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Extracted from Chapter 12
“The wind moved into the north sometime during our third week. Squally showers came whipping down the lough and the dogs hung around the front door of the cabin waiting to be let in. The feral flock of Canada geese massing in black and white on the fringes of the shallow bay opposite became noisy and restless, sensing the change of season and unsure what to do about it. Introduced to Strangford Lough by private collectors over three hundred years ago, they have almost, but not quite, lost their migratory impulse, and each autumn and spring, as their settled existence is comprehensively disrupted by the coming and going of enormous migrant flocks of pale-bellied brent geese on an annual passage from Europe to the Arctic and back, something seems to stir within them, and like a gathering of homesick expatriates who chatter feverishly about home and can’t find their way to the airport, they jostle and bristle and honk themselves into a state of high agitation, martyrs to a vague and atrophied wanderlust – and stay put.
No wonder they get restless. Listening to them, I felt I understood their confusion, and Lynn, to be honest, will probably have shared it.
We retreated inside, where the cabin’s limitations in the face of a cold wind became obvious. A fairly basic construction in the first place, eighty Irish winters and only irregular upkeep had taken their toll. Patchy, horizontal weatherboarding on the outside, an internal skin of vertical tongue and groove lining, whose tongues and grooves didn’t always meet, and between the two a three-inch void without insulation meant that glimpses of the lough were by no means confined to the windows, and simply to use the corridor was to run a gauntlet of cold, and sometimes wet, blasts of sea air. Lynn conducted a quick survey, running her hand along the wall and laughing as she found more and more gaps. She kept saying, ‘Feel this one! Oh no way! Put your hand here!’ And finally, low down under one of the windows, she came upon the mother of all gaps, wide enough to permit a conversation with Rab, who had followed her progress down the cabin and was poking his nose through the wall from the outside.
‘It’s like living in a tent,’ she said; and curiously enough she was echoing the feelings of an unfortunate German missionary, one Otto Schimming, who found himself stranded in the former German colony of Togoland, East Africa, when it was taken over by the British in 1916. He was shipped to England, then to the Isle of Man, as an enemy alien, and on entering an exactly similar hut at Knockaloe Internment Camp late that year, he wrote:
Thin, windy board barracks, no doubt suitable for the Tropics; against the wet, cold climate of the island they offer too little. It seems that the huts were intended for the Tropics ...
Late of East Africa, he adds ruefully, and with a touch of gallows humour: ‘… as, of course, were we prisoners’.
Schimming was one of 23,000 prisoners of war who passed through Knockaloe camp, and all of them lived and slept in sectional huts 30 feet long by 15 feet wide, which were generally butted together three in line and then paired (‘A’ huts and ‘B’ huts) to make one large hut 90 feet by 30 feet capable of taking 180 men.
The cabin on Islandmore, exactly 15 feet wide by 60 feet long without the little extensions at either end, represents two regular War Office pattern POW huts, and who knows, maybe Schimming himself spent his war in it...”