by Ian Stephen
He got hold of a van. I was in tears, not allowed to come with him. This was one time I couldn’t come. Me grabbing at his arm and crying louder but still not allowed to come.
When he came back, his boiler-suit didn’t smell of my grannie’s shed the way it should have done. There was something I’d only smelled before each year on the night of the gellie. The paraffin hints around the burning wood. Then he went across the road to give the widow her money.
Strandings
The blue of these doors was deep. It was a dark, navy shade, no green in it. Stornoway harbour was pea soup and the beaches you reached out to, on Sunday school picnics, were as much green as blue. A colour I’d seen called ‘mallard’ in the plates of the Arthur Mee encyclopaedias. A locomotive was called that and coloured it too.
Three words, ‘Life Saving Apparatus’, were painted across the double doors, in white and you couldn’t see any drips from the letters. When you passed by here, it was always worth a look to see if anyone was inside. Same thing, passing the fire station. Just round the corner. Doors open. Abandoned bicycles. A car or van left with its wheels on the pavement, parked in a hurry.
Sometimes I’d walk down for the paper, with the olman, him stretching his legs after pedalling at the loom all day. This was before we had the car and before he moved to that other office, up the far end of town, near The Battery. It was while he still got the Express. We’d to remember the Woman’s Weekly, if it was the right day for it. Then he’d wind me up. ‘Harold Hare for you, isn’t it?’ But he knew fine I got The Eagle now. A Bunty for Kirsty. I’d learned it was no good asking for a Beano or a Topper. He’d always get our Eagle and Bunty, our choices, and a Look And Learn to share.
Back up the road, this day. The small door, set into the big double LSA doors, was open. It was there so you didn’t have to go undoing all the bolts to get in. You only opened the big doors if you needed to get all the gear out. Some of our neighbours were in the team. We might see Uisdean, a neighbour, sorting out stuff.
Then one of the big doors opened. A man appeared. He had a white shirt and a white-topped cap. I wondered how he’d managed to bend through that small door, to open the big doors from the inside. Like in Alice In Wonderland, I thought, though I’m sure I didn’t say that.
‘What do you have in the Aladdin’s cave, these days?’ the olman asked and the tall Coastguard said, as it happened, he was just going to do his inspection so we’d get a look.
The second, wide door opened to brass lamps, wooden crates painted the same blue shade, wooden pulleys, shining with oil, neat coils of rope. Faint creosote. Dusty hemp. My father lifted one of the pulleys and said there was quite a trick to it.
This was the snatch block for the hawser. The breeches buoy would run on that, pulled out on an endless whip of lighter rope. I liked the words but couldn’t see how that gear could rescue anyone, till the Coastguard started chalking a picture on a blackboard for me. Now I could see it, how people were brought ashore from wrecks. First the big rocket took out a light line. Then the crew had to pull out the thick rope – the hawser – so it all went from the shore to get tied round the mast of the wreck. That big rope was pulled tight and then it was like a runway for a cable car. The whip was the lighter rope that pulled the thing like a lifering back and fore, running along the thick hawser.
Survivors had to climb into the buoy. It had thick canvas leggings roped to it. Just in case you didn’t get the idea, there was dark lettering which said, ‘Sit In Breeches’. You were pulled ashore by the endless rope as your breeches ran along the thick hawser line. The empty buoy was then pulled back out again, for the next survivor in line.
The olman had gone very quiet. I thought this was just his usual trick of stepping back to let me figure things out. Then his voice came but it was very low.
‘So why couldn’t they use all this stuff at the Iolaire?’
‘Feel the bloody weight of it. Even if you rounded up ten hardy crofters and a horse and cart, in time, it would be a struggle. When it gets wet, it’s heavier still. No Land Rovers then. The access at Holm wasn’t great either. And it was New Year’s night – the first one after the War. It would take time to round up your squad.’
At school, we were always told the story of the Iolaire. It wasn’t a proper warship. Just a big motor yacht trying to carry the survivors of the First World War home for the New Year. Most were lost, about a mile out from Stornoway. The Beasts of Holm were really close to the shore. My olman took me out a walk to the memorial a few times. Most of the lost men were naval reserve. Most could have piloted the ship into harbour.
My father and the Coastguard were talking about it. One lad swam ashore with a rope. A few got off. What’s the tide doing then? Falling. That’s it, then. She’ll be over. A watch was recovered, stopped at the time water entered it.
‘And the Stella?’ It was my father’s voice again. Kenny F’s olman’s boat.
More recent history. They were all running for home but she was behind the rest of the fleet. He’d been on watch, at Holm. She was still showing her fishing lights, as well as her steaming lights. Red over white, up top, for fishing other than trawling. Most of the boats never bothered to put out the fishing lights, when they were steaming home, and most of them showed green over white – the trawlers.
‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’ the Coastguard said.
I saw him get a nod from my olman. Something passed between these two then, I wasn’t sure what.
Knowing she’d be stacked up with gear, he’d watched her go under the blind spot at Holm. Off the Beasts. You could start counting then till you saw the lights re-appear. A slow count to fifteen or so, usually. But she never came back into sight. He called out the lifeboat and LSA then.
‘Aye,’ the olman said, ‘the word is she just lost steerage, surfing in there and couldn’t turn in time. Could have been the same with the Iolaire. Or maybe just underestimating what speed she was making in that following sea.’
‘So you’re a seaman, right enough?’ the Coastguard said.
‘Not now and you still don’t know me, do you?’
Then my father did something I’ve only seen him do in our own house. Took his beret off. You didn’t even notice it was on, after a while. Outside the house, it was always there. But that wasn’t too unusual, round the town. We even have a word for it – your caydie, not just any hat. Like your trademark.
When I say he was bald, I don’t mean just in the centre. He didn’t have any hair on his head. You didn’t even notice this after a while, even when he had the caydie off, in our house. And I suppose our neighbours were used to it, too.
But as soon as he took the beret off, the other man knew him. He couldn’t say a word.
‘I’m not a ghost yet. Remember, you got me out alive,’ the olman said. ‘There was nothing wrong with our own steering that night. Just the guy on the bridge.’
The Coastguard was recovering. Leaning against that rescue equipment. Remembering. Then he could speak.
North African coast. Ben Line. I was bosun. You were shaping up that way yourself. We hadn’t been that route before. We thought Casablanca was only in the movies. This was a wind-up. We couldn’t be heading there for real. Hogmanay and we were off watch. We’d taken our skinful early and were sleeping it off so we’d be ready for the next shift. Pity everyone hadn’t done it that way.
The apprentice was left on the bridge on his own. Poor wee cadet steering when the mate went off to try to quieten down all the whoopee getting made down below. ‘Just be a minute,’ he said.
The baby sailor had the course to steer, safely round the top but he got into a daze. Instead of putting the helm over to keep her off the land, fighting the drift, he just calmly went with it. The compass started swinging.
What a crunch when we hit. Then the bloody klaxons went off. Everybody was going for a door. Drunk or sober. In their clothes or not. Bloody shambles.
Four to a cabin, thos
e days, in steel bunks. Hellish steep companionways. The captain was shouting for the bosun to get a count going. None of these boats is getting lowered until every man’s accounted for.
‘Where’s MacAulay?’ he asks. Bloody hell. I had to get back down below with another guy to look for you. There was bit of a list on the ship already. She was settling. Not falling any further.
We found your cabin door and the bunk was collapsed in there. The steel beam of the top one was lying across your bunk below. You saw the torch and started shouting out in Gaelic. But you weren’t in pain. Nothing lying on top of your body. Just the way these steel beams fell. They’d caged you in. We shifted one and you were free. Unhurt. We all got up on deck together.
But you were still shouting. All in Gaelic. The captain said, ‘MacAulay is panicking the others, what’s he saying?’ I told him you were back in the war. Something about a tank. You were trapped inside.
We got told to shut you up. Someone found a bottle and we got a fair bit of rum down you. Then we got on with the counting and checking lifejackets. The boats were all ready to leave. But the ship didn’t list any further.
In the morning we could all look at these bloody great lumps of rock. Shit, we were lucky. We could just sit tight for now. The weather was good. She was wedged solid. Then a squad of harbour launches was arranged to get us in to port. Nothing to write home about. We didn’t get to Casablanca. We were in hotels for a couple of days before they decided to write off the ship. In that time, something was happening to your hair. First, it turned white. By the time we got home, it was gone. All of it. Your own mother was going to have trouble recognising you.
And you never did go back to sea, did you? Well, you didn’t miss much. The Last Days of the British Merchant Fleet. We saw them. On the decline from then on. They were giving the Japanese builders guided tours of the Clyde, don’t ask me why. Missionary work to show our way was better than the Communists, I suppose. Who was doing the kamikaze now?
Hell, this must be hard work for the boy. Must be some emergency rations here somewhere. Yes, here’s an issue of chocolate bars. What about putting your name down for the LSA? Could do with a few guys who knew the arse end of a block from the other. No?
Well, I can understand that. Hell of a night on the way to Casablanca. Could have been worse. That was close enough. We got away with it.
‘Most of the boys on the Iolaire didn’t get away with it,’ my father said.
‘He was some lad, the man who got the rope ashore. The boat builder at Ness. The Royal Humane Society gave him a medal but they say he never talked about it.’
‘No, I don’t think he did.’
I heard the olman say that, even though I was getting stuck into the chocolate ration. That’s all he said.
Yarns
My grannie with the Spangles was always telling stories. So was my uncle Ruaraidh. He’d get his mother started and then something she said would get him going. My aunty Sheena said they were like collie dogs chasing each other out on the hill.
Usually my uncle took me out in the green Austin van. I liked its badge. It matched the chrome of the stick-out indicators which showed other drivers where you were going. Better than sticking your arm out the window in the rain. Ruaraidh showed me how to save petrol. He’d turn the key as we took the left fork, off the Ranais road, down the hill. We’d see if we could coast all the way to my grannie’s door.
It wasn’t like our house. You could see the stones it was made from. Some of them were huge. It was easy to see how the lower ones would get moved but how could they get the big ones up when the walls were already high? There were never any cranes out here. I never got a proper answer to my question.
The mantelpiece was wood, not tiles. It had china dogs, big as real ones, not collies but terrier-sized. It was usually just myself, the uncle took along. The sister would be helping the olaid, baking and things. There wasn’t an open fire like our house but a creamy Rayburn. If it was cold weather, my grannie opened the bottom oven door and told you to stick your feet in for a while. We’d have a cup of tea to start with. Then Ruaraidh would say, ‘This won’t pay the rent, a bhalaich. Nor put bread in the mouths of the bairns.’
Fanks were best. Other people would come and then there would be two or three dogs and a smell like Dettol. I liked that smell. So did most of the people. One man put his dog in to the bath when the sheep were finished. Another said, well if he hadn’t gone bald he’d give his own hair a wash now. But when he took off his caydie his head was nearly as shiny as my olman’s. I wondered what had happened to him.
At first, my grannie came out to help a bit. She got carried away when she was shooing the sheep. She always said, ‘Kirie, Kirie, Kirie.’ Maybe the sheep know that means to go on ahead, the same way the dog knows to crouch down or to start chasing, from a word or a whistle. Then my grannie stopped coming out but she still made scones, stacks of them. They came off a thing like a heavy frying pan. They didn’t come out of the oven. She always timed it so there was a pile, still warm, when we came in. ‘Help yourselves now, you’ll get no waitress service here.’
People always started off with the weather then the news.
A coorse, coorse winter this, worst one for snow I can remember and I wasn’t born yesterday. That Eichmann was found guilty on all counts. The world’s getting smaller. You can’t run away forever. That was a terrible plane-crash in Rhodesia. The Secretary General on his way to talks on the Congo. Was it an accident? A man swam the Channel both ways, an Argentinean. Must be all that corned beef. Get some of that down the wee fellow. Even if he is a Catholic that President Kennedy is a lovely man. Aye, some would say the first lady is a fine specimen too. It would take more than pretty speeches to stop them building that wall in Berlin. Will Real Madrid take it again this year? Big challenges. At least we can’t do much worse than last year. We’ll need to watch that Charlton fellow. And Greaves is deadly.
I didn’t always know what they were talking about. But I got pictures in my mind, like listening to the radio. The Secretary on the Congo – you could see people typing letters, really fast while they were sitting on cushions floating on a wide river with jungle on each bank.
Then they’d get laughing, jumping back and fore between Gaelic and English. ‘I’ll tell you after,’ Ruaraidh would say but I’d tug at my grannie’s sleeve while she was laughing away. ‘A ghràidh, it’s not the same in English. Here, do you like Spangles?’ Each one was wrapped separately in the packet. Sometimes it was fruit ones and sometimes it was sharper ones.
You only got the other kind of stories if it was getting dark early. My grannie would sometimes ask Ruaraidh to tell me one of his yarns, so I wasn’t left out, with all the political talk and the Gaelic. A story. For himself – that was me. Ruaraidh or someone else would say, ‘Listen to herself trying to stir it up. What about one of your own Mac an t-Sronaich stories?’
‘I don’t want to frighten the townie,’ she’d say. ‘They only go to the pictures to get scared. They don’t hear the real stories any more in Stornoway.’
So of course I’d to push out my chest. Proud because I’d done my share at the fank. Even got blood on my hand when the ram pulled me against the fence and they all said I’d seen too many Westerns at the Playhouse.
My grannie with the Spangles would top up everyone’s tea then Ruaraidh might start.
‘Did you hear now, the Ranais seaman’s story about the coffin?’ So of course everyone laughs and asks which of the thousand and one stories about a coffin this is. ‘The true one,’ he said and they all laughed again, but once my uncle was in full flight they’d all be leaning over to catch every word.
Someone said these yarns were better when the Tilley lamp was whirring away. But my grannie said we were supposed to be moving forward, not going backward. ‘It wasn’t that long ago electricity and running water came to this house. Maybe you’d rather just go out the back to the old chemical toilet but you can all use my WC if you ask nic
ely.’
My grannie admitted, though, that she kept the Tilley handy for power-cuts. ‘What about Mac an t-Sronaich now before the boy had to be getting home?’ someone said. Why did he have to get home tonight at all? There was a spare bed made up. His father could surely pick him up tomorrow.
‘What about me though?’ Ruaraidh said. ‘I’ll be scared stiff driving across the moor on my own after one of my mother’s stories.’
But my grannie got me to phone home and it was decided.
‘Have you seen Mac an t-Sronaich’s cave, out the castle grounds at the mouth of the Creed?’
‘Course I have.’
That big smooth slab, out there, where he cut up any animal he could steal. And the chimney in the rock where he roasted them. Now when the Creed river is low it’s an easy crossing, maybe at the island and you’re well out the Arnish moor. Then you wouldn’t have to go near the lighthouse, not even the farm. You could dodge round the back at Prince Charlie’s loch and get across the burn that goes into the Tob. Sometimes it’s slow going in the heather and bogs. But it’s not a long walk for a fit man. And they said Mac an t-Sronaich was fit all right, wiry as they come.
See when you come out at Griomsiadair, if you come over the shore way, you stumble on the last croft, a bit apart from the rest. You’ll still see them, the lazy-beds, for oats and potatoes, enough for half the village. They’re mostly out that way. So he wouldn’t risk coming out there, in case there was a squad from the village working late. But see if you follow the lochs, you come to the end of our own croft and the houses were further apart then. Now you’ve got to think back a few years. They didn’t even have the chemical toilet. No corrugated iron even. Just a blackhouse. Just a thatch and a rough door and the fire in the middle of the floor. A lean-to barn so you got the heat of the animals as well.
Mostly it was big families then but this poor wee boy’s mother had died, having him. So the boy and his father just looked after each other and the boy helped with everything. Now they only had the one cow and they were very attached to her. She was Anabladh – a proper Highland cow, hardy as anything. Every evening she would come in from the grazings on her own when it was milking time. Without fail. And she had a fine calf, a red one so that was Anabladh Ruadh. She’d be worth a bit, end of the season.