Until Rosanne Alexander met her boyfriend, Mike, she had never heard of Skomer. She was eighteen years old, newly enrolled at college and hadn’t seen much of the world. Two years later, in 1976, Mike was offered the job of nature warden on this tiny, uninhabited island off the coast of Pembrokeshire – an island which had cast a spell on him as a young boy. The couple accepted the post, married quickly (a prerequisite for the job), and packed their belongings.
     Waterfalls of Stars is an intimate and emotive account of a decade living in this wild, profoundly isolated place where the outside world intrudes only in the form of crackling voice on Radio 4. Here there is no TV, electricity, phone or washing machine.Visitors arrive only in the Summer season and in the Winter the island can be cut off for months.
     Would-be castaways might be disappointed, however, to realise that this is not a romantic story about young love and an island paradise. ‘I didn’t enjoy getting married,’ Alexander states bluntly about her wedding day, and their first attempt to cross over to the island is aborted due to bad weather. This is a treacherous stretch of water. Things have got off to a rocky start.
     As they finally settle down to their new life together, the couple soon run out of fresh food. Alexander starts to develop ‘raging food cravings’ as they embark on a ‘hopelessly unhealthy diet’ made up of large quantities of tinned meat and powdered potato – hardly the stuff that castaway fantasies are made of. Moreover, we are given stress-inducing accounts of kitchen windows being smashed by Atlantic storms, numerous disasters out at sea (the author never overcomes her fear of boating), a near-death experience while fixing a roof, and tragically, a corpse being washed up onto the beach.
     Not many marriages would survive such a test. ‘It had all the ingredients for a bitter ending,’ the author admits. Yet she turns out to be a true stoic, and the experience of living on the edge of the world, with the island as their ‘common cause’, brings the couple closer. Also, they are less isolated than we might first think; Skomer, in one sense, is not uninhabited. The island is teeming with life: birds, seals, and small mammals scurrying around in the undergrowth, all of which are a source of fascination, comfort and companionship to Alexander.
     We learn about the Manx shearwater, a quarter of whose global population breeds on Skomer, and who create a secretive network of burrows underneath the soil. We read about the seals and how a mother will lie by her stillborn pup for days in a gesture of maternal love. Alexander observes these animals obsessively, dangling over ledges and scrambling down cliffs to get a better view. Showing genuine physical courage, she becomes absorbed into their world. Sometimes she gives the seals names, taking note of their unique characteristics and temperaments. The boundaries between human and non-human life start to dissolve. On being surrounded by a hail of gannets out at sea, she writes: ‘It felt as though we had found the hidden gateway that allowed us to cross their barriers and enter their domain.’
     It is hugely distressing to read about the impact of two oil spills on the island, and the cruelly drawn-out deaths of the birds and seals whom we have come to know. The author feels a ‘helpless rage’ in the aftermath of the disasters, and in these chapters she writes with a raw intensity which brought tears to my eyes.
     She writes with lyricism, too. As an artist she is attuned to the nuances of colour and light, and her descriptions are transporting. She is brilliant also at capturing birdsong. Life on the busy, noisy mainland becomes irrelevant to her and the thought of returning to it increasingly painful. ‘Our lives had become very small,’ she observes. ‘Everything we knew was confined within a little circle of sea. But far from being dull, it all mattered so much more.’
     While Waterfalls of Stars is not perfect, its sentences often clogged with adjectives and adverbs, it is impossible not to be swept along by Alexander’s sense of awe at the natural world and her compassion for Skomer’s inhabitants. To read about the couple’s decision to leave the island after ten years is heart-wrenching. By the end of the book, I had also come under its spell, and was dreaming of being on a cliff top at the edge of the Atlantic, looking out to sea.

I have been fascinated by the Pembrokeshire islands since going on a field trip to Skokholm as a schoolboy, so I was delighted to be given this book to review. Delighted, but a little apprehensive that it would not be worthy of the jewel-like, other-worldly dream-place that is Skomer. After all, much has been written before, notably by R.M. Lockley, whose works are classics of their genre. On receipt of the book I was also somewhat daunted by its format of small-font, closely-spaced text running to about 350 pages. I need not have worried. What we have here is a beautifully written, highly personal account of a young woman's life-changing ten years on a small island with just one companion. There is something deeply moving about this seemingly timid and unassuming young woman taking the enormous step of incarceration on a small island with her barely-known husband. This takes the book beyond nature writing into an almost anthropological investigation into the workings of the human spirit. 

Having said that, it is, indeed, nature writing of a high order: truthful, compelling and at the same time clearly expressed with modestly understated poesy. Lucid and original description enables an appreciation of this jewel of an island. Rosanne Alexander's metaphors are well thought out and pleasingly avoid the banal and the obvious. There is a good mix of natural history and reflective introspection, and the reader quickly warms to the bold and courageous ways in which she adapts to her unique circumstances, rather like the animals with which she shares her situation. 

There is no shortage of drama. Skomer is only a few miles off the Pembrokeshire coast, but the seas are extremely fickle and treacherous. There are many days when it is impossible for boats to cross the sound, and the inhabitants (in the winter just Rosanne and Mike) can be stuck on the island for weeks on end. They are dependent on their own resources and resilience. Some of the storms are truly ferocious, and the author describes them with admirable force, and sometimes terror. 

In the ten years that they were there, they had to cope with two major oil-spills from tankers in the Irish Sea. These tragic events were dealt with by superhuman efforts from a team of both naturalists, the RAF and workers from the oil industry, and Alexander covers the process with thoughtful compassion as well as seething anger at the despoliation of her once pristine adopted home. 

There are many lyrical moments when the author revels in the serenity and beauty of her surroundings. In describing the phosphorescent autumn sea she says, ‘it all added to the feeling that Skomer had almost endless layers to be unravelled, more than anywhere I had ever known’. She has unravelled many of these layers, and will leave readers longing to experience the island for themselves, as well as admiring the dedicated and resourceful people who look after it for us. 

‘Even now, the slightest thing can take me back: the way the sunlight catches in the turn of the wave or a distant bird call, half-heard, snagged in the breeze. Then, in that moment between eye-blinks, I am there on a cliff top at the edge of the Atlantic’.

And so am I. Take the book in your hand and it is like setting off across the choppy sound in a small boat to Skomer. I’m talking about the front cover of course. A storm is brewing: the orange blue colour of an angry sky juxtaposes with an aquamarine hope in the top right-hand corner; these colours are intensified by a warm paradise sun, peeping just beyond the spine. This is what you see when you first take Waterfall of Stars into your hand. The island is there too; it looks like a melancholic whale, trailing through the waves – a living creature rather than some piece of rock. As I read this lyrical account of the Alexanders’ sojourn, it struck me how words still transport us, and how we all subliminally crave for a decade on a lonely, uninhabited island on the edge of the Atlantic.

Islands are complex places. They are both microcosms of mainland life and alternative spaces for new beginnings. The book does have that frontier feel to it. Inside their basic refuge, Radio 4 is like a flickering reminder of home. There are Wordsworthian instances where the dark island reveals its huge form which sometimes frightens the author. The scream of a rabbit caught by a buzzard, or the wind blowing across the isthmus become significant events. We soon realise that the island, like a pagan deity, gives and takes away. It provides a panorama of colour and light as well as the darkness that is felt by the reader. It gives off a melody – sometimes cacophony, sometimes not – of Puffins, Shearwaters, and Kittiwakes. These birds use Skomer as a home, or as a spring board to other places, a breeding ground, or possibly, even a holiday destination. But like the Alexanders, we cannot fly away and we stay when things take the turn for the worst. Skomer’s beaches are a haven for the seals before turning into hell when an oil spill laps the island’s shore. Even Skomer cannot escape the black force that drives the human machine. The disintegrating cliff edges are a poignant reminder that these places are rare and that they are threatened…

The sea is as complex as the island. It attacks Skomer on a daily basis but, in a strange way, it also acts as its shield and defender. The same waves that wound the seals during the oil spill had wooed Rosanne when she first arrived:

It was impossible to enter the water there without feeling the breath snag in the back of my throat and thinking ‘never again’, but its appearance was so limpidly enticing that I fell victim to its temptations again and again. Then, as the first sensation of shock subsided, I was won over. I became lost in the fascination of that different world, following my ghostly pale hands as they parted a trail through the shuddering fronds of seaweed.

This sensual image is just one of many that she paints for us as she is ‘lost in the fascination’ of these new worlds. I could not eradicate that image from my mind for days. I envied that experience. It triggered some distant memory in my own mind when I went snorkelling as a child. It was either the ‘ghostly pale hands’ or the seaweed trails that did it. It is Alexander the artist that is swimming here. This is not the first Welsh island to draw the gaze of a literary painter. Brenda Chamberlain lived on Bardsey and then there was David Jones, who was drawn to the rocks of Caldey with his sacramental gaze. Rosanne Alexander has added Skomer to that Welsh portfolio of island works. The Alexanders painted during their sojourn and I was surprised, at first, when she did not include any illustrations, paintings, or photographs in the book. Perhaps this is an experiment with words where the sonic palette of imagined bird calls, rich adjectives, and personal memoir portrays the island in much clearer and realistic hues. But I still would have liked some pictures.

Alexander’s writing is captivating. It is experiential, fresh, and alive, reflecting the peripheral environment where this book was born. Perhaps this is why travel writing, or at least books about place, remain as popular as ever. They give us a dose of fresh air which gives us a craving for more and more and we are not satisfied until we step outside and find something worth writing about.

It is ‘fresh’ in other ways as well. Like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (which was written from the perspective of his younger self), Alexander writes with that same youthful voice. The experiences are new to her and she describes them in a way which gives us newcomers the same insight that she had when she landed on the island:

Everything was a first; nothing was lost in the haze of routine.

She’s honest. Even the extensive use of adjectives is part of the honeymooned lexicon which makes this story real. She does not shy away from describing the frustrations which add to the colourful tapestry of marriage. There is much joy too and an Adam and Eve feel to the narrative; a man and a woman, isolation, a beautiful but dangerous habitat, and animals galore. My favourite has to be Wellington the goat who causes them to fall now and again! The animals are never over-anthropomorphised, but we do feel that we know and care for them. The book involves us and we are as hungry as they are when they run out of food. I was heart wrenchingly gutted when the precious pear pudding was ruined or when a bird flew in through the window, leaving shards of glass in the freshly cooked pies.

The structure of the book was always going to be tricky. How does one sum up ten years in three hundred pages? I was sceptical at the beginning but I was soon broken into the rhythms of the island. The structure becomes less important. These are, after all, the moments ‘between eye-blinks’ and memories should never be restricted by the chapters and divisions of mainland life which run with Filofax accuracy.

By the end of the book, I was both ready and unready to leave Skomer. Maybe that’s what Adam and Eve felt as they left the confines of Eden? Anyhow, the reader should not rush through this experience. Stay in Skomer for a while, close your eyes, and breathe the fresh air of the Atlantic.