The bairns followed the pointed stem of grass.
‘Follow a trail in the sky from the two stars to the right of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, to the one on the right of Ursa Minor. It’s called lots of names,’ he continued, ‘the Pole Star, the North Star, Polaris, and when the Egyptians were building the pyramids they called it Thuban. Just think of that, the pharaohs of Egypt looked at that star all those years ago, just as we are doing now, and there will be a fisherman somewhere out at sea at this moment looking at it or for it, because as long as you can see the North Star you can plot exactly where you are.’ The three stared heavenwards and shook their heads in wonderment.
‘And,’ Magnus said, ‘even though we’re watching it together now, it might be dead. Imagine that now, it might not exist at all, even though we can see it sparkling away for us. It’s so far away from Earth that the light takes a long, long time to get to us here. We might now be seeing it as it was when it was still there. Isn’t that strange, now?’
Ida would stare at the star. ‘How far away is it, then?’
‘Well, I can’t say exactly, Ida,’ Magnus would reply. ‘Millions of miles, certainly. You see the moon up there yonder? It’s 230,000 miles away from us, so you can just imagine how far away the stars are.’
Two hundred and thirty thousand miles. It was too vast a distance to contemplate, especially when she found the 211 miles to Aberdeen more than she could cope with, so the moon must be nearly as far away, Ida would muse, as Uncle Andro’s family in the Land of Trees.
‘And did you know,’ Magnus would continue, ‘that Jupiter weighs more than all the planets put together, including the Earth?’
The bairns would shake their heads again in a show of united wonder. They did know, of course, because Magnus’s facts about the planets were frequently discussed.
‘And that Saturn is so light that, if you put it in water, it would float?’
The three would shake their heads in yet more wonderment, then Magnus would test them on their knowledge.
‘Where is the Earth in relation to the Sun?’ he would ask.
‘The Earth,’ Ina would say, ‘is third from the Sun, Da.’
Magnus would nod contentedly.
‘And what’s the order of the planets?’
‘The Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,’ Ina would repeat from memory, exchanging a secret giggly look with Danny when she came to ‘Uranus’, because their father didn’t approve of nonsense where learning was concerned. No one knew about tiny Pluto in those days, and oh, Magnus’s excitement when it was discovered in 1930. Even if he couldn’t see it, it was as if he had found the answer to all the questions in the universe, and the knowledge that it was there pleased him every bit as much as his youngest daughter’s shared interest in the stars. That year, 1930, was also the year that Magnus had lost a son.
In those early days of the fishing when her great-grandfather had started out, open boats meant that the fishermen lived and worked exposed to wind, rain and hail, always liable to be swamped by the waves. Gradually, as they learned more about the sea and their trade, part-decked and full-decked boats evolved, and different kinds of boats entirely appeared, with nets designed to go after specific catches. There were some fishermen, like one of Ina’s brothers, who went further afield to work as sealers and whalers, catching what was known as ‘sea pork’. They came back with tales of the shrill, plaintive cries of the whales as they were ‘driven like a flock of sheep to shallow water on a sandy shore’, and described how ‘the boats push in, stabbing and wounding in all directions’, as the creatures finally died ‘in water dyed red with their blood.’
Fishermen in other areas went after the poor man’s food – oysters, or crabs, lobsters, clams, or salmon – but Magnus Polson went after white fish, which meant he had to find work during the summer months when there were none to be caught. Then he worked in a factory on the tiny island of Bressay, outside Lerwick Harbour, coming home at weekends, and those were his times with Danny and Ina and the stars. The factory produced fertiliser, and when the boats came in loaded with herring, the ones at the bottom would be crushed and inedible, so these were sold to the factory for processing, along with other fish that wasn’t good quality. The resulting smell was terrible, so terrible that Magnus Polson wasn’t allowed into his home when he arrived on a Friday evening. The family would make him stand outside to strip off his working clothes so that they could be soaked in the washing tub to be ready for work again on Monday morning. Ina could almost smell it now, all these long years later, picturing Magnus pretending to forget and trying to come indoors as she and her brothers and sisters pushed him back out, holding their noses, giggling and shouting, ‘Stand outside! Get your clothes off!’
He had been a nice man, her father; he had always made her laugh. That was probably why she had always had a fondness for men who could make her laugh. They said women married men like their fathers; maybe that had been her mistake – if she had made a mistake with Aeneas, and she wasn’t saying she had. Ina smiled to herself. The truth was that the man she had married had been more like her mother, though she hadn’t realised it at the time. Was that what the gypsy woman in Yarmouth had meant all those years ago, she wondered? ‘Ach, away with you, old woman!’ she chided herself. ‘Next you’ll be believing in fairies!’ From the doorway behind her fireside armchair she sensed her daughter, Margo, listening as she worked about the kitchen and watching her with Dolina Polson’s eyes. ‘She’ll be saying the old one’s finally losing her marbles,’ Ina thought, and hoped she hadn’t actually said it aloud.
2
Ina had loved all the seasons on Shetland. In summertime it never quite got dark, and even in those days without street lights it was possible to walk about with no difficulty at midnight. ‘Simmer dim’, that special high summer light was called, and even once the Sun had dipped below the horizon in the middle of the night it still didn’t get dark. Instead a lilac twilight bathed the islands before dawn sunlight returned, bringing a new day. But perhaps Ina loved winter most of all, with the snow sparkling on the frosty roads and almost rivalling the stars in the sky for beauty. She was spellbound watching the mirry-dancers, the bright lights that she’d heard other people call the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis, and in the clear, quiet air you could even hear the red flames swish-swishing across the sky.
The snow was so deep and stayed on the ground so long that they were regularly snowed-in for weeks at a time, with the entire population on the big sledges every family had, the metal runners polished to make them go faster, weaving in and out of the horses and carts till three in the morning sometimes. They would find the biggest hill and push off, knowing that they couldn’t stop till they reached the end or met some obstacle. Once her brother, Danny, had found a horse in the way and just closed his eyes, so that he was the only one who didn’t see himself going straight between the animal’s front and back legs. And there was a really big hill three miles long that everyone had to try, though the long hike up pulling a sledge, even one with very highly polished runners, could exhaust you before you got to the top. Then would come the exhilaration of the wild, exciting descent that somehow seemed to pass in seconds, followed by that long, long climb back up again.
These days everything was shop-bought, even sledges, though there were few enough of even the modern, plastic variety about. It had to be skis and snowboards for this generation. Not that you saw much snow in Acarsaid, where she lived now, but you saw folk on the TV and wondered what pleasure they got from things they hadn’t made themselves. Look what they’d done to Up Helly Aa. She’d seen a news programme about it from Shetland last January and she could hardly believe it: it was all glitter and polish these days. Though TV was one invention she did approve of. Now that her legs no longer worked properly and her memory sometimes played tricks, too, the TV had opened up the worlds that she had never quite managed to visit. During the first moon landing she had sat in her c
hair, wrapped in a quilt, and watched Neil Armstrong take his gigantic step for mankind and envied him so much it hurt. There were lots of astronomy programmes to see, and in those nights when she didn’t sleep as long or as deeply as she had when she was younger, she had discovered a whole new universe in programmes for the Open University, without dancing, singing fools appearing just as it got interesting. She could see up close the familiar constellations her father had taught her all those years ago, and she’d find her eyes tearing up, hearing his voice instead of Patrick Moore’s, pointing out supernovas and meteor showers. And now here she was, tears starting again just thinking about him; she would have to stop or her daughter, Margo, would tell the doctor or the grandbairns, with that Dolina shake of her head, that she’d been crying over nothing again.
Where was she? Up Helly Aa, that was it. It too came ready-made these days. When Ina had been a bairn it had been a different kind of a thing altogether, as different from what they had now as chalk and cheese. Up Helly Aa was a Norse festival, a homage to their Viking ancestors, held on the last Tuesday in January to brighten the depths of winter. All the men would dress up in fancy dress – she remembered seeing one who’d made himself look like a box of Scott’s Porridge Oats once; she thought of him every time she saw an advert for them on the TV and she’d laugh. Up Helly Aa was a men’s only affair and they’d organise themselves into about twenty squads of twelve or fourteen men and march through the town with flaming torches till they came to the Lochside, where a specially built replica of a Viking longboat had earlier been towed. The men would sing ‘The Norseman’s Home’, and then all the torches would be thrown into the air to land on the boat, like streams of fire in the dusk, until it had been consumed by the flames. After that the squads of guizers would make their way through the town, their own fiddle and accordion players accompanying them all through the night, stopping at all the halls and big houses on the way so that everyone could have a dance. The women, though, had to pay for tickets; nowhere was big on female equality in those days, and Shetland was no exception.
The small boys of Lerwick had their own version of Up Helly Aa earlier in the day, they even had their own longboat to burn, but she had seen it on TV recently and the guizers no longer dressed up like cereal packets, they all wore identical Viking outfits with shiny breastplates and horned helmets. They were like theatrical costumes; the whole thing had become a well-organised spectacle for tourists. Well, tourism was big business these days, she knew that, but though the fishing had all but gone, the place was awash with oil money, so what need did they have to change things that had existed for generations and once meant something, just to attract outsiders? She no longer lived there – hadn’t even been back since the 1950s – but she still felt they had lost something important when they moved Up Helly Aa upmarket.
It was the same with everything these days. Easter: there was another case in point. Some bairns in her day boiled eggs and painted them, but the Polsons boiled theirs with a piece of red paper to dye them, then they’d roll them down a hill. The egg that rolled the furthest won, but there was no prize – they’d eat them with bread and butter. There were no chocolate eggs in those days, either; not that she wasn’t partial to a bit of chocolate, but they seemed to get bigger and more elaborate every year. Did anyone dye or paint their own eggs these days?, she wondered, and laughed at the thought of how a modern bairn might react if they were handed a hen’s egg and expected to be content with that. Birthdays were the same: the presents and cards got more ornate and expensive all the time. When she was young no one celebrated birthdays at all, and at Christmas and New Year they danced in Market Square; that was it. At Hallowe’en nowadays bairns no longer knew what it was to dress up and do a turn. If they celebrated it at all their outfits came straight from a shop, bought ready-sized and complete.
Everything was ready-made these days, Ina thought. She tried to remember when she had last seen a woman knitting. There was a time when every female knitted as soon as she could hold a pair of needles, but these days handknitting seemed to be a reminder of a poorer age and was therefore shunned. They always said they hadn’t time, or they had never learned, but Ina always suspected that the real reason was that no one wanted to be reminded of where they had come from. Poverty was a stigma, and making your own or your bairns’ clothes was seen as something only the poor did, because they couldn’t afford anything ‘better’. By ‘better’ they meant shop-bought tat, Ina thought; inferior machine-knitted rubbish from the sweatshops of the Third World where people were indeed still trapped in poverty. She had seen programmes about it on TV, and would shout at the screen as she watched, much to the amusement of Margo and the others, but that was their ignorance, not hers, she had decided. ‘Look at the old one,’ they would say indulgently, ‘still a firebrand!’ as though she was some kind of dinosaur, and she would wonder to herself how this could have happened, how she could have raised a family so unaware of what was going on around them. They were wrong anyway, Ina Polson was no dinosaur, she just thought more than most of them were prepared to; thinking for yourself wasn’t encouraged in today’s world. It was a strange world to be sure, one where she didn’t belong any longer. She was glad she wasn’t long for it.
Ina had gone to the fishing on the autumn of her fifteenth year. Lowestoft it was, on the southeast of England, when herring shoals were reaching Smith’s Knoll off the East Anglian Coast. The shoals started their long, slow migration in the North, with the Shetland waters fished in March–April, so there was a tradition of herring lassies being Scottish because they were on hand at the start of the season. From there the lassies followed the boats that followed the herring, from Shetland to Wick then on to Fraserburgh, Peterhead, South Shields, Scarborough, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. The heaviest and best catches were landed there because the herring were at their peak, fat with milt and roe.
Ina had been more restless than usual that autumn, after her brother, Danny, her closest companion since the day she was born, had joined the Merchant Marine the year before. She missed him and envied him in equal measure. There had been quite a stushie before he left. It had happened on Christmas Eve and Isobel Carnegie, the headmaster’s daughter, had managed to evade her father and join the others dancing in Market Square. Ina noticed her dancing with Danny, but she was never quick on the uptake about romances; unlike other lassies of her age, she somehow didn’t seem to think in that way. It was only later she understood that Isobel had been sneaking out to meet Danny for some time. Danny hadn’t mentioned it to Ina, but then Danny wouldn’t, she knew that, it was how he was too, and though both he and Isobel were in their teens, her father still wanted her to have nothing to do with the inferior Shetlanders who had provided him with the best living in the area for years.
That Christmas Eve Danny and Isobel had decided to brave Mr Carnegie, but when Danny asked for permission to court his daughter the headmaster erupted with a fury not even those who determinedly called potatoes ‘tatties’ had ever seen. Danny was thrown out with some roughness, and Isobel was banished to her bedroom for what seemed likely to be the rest of her life, and not long after that Danny departed for a life on the seven seas. Ina was less concerned about his broken heart or Isobel’s and more about the injustices of life. Males could travel the globe, but not females, and the unfairness of that ate at her as she worked about the house with Dolina.
Her chance came like a ray of sunshine on a stormy day, that was how she remembered it: one moment dark and forbidding, the next golden and bright. All of the family were involved in the fishing trade in some way or other. Sandy, her older brother, was a cooper, making barrels for the salt and the fish, and for years he had travelled south, following the fleet every season. But now that he had married, he and his new wife wanted to settle at home. His wife was one of the gutters on their sister Ella’s crew, which left Ella, the packer and effectively the boss, short of a worker. Instantly Ina was determined to fill the vacancy. Ella was quite a lot
older than Ina; in her early twenties and already married to a crofter. It wasn’t unusual for women to leave their menfolk behind to carry on working poor crofts while the women made the money that could mean family survival. There was something more with Ella, though; everyone knew that. It was never put into words, or certainly not words ever spoken in Ina’s hearing, but there was a tacit understanding that Ella was more than happy to leave Ronnie at home for the herring months.
The man from Bloomfield’s, a curer based in Yarmouth, arrived in Shetland every year to recruit replacements for those who had gone elsewhere and, despite Dolina’s misgivings, Ina signed the contract and gleefully accepted five shillings in return. She had been doing housework for two solid years and anyone could have told you that Ina Polson was no homebody, that all her life she had had her eyes firmly fixed on those faraway stars and brighter horizons. The truth was that she would’ve paid the agent five shillings to take her, if she’d had it, that was; never in her entire life had she had even one shilling to call her own, in that she was no different from any other lassie of her era. Knowing this, Bloomfields paid for her ‘oilies’, the oilskin skirts and rubber boots that were the uniform of every herring lassie, her mother couldn’t use lack of money as an excuse to stop Ina from leaving home because there would be no financial outlay. The firm would also pay for her kist, or trunk, containing her clothes, working and best, as well as the ever-present ‘makkin’, her knitting. It would take twelve hours by boat from Lerwick to Aberdeen, then another ten or twelve hours to Yarmouth by train, with ‘Reserved for Bloomfields’ on the carriage window – every curer had their own coaches – followed by more long hours on a milk train to Lowestoft. Once there, she knew, she and the other lassies would have somewhere to stay, in a bothy or a lodging house, but she was in the experienced hands of the other lassies who had followed the herring for years and years before she joined them and if all else failed the Red Cross, the Church of Scotland and the Mission to Fisherfolk were always on hand.
The Last Wanderer Page 3