I was 19 in 1975 and living in a bedsit in London. One night, I went to the pub to say farewell to a friend who was heading off to Fair Isle to become assistant warden at the bird observatory. I thought this was a grand idea and told him I’d love to live on Fair Isle.

A few weeks later, he called and told me there was a job going as assistant cook. It seemed like an adventure, so off I set: sleeper train to Aberdeen, the St Clair ferry to Shetland mainland. Then I was told to get the post boat from Grutness Pier to Fair Isle. I waited — and I waited — and finally a post van appeared and the man wound down his window and said: “Oh, it’ll not come today. The weather’s just too bad.”

I found a bed and breakfast and, two days later, the boat came. The journey was horrible — I’ve never been as ill in all my life. When I arrived on Fair Isle, it’s safe to say I was thinking: “What on earth possessed me to do this?”

But it was April and it was beautiful. The wild flowers were beginning to come out and the sea birds were returning. I felt better immediately. I couldn’t cook and I knew nothing about birds, but that was only a minor problem. I still don’t know a lot about birds, but the cooking wasn’t too difficult.

It was a small community. There was the warden, his wife and son. They had a flat in the observatory. Then there was the assistant warden, a seabird assistant, the cook and me. We were all quite young and all had rooms in various parts of the observatory. Mine was sparse — a little like a student dormitory — but it was my refuge.

The observatory is a squat, two-storey building at the north end of the island. They are trying to raise the last bit of money to rebuild it — they’re going to bring it up to date, with rooms with en-suites, which sounds like a terrific luxury to me.

It was an early start. I’d help prepare breakfast then do some housekeeping, make soup and rolls for lunch, then dinner and finally, at the end of the day, cocoa and scones in the common room, where the warden would do a log of which birds had been seen that day.

I always had a few hours off, when I would wander around the island socialising and listening to stories. There was a great old guy called Willie Eunson, who had no family on the island so was always keen to see you. It was island etiquette to give something to a visitor but he didn’t do tea or homebakes, so he’d greet me with: “Come in, Ann, come in. You’ll take a wee dram, won’t you?”

We would drink tots of whisky and he would tell me about the terrible storm that almost wiped out the men in the community. When it subsided the boats washed ashore empty.

It was such a good place for gossip, and writers love gossip because it provides such good material. It was always very windy and dramatic. Every croft had its own generator. So did the observatory, and it was switched off at a certain time; parties carried on by candle and lamp light.

In autumn, the peak migration season, it was always full of people. I loved meeting interesting people from all over the world. Some are still friends.

I married one of them. Tim came to stay in the observatory as a resident birdwatcher. When it closed for winter, I left to go back home to Devon, but we kept in touch. He came back the following year to camp out and do some work on one of the crofts, in return for beer and home-made cooking.

We got engaged in the North Lighthouse, which was still manned in those days by a wild Glaswegian couple. They invited us up for a few drinks. In the way that you do when you’re drunk, they suggested coming to see me in Devon and going on a pub crawl between Bristol and Barnstaple.

I may have been drunk but I knew this was a foolish idea, so I said: “Tell you what, why don’t you just come for the wedding.” Tim looked at me in a startled manner and said: “Is that a proposal?” I made him propose to me properly the next day when we were hay-making. It was very romantic.

That, and the fact that my breakthrough book, Raven Black, was set on Shetland, means it’s always going to mean a huge deal to me, and Fair Isle in particular. I had great fun writing the last book in the quartet because it’s set on Fair Isle. It’s been easy to write because I feel I know the place so well.

My daughter, Ruth, worked as a child-minder for the present warden. She adored it, but it’s a different place now — they have mobile phones and the internet. It doesn’t seem as remote as when I was there — but I liked it just the way it was.

White Nights, part of the Shetland Quartet, is published by Pan Macmillan

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