For instance, Hadfield gives the sea not romance, but aggressive eroticism: “It ploughs, in white, continuous surges, through the cervix of the bay.” And in Hadfield’s early days living in Shetland, before building a career writing and teaching students over Zoom, she gets a disgusting-sounding day job “teasing worm after bouncy worm” out of vast expanses of salmon faeces, equipped only with a pair of tweezers, to determine the health of fish populations. I felt queasy just reading about this, but Hadfield utterly loves it. “I feel like a monk at a painstaking act of devotion,” she writes. “Every worm is a pink question mark after the question, ‘Where am I?’”
A friend of Hadfield’s, Magnie, shows her how to gut a cod. Hadfield flinches at the dead stare of its “human-looking iris”. But Magnie assures her that “all you need is a sharp knife and a clear conscience”, plunging in the blade as blood runs down the kitchen cabinets.
There’s plentiful beauty and humour, too. The book shines with the Shetland vocabulary that has previously given rich inspiration to Hadfield’s poetry: simmer dim (the long Shetland twilight in summer), innadaeks (inside), shaela (the colour of dark frost), stroopy (a teapot’s spout – or a man’s penis, depending on the context). Through all this, Hadfield paints Shetland vividly as a place ever-changing, made by its people, rich in language and stories. And she firmly resists any suggestion that her home is remote: “Is it not strange that we see other places as ‘remote’? Everywhere is the centre for someone, human or otherwise.”
Storm Pegs is a powerful hymn to Shetland and to community, as well as to the awesomeness of nature. This is a bewitching book, tactile and immersive, riven with salt winds, alive with human oddities and loud with the cries of seabirds. Everything glows in the light of Hadfield’s words, from slimy sea molluscs to grand island vistas.
“Do you see what I mean?” Sometimes she addresses the reader directly like this, as if grabbing you by the collar. “You would not believe who lives here,” she writes. “You would not believe what’s around the next bend.”
Charlotte Runcie is the author of Salt on Your Tongue: Women and the Sea. Storm Pegs is published by Picador at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
