Authors: Hammond Innes
What exactly the divers found on the seabed was not reported on the air, but something caused Ed Wiseberg to have the rig shifted 10 metres to the north-west. They did it on the winch cables, which meant, of course, some 30 feet less cable holding the rig on the side from which winds blow hard at the tail end of a depression. Ken Stewart wanted anchors 1 and 2 re-laid, but with only a single supply ship servicing
North Star
, Ed Wiseberg overruled him. He was spudded in by then and finding the going better than expected. He needed mud and drill casing, and he wasn’t going to have
Rattler
wasting time ‘frigging around with the bloody anchors.’
We listened in to it all as Ken discussed it with the
Rattler
’s skipper, sometimes by walkie-talkie, sometimes on the R/T, bemoaning the fact that Yankee toolpushers didn’t know the difference between a semi-submersible off Shetland and a drilling barge moored in the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico. ‘It’s not right, Jock. It’s my responsibility if we drag. But because we’re drilling he makes the decisions.’ And the other laughing and saying, ‘Every barge engineer says the same. Ye canna win, can ye.’
They had started drilling on the 23rd, and as April ran into May, and the sea stayed calm, the danger of the rig dragging receded from my mind. It was a glorious spell of weather, the wind light and the sun shining day after day, except when there was a sea mist. Often by noon we were stripped to the waist, the ship just lying-to or drifting close along the rig with both engines shut down. We were saving fuel and a lot of wear and tear during those first ten days.
In that time we saw only two other ships, both small drifters out of Lerwick. And with the sun moving steadily north, the
nights were shortening, the period of maximum alertness a little less each day. It was a pleasant interlude after all the hard work we had put into the ship, except for the monotony of it and the continuous racket of the rig. The drawworks, the big diesel up on the derrick floor, never stopped, an endless roar that only changed its note when they were using the winches to disconnect and screw on another 90-foot length of pipe to the drilling string that was steadily moving down its casing as the bit thrust deeper and deeper into the seabed sediments. And added to the racket of the drawworks was the steady, continuous hum of the power plant. Even when we had drifted beyond the circle of the anchor buoys, the sound of the rig was almost as loud, the noise of it bouncing off the surface of the sea. And for me there was the sense of waiting, the certainty that this was no more than an interlude. Pacing the bridge in the dark hours, or in my bunk turning restlessly and trying to sleep, there was always at the back of my mind the fear that the work permits would be refused or something else would happen to disturb the new life I was trying to build for myself.
It was the loneliness more than anything else. It preyed on my nerves. I was so goddam lonely stuck out there beside that steel monster, drifting back and forth over the same patch of sea, with nobody to turn to, no living soul I could discuss it with. Once I started writing to Gertrude, but I soon gave it up. The things I wanted to say were not the things I could put in a letter. And she was so businesslike, always concerned about our supply of fresh meat, vegetables and fruit.
Rattler
was based on Aberdeen, but periodically the supply ship put into Scalloway, and then, as well as stores, there was always a note for me. Because Gertrude had sailed so often in the
Duchess
, she understood very well that our chief enemy would be the monotony and emptiness of life out here. She sent us ground tackle so that we could amuse ourselves fishing, and incidentally augment our food supplies for free. She sent out records and the new cribbage board I asked for after Henrik, in a fit of
temper, had thrown the old one overboard, intending it for Flett’s head. Little things were already beginning to assume larger-than-life proportions, the atmosphere among some members of the crew moving towards flashpoint.
Then the weather broke and we had other things to keep us busy. The wind, which had been mainly north-easterly, backed into the south-west – Force 7, gusting 8, low cloud and rain. A series of deep Lows swept up between us and Iceland and we had three fronts pass over us in quick succession. After that it was unsettled and, with a big sea still running, we had difficulty going alongside
Rattler
when she finally came out to us. With the stores was the usual note from Gertrude. I didn’t read it until we had finished standing by the supply ship while she hitched herself stern-on to the rig below the crane, with both spring-loaded mooring hawsers made fast.
A woman came to see me today
.
She says she is your wife.
I was in my cabin then and I stood with the note in my hand staring out of the window. The wind had veered a little and increased in strength, but I barely noticed it, balancing automatically to the swoop and twist of the ship. It was hard to imagine Fiona in that house by The Taing – Fiona with her pale pointed face, the small determined chin, the high white forehead surmounted by the black fringe of her pageboy cut, and deep-socketed eyes, the small mouth, that bitter tongue. And Gertrude, big and fair and solid as a rock, utterly reliable. Pity I could not fuse the two of them. I laughed at the thought, thinking of the result and wondering, if it was true that the attraction is towards opposites, what these two had got that I hadn’t, other than a bosom and the means of satisfying me?
But Fiona had meant more to me than that, much more. She had been a force in my life – for a time at any rate. We had met in Glasgow, at a teach-in on Ché and his place in the selfawareness of emergent peoples. I was remembering how she had looked …
She is nice I think
,
but very nervy. She stayed for tea and we talked
,
mostly about you
,
or I think perhaps it is more accurate to say that she do the talking while I listen. Some
of it I do not understand
.
She is I think a most political woman
.
She talk and talk
,
that is the nerves I would suppose. Is that why you are separated? She told me. She also told me you are wasting your life in trawlers
,
that you could be a very important man. She is a Progressive
,
she tells me
–
I could not help smiling at that. Fiona had been so many things, at various times, a Trotskyist, a Maoist. She had been a member of the WRP, the PD; now apparently she was a good old-fashioned Progressive.
She want to know how she can get in touch with you. I tell her if she wish to write she must send it to Aberdeen to go out by the supply boat
.
But she don’t agree to that
.
She want to meet you. It is not easy to convince her that you are out there for a long time and not coming ashore
.
I think maybe you get a letter from her by the boat after this one
.
What do you want? She seems very worried about you
,
for what reason she do not say.
The last I had heard of Fiona she was in Dublin. But that was more than a year ago, and even if she had been working for the IRA, I doubted whether she would still be with them. Her allegiances never lasted long. There had to be a Cause, but always something different. She had never been consistent, except that she was anti- the present social order. And for her that had always meant the British social order, presumably because it was the one she had grown up with and was thus able to identify as the root of all that was wrong in society. To claim she was a Progressive could mean almost anything. But whatever her current Cause, it didn’t explain what she was doing in Shetland visiting Gertrude Petersen and trying to contact me.
I called up
Rattler
on the R/T and asked them to come alongside again before they cleared for Aberdeen. Then I handed over to Johan and shut myself in my cabin to compose a letter. But to explain Fiona to somebody like Gertrude was impossible. If I could have talked to her … But even then it would have been difficult. I didn’t understand Fiona myself. We had lived together almost four years, in a miserable little
tenement house looking up the Clyde to the old John Brown shipyard. There had been times when we were happy together, fleeting moments in each other’s arms, or when she was high. But mostly I remembered the arguments, the over-intense voice, the relentless pressure of her restless mind.
I never knew what she took, only that it had the effect of soothing her nerves. She was very emotional then, often lovable, with something of the kitten about her. Even now the ache was still there. But none of this could I explain to Gertrude. Twice I started that letter and tore it up. Then, as I tried again, Lars called to me that I was wanted on the R/T. It was the rig’s radio operator with orders for me to report to the barge engineer on board.
‘He can talk to me on the radio.’
‘He wants to see you personally.’
‘Why?’
‘He didn’t tell me why.’ The metallic voice sounded remote and uninterested. ‘If you can get yourself on to the supply ship he says they’ll lift you on board by crane. Okay?’
‘Roger,’ I said.
Johan took the ship in for me and I made the leap from the high point of our bows,
Rattler
’s crew watching with their fenders out. They put me in the net, clipped it to the big hook on the end of the crane hoist and I was whisked up to be dumped like a sack on the oil-slimed pipe deck beside a pile of stores and new drill bits. It was van Dam’s week on duty and I found him waiting for me in the same little office where I had talked to Villiers. ‘Ah zo, they get you up all right an’ no bones broken, eh?’ He had a telex in his hand. ‘Virst you read this,’ he said and held it out to me. ‘Then you tell me vat it eez all about.’
It was from the Star-Trion office in Aberdeen and read:
INFORM CAPTAIN RANDALL, STANDBY BOAT DUCHESS OF NORFOLK, WE HAVE RECEIVED NOTIFICATION FROM THE CLERK OF THE CROWN COURT IN HULL THAT HE HAS BEEN CALLED AS WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION IN A CASE OF ARSON DUE TO BE
HEARD ON JUNE
5.
SOLICITORS FOR THE CROWN INSIST THAT THE WITNESS BE IN HULL AT LEAST
24
HOURS BEFORE THE CASE OPENS AND HOLDS HIMSELF AT THE DISPOSAL OF THE PROSECUTION. YOU ARE TO NOTIFY ETA SUMBURGH AND WE WILL BOOK ONWARD FLIGHT. CONFIRM PLEASE.
‘Veil?’ the barge engineer enquired as I stood gazing down at the flimsy, my mind leaping to the courtroom and the Crown’s QC questioning me. Cross-examination would follow. And the court listening, faces in the public seats.
You’ll never know a moment’s peace
… ‘It eez an order of the court. I do not know the law in your country, but I think you ’ave to go, eh?’
I nodded. Two weeks. In just over two weeks I would be in that court, a witness, and the shadowy figures I had seen running would be standing in the dock facing me. Scunton would be there, others too, watching me, waiting to hear what I said.
‘Vat I tell them?’
And I would be under oath. How Fiona would laugh! She had never believed in God. She was an atheist, and the oath an Establishment trick, an anachronism harking back to an age of superstition when there was a Heaven and a Hell and fire and brimstone.
‘I think you ’ave to go, is it?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll have to go.’ For all the marching and the talk, the strikes and demos, the System was still the same. ‘Tell your office to book the onward flight so that I get to Hull on 3rd June. Accommodation, too.’
‘Okay. I tell them. Iz not very nice I think appearing for a prosecution.’ He was smiling sympathetically. ‘That is vy I do not tell you over the radio. Then everybody know.’
‘Kind of you,’ I murmured. And conscious of the need to say something that would satisfy his curiosity, I added, ‘Two youths set fire to a house and I am supposed to identify them.’
‘Vandals, ja. Ve haf that in Holland alzo. Too much.’
I went back to my ship, morose and silent, cursing myself
for not having gone to Hull directly the
Fisher Maid
docked in Aberdeen. It would have been over and done with then, my statement given to the police instead of in open court, and no threats, nothing they could have done about it. Now, whatever I said, one side or the other would hold it against me.
May ended as it had begun in a blaze of fine weather, the days passing in the slow monotony of patrolling back and forth. The crew were relieved one at a time and the Norwegians stayed. Fuller had succeeded in fixing their work permits. There had been an outcry about it and there was a picture in the local paper of some fishermen demonstrating in front of the Star-Trion office in Scalloway. Gertrude did not bother to send us the national papers, knowing the rig was supplied by helicopter – anyway we got the world news over the radio. But she did send us the
Shetland Times
and in the issue of 16th May there had been a short paragraph stating that Mr Ian Sandford of the Root Stacks Hotel, Burra Firth, had acquired the Hamnavoe fishing vessel,
Island Girl
, built in 1947. He now intended to use her for supplying oil rigs operating off Shetland. Gertrude had marked the news item and in a note to me she said,
I think this is possibly why we have had no more trouble from him
.
On the evening of 2nd June, the day before I was due to leave for Hull, the drawworks suddenly went silent. They had started pulling pipe shortly after noon, and
Rattler
’s skipper, Jock Fraser, told me over the radio the rumour was it was a dry well. This was confirmed when
Bowstring
came on the air to say she had cleared Aberdeen and her ETA would be around 15.00 hours next day.
I went on board the rig shortly after 07.00. The drawworks were running again and Sparks told me they would be lifting anchors and moving to a new location just as soon as they had cleared the seabed. The helicopter that would take me to Sumburgh was not due until 08.30. I left my case under the sick-bay attendant’s desk and went in search of Ed Wiseberg.
I found him down on the spider deck with Ken Stewart and several others. They were standing just inside the pump room in front of a big steel cabinet equipped with a TV screen. The picture was vague, a flickering image of some white object that wavered uncertainly. ‘Guess we’ll have to trim again, Ken. The angle’s still wrong.’ The barge engineer went over to the pumps and stood considering, the mud tanks rising in bulky curves behind him. He stepped forward, pressing levers, holding them as the pumps hissed. Ed Wiseberg was at the console of the TV cabinet, the picture shifting, the object becoming clearer as he adjusted the position and focus of the camera on the seabed. The atmosphere was tense, electric with frustration and concentration. Through the open door I could see the spider with its girders slotted in to the deck structure and the guidewires leading down into the depths.