a sheep. One was kept permanently in a tiny pen at the top of a ramp.

Why?

"Because sheep always follow each other. So you put one up there and the others will follow."

She said she received £1.20 a fleece from the British Wool Board. She said it with sadness.

"There's not much left for us farmers. We're hoping to send some to Shetland, because we think they'll pay better."

She had 2 000 yoes, as she pronounced it. So work out what she earns in return for buying and then keeping sheep, feeding them, maintaining the fields, paying vets' fees, paying a sheerer, insurance and maintaining a house and office. So there wouldn't be much left, as she said, even with any subsidies. And it's a tough climate in which to do it, far from the sunny pastures of Australia and New Zealand.

"When you think what you pay for a sweater and then see how little we farmers get out of it, it makes you think, doesn't it?"

Today's ride: 46 km (29 miles)
Total: 2,639 km (1,639 miles)

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