Cold, lonely, one choccie a day: My battle to write a book at the edge of the world

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MEMOIR

BLEAKER HOUSE 

by Nell Stevens (Picador £12.99)

When 27-year-old Nell Stevens told her friends that she was going alone to a remote island in the Falklands to write a novel, she got a mixed response.

A stressed-out lawyer envied the peace and quiet: ‘You can do yoga.’ An actor saw an opportunity to ‘really get to know yourself’. Then a primary school teacher downed her wine, looked Stevens squarely in the eye and said: ‘It’s going to be f***ing horrible. It will be cold and you won’t have enough to eat. You got depressed house-sitting alone in Wales for a week.’

Whistling in the wind: Nell Stevens

Like so many of us, Stevens had always believed she had a book in her. She sent her first attempt to an agent at the age of 12 and held on to the ambition through a series of unrewarding office jobs in London. But there were two problems: she didn’t know what to write about, and she was constantly distracted by life. After a ‘boring’ childhood in Oxford, she consequently spent her 20s ‘in a frantic and masochistic quest for good material’. But each of her adventures fizzled out, just like the plots of her novels.

She went to the Israeli border to teach English to Palestinian refugees and ended up having to be rescued when war broke out. She threw herself into romance with a musician, but he turned out to be a depressive who watched TV all day.

She advertised herself as a prostitute online to research character ideas and even met up with one potential client in a coffee shop, but failed to turn the sad and cliched results into fiction. So her strange voyage to the Falklands felt like a last‑ditch attempt.

It came out of a creative writing course at Boston University, which required participants to travel in the final three months. Fellow students planned to sip coffee in Brittany or cocktails in Havana.

But Stevens became fixated on the romantic solitude of a rented house on the ominously named Bleaker Island, just ‘eight miles square of mud and rock’ and unpeopled through much of the winter.

She told her professor she wanted to experience the isolation of this ‘tiny colony of sheep farmers, most of whom self-identify as British, which has existed 8,000 miles from the UK for the past 200 years’ and planned to spin a yarn in which a young Englishman called Ollie would travel there in search of his father.

But Stevens never made anything of her novel and has, instead, produced a quirky memoir about her time on the island. The practicalities alone are fascinating. She had to take all her food rations with her on the tiny plane: powdered soup, granola bars, and one Ferrero Rocher chocolate per night.

Over the course of her 41-day stay she planned to ‘consume a total of 44,485 calories and convert them into one 90,000-word novel’.

BLEAKER HOUSE by Nell Stevens (Picador £12.99)

But instead of eating and writing, she walked and whinged.

Without the internet she felt suffocated. Into the space left by social media flooded dark thoughts. Is the patch of dry skin on her face cancer? Will a blade come whirling off a wind turbine and decapitate her? Has someone poisoned her coffee?

Used to salon treatments at home, on Bleaker she didn’t shave her legs or moisturise her feet. She lost weight, bit her nails and gained freckles. It felt like she was ‘falling back into’ herself, looking younger each day.

But she learned this was not a truer version of herself, simply a different one. And her cracked heels began to hurt.

Setting out her laptop on the coffee table of a ‘sunroom’ pelted with hail, she felt like a fraud. The snatches of novel she wrote were flatter than the scenery.

Yet, against the odds, Stevens made me want to visit Bleaker, with its beached whale skeletons, ‘miserable’ penguins and shearing sheds. She certainly made a lonely stomp through desolate scenery sound more fun than facing a blank page and a blinking cursor.

She may not have written the novel of her dreams, but the book she has produced will resonate with anyone who has shared her ambitions. It’s comforting to know that even without any of the distractions of normal life, even at the ends of the Earth, you can still end up whistling in the wind.