Read A Book of Death and Fish Online
Authors: Ian Stephen
The olman could never do much damage to anyone because he always had his doubts. I think he cherished them, really, as proof he was still human after a certain six years. So it couldn’t really have all been Yorkshire puddings baking over petrol fires, his personal history of World War Two. He was a restless body, for as long as I can remember. You might expect that of a man who was trapped in a confined space, not once but twice in his lifetime.
One day, in my room in the SY flat owned by the Mill, all the revolutionaries were doing sweet FA as usual. This was us settling back in the hometown after us all getting disorientated in the Central Belt. Kenny F, me and the boys did nothing much except learn to smoke and wear out vinyl discs, in a dark room, shutting the curtains on the decent weather outside. The cove himself came in to us with a tray of coffee. He was more or less his own boss since we moved back to the Island. He was under contract to design for new markets but trusted to do it his way, like Frank Sinatra. In fact he was quite bloody capable of bursting into that song just to embarrass me in front of the mates. This time he dropped a line in our direction.
‘Surprised to see any of yous in here when there’s big money to be made down the hoil.’
The Klondykers. We hadn’t heard the Norskis were back? Pound an hour, here we come. That was two full-price LPs for the dawn till dusk shift.
‘No, better than that. Two-fifty, or maybe it was up to three quid now. But nobody could stand more than a couple of hours of that. No, not
the herring. A Geest boat. Banana-carrier. The refrigeration’s gone bust and the hold’s stinking. It’s got to get cleared. They’re issuing masks and everything.’
We were off. Searched both Number One and Number Two piers. Nothing to see. The coal boat was in, that was about the lot. We took another looksee before we could admit to ourselves he’d hooked us. A bloody banana boat, how the hell had we bought that dummy? The gang came back, livid, to find him trying to continue being deadpan. Giving it up and just falling apart. But he’d a hell of a laugh when he got going. Big laugh for a slightly built guy. A tall man but still, nothing much of him.
Back further than that. Fast rewind. Before we left the Island in the first place. We played war most of the time, back in the cul-de-sac. Think we were playing it when I fell from the rafters at the second storey of brick houses, going up fast in the field behind us. OK, there was blood then and it could have been bad. Must have looked bad. Someone saw me and screamed. No, don’t start, I wasn’t that bad looking a kid. Kirsty was standing out with the older coves in the street. She led me by the hand to our own house. Just needed a clean up. Herself and the olaid just gently wiped the blood away. Nothing needed stitching. Just as well, I was thinking of the sewing machine when they said that. It looked like a normal one but they’d got an electric motor fixed to it now.
Could have been it, I suppose, if I’d made the wrong landing. But most of the time you never came close to the thing. Death, I mean.
War games got exciting again when the Bay of Pigs was on. The themes changed from Second to Third World War. But Sputniks made stronger pictures than missiles. You couldn’t get them yet in Airfix kits, but the American lot, Revell, they had missile models. Andra had given me a set, one holiday. Jeeps and U.S. personnel guarding a missile installation.
About that time I used to go to the slaughterhouse, round the corner, to get the innards of a sheep so my grannie could make
marag
– black and white puddings. These streets still had village ways then. My mother – she was in hospital. The Broch stomach had bothered her for years and she was having a big chunk of it removed. She was home in a week or two, taking it easy for a short time. The operation seemed to work.
We had plenty of visitors. Never heard so many war stories from the olman and my uncle Andra, who’d got a flight over. They hit it off. Yarns.
There were stolen geese and a scrawny turkey that needed fattening. A sack of almonds that was worth a fortune if they could find a buyer. Petrol traded for anything. Plenty of petrol. Trouble was, the British Army used more petrol when it was static. The brass were getting suspicious.
What the hell do I know? It was all
Commando
comics to me. I was born ten years to the day after that rat took to his bunker. That’s an insult to rats and I retract it. The great orator gone shabby.
That wasn’t the end of it. Not by a long way. A lot of people got killed after that. What about Japan? And Andra had a brother killed when his Jeep fell off a bridge when the whole show was over.
One day, my Lewis uncle, Ruaraidh, called by with a dram in him and the yarns with his brother really did get going. But they stopped, mid-flight. The olman asked why they had to keep doing this, just telling the funny stories. Nothing about the rest of it. Shivering under trucks. The sound of shells, falling close.
Now fast-back to later summer holidays, 1968. When the olman was putting in every hour of the day to keep us in a bungalow on a hungry hill in the Central Belt. And my mother was working and worrying about money. They were only too happy when I wanted to be packed back to the Island for the whole of the holidays.
So I was billeted with Ruaraidh and Sheena. Getting spoiled rotten. They didn’t have a family of their own. I’d come back early from Goat Island because I’d caught a sea trout instead of a mackerel. I didn’t want that sea silver to get cracked and dry.
He was day-off, down town. She was working in the morning, a history teacher at the Nic, because school was to start for the kids in a couple of days. She came home to make a late lunch. She didn’t believe me when I told her about all the tanks on the news. Rolling, one after another. The downfall of Dub
č
ek. A young guy setting himself on fire. With petrol.
Ruaraidh came back from the garage, scrubbed down and sat, dazed, in the armchair, still in his overalls. This was the man who told me stories with shadows and big laughs and the big laughs always won, in the end.
Jan Palach died a public death. A martyr who knows he’s going to heaven, that could have a shade of self-interest, he said. But Jan’s act was the ultimate thing one young guy could do against all that armour. The message went out, with some time-delays, out over continental Europe. Out across the North Sea.
Over Aberdeen and West Road in The Broch and across the Grampians and bouncing across the Minch. It got picked up at the remote aerials up from the new landfill site that was still called the òtrach. Only for us, grown in the town, it was now the okeroch. Part of our English. Then these signals were routed by cables. Into houses all over town.
God, I loved Ruaraidh and Sheena. But I never told them or showed them. Like the famous Lewisman who loved his wife so much that he very nearly told her. Can’t make amends for that to either of them now, anymore than I can ask my olman more about who he was. Or about when he was trapped in that tank. How it felt when he saw sky over him again.
Fast forward now. We’re all back on the Island. It was Ruaraidh who told me my father was gone. He didn’t tell me exactly. Just shook my hand, clasped me really and said what could he say?
Colin had waved us ashore. We’d been out at the pots. Bantering about sharing out the sheep and goats, one for our lobster curry in the bothy, one for the Lodge. The days were getting shorter and the water was getting cooler. But big Colin was just standing there and looking grim. I was thinking, shit I must have left the gate open when I fed the ponies in the morning.
Then, Colin said something like, ‘There’s some not very good news for you. Your father’s not well. The car’s ready. I’ll drive you in.’
Ruaraidh coming to meet me, once we arrived in town. That embrace was waiting to happen. Should have happened when we’d cut peats or dipped sheep or succeeded in something or other. Then me saying, I’ll be OK, just got to get some air. Him not wanting to let me and then realising I had to get out the back garden for a minute.
Talk about clarity. Everything embossing, printing. Every stalk of grass stood out on its own.
My sister coming home. Some comfort for our mother. The olaid just looked stunned. She couldn’t believe it yet.
We all went through a year at that heightened pitch. Stories came fast and furious. I got the feeling that maybe so many of them were like Ruaraidh’s own stories. And most of the olman’s. So many of them skirting around their real subject, maybe because they had to. Maybe their very purpose was to help cope with what had come to your senses, unasked for.
After so many stories you can come one day to the body you never saw because it had all been so sudden. The undertaker, I mean the father of the present one, taking care of everything, all in safe hands. There had to be a P.M. So the lid was put on the box, after the body was released. The only thing to see was a brass plate with his name and age.
And the job which now looks like therapy but was pure chance. Me taking the year out from Uni. It was Kenny’s uncle Angus who steered me to it. Ruaraidh was trying to get us in touch, see if they could get the two nephews to piss off to sea now and again. Get me out of the books and the hushed houses.
Angus had seen the card in the window. There on the board of the Buroo, was the hospital porter’s job. Shift work. So I got to meet the folk who dealt with local life and death. I got involved. Got my hands dirty, as they say.
One day, I took a look-in to see one of the guys, in the beds I kept having to move. This was one of the ambulance drivers. We’d give them a hand with the trolley, in the doors. You got to know each other over a cup of tea, after the patient was delivered. He’d had a wee stroke. Taken a turn, as they say. The job didn’t give you immunity. I went in for a yarn and he told me then, he was the one. My olman, he meant. He was first on scene. They were just too late. Cardiac arrest is like that.
We shook hands. He made a good recovery. Every time I saw him in the street there was something there between us and it wasn’t a bad thing.
Then there was the mortuary and I never thought much of it at first. Fact of life, as they say. One of the additional duties, you had to do, along with the medical staff. Then this night, this male nurse started clowning
around a bit, not out of hand. Just his way of showing a trainee nurse something she’d need to get used to. He was only bantering, to make things easier. Part of hospital life.
But then he says to her, putting on an eerie sort of voice, ‘And this is where they do post-mortems.’
And I realised I was about to strangle the bastard and I knew I had to get outside before I laid hands on him. The night was very clear.
There wasn’t a lot to sort out. He’d kept the shed going. It wasn’t the same one he was in, before we left the Island. It might have been a second cousin of it, as the saying goes. Second generation corrugated iron which of course is zinc-coated mild steel and likely to rust faster than the old bit you’re improving by laying the new sheet on top of it. So the main result of the repairs is art. Oxygen reacts with exposed metal but fails to eat into areas which still cling to their coating. I was looking at random etching. Varied resistance to weather. Colour and texture altering within each individual shed. When you stepped back to try to take in the whole park of sheds, with a few contrasting timber ones, islands in the waves of metal, you were swimming in lush imagery, SY style. Greening bitumen. Burnt-orange oxide. A bakers’ dozen shades of chocolate.
The number eleven was stencilled on a door which might have been Lifeboat blue, one time. I now know the cause of the heightened vision, heightened everything. Eat your hearts out, users of mescaline and pimpled mushrooms, the proximity of death is the thing that really alters perception.
The olman had jumped at the first chance to buy one of these sheds though we no longer lived round the corner. Hattersley looms were easier to find and cheaper to buy. A slump in the tweeds was looking permanent and looms weren’t far off ten a penny. I don’t know if he’d become more reclusive or if it was just that I was away at Uni for a good chunk of the year so I didn’t see it happen. It looked like he’d been hankering back to a community of sheds. This one had been thrown up by rows of houses. It wasn’t far from the site of the old one where me and Kenny F used to fill the bobbins.
The tiny key turned easily in the greased padlock. I’d kind of hoped it would jam and break and I could make a decent excuse to my mother. But I was in. OK, there were cobwebs but the light was now bursting through the small panes onto the loom. His tweed was a beauty. This one looked quiet and fine enough till you came nearer. The harmonic threads had some startling colours amongst them. I’d need some help to get the olman’s last cloth off his loom intact. Couldn’t trust myself to that.
My eye went to a curved wooden tray on a deal table. I know it’s called a
scumaig
but I don’t know an English word for it. There was a coil of cotton line resting in it. The hooks had gone brittle. Snoods were strange stuff, maybe horsehair. There was a round tobacco tin on the scrubbed wood top. You had to use a coin to lever it open. A military badge on a pad of soft cloth. A strong red on black. I knew it was a tank regiment.
I was sure I could smell the gravy. His stories always came after Sunday dinner. He’d made the big mistake of volunteering. In his own house. His best efforts at making Yorkshire pudding collapsed before the olaid’s hardest glance. He’d made it worse by saying he was a bit lost with the electric oven, really needed a petrol fire. ‘Weel you can light one oot the back next week,’ she’d said.
The ledger in the drawer didn’t have many figures in it. It was careful but brief. And then there were grids and letters, like a code. I was back in Enidbloodyblytonland, as he called it, till I realised it was his pattern book. All these single letters would amount to cloth. And now I noticed a few patches, samples, tacked to a board.
I turned over a few pages of the tall, lined book. Plain, black, board covers, without any tables of weights and measures. This was something different. Letters joined to others, arranged to make a complete design. I recognised the rhythms and listened to his voice. It came from a sloping handwriting that you somehow knew.
The Parker 61 was there too, in its box. The box of navy Quink. I remember the olaid showing me what she’d got him for Christmas. She knew it was the right thing.
This was my father’s testament. I read it first, standing up. I’ve typed it out for you.
PATTERN BOOK
I grew up by Loch Griomsiadair. It’s better in Gaelic because the English says Grimshader and for me it was never a grim place. It is the first sea-loch as you proceed south from Stornoway, on the east side of Lewis. There is excellent shelter to be had, up through the narrows into Loch Beag, a sheltered Tob. But first you have to be sure and leave Sgeir Linish, on the north side of the mouth, to starboard and watch for Sgeir a Chaolais. That is a reef which covers at about three-quarters flood tide but there is navigable water, to be found, on either side.
This is the approach from seaward, of course. You will probably be driving, over the cattle grid, up the other side of the hill. From there, the village looks across to Ranais. You must turn the corner before you can look out to the open Minch at the road end.
We were never far from boats. We were brought out and the marks were pointed out to us and named, from the beginning. After a few trips they were with you forever. On that northern side, between the two dangers I mentioned earlier, there is a conspicuous rock. It is known as The Sail and that is exactly what it looks like, even from a distance out, in good visibility. It is not like the tan sail of a working boat but a new sail as delivered before treatment, or one for a yacht: white with a hint of yellow and green in it. Perhaps the colour is derived from the lichens growing on it but when you sight that rock from the sea, there appears to be a tint in the white.
If you hold that mark open on Gob A Chuilg, the headland on the south side of the mouth of Loch Griomsiadair, you have a back bearing, also known as a stern transit. This will take you out as far as The Carranoch – a pinnacle where the fish take shelter. When I was a boy we never had to come further than the mouth of the loch to catch all the haddock, whiting, codling and gurnard, the whole village could eat. Going to The Carranoch was more of an adventure, seeking larger fish and other species. Cod, ling, large mature coalfish and, if you anchored, conger eels.
It was a matter of honour to know which was a haddock and which a whiting before they surfaced. The haddock thumped at the mussel and thumped again on the line and if you had two, one on each hook at each
end of the wire
dorgh
, you had quite a pull. The whiting mouthed at the bait and you sometimes thought you’d lost it. Then you’d feel the weight of it again and it would come swirling up.
The men went out late for herring but I was too young to be considered for that – they were not back till the early morning. One night, though, I joined the old boys.
All the able-bodied men, my father amongst them, were away fighting a war we now know had little to do with them or us: ‘The Imperialists’ War’ or ‘The Industrialists’ War’. My own father, like so many from our Island, had been in the Naval Reserve – that was money coming into the house after all, so he’d been called up right away. I can only remember a fearsome moustache, the smell of pipe tobacco and a laugh that had the momentum of a following sea. He was always making jokes. He was probably making jokes aboard whichever warship or auxiliary he was serving on. But the herring did not know that he was away, along with most of the able men. The word was that the shoals were coming in from the Minch, to the entrance of our sea-loch, the same as usual, late summer.
You could tell something was brewing from the amount of smoke going up into the air, down at the narrows. The village boat was being tarred but I heard my mother say there was as much smoke coming from the bogey-roll as the tar barrel. The older men had got together over the boat and I don’t think there was one of them under sixty years of age, though I’ve heard some say that none were under seventy: the boat of the old men. To me, then, anyone over fifteen years of age was old.
My mother could be quite a hard woman at times but a delegation came up to seek official permission.
The spokesman took a step forward.
‘We are a man short for the boat,’ he said. ‘Your boy is strong for his age. He has a keen eye on him. We will look after him well but it might be a late night. We could do with him, on the tiller.’
‘And what are you going to take the herring with?’ my mother asked.
‘Well, the boy said his father’s nets were…’
‘Yes, I’m sure he did. But have you had a look at them yet?’
So they filed out after my mother to the barn. The nets had been put away properly but unless they are treated with preservative, they fall rotten. When you treated the nets, you treated the sail and cordage.
‘Well, I cannot see how you think you will keep a herring in those.’ Her scrubbed hand went through the black cotton.
The
bodaich Ghriomsiadair
were crestfallen but she took pity on them. My mother led them back through the house. She reached behind the wally dugs on the mantel shelf. (Some peddlar must have made his fortune because there is a pair like that in every other house in the island.) She brought a couple of small packets out. The old boys were looking at each other. They did not know what to make of this.
My mother took out some very small new hooks, ones with a glint to them.
‘In the Shetlands,’ she said, ‘they take herring on these. At Baltasound, at the gutting and packing, I saw them rig lines like that. A dandy, they called it. My husband was going to try them.’
Then my mother sent me for a
dorgh
– that is a bent wire a bit like a coat hanger with lead fixed at the centre. It keeps the two hooks separate so they cannot get into a fankle. She fixed these fine hooks to light gut, more like stuff you would use for trout, making a rig with three of them suspended on each side.
‘Yes, we saw them going out in these narrow boats, with tackle like that,’ she told the old men. ‘If you all make up a line like this one, you might take herring if there are herring to be caught. You need not bother starting in full light and you can stop right away when it falls dark.’
Well, to be told how to fish by a woman was something but a woman from another village instructing them in a technique from another group of Islands – that was something else, again. And when that other village was on the West side (my mother was a
Siarach
) and that other group of islands was Shetland – the home of pagan Vikings – that was pretty close to the limit. I was desperate in case the whole expedition was cancelled there and then but our village needed that fishing.
So we set out. The boat was sound enough and she took in very little water. She had been hauled up and tied down where the spring tides
could reach her and keep her timbers from drying out too much. The first thing was to clear the narrows, going out into the calm loch under the sweeps. I had to take a wee go at the pipe. I cannot say I enjoyed it much. Then I got my lesson.
That was my place, at the tiller but I had to look to catch the eye of one man – I suppose you could say he was the skipper though we never called him that.
This was my lesson. First, if I was worried about anything I just had to catch his eye and he would keep me right.
‘Aye.’
‘Second, this is the starboard side. That is the port. You will need to give her starboard helm to go port, port helm for starboard. Do you have that?’
‘I do.’
They tested me when we were still under oars. I had the hang of it.
Did I know Sgeir a Chaolais? I nodded. Sgeir Linish? I nodded again. Well, when we were under sail we had to give these an even wider berth, in case our way through the water was not as direct as we thought it was. But there was a good keel under this boat. I would learn to trust it. Did I know the transit on The Sail?
‘The what?’
‘How to line up the marks.’
‘The Sail on the point.’
‘Well, that should do you for now.’
Then I got the nod to put her nose into the wind. Where was it coming from? ‘Southerly.’
‘Aye, now just you hold her there,’ I was told, ‘and the boys will soon have the lugsail up.’
They had done that before, I could see. It was still pretty smooth. I was so involved in watching how one was fastening something while another was hauling, that I lost the eye of the man guiding me and was slow to take her off the wind. But we found momentum again all right and I got a look, as much as to say they wouldn’t hold that one against me.
The old boat really got going then. I was amazed at the way we made under sail. I was to take her as close to the wind as I could without losing
power. I was guided into steering her upwind till there was a small shake at the front edge of the sail. Then the skipper on the sheet took in the slack and when I eased her off the wind we heeled a bit. The breeze was on our starboard side, so the sail was out the other way. Nobody said anything but these boys were easing their weight on to the windward gunnel as neat as dancers.
The sheet was never tied. If that was released, the strain would come off. And the halyard too, the rope that held the sail high on its bending spar, just a few turns. No knots, so it could be let go in a hurry. The friction would be sufficient to hold it.
We were now further out to sea than I had ever been before. Someone asked, were we making for Sutherland, but one old fellow knew exactly where we were going. To the herring. He talked me through tacking the boat. I had just to take her all the way through the wind, quite smart but nothing sudden. The sail would be dipped round to the other side of the mast and the sheet shifted from one hole in the top plank, across to its opposite number.
I could tell they were happy with the manoeuvre, pleased with themselves for not losing their touch. The whole boat was smiling. And we were fair shifting, beating into it, with the wind on our port side, now. The sea hadn’t built up yet. Our course was taking us closer to the land again but further down the east coast of Lewis.
How that man knew they were under our keel, I could not even guess. It might have been his sense of smell, sight, taste or sound – or all of them. Perhaps he just knew where they usually shoaled at that time of year. I had seen the porpoises in the loch but these were dolphins around us, leaping like salmon. Maybe it was their excitement that provided the sign.
These old boys and myself, we all sent the
dorgh
over, I could not say with how much faith. The light was just starting to fade. It was a strange feeling. You know when you take a mackerel, the line goes everywhere. A spray comes off the line. Well the herring are not at all like that. They rise to feed on the plankton and must go for the glint on these bare hooks, mouthing softer than whiting. You feel only a shimmer.
The old boys were wondering if there was fish there or not. They were
hauling at speed and shaking them off. It was maybe just my curiosity at work but I was pulling very gently, hand over hand and there they were: five herring for six hooks. Then everyone was into them.
You think you have already seen a herring. If that fish has come from a trawl, you have not really seen a herring yet. If you have seen one that fell from a drift-net, you have come close to what I witnessed that night. You might think they are silver but that night I could see purple, brown, grey and other colours on the broad scales of the
sgadan
as they fell into our black boat. I do not know names for these colours, in Gaelic or English.
One thing was sure, the Minch was thick with fish. We had to ditch some of our ballast of round boulders, over the side. We cast out more, as the weight of fish amassed. We only knew the light had gone when the fish stopped taking.
There was more than the whole village could eat. It was later in the year you wanted them for salting. The old boys knew there would be a hell of a price in Stornoway, with the wartime shortage. What about the boy? Someone said what they were all thinking. But I said I’d be fine. It was a fair night.
We were drunk with it, including myself, left on the tiller as
Bhalaich Ghriomsiadair
set course for harbour. The Stornoway fleet were a long way off. The word was, they were working out off The Butt, these nights. We would be the first to land.
I was told that you did not run with the wind up your backside. You kept it on your quarter so the sail could not back. Even so, the boys put one reef in the sail, showing me the seaman’s way with the slipknot. So nothing would jam. Where is she coming from now? And I could tell the wind had backed a touch to the east. Not good for fishing but we had all the catch we could carry and a fair breeze to take us to the Market.
We were creaming in, on the surf out from the beacon off Arnish light. I could feel real weight in the tiller now and I had to lean against it to keep her steady. I can still hear the voice of the man who was directing us.
‘Here is a trick for you. Harden her up a bit as you hear one coming. That’s it. Now relax your grip completely when the wave has a hold of us and we will just ride with it. Tighten up again, ready for the next one.’
He had a wee word for us all before we took her in, alongside. There would be none of this dropping the sail and dragging her in on the sweeps. The village boys would take her in under sail.
I only had to keep watching for that eye and we would be fine. So she turned into the wind for the few souls on the pier to see us arrive, first at the market, our larch kissing the greenheart. The iron traveller slid down the mast. It was gliding on the linseed oil we’d been rubbing in, only a day before.
We landed these fish and they sold themselves. There was blood in their gills and pearls in their scales. Wads of money started appearing. The share-out would come later. We had to take a dram, only the one, from a clay piggy that was not supposed to be for sale. The boy, that was me, could take a sip. ‘Hold it down now,’ they said. ‘Don’t you go looking green about your own gills.’
Now the way they said it, afterwards, was this: you learn a thing and you think that is that. But it is not. You think you know a thing but you have to find it out again. Then when you grow old, surely you have made all your mistakes and that is finally that.
But all these men were boys like me. The signs were there for anyone to see. The sixty and seventy-foot Zulus and Fifies were coming in when we were going out. The big fishing ships were well reefed-down and that is a sight you did not see often, when they were racing to land their catch. A big tide was still ebbing so you got a confused sea, just off the beacon.