The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  I mustn’t, Charlie said as I said goodbye, leave Shetland without going out on a fishing vessel. ‘I’m heading out on the Radiant Star tomorrow.’ He reassured me that that was a good boat, that I’d be fine. Charlie knew every boat and skipper on the island, having written a book about them.

  To my bemusement, Victor Laurenson said he had never heard of a piltock, though it might have been that I mispronounced it. Victor’s thick dialect-laced speech had led me to believe that he was old when we spoke on the telephone, but he was only forty-seven. On giving directions to his village of Hamnavoe on the island of West Burra he had to stop several times and repeat things for me as I took down his instructions. Victor skippers the Radiant Star, a twenty-three-metre seine-netter built for him by Parkol Marine in Whitby. When Victor’s wife Pauline smashed a bottle of champagne over her bows in 2007, a 150 people were at the naming ceremony, and a Shetland band played reels.

  There were Laurensons lost in the terrible Delting tragedy, when twenty-two men, crews of a fleet of foureens – four-oared boats – fishing at the haaf on a day in July 1900, drowned, the boats scattered and sunk by a sudden snowstorm. The crofts of the destitute widows and families still weigh sorrowfully upon the hills around the village of Mossbank. And Victor’s father, who lives in an old whitewashed house by the quay, once chased the silver darlings down to Lowestoft and Yarmouth every summer.

  The road to Hamnavoe slewed along blue-blanched valley sides, past snow-capped drywalls, croft ruins, rose to a point above Scalloway, presenting the old capital, its castle and the sea with its wishing-pond wonder and platters of islands unfolding like the denouement of a well-worn, well-told tale, and then descended past and through the town, over a bridge and up again into the hills, where it plateaued and gently alighted by the sea.

  ‘Would you like to go fishing tomorrow?’ asked Victor.

  I sipped my tea and watched the long fetch of the waves, so elegantly murderous as they flung themselves upon the rocks beneath snow-mantled islands luminous against a growling sky. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said. But that evening I slipped aboard with a Chinese takeaway, treading carefully on the frozen quayside, afraid that I or my steaming foil container might fall and be crushed between the gunwale and the dock as I boarded the crimson-painted, ice-trimmed Radiant Star, which, when I woke in my bunk at six, had slipped out of Scalloway and was steaming south towards the fishing grounds. Not an inch of sun, but stars still sparkled brightly and the breeze was only the echo of a memory of earlier gales.

  This time the previous year I had been out on a boat, Andrew French’s Valkyrie of Mersea, to take the winter herring from the Blackwater. Andrew (Bubby’s granddad) used a gill net, like a large badminton net suspended in the river, into which the herring swam and became enmeshed. We set the nets, drank tea in the tiny wheelhouse and came back to retrieve them. The Valkyrie was a small boat, perhaps eight metres only, open save for a cabin-like wheelhouse – a muddle of stained and chipped mugs and old newspapers, large enough to keep two men out of the cold, but no more. By lunchtime, the deck was filled with as many mucusy blue and silver fish, some pristine, others gashed and ripped at the gills, as it could be without overflowing, and we headed back to box them up for Billingsgate, climbing onto the quayside sequinned with fish scales like tiny, rain-wetted petals of blossom.

  The Radiant Star was a different beast to the Valkyrie, a proper sea boat, her deckhouse saloon-like and comfortable and reassuring. Below decks, in the galley, a cupboard was stuffed with a year’s worth of biscuits; there was a bulging fridge, and the wall was adorned with a tasteful, no nipples, saucy calendar and a giant television upon which I had the night before we chugged out of port watched coverage of the funeral of Nelson Mandela.

  Radiant Star wasn’t as enormous as the boat I’d seen at Carstensens, only around a tenth of the very biggest, and Victor had hinted that to build she had cost in the region of two or three million pounds. But she was fast, easy to work and safe, the hold big enough for five days’ fishing. Victor’s dad, by contrast, only recently retired, had started work on the old herring boats, exposed to the weather almost for the duration of the voyage.

  ‘It must have been hell,’ I said, solemnly. We were reclining in the skipper and mate’s barbershop chairs staring out of the raked windscreens at the black water. The electronic chart, fish finder and other nautical toys cast a soft ambient glow, and the fear I had felt at the prospect of this trip had long departed.

  ‘Oh no-o-o. Not at all! Imagine. Sixteen year old and stuck on Shetland all your life! How many other opportunities were there to see the world, ken? It was a great life, especially in the summer – the great sail down to the Suffolk coast, to Yarmouth and Lowestoft, meeting new pipple an’ all. I think he lo-o-o-ved it.’

  Now the darkness was being sucked away. Hamnavoe and Scalloway lay to the north. The Sumburgh Light pinpricked the dawn to the east. Far away in the west Foula sat on the horizon like the bright line of a chisel’s edge. Victor told me about the meirs, the ancient way of navigating the inland waters around Shetland, and locating the haafs by giving names to visible features, lining them up and triangulating. It made sense, he pointed out, not to share the names; that way the grounds could stay secret.

  A seine net grazes the sea floor, in comparison to a trawl net, which scours it, dragged by a pair of two-kilometre cables. The boat first runs out one cable, then the net, then the second cable, joins the cables together to create a long isosceles triangle and winches them in. For no reason that is clearly understood, the cables frighten the fish into the net, although they have the opportunity to swim free.

  On the Radiant Star that morning, once the net had been drawn in, it was raised above the deck by a small derrick, and for a while the fish were suspended in green mesh while the crew got the measure of the shot’s success. Victor gave a contented nod. By now an army of gulls was flanking and following, ten thousand or more wing tips calibrated to every turn of the Radiant Star, but so almost-static that they could have been flying through aspic. There were mollies – kittiwakes – greater black-backed gulls, a solan goose or two, each bird a keen-eyed particle in a miasmic cloud of grey and white feathers, keeping the beat, keeping time with the rise and fall of the boat.

  Tope, small sharks, somehow found their way to the edge of the bulge, their puppyish heads squeezing out of the mesh. Victor pulled these and other chaff out and flung them into the sea, the birds swooping and jabbing, the fish desperate to wriggle back to the depths but with their swim bladders distended and burst, already done for. Then the net opened, and its contents with a long slippery thud, gallows-grim, fell into the chute with an incontrovertible finality while I stared down from above with the fascination of a child.

  In the bright-lit hold, whitewashed, throbbing with the deafening rumble of the ship’s engine, floor swilling with seawater, the fate of the fish reached its terrible conclusion. They came up a conveyor belt, those that still had the strength wriggling back into the slimy mass of each other, like kittens hiding from the cold. The herring were remarkable by their sameness, but here were quivering, whiskered, fat-bellied haddock and cod a yard long, a giant-mawed tiny-sharp-toothed monkfish, gurnard, an octopus the size of a grapefruit, a crab, saithe . . . Sometimes the little fish had fallen into the mouths of the larger.

  What, I wondered, did those glistening, unblinking eyes make of the monstrousness of it all? With what kind of noise – were they able – would the mute mouths register their displeasure at being plucked from the sea into a wholly unknown element, thrust among each other, bruised, suffocated and drawn?

  On one side of the conveyor belt stood the heavy-weather-suited crew, exhausted from the final stages of the shot and weary-eyed. Working quickly like fruit pickers, one gloved hand grabbed a fish and the other ripped a knife through its belly from gills to sternum, reached inside the cavity and yanked out everything that had made it vital, leaving only its carcass. By rights I should have been revolted, but i
t was the men who had my pity. The unremitting relentlessness of it all – grab, slice, eviscerate – and then when the fish were done and the floor sluiced of their autumn-berry blood, a cup of tea, a slice of the fudge that the wife of one of the crew had made, before preparing for the next shot.

  As the day matured, the wisps of cloud thickened like phlegm. Gone were Fair Isle, Foula and Sumburgh. Gone also was my fascination with the fish. But Victor was very pleased. The weather having been so atrocious, this was the first day that the Radiant Star had fished in over three weeks. Better still, on account of the weather, the producers’ association that manages catch allowances had distributed extra quota for cod, fishing for which is tightly controlled in the North Sea.

  ‘You canna not catch de cod when you’re fishing for de haddock because they swim in de same shoal. Ordinarily, we’d be having to throw all de cod away on account of de fact that we’d be above de quota.’ Victor pronounced the first consonant in ‘fishing’ as ‘vie’ with a very hard v. His ‘fishing’ half-rhymed with ‘Viking’.

  I sipped my tea.

  ‘That would ha’ meant throwin’ away more than half de day’s catch! Discarding it! Food for de gulls, because none of it would ha’ survived. De bird people should be thankin’ us.’

  Earlier Larry – whose wife had made the fudge – had shown me the catch book, recording what they’d landed, its value, weather conditions, fishing grounds and incidents, some at Victor’s expense, like the time he had to turn back because a lad’s night out the day before had rendered him incapable of anything, and the day Victor had leaped out of the wheelhouse to help with a haul only to find that he’d forgotten to put his sea boots on and was standing on the sodden deck in a gale wearing only his socks. The sums were quite remarkable, a mediocre day’s catch worth nine or ten thousand pounds and a good catch closer to fifteen, although the costs of running a commercial fishing boat – not only fuel, upkeep, insurance, berthing fees, but servicing the loan to buy it – are considerable. Even so, as Victor pointed out, many of the fishermen who had sold their quotas and decommissioned their boats in the late 1980s and 90s were kicking themselves now because the Shetland waters, rich in plankton and made fecund by the swirling of currents, are full of fish, if not quite as many as there have ever been. In the late 1960s Shetland was at the epicentre of a Gadidae explosion – Gadidae being the genus to which cod and haddock belong – when, because of a peculiar and not yet fully understood confluence of tides, temperature and the movement of the Gulf Stream, numbers of prime eating fish burgeoned.

  It was just as Jacob Hammer had said, after a fashion, in Skagen: the science of predicting fish numbers is sophisticated but imprecise, like shining a light into the gloom.

  A boom also has its perils, turning all too easily into a glut, making prices plummet and consigning much of the catch to animal feed or, more ironically still, fishmeal to feed to farmed salmon. The regulation of fishing is fiendishly difficult and, given the conflicting agendas of environmental groups, commercial fishing lobbies, national governments, the European Union and scientists, a subject on which consensus is impossible to reach.

  Victor pointed out that the Shetland fishermen had strong incentives to manage their own fisheries well. They had been fishing these waters since they arrived on the islands, and almost all the boats – at least in the whitefish fleet catching cod and haddock – were either family owned or, as in the case of the Radiant Star, belonged to the crew. There was a good living to be made out of it, as long as the quotas were reasonable. ‘Shetland fishermen respect de resources, ken? Not like the Scots down in Fraserburgh and Peterhead. Dey’re rap-a-cious bastards.’

  Ironically, said Victor, winter fishing is easier. There’s only enough light for four shots, and staying out to sea overnight is ludicrous. In the summer, when the sun rises above the horizon almost before it disappears, the boats will stay out for the best part of a week, shooting the nets maybe seven or eight times each day.

  Returning with the net stowed and fish washed and packed down, Victor settled back into his captain’s chair; the crew shed their oilskins, and I had a sense of the pleasure of returning with a full hunting bag.

  There were phone calls to make and receive. First Victor’s da – ‘He’s no’ at the fishing any more, but he takes a very active interest in de boat’ – and the other trawlers heading back to Scalloway. When he spoke in dialect, I couldn’t understand Victor, but could recognise that he was downplaying success. I thought of the notion of sjusamillabakka. Periodically Victor glanced over and winked, indicating that what he had just told the skipper of the Cormorant was only half true. ‘We’re all de be-e-estest o’ friends, but we tell each other wee half-lies – it’s a part of the game of de fishing,’ he said.

  Soon the Scalloway light came into view. Victor’s wife rang to ask what time he’d back and what he wanted for his tea. ‘Not fish!’ he said, and though it was now raining hard, the sea remained fair, and the Radiant Star scampered over the chop. On the television the news of Nelson Mandela’s death began to ebb, and the flickering screen showed images of the terrible damage done across the east coast of England by the ravaging sea, upon and across which we rode in the direction of home.

  ‘I feel for dose poor pipple down in de south,’ said Victor, ‘I really do.’ And, feeling light and buoyant in my pilot’s chair, so did I.

  15

  New Sea, New Chapters

  I, last least voice of her voices

  Give thanks that were mute in me long

  To the soul in my soul that rejoices

  For the song that is over my song

  Time gives what he gains for the giving

  Or takes for his tribute of me;

  My dreams to the wind everliving

  My song to the sea.

  Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘By the North Sea’

  Riding out the tail end of that storm on the Radiant Star in Shetland’s subarctic latitudes we were safe from the tidal surge sucking along the east coast of Britain. News reports came in of the Thames Barrier literally but slowly swinging into action to save the capital, of flooded homes in Boston, Lincolnshire, stranded seal pups at Donna Nook and the evacuation of thousands of people, especially from low-lying towns such as Canvey, where six decades ago such damage had been inflicted.

  I received an email from Uwe, my teacher friend on the Hallig of Hooge. It showed his Warft entirely surrounded by swirling green sea. ‘It has been difficult,’ he said, ‘but we are all OK.’

  The surge had been powerful, reproving and disruptive but not cataclysmic – a hard-hitting feint. The real body blow came later, not to the North Sea coast but to the west and south: a battery of sea-spitting, roof-ripping storms, barrelling, broadsiding . . . Soaring, tumbling towers of spray pummelled and exploded against quaysides, boulders and harbour walls, transfixing the thrill seekers who came as close – or too close – as they could to something that for once deserved to be described as awesome. Of a sudden the transformative powers of the elements were revealing themselves in ways that took a modern double-glazed nation wholly by surprise.

  Climatic caprice also showed talent for mischief-making. Somerset’s low-lying Levels were lost beneath flood waters, and a suite of government agencies descended to carp and finger-point, each flattering the other that it was responsible for the debacle. A seaside railway that had threaded its way along the Devon coast for a hundred years was left looking like the broken toy of a petulant child-god. Divine retribution was indeed invoked as the cause of the misery by a county councillor who blamed the British prime minister’s support of same-sex marriage for the nation’s woes. Insane it may have seemed to many, but the scenes of destruction, tame by the standards of even the mildest Asian tsunami or Middle East earthquake, were sufficiently Old Testament for somebody to make that connection.

  Even for city dwellers, scarcely touched by the storms save that it tickled them to watch the drama through office windows and listen to
the weather’s nocturnal swirling and gurgitation, Britain was like a great barque floundering in a mountainous sea, anticipating the final lurch or the tumbling of a mast.

  The weather takes, but it also gives. At Happisburgh in Norfolk soft cliffs crumbled to unveil in a stratum of sand the footprints of a small family group of pre-human beings. The prints were 850,000 – perhaps even a million – years old, their humanity strangely amplified by their antiquity. Easy and unchoreographed, they implied the presence of a foraging party – maybe gathering shellfish, seaweed or pretty stones. And in places on the coast of Wales freakish low tides pulled back to reveal the petrified stumps of oak and pine trees studded in the sand – more of the Noah’s Woods that had so intrigued Clement Reid.

  History never repeats itself, but patterns and ironies emerge over the course of time. Much of the farmland in the east of England reclaimed from the sea by the brawn and ingenuity of the Dutch in the seventeenth century is now worked by the industry of migrants from the new accession states of the European Union. As before, these outsiders are resented by those shamed by their perspicacity and ability to thrive despite pitiable wages and lack of foreign language skills. Support for the nationalist UKIP party is particularly high in towns like Boston, not the US city which flourished on its early diet of Irish immigrants, but the fading Fenland port which in 2011 Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens rechristened Lincolngrad on account of its being ‘riven by mass immigration in its hardest and most uncompromising form’.

  Who can honestly disapprove of the poor person from Lisbon, Riga or Bucharest, with a family to house and feed, tempted to uproot his or her life by the promise of wages unthinkable at home . . . [and yet who] can blame the people of this ancient place, nervous, baffled and disquieted by the sudden arrival of hundreds of people who do not speak English, who are ignorant of our customs, who move among us like interplanetary visitors, so cut off that they could not even understand a shout of ‘Help!’ let alone laugh at our jokes?