My Journey Home : Memoirs of a Shetland Exile

Pottinger, James A2021

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Summary

"You should write a book", says a friend. Approaching 86 years of age that's just what James Pottinger decided to do. His travels from his birthplace in a croft house in pre-war Burra have taken him full circle and he is "home" again, after a career in engineering, the merchant navy, sales and management. This gentle memoir reflects the vast difference in lifestyles and opportunities for a youngster born in modest circumstances then and those prevailing today. Educated at Hamnavoe school and then the Lerwick Central Public School, his first job was as a builders labourer in Burra. Seeking a career meant leaving home and taking on a marine engineering apprenticeship in Greenock before sailing as an engineer in the last gasp of the "great" British merchant marine. Then followed marriage, work in Scandinavia and Holland throughout the oil era and, eventually, a happy retirement in Aberdeen. A keen artisit, draughtsman and boating enthusiast James decided after the death of his wife, to return to Shetland and "with inevitable mortality drawing ever nearer", as he puts it, finally records his "journey home."