“He wass the despair o’ his poor wife. She was more than twenty years younger than him, a kindly soul Alec said, but no match for the Laird, and efter Alec had been in the man’s service for six months or thereby, the poor wumman chust upped and left him and went hame to her own people in Dingwall and took the weans wi’ her.
“That wass when things started to go really doon hill at the Big Hoose, Alec said. There wass nobody to even try to keep the man in check, the drinking perties went on aal night, and the cairds wass played seven days a week, for there wull always be disreputable cronies to gather roond a man like the Laird ass long ass he has his money.
“Within a couple of weeks of the wife leaving, Alec wass the only servant left at the hoose, aal the wummen had fled, and Alec himsel’ had had mair than enough of it and was lookin’ oot for anither place.
“The Meenister took to comin’ oot to see the Laird, he thought it his Chrustian duty to save sich a dreadful backslider, and tried to persuade him to get back on the straight and narrow.
“ ‘To bleezes wi’ your straight and narrow,’ said the Laird. ‘Is it no’ enough that I come to the Kirk releegiously every Lord’s Day?’
“ ‘You may come to the Kirk,’ said the Minister, ‘but you always sleep through the service, and the congregation iss beginning to complain aboot it.’
“ ‘Nae doot,’ replied the Laird, ‘but that’ll only be because of my snoring keeping them awake. What else can you expect when you preach nothing but hellfire and brumstone? Lustenin’ to wan o’ your sermons would turn milk sour.’
“From that you can imagine that relationships between the Laird and the Manse wass very strained.”
The Vital Spark was now less than a hundred yards from the harbour and Para Handy, calling down for the engines to be stopped, let her drift slowly towards the stone quay. Sunny Jim moved forward and made ready to leap ashore with the bow rope.
The reception committee waiting on the quayside to welcome them to Ullapool consisted in its entirety of two very small, dirty and ragged urchins of about eight years of age, one engaged in throwing stones at the wheeling seagulls, and the other picking his nose.
“What wass also clear to Alec by now,” the Captain continued once the mooring process was complete and the crew retired to the fo’c’sle to brew up a pot of tea, “wass that the Laird wass chust destroyin’ himself wi’ drink.
“But it wass a fever that took him before the drink had had the chance to feenish the chob. For three days he lay at death’s door, but if you thought that would have concentrated his mind on higher things, you can think again. He kept a bottle hidden under the bed and made sure Alec had it topped up: he wass aalways tryin’ to grab hold of the nurse that the local doctor sent in to look efter him: and whenever the Meenister, good Chrustian soul that he wass, came to see him, he cursed him and his whole Kirk Session to bleezes.
“Then came the morning when Alec answered a knock on the door to find the Minister on the step.
“ ‘A fine day, Alec,’ said he as my brither took his coat. ‘And how is the Laird this morning? I do hope his temperature is no higher than it was last night?’
“ ‘I wass speculating aboot that very thing myself, Meenister, and hoping chust the same ass you: though I wouldna be counting on it,’ said Alec. ‘for I think it could well be a great deal higher by now. You see, the Laird passed awa’ at three o’clock this morning.’
“So there wass Alec withoot a billet, though a relieved man to have got oot of his last one. But the Meenister put in a word for him wi’ the owner o’ the Bay Hotel, here in the toon, and he took Alec on as Head Porter. The Hotel’s still here, but it iss changed oot of aal recognition for it has a drinks licence noo but when Alec worked there it wass a Temperance Hoose.
“Alec could tak’ that or leave it, he wassna for drink the way Hurricane Jeck iss, for instance: and in spite of aal the months of misery wi’ the Laird, he wassna against it neither.
“What he wass against, though, wass the miserable kind of a clientele the Hotel attracted for the maist o’ them wass the sort of folk that looked ass if they’d neffer had so mich ass wan single day’s enchoyment out of life. Good Templar families on holiday: or commercial travellers of the Rechabite persuasion (and little enough business they could expect to do in Ullapool, what with the shopkeepers no’ wantin’ to offend the sensubilities of the fushermen that made up the maist of their regular custom by havin’ ony truck wi’ teetotallers): or Meenisters — Meenisters maist of aal.
“ ‘It wass that miserable in that Hotel, Peter’ he said to me after he’d got oot of it, ‘that in comparison wi’ it, a day in an undertaker’s office would have been mair like a night at the Music Halls for cheneral hilarity and entertainment.’
“Mercifully he didna have to thole it for long, for he got the seck wan November morning chust a couple of months after he’d started.
“There was some kind of a Presbytery Convention in the toon and Ullapool wass chust hotching wi’ gentlemen of the cloth, there wass dog-collars on effery street corner and needless to say the Bay Hotel was chammed to the rafters wi’ them. If it had been a gloomy place afore, it wass like a wet day in Rothesay noo, prayer-meetings in effery room and faces efferywhere ass lang ass the Parliamentary Road.
“That morning was the third day of the Convention and Alec wass at his wut’s end, but he wass up at the crack o’ dawn ass usual and laid a fine log fire in the big open fireplace in the main lounge, then took up his post at the Porter’s Desk in the front hall.
“Pretty soon the Meenisters began to come doon stairs in ones and twos and foregaither, ass they did the first thing effery morning, for a wheen o’ prayers and a lugubrious unaccompanied psalm or two in the lounge. That wass usually feenished by quarter to eight or thereby, and at eight o’clock it wass Alec’s duty to go through the various public rooms wi’ a gong, to summon the residents to their breakfasts in the dining-room.
“When he went into the lounge to do chust that, there wass mair than a dozen Meenisters in their bleck frock-coats and white collars clustered aboot the fire, some o’ them toasting their backs at it, others warmin’ their hands, for it wass a frosty cauld morning outside and the Hotel wass far from warm.
“ ‘Yes,’ one of the older Meenisters wass saying ass Alec came into the room, ‘I enchoyed a positively apocalyptic dream last night — I dreamed that I wass in Heaven!’
“ ‘And what wass Heaven like,’ asked one of the younger ones.
“ ‘It wass very much like our Convention,’ replied the older man solemnly, ‘a meeting-place and a gathering-place for the faithful and the penitent.’
“Alec told me later that he chust could not have resisted the temptation that now overwhelmed him. He coughed, and the group round the fire turned towards him.
“ ‘That is aal most interesting, chentlemen,’ said he, ‘for I too had a most prophetic dream last night. But where you, Sir, dreamed of Heaven I dreamed that I was in Hell.’
“There was a pause till one of the chentleman asked: ‘And what was that like?’
“ ‘It wass chust exactly like the fire in this hotel lounge,’ said Alec brightly, ‘you could hardly see the flames for Meenisters!’
“He wass oot on the street wi’ his tin trunk within 20 minutes but it was the very best thing that effer happened to him. Not only did he get oot of the Bay Hotel and oot of Ullapool, but he took a tumble to himself and gave up working in service and got a proper chob.
“He’s a potman at the Horseshoe Inn in Gleska now, happy ass larry, and quite reconciled wi’ the rest o’ the faimily, for the maist o’ my cheneration o’ the Macfarlanes wouldna talk to him whiles he wass in service.
“ ‘It iss like a new lease of life, Peter,’ he told me the last time I saw him, and the latest word iss that he iss getting married next month to wan o’ the barmaids.”
“Well, there you are Peter,” said the Engineer, laughing: “you were wrong in what you said a whi
le back — it seems they do get earth-shattering events happening in Ullapool! Jist ask your brother — Ah’m sure he’d agree!”
FACTNOTE
Para Handy’s (unnamed) brother is referred to (working as a valet and disowned by the his nine siblings) on the very first page of the first of Neil Munro’s original tales — Para Handy, Master Mariner. I felt that following the tale of Keep Dark in the previous chapter such an unlikely relative had to be worth investigating!
Ullapool was founded on fishing, has had two hundred years of feast and famine as the herring shoals have come and gone and come back again, but now earns its keep almost entirely from tourism. Though Loch Broom in recent years has been crammed with catchers and mother-ships from almost every country of Northern Europe and some from even further afield, only a tiny handful of small wooden vessels are locally owned and crewed (almost exclusively for shellfish) and no shore-based curing stations remain. The processing of the catch is now carried out on the fleet of klondykers anchored out in the Loch.
Just as Neil Munro’s home town of Inveraray was designed and built from scratch as a planned entity by the Duke of Argyll in the 1740s when his new Castle was also constructed and the old Castle and Village demolished, so Ullapool too is an artificial creation.
Here, though, the builder was not a local landowner and the motive was not for the sake of elegance and prestige. Ullapool was identified as the perfect location for a fully integrated fishing town ideally placed to exploit the huge herring shoals of the Minches.
Thus the town came into being in 1788, the brainchild of the British Fisheries Society, with the necessary constituent parts for catching the fish, processing the fish, and servicing the fleet. Thus there were, in addition to the curing stations, a variety of other shore-based operations including boatyards and ship-chandlers, cooperages and networks. In season not just the boats but the majority of the shore-workers moved into Ullapool in those days when an army of workers spent each year following the herring shoals on their mysterious migrations around the coasts.
In 1974 Ullapool replaced Mallaig and Kyle of Lochalsh as the terminus for the direct sea-crossing to Stornoway. One perhaps unforeseen side-effect of that decision was that it placed the Inverness to Kyle Railway Line, world-famous for the stunning beauty of its meanderings across some of the most evocative and remote landscapes in the United Kingdom, but economically very fragile, under almost constant threat of closure. So far the conservationists have managed to fend off the pragmatists but its long-term future is still far from assured.
51
A Matter of Men and Machinery
Dougie, who was seated atop the wheelhouse with paint-pot and brush, touching up the black boot-topping on the puffer’s funnel, pointed over the puffer’s bows and observed: “This must be him comin’ noo.”
Para Handy turned round from the sternpost, where he had been making some minor adjustments to the rope fenders, and peered along the empty cobbled vista of Yorkhill quayside towards the distant dock gates.
A small figure, hunching forward slightly as he walked and clutching a shabby canvas holdall, was rapidly drawing near the Vital Spark with quick, purposeful paces.
“He looks hermless enough,” observed the Captain, “and there iss not much of him, to be sure!”
The Mate slid down from the wheelhouse roof and joined him against the rail on the puffer’s port quarter. The approaching figure took the last few paces which brought him abreast of the two shipmates and leaned down towards the vessel, whose deck was a few feet below the level of the quay.
“I am sure I must have mistaken my instructions,” he observed to the pair quietly in a soft voice with the clipped tones of the east coast discernible in it. “and taken a wrong turning somewhere in the docks. You are not by any chance Captain Peter Macfarlane? I think, surely, that you can’t possibly be.”
“Oh but I am,” said Para Handy cheerfully. “And you’ll be Angus Napier? The Docks Office told me to expect you some time this afternoon. Welcome to the smartest boat in the tred. This iss Dougie Campbell, my Mate. Throw us your portmanteau and come aboard. I can assure you we are mair than pleased that you are here, for we have been marooned in this wulderness for the last two days.”
With a strangely twisted expression on his face Napier complied with these instructions slowly and uncertainly, and clambered down the iron ladder set into the face of the quay and onto the deck.
He looked about him almost apprehensively.
“And this is really the Vital Spark?” he enquired in a doubtful voice, “and you’re expecting an engineer…?”
Forty-eight hours previously misfortune had struck the puffer or, more accurately, her engineer when Dan Macphail, at home in Plantation for the weekend, had been suddenly taken ill with severe stomach pains which were quickly diagnosed by the doctor summoned by his anxious wife as appendicitis.
Now Dan languished in the Western Infirmary awaiting a decision about an operation and the owner of the Vital Spark had been forced to look for a relief engineer. The ship, meanwhile, lay idle at Yorkhill fully-laden with the annual cargo of winter coals ordered by their Laird for the islanders of Canna, unable to fulfill her obligations under that contract till a temporary replacement for Macphail could be found.
“Could you and your Mate not manage the conning and the running of the vessel?” had been the owner’s first question when Para Handy reported the situation at his office on Monday morning. “I am sure that between the pair of you you’re as familiar with the engines as Macphail himself, and there is little enough to do except keep the furnace fired.”
“Not I!” exclaimed Para Handy in some horror. “I leave aal that side of the business to Macphail. My place iss on the brudge o’ the shup, no deevin’ aboot amang aal the coals and grease and bilers like wan o’ the bleck geng on the Lusitania. It iss the naavigation and cheneral management of the vessel that iss my responsibility, and a heavy one it iss.
“Besides, you wouldna want the Vital Spark to end up the same way as Wullie Jardine’s Saxon did a year or two back?”
“What happened to her?” enquired the owner, curious.
“She was dam’ lucky no’ to be sunk.” said Para Handy. “Wullie had a furious argument wi’ his engineer, old Erchie Begg, one November night when they wass berthed in Dunoon and had gone ashore for a smaal refreshment, and they fell oot aboot their relative importance to the shup.
“ ‘Caal yourself an enchineer do you,’ howled Wullie when Erchie suchested that because of his qualifications he was the key man on board. ‘Ah’ve seen better-qualified men than you drivin’ a dustcairt for the Gleska Corporation. You run a shup indeed! My Lordie, you couldna even run a tap!’
“ ‘Iss that so,’ retorted Erchie, ‘well then I would like to see you tryin’ your hand at the controls o’ the engine-room. Ony fool can steer a boat, Lord knows, Ah did it in my bath when I was a bairn, but it tak’s brains to drive wan, and you couldna drive a nail intae a plank.’
“There wass more, much more, in the same comradely vein for the two wass in their best insultin’ trum what wi’ the refreshments they had taken and the upshot of it aal wass that they agreed that, next mornin’, the Engineer would tak’ the wheel ass they left the Coal Pier at Dunoon, whiles Wullie would be doon below makin’ sure the engines didna break.
“What had seemed a good idea at midnight wass very much less attractive at seven o’clock on a dark winter mornin’ but the two o’ them wass that thrawn neither would admit it, and Wullie went doon to the engine-room while Erchie sauntered into the deckhoose and grabbed the wheel and pretended to himself he’d been doin’ it aal his naitural.
“The Mate, who’d been told to keep well clear and leave the two eejits to their ain devices, cast off the bow and stern ropes and she began to druft off the pierhead. Erchie rang doon for full-speed ahead and Wullie tried to mak’ some sense of aal the levers and gauges in front of him.
“For a few minutes there wass no soun
d apart from a series of muffled curses from doon below, then there wass a grindin’ and a crunchin’ and the propellor began to turn. For a while both men thought efferything wass hunky-dory, till there wass a loud screech on the whustle to the engine-room and Erchie roared doon the voice-pipe ‘You auld goat! You’ve got her goin’ astern instead of aheid!’
“Next thing came the crunchin’ and the grindin’ sounds aal over again, followed by silence and then mair cursin’, lots mair cursin’, wi’ chust occasional bursts of the shaft turnin’ for a meenit and then stoppin’, and then turnin’ again, till finally in a last flurry of un-Chrustian language Wullie admitted defeat and yelled up the voice-pipe for Erchie to get back doon below and sort things oot for he chust wassna able to cope wi’ it at aal.
“There was a short silence, then Erchie called quietly doon the pipe ‘Weel, Ah dinna think there’s mich point in me comin’ back doon right noo, Wullie, for Ah’m pretty sure Ah’ve chust run her onto the Gantocks onyway.’
“And indeed he had, right at the top of the tide, and it wass a full twelve hoors before they wass able to float her off again!
“Naw,” concluded Para Handy firmly. “We’re no sturrin’ till we get an engineer.” And, in view of the evidence which he had just had put so graphically before him, the owner agreed with some alacrity that Para Handy should register the temporary vacancy with the employment exchange at the Clyde Docks Office as a matter of urgency.
The bemused Napier set foot on the puffer’s deck with an air of reluctance and stared about him in disbelief, pulling off his jauntily-tilted blue peaked cap to scratch at his head with all the signs of an inner turmoil.
Para Handy led him to Macphail’s dark subterranean domain. The East Coast man looked even more distraught as he cast his eyes over the cramped engine-room with its single bunker, its single furnace, single boiler, single-pistoned power unit and single propellor shaft: its ramshackle tangle of dank pipes stained here and there with rust and marked by dark streaks of oil: its basic controls and almost total absence of instrumentation of any description.
Complete New Tales of Para Handy Page 38