Carcass’s unmissable foray is to West Point Island, an hour’s boat ride aw’ay, to see its 14,000 pairs of black-browed albatrosses. As I boarded the Condor, boatman Michael Clarke and his wife, Jeanette, were on tenterhooks. “My grandson Stefan has sheared 116 sheep before breakfast,” Jeanette announced. “He needs to do nearly 50 an hour today to break the record [461]”. Sheep shearing is the national sport. They may lose to Greenland at football but Falklanders are premier league at removing fleeces.
The Clarkes later told me that, during the invasion, they’d been confined by Argentine troops in a building in Douglas. When commandos ended their ordeal, they were ecstatic. “We had 14 soldiers at a time sleeping in our living room,” said Jeanette. “I baked them cakes all day and washed their socks.” On West Point, where 45°- angled cliffs crumble into the ocean, I sat among hundreds of utterly trusting albatrosses. They were preening and feeding their furry chicks, already the size of Christmas turkeys, which chirped on potty-shaped nests. Utilising strong gusts, the parents unfurled their 2m wingspans to effortlessly lift off, before returning so close overhead that the draught of their wingbeats ruffled my hair. On the Condor’s return journey, Jeanette was disappointed: Stefan had sheared 433 sheep, missing out on the record.
A bit of Britain – Back in Stanley, a farrago of enduring Britishness exists. Union Jacks rustle over brightly roofed dwellings; the governor’s house has a lawn ripe for tea parties; there are red telephone boxes, and Deano’s Bar offers fish ’n’ chips ’n’ darts. The editorial of the Penguin News leaves you in no doubt of allegiances: ‘Argentine policy on Falklands is doomed says FCO minister’. I wondered how often it had run that headline. Yet it would be lazy to stereotype Stanley as a stagnant throwback. A modern hospital and school have been paid for out of the islands’ own fisheries money.
With zero unemployment and petroleum speculation, there is an influx of labour, particularly from Chile, to supplement an already significant Chilean Falkland community. Opportunities exist for those embracing self-reliance. A policeman told me he’d recently arrived in Stanley seeking a less stressful existence from investment banking in London: “Crime is ridiculously low. I just spent the afternoon searching for a lost sheep.”
On an excursion from Stanley to Volunteer Point, Patrick Watts and I drove past Sapper’s Hill, one of the spartan outcrops where Anglo-Argentine battles raged. Now, 200 new homes are being built here. “It’s important to see signs of progress so when veterans return they’ll see they fought for something,” Patrick said. The war still seemed to simmer in his soul. “Those last days were the worst,” he added. “There was so much shelling, you didn’t know where they were going to fall.” We talked war, nature and radio broadcasting during an off-road journey over boggy moorland with granite-topped hills. At Volunteer Point, the landscape melted into a pearl-white beach that was peopled by kings.
Bearing golden stains on their necks – like treacle slopped down a child’s white bib – the world’s second-largest penguin species obligingly mingled within a circle of stones set aside for penguins; this time it was humans, not menacing skuas, that encircled them, snatching the easiest wildlife photographs imaginable. Over 1,000 pairs raise their chicks here between November and April. Sometimes they leave their safety in numbers to form lines and waddle down to the soft white foreshore. Entering the ocean they trumpet loudly, heads held high. They look proud, defiant – more characteristics shared with the hardy humans who survive at the edge of the earth.
