John North: Treasured Islands

IT'S a mellow Monday evening on Orkney, a day and a half to deadline and the Orcadian's front page still held hopefully. Stuart Laundy essays an impression of a journalistic Micawber, confident that something will turn up.

Prince Edward's visit the following day is expected to merit no more than a front page picture caption. "I've never seen Stuart so happy, so relaxed, as he has been here," says Naila, his Pakistani wife.

"I barred someone for hitting me last night," says the landlady of the Motor Hoos in a spirit of helpfulness.

Stuart, Darlington lad, has been the Orcadian's news and production editor - answerable only to James Miller, the owner - since May. Before that, he was Gulf News chief of staff in Abu Dhabi, 5,000 miles and perhaps 50 degrees to the south.

The paper, 57p every Thursday, has for the last 149 years been published from an office in Kirkwall addressed officially as Hell's Half Acre. For Stuart, it is paradise on earth.

Even the expected appearance of a rival weekly - Orkney Today has been delayed, perhaps Orkney Tomorrow - does nothing to ruffle his tranquility.

"I wouldn't say the relationship with James was exactly Kelvin Mackenzie and Rupert Murdoch but I have a lot of autonomy and it works very well," Stuart says. "This is one of the last great jobs in journalism."

The 17 inhabited islands off the northern Scottish coast have a population of around 23,000 and around 9,000 homes. The Orcadian sells 11,000 copies. "It's very common to see people pick up two," says Stuart, 36. "One just isn't enough."

They are the islands of Andrew Thomson and James Dever, inventors of the stocking suspender, of John Gow - the last British pirate to be hanged - of lovely Lesley Langley, Miss World in the 1960s, and of Cameron Stout, the 32-year-old virgin fisherman and committed Christian who recently won Big Brother.

They called it Cameronmania; still the letters arrive. "I will miss seeing his lovely face on my television," Linda from Malton, North Yorkshire, had written in that week's Orcadian. "He will continue to need the whole armour of God while the hero of the hour," said a correspondent from Penrith. They've had lots of letters like both of those, says Stuart.

That week's front page had led on a Sunday evening "immigration swoop" involving four Asian illegals at the restaurant where Stuart and Naila just happened to be dining at the time.

"We wondered what was taking the meal so long to arrive," he recalls.

"It is not thought that people are being landed on the beaches in droves," added The Orcadian, reassuringly.

Another story recorded that in the previous three months, Orkney police had looked for 14 missing people but just one stolen car. "Force of habit, I may be the only person here who locks my front door," says Stuart, though there's sufficient concern about vandalism in Kirkwall's 15mph main street for the paper to have run its first ever on-line opinion poll on the desirability of closed circuit television.

It's one of his few innovations. "It's like everything else, if you try to impose things they won't work. You have to adapt but the more I see of it, the less I want to change anyway."

The poll brought nearly 400 replies, mainly in favour. "We were delighted at the response," says Stuart.

He lived in Middleton St George and Hurworth Place, attended Hurworth comprehensive - where his mother taught - played village cricket alongside his father, spent a year on the Gateshead Post, three-and-a-half in Blackpool ("like going to university with money") and has also worked on newspapers in South Shields and Sunderland.

Perhaps all that Abu Dhabi and the Orkneys had in common was that both defied expectation. "Visitors thought people in Abu Dhabi would be riding around on camels, just as they're amazed to discover that Kirkwall has a Safeway. It's not the back of beyond and people here have been nothing but welcoming," says Stuart.

He has yet, however, to face an Orcadian winter, when it's light at nine and dark by three and the very opposite of summer, when darkness may last two hours, and Naila supposed that she knew what a bird feels like, awake (if not chirrupping) through all the hours of daylight.

Though he'd never set foot on Orkney until his interview - "I just liked Scotland" - her husband insists he's prepared. "Everyone assumes it's always wild and windy and certainly the fog can come down sometimes, but we've just had one of the finest summers anyone can remember.

"Orkney people seem to take winter in their stride, wonder what all the fuss is about as if they couldn't still get out for a beer. We had a letter about it recently; true character comes out in the winter," he says.

In the Motor Hoos, as if by way of reminder, the music machine persistently plays Christmas in New York.

Other problems include the cost of air travel - Orkney's scheduled services include the two minute flight from Westray to Papa Westray - and the continuing drift of the islands' young people.

"They get their Highers then leave and don't come back," says Stuart. The Old Man of Hoy may be near the average age.

Someone from an obscure Redemptorist monastery on an outer island wrote suggesting that the answer was for Catholics to follow Papal authority on birth control. Stuart headlined it "Have a baby for Orkney."

He and Naila have moved into the former coastguard headquarters in Kirkwall, with views over the harbour and the far and fetching beyond, and have plans for a boat, the more easily to get around the patch. The house has undergone major refurbishment.

"I must have subsidised the summer holiday of every tradesman on Orkney," says Stuart. "I see it as a long term move. We haven't finished the dining room yet."

We've walked round from the Motor Hoos to the Kirkwall Hotel, where the Orcadian scallops and mealie pudding are both off but the Mexican cous-cous is very tasty.

Talk of mutual acquaintance, of County Durham and of cricket overflows on a highly convivial evening on the island of dreams. Next morning, he'd still have a hole on the front page and we'd still be on holiday but - for both of us - that's another story altogether.

SERENE and semi-Scandinavian, Stromness is Orkney's second biggest town. There might be as many as 2,500 huddled there, Cameron Stout now only occasionally among his neighbours.

Hundreds had lined the harbour to welcome him home. Hundreds fewer greeted Prince Edward last Tuesday.

Stromness is also where the ferry departs on the 90 minute crossing to Scrabster, on the Scottish mainland. Thirty miles west of Scrabster, along a coast road with passing places and amid scenery barely surpassable, is the former crofters' village of Bettyhill - and another North-East connection.

Elizabeth Best, who with husband Graham, runs Elizabeth's tea room and craft shop, is a Shildon lass. Her dad and the column's had neighbouring allotments, though Gordon French grew pigs, not potatoes.

"It's Mike," she said at once, though it had been nigh on 40 years and she'd been in ankle socks back then.

Bettyhill is in Sutherland, a spectacular county of unnumbered sheep and approximately 13,500 people. If this is living on the edge, as is supposed, then they - and Stuart Laundy - can hardly fall off.

Both Elizabeth and Graham were primary school heads in Kent, resigned not because they disliked teaching but because they'd discovered northern Scotland - Cape Wrath raging to the west, Dunnett Head dramatically east, whales at the bottom of the garden and a max/min thermometer which last winter never dropped below -1 and this summer caressed 34.

Last week's Northern Times credited the weather for a successful Scottish season, that and the "Madonna factor". The lass was married in Dornoch.

Elizabeth's opens from May to October and on Friday and Saturday evenings throughout the year for the fresh fish and chips for which they have become for many a mile renowned. They are sufficiently acclimatised, however, still to serve deep fried red and white puddings - those great staples of Scottish gastronomy - and haggis, which they eat in Oor Wullie.

"They work incredibly hard," said the chap in the village museum, chiefly devoted to the "clearances" of Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland.

Nearly 50 now, Elizabeth Best recalled St John's Youth Club, Leeholme School and the dear old back room of the Red Lion in Shildon. They don't get back much, don't have the need. "Everything we could ever want is here," says Elizabeth.

WE headed homeward via Achnasheen, midway between Inverness and the Kyle of Lochalsh, where Stockton lass Jill Devonport is postmistress for an immediate population of 44 and the second biggest delivery area in Britain.

We'd first met her this time last year, another Highland fling. Since then they've demolished the old wooden post office ("one Sunday morning, didn't take long") and set her up splendidly in a new one.

She still wears a fleece on duty, though. "You never quite know around here."

Jill, 51, had been landlady of the Laurel in Middlesbrough, of several other North-East pubs and of one in Soho. Her mum would never tell the neighbours it was Soho, only London.

Far from the madding, she now rises six mornings at 5.30, works 12-hour shifts, loves the minutes and hates the midges. Last time she'd reckoned they'd have to take her out of Achnasheen in a box, now she's not so sure. "I think they'll have to leave me where I am."

...and finally, holiday reading included The Maddison Line, the autobiography of former North-East journalist Roy Maddison - an editor at Alnwick and North Shields and well remembered elsewhere.

Roy was a West Hartlepool lad and compositor on the Hartlepool Mail, and recalls how the term "British West Hartlepool" was coined by the comedian Jimmy Edwards on a 1950s radio show called Take It From Here.

Intrigued, we sent a picture postcard to the near-omniscient Ron Hails in Hartlepool, to ascertain what his team thought. Either because he is himself on holiday or (more likely) because he couldn't read a word of it, Ron hasn't been in touch.

Others may have theories of their own. More of British West Hartlepool, and of The Maddison Line, next week.