Trawl

by B. S. Johnson

  They told me cats were put to sleep to doctor them. I knew something of what doctoring meant. For nights after that I was afraid to go to sleep. I kept awake for as long as possible in case they doctored me after I had been put to sleep. Peter was the cat we had then. I remember Peter. They told me they bought him not long after they were married. So Peter was older than I was. I was there on my own when he died, poor Peter. I must have been thirteen or fourteen, then. The war was over, I know. I was back home after being evacuated. Peter was skinny by then. Feeling his bones through the skin was not pleasant. But we all loved him still. Peter was a country cat. His hair, long black and white hair, became matted under his tummy. Perhaps it was our fault, that it was matted. We should have combed and brushed him more often. And he smelt and messed a lot, as he grew older. But I loved him. I was glad I was the one who was with him when he died. I had come home from school one afternoon. I was always in before they were. They worked up in town. I was in the kitchen making my tea when Peter suddenly went mad. That is, he rushed around the kitchen banging into the legs of things and knocking himself about. He ended up lying panting under the gas cooker. It was difficult to lift him gently from under there. I laid him on the carpet. He was panting, breathing hard and scratchily. I cut a piece of meat from the raw joint there was in the larder, and I gave it to him. That is, I laid it by his mouth as he lay there with his breathing so difficult. He ate it. I was pleased, and I thought he was going to be all right. He opened his eyes and looked at me and I felt sure that he was grateful to me. That is the way he looked. He and I had always loved one another. I grew up with him, he was there when I was brought home as a baby, he was there before I was. Suddenly his poor old eyes closed and his head fell just the short distance to the carpet. I felt for his heartbeat through the old ribs. There was none. Poor old Peter. I felt very sad, though I did not cry. I felt he had tried to eat for my sake, and I was grateful to him for it. · · · · · · · · We had another cat at that time, as well. They gave him to me, he was mine. When I was first evacuated, it was with my mother, to a farm in the country. They came in one morning, put the kitten in bed with me and woke me up. It was a kind thing to do for a child, was it not? I said, Is he mine? And they said, Yes. All mine to keep? I said, and Yes, they said again, and I was so pleased it was true. I called him Winkie. I expect this was because he kept blinking. I could check on that. My mother would know. When I return. · · · · · Later Winkie grew away from me. He stayed in London when I was officially evacuated without my mother. When I came home after the war he did not really know me. I tried to show him I was his master. He did not like this. I think he must have hated me. He would not do as I told him. This made me angry. I pulled him about too much. He would not stand for this. Cats have limits. Not so long after Peter died Winkie brought down a stack of planks upon himself, and was injured so badly that he had to be put to sleep. That was on a Saturday morning and I played football for a team in the afternoon. They shouted at me because I played so badly. I kept thinking of Winkie. He died hating me, before I had had a chance to put it right. They shouted at me. I nearly cried in the dressing room afterwards. I could not tell them about Winkie being put to sleep. · · · · · Chloroform do they use to put them to sleep? Perhaps there is something cheaper for animals. Thawpit. We used to knock ourselves out with Thawpit on a blackboard duster at school. In the bogs, that was, during lunch hour. Other kids used to go to the bogs for a quiet smoke. Doug and Freeman and I used to knock ourselves out. Not all at once, one at a time, two bringing the one round with water from the lavatory pan. Once Doug nodded off in the lesson immediately after lunch and I had to keep pinching him or Gus would have seen. · · I never smoked. I do not say I was in the habit of knocking myself out with Thawpit, either, but somehow it was in the same category as smoking, but more exciting. All the other kids at school used to smoke to look big, I now say, my weak adult joke when asked by strangers why I never started, but I was big already. Not far from poor, as jokes go, but genuinely my own, which is not nothing. I wonder what the manufacturers of Thawpit would think? Or Dabitoff, for that matter, let there be no favouritism in the matter of tradenames for carbon tetrachloride. First remember smelling it when I got tar on my trousers from down by the river. There was always driftwood going up and down on the tides. I loved playing there from a very early age. Before the war. I used to think of it as my river. Very few other kids played there. But I used to get very dirty, not only from the tar. All sorts of things drifted down. My uncle once rescued a cork boat for me from amongst the drifting things. It was a flat piece of cork with a stick in it and on the stick there was another flat piece of cork which was thinner so that it could be bent to form a sail. It looked more like a raft than a boat, when I come to think about it. He went to so much trouble to fish it out of the dirty river. He was annoyed when I put it back into the river. Well, I wanted to see it sail, didn’t I? A boat or raft is no use unless it is in the water, sailing, is it? I did not understand why he should be so annoyed. My uncle was tall and I thought he was handsome. He had a wonderful smile and said things which made me laugh. He went in for sports and was often in car accidents. Rowing I remember him doing best. Just down at the end of our road at Hammersmith was the river, and there were many rowing clubs there. One rowing club kept an eel in their practice tank. We used to watch the Boat Race every year. I was always Oxford. They told me I was, and I accepted it. Later they explained that they had offered me two favours when I was a baby in my pram down by the river, and I had taken the dark blue one. I do not remember this myself. But they told me I was Oxford and I accepted this. It does not seem important. It was my first experience of the essential arbitrariness of university matters. · · My uncle and my mother and my father told me as well that once they were walking with me down by the river past a house bought by Henry VIII for Nell Gwynne. My mother asked why, and my uncle replied for goings-on or some such. They tell me that I then said that I had often seen them there together, Nell Gwynne and the eighth Henry. This caused them great merriment at the time. Enough for them to want to tell me of it in later years, anyway. I do not remember this pearl of wit, myself. So much of one’s childhood must be taken on trust, seen refracted through others. Especially the earlier parts of a childhood. · · · · · There was a girl . . . there always is a girl. There was a little girl called . . . yes, Dulcie. She used to play with me down by that dirty river, sometimes. Her mother did not let her do so very often, I recall. Dulcie used to play in our garden too, sometimes. We used to play Mothers and Fathers. We would build a house at the end behind a syringa tree. Not an actual house, of course. We used to mark out rooms with stones and twigs. The plan of a house. The early times we played Mothers and Fathers were interesting. We spent a lot of time watching each other go to the lavatory. It was very interesting. I think Dulcie’s mother must have thought we were doing something nasty because one day she came and saw us and took her daughter away at once. They always watched us when we played after that, and soon Dulcie did not come any more. I could not play just Fathers on my own, could I? I lost interest in that game then. Dulcie was at the same primary school as I was. We were both in a class play together. The boys had to wear triangular scarves round their necks. We lined up at the teacher’s desk to receive our scarves the day before the play. I worked out two or three boys ahead that I would be given a purple scarf to wear. Purple was a colour I hated. He made me wear it. I cried. But the next day we lined up for the actual play and he gave me a yellow scarf. I was very relieved. I liked yellow. I ran across the playground to the bogs in my yellow scarf and played who-pees-highest with some other boys. My Mum and my Nan were coming across the playground and saw me go in. They stuck their heads in the bogs and saw us. I do not remember who had won. Dulcie had a yellow thing too. We matched. Now I like purple, I have a purple sweater. One changes. I cannot remember what the play was about. All recollection of it escape
s me. Dulcie I liked. Perhaps she was the first girl I loved. I doubt it. The teacher I did not like. He told my parents not to give me bacon and fried egg for breakfast because I was too fat. He told them to give me fruit and cornflakes instead. I think he must have been an early social reformer. My parents gave me fruit and cornflakes for breakfast for a while. I did not like my breakfasts then. Sometimes I did not eat them all up. Later they persuaded themselves that this was not proper food for a child, and I went back to bacon and fried egg. I began to like my breakfasts again. The teacher gave some kids codliveroil and malt each day. I loved codliveroil and malt, but I was not a skinny enough kid to deserve it. Dulcie was not a skinny kid, either. Dulcie’s Mum was skinny, though, and she had a square bum and one eye was different from the other one. . . . like me, like me, after that . . . the green pro, with Terry, no, I was not with him at that, but it was he who pointed out to me that since the disaster of not being able to with the green pro my left eyelid had begun to droop and sometimes for days on end I would have a twitch in that eyelid, a sudden tightening of some muscle there, uncontrollable, an inexplicable twitch. But perhaps they are not connected, the twitch and the green pro, perhaps it was coincidence that Terry just happened to notice it at that point, perhaps he was unobservant until then, but he is quite observant, more so than most, I would think, and the twitch certainly started within a few hours · · sleep · · these things will · · · · · sleep.

  They mislead who say the sea is savage:

  Are wrong who believe the sea is friendly:

  The sea is neither and both: is neutral:

  Men put themselves at hazard on its face:

  Attribute savageness and friendliness:

  But the sea merely and mightily is.

  They wear gloves and rubber smocks, long boots, thigh boots, waders, some even like rubber dungarees, if that is the name. The knife is very ordinary, a single folding blade, pointed, kept sharp on a stone in the crew messroom. They seize one of the fish lying about their feet in the pens, seize it onehanded through the gills on one side, fingers crushing the fine, blood-filled membranes for a certain grip, and cut shortly sideways from this natural opening to the centre of the throat. Without taking the blade from the flesh they rip downwards along the belly with ease and accuracy exactly to the vent, and then with a short flick they sever the anal canal. The flap of one side of intestinal wall hinges flabbily, the multicoloured guts hang down from the windpipe. The knife is deflected aside in the hand holding it as the fingers grasp at the long khaki sliminess of the liver, which, wrenched away, is thrown into a basket to join many others, a conical withy basket in which the fishlivers constantly shudder together with every movement of the ship. Two more short snicks: one across the windpipe as closely as possible to the head, and the coloured guts fall: the second completes the symmetry, slicing back to the gill to leave the other wall flapping. Still with the same hold, they throw up and accurately into the washer, which is like a great opened sardine tin with a mesh guard on the far side. Considering the size of some of the fish, they are remarkably consistent in their throwing. · · · · · I watch the gutting from the bridge. The water in the washer surges with both the movement of the ship and the force of the seawater jet filling it. Each surge spills water over and, at one end, fish, now gutted and washed, edge gently over on to the top of an inclined roller chute down which they ripple faster and faster, to disappear down through the round hatch of the fish room. Those which come out of the washer head first have an easy passage, those which present their tails often stick them through the rollers and thus become stuck. Analogies suggest themselves. The redfish, the soldiers, which for some reason do not need to be gutted, have the easiest journey of all, plumply sliding down the chute to turn half round the circular hatch lip before falling. Occasionally there is a jam, too many tails become trapped, and one of those gutting will come round to clear the chute, and perhaps will pick up those few fish which have not been accurately thrown. · · · · · · · · Perhaps I feel, have felt, some sympathy for the fish, as for any form of life about to die what appears to be, would be for a human, a painful death, after perhaps some not so short suffering: but once gutted, washed and sliding down they become absurd, the fish, no longer pitiable, even stupid, without their guts, the flaps of their sides hanging flabbily and unfunctionally now, already to be seen as food, no longer as fish. · · Oh, some of them kick still, yes, there is in some of them still life, of a sort, one might say, the brain I suppose is still intact, the central nervous system too: something of them still works despite the great shocks to which they have been subjected. But what kind of life is that, to splash about in twenty gallons, be flushed out, to arch your back twice in a sad imitation of the old way? The anthropomorphic fallacy. · · · · · They hose the deck clear of the accumulated guts, debris, starfish, ginnies, dabs, rejectamenta. All disappears in foul surges through the scuppers, doors wide open, and then the gulls descend like white harpies, have been following us like white-winged erinnys, scream in their hundreds as they drop and fall, plunge and plummet, into the gut-lightened sea, squawk and fight over the stream of offal, flap and settle and hit the sea and air to raise themselves with some intestinal particle draped from their beaks, scavenge and hawk and eye each others’ lots for chances to improve their own. The anthropomorphic fallacy. The gulls are wild, wary, no tame Thames visitors these: they will not land upon the deck to take their fill of the tumbled guts, far less will they snatch the liver from the deckie’s hand as he selects it from the slimy living guts to keep it for its special value, no: but perhaps they are more daring when food is scarcer. · · · · · A gull on the water attacking a dying redfish through its anal vent is pointed out to me by the Skipper: he tells me that the bird is interested only in the liver and that this is the quickest way to find it if no gutter has already separated it for the bird. · · · · · I feel better today, and the Skipper must notice it and think me worthy of conversation. Now is the only time he might have time, between hauls. Even so, his dedication is still intense. He sits on a special seat, fixed by a rod in a column, which was not in place before we started fishing. From this he overlooks the deck, the pounds and the winch: his knees touch the casing of the fishfinder and he glances down every few seconds at the instrument’s cathode ray tube. The fishfinder indicates by a green line-pattern at regular intervals what fish there are in a given depth of water. The Skipper’s careful hand demonstrates for me how the depth of water shown can be adjusted by a knurled knob, and then he re-adjusts to thirty feet above the seabed. He explains that the instrument is of only limited use, since it indicates that fish are directly under the ship at that point: while the trawl is perhaps half a mile astern. The Skipper nevertheless scans the fishfinder as it bleeps: it is after all his only guide to what is happening. · · · · · · · · There is a great deal of brasswork on the bridge. Every day out this was polished, but no one has bothered while we have been fishing. The wheel has a brass boss and a brass band circling either side of the outer rim, and a brass catch for locking it: brass radiator covers are patterned with holes in simple designs. There are brass speaker tubes to the deck and engine room and other points: they are not used unless the telegraph and telephone fail. The telegraph is a brass manikin, duplicated either side of the bridge, its wedged instructions plain and unambiguous. Alternate windows in the bridge have crimping levers of brass to lock the half-inch glass into position, and even the circular all-weather window has a centre nut of brass. · · But the radar set, the fishfinder and the automatic steerage make little use of the yellow alloy, being finished in various versions of an official grey. The automatic pilot clicks away its points of error from the set course: four points this side, six back, three again, four, back seven, constantly. The radar glows orange in its hood, darkly cowled, rings round distances, to me difficult to interpret. Behind the Skipper as he
sits at the fishfinder is a linked machine which tongues out a long strip of sensitized paper on which an inked needle has swung, recording fishmarks and the bottom: the former as patches of cloud, the latter as a solid mass. Next to this is the Sal log, the speed indicator, luminous pink, the arm now round about the three-and-a-half knots mark as we tow the trawl; whereas all the way out on passage it hovered between twelve and thirteen. And beneath it the long wave radio on which the Skipper calls up other ships belonging to the same owners to discuss catches and positions, its telephone handset and coiled plastic wire seeming strangely out of place in this setting. As the chartroom seems a different kind of place from the bridge: it opens off, a third as wide, slightly deeper, has the feel of a study. A large flat top to a chart chest of mahogany, brass fittings, a cupboard, the spare radar set squatting in a corner covered over, and a duplicate Sal log on the wall next to the chronometer. Brass and mahogany everywhere, dark green cushions along a bench seat where I slept that first few hours before the crew came aboard. Next door, also leading off the bridge, is the radio room, about the same size as the chartroom: but appearing smaller since it is packed with equipment, with a desk elbowed into a space along one longer side for the operator. The operator on this trawler is Molloy. · · · · · · · · Before each window is a brass leaning rail, on which it is possible to rest one’s arm only at those places not encumbered by the wheel, the radar, and the fishfinder. These standing places are towards the sides of the bridge. I can look down at the deck threequarters forward in two places, left and right respectively, or I can look squarely to port or to starboard at two others. I have already become used to standing for some hours at a stretch at one or another of these windows, whichever one will keep me out of the way of the watch; it seems the easiest way to pass the time, and the fresh air alleviates my seasickness considerably: makes it more bearable, that is. When facing forwards, in either position, it is possible not only to rest the arm but also to brace the buttocks against the telegraph, which makes for the greatest weight being relieved from the feet whilst yet remaining nominally in a standing position. For the first few times I would be struck almost painfully by the telegraph brasshandle as it was rung the other side of the bridge. Indeed, catching the pleasuretripper on the arse unwares has become something of a sport with several of those on watch. But the score is decreasing steadily as I become more aware of the times the telegraph is likely to be rung. · · · · · · · · Today has been a good day: I have felt less sick, the weather has been better than at any time on the trip, perhaps I am nearer to understanding something about myself: I shall sleep well tonight, or sleep and think, both: about the war, yes, and being evacuated: if any one event or section of my life can be said to be more responsible than another for my isolation, the word is not too strong, then it must be that one. · · · · · · · · The first real sunset of the trip, as well, today: great blazing streamers bar the sky like long banners at a tourney, the light alchemizes the brass of the bridge into winedark gold: now the short northern autumn day closes quickly: the coast, of Norway is it, or of Russia, appears only as a formal change in the pattern of clouds on our port side. Down below on the deck the lights steadily illuminate no activity but the swell of the water in the washer, and the way starfish and the white bellies of dabs move unnaturally in the bilges. A fishgut hangs like a hank of hair from the iron grill in a pound board. · · The green bleep from the fishfinder now catches the Skipper’s intentness as he sits over this talismanic yet scientific aid to fishing, brighter now than the sun. · · · · · Yes, it has been a good day. I shall sleep tonight. It is four o’clock. I shall read until tea at six, and then sleep. And think.