by Ian Stephen
So, in this case, we were the one that got away. That’s why he remembered our ship so clearly. The way you remember that big ling, off Calbost.
Andra
The summer after the one when all the grandparents disappeared, the olman had to work on, get some overtime. This was a new word in our house. There was no more talk of having to earn your crust in a decent number of hours. And it wasn’t only pattern-making. The olaid said he was just a foreman really, overseeing all these rows of knitting machines. They were getting all the rest, out of him, free, gratis and for nothing.
So I’d need to go with my mother to The Broch. I couldn’t be left alone all these days and my sister had her own summer job.
They were worried about my fluctuating moods. One day I’d be hitting the glottal stop with the rest of them, the next pissing them off by saying that Stornoway ruled OK. Even if the Aths or the Rovers weren’t even in the Highland League. At least Alloa was in the second division. But I only boasted out loud to those my size or smaller.
Maybe it was just the time of life. Hair was starting to appear all over the place. At last you felt you could hold up your arms when you were diving, at the baths. But you were worried that the almost constant erection would come out over the top of the swimming trunks. So you didn’t focus too long on these older girls, swimming slowly by with the upper parts of their costumes pretty full.
That was about the time that sex started to rot my teeth. Or maybe it was the lack of sex. This science teacher had bobbed black hair. I’d study the bare part of her neck while she wrote on the board. Even now, there’s a faint hint of the erotic when you click to light the gas – the smell of a Bunsen burner. Normally distant and aloof, she hated anybody chewing in class. So you got attention. OK, you got belted as well but that was attention too.
That item of Lochgelly craftsmanship would go back over her shoulder and then she’d catch your eye before she swung it. She put plenty into the swing but it wasn’t like when a male teacher belted you. If you got even one or two on a cold morning, from a man, that was something you wouldn’t want to go through again, in a hurry.
The ritual was also a kind of status. Sometimes a female teacher would send you to be belted by a male. But the science teacher was maybe too proud for that. We kept a score. I ate a lot of toffee. I was in the lead.
Maybe I was just seasick. Defined as a growing awareness of the lack of the stuff around you. Not only sea for the purposes of floating vessels or for providing a home for mackerel whose dorsals made a zig-zag of vees in calm harbours, broken by the leaping cloud of small fry.
Your line going first one way then another in a pattern you couldn’t predict. The sheen and phosphor hints of the belly. The back turning against the source of light to show something of a crazy pattern of greens and blues and blacks.
But the sea as something on the move. Just there. So a day trip to the gritty and probably contaminated Burntisland shore beat the Trossachs. We weren’t too fussed about the Aberfeldy-Auchtermuchty Scotland where you could find the Broon’s But and Ben round the next bend in the road. Too much scenery. Bonny enough. Damp enough. Not salty enough.
So I did grieve for the loss of the harbour, the inner loch at Griomsiadair, maybe even for my grannie with the Spangles and the stories and the bloody great forearms that would wrap you all up in a wrestle just when your temper was at its fiercest. You couldn’t win that kind of struggle with your grannie. Even if she wasn’t related to Grannie Broon.
Then there were the plots across from the Toolies at The Broch. The hard wee onions that came from them and came to you from out of wide jars. The wind blowing sand between the barriers at the beach. Ice-creams from Jimmie Sinclair’s van, eaten amongst the dunes. Out along the rocks to Rosehearty and the cold blue pool, the tiles concreted in to a smoothed-out hollow, near the black breakwater.
Andra would pick us up from Aberdeen Station. Dr Beeching had got to Fraserburgh station first. I used to mix up his name with the Dr on the powders for colds and flu. The adverts were still new to us and we concentrated on them, still.
Andra was the oldest. Maist o his loonies and quinies were gang aboot the planet. Satellites jist. Comin back to base jist when they were wintin fuel.
Maggie let him talk most of the time, just throwing out a line when she felt he was totally off the beam. Andra loved Scotland. Loved his family, loved life. Fairly keen on the fitba as weil. Mebbe he’d jist manage to git doon the roadie tae us, next time Aiberdeen hid an Old Firm game.
Family suppers, aabody jist caain in by West Road fanivver they took a notion for’t. A ham or a tongue in the centre wi pickles aa roon aboot it. Jist lke the aul man’s.
Maybe it was these suppers gave Andra his stature. He was keeping the big family going. I thought he was a big man. So he was but eventually I noticed he didn’t have a head over me. Just big arms, big shoulders, big chest and belly. Big legs. Flicking big heart.
My Aunty Maggie wasn’t the thin woman you’d expect as the other side of the act, from all these cartoons in The Sunday Post and The Weekly News. Everything about her struck you as normal. Just as well.
It was strange staying in the Swedish house even if there was a bit more space than the pre-fab down West Road. Somebody else was in there now. I had to take a walk down, the first day. So I saw the overgrown roses. I never stepped across the low wall but was right back into that garden and through the door, smelling my Broch granma’s shreddy beef casserole and the mealy puddins.
The strawberries and sweet peas faded from the orange-red and grass-green after a few days. They just became normal. The colours stayed strong in the crates of skoosh. Back in SY this was all called lade. You got limeade and raspberryade and plain lade and any colour so long as it was bright. Round about Sauchie and Alloa, it was all called ginger. But my Broch granma called it skoosh and she was always digging out crates from cupboards that smelled of old people’s clothes. Once or twice, a gill of rum would appear from a cranny and the grampa would kind of look the other way. Evenings were best. The TV was always on but nobody ever paid much attention except when there was sport on.
The Fugitive was still tracking the one-armed man. Bitter veterans of the Korean War. Andra learned to appear when my cousin and me were deep into Top Of The Pops. Grampa Sandy would always join forces with the loons, in defence, whether he liked the records or not. Andra would throw out his lines. ‘Fit the hell d’you see in yon galshick? Gie me Bothy Nichts ony day o the week. Is that a loon or a quine, that ane?’
‘Leave the loons in peace tae enjoy their music.’
My granma was keen on music with a bit of get up and go. And she didn’t mind dressing up. The olaid told me how she and my grampa had been local champions at roller-skating, dancing on wheels, when it was a big thing. She was a fully dressed member of the Sally Ally and went to the kirk with the bright sound of brass ringing over grey stone. Old Sandy always wheezed a bit – he’d had a whiff of gas in the trenches but was always tense with energy. He’d never sit for long. A glass of rum helped. He’d argue with Andra just to keep things lively. But usually you saw the old man on his bike. Pedalling away on the single gear, between the plot and the harbour. Always a string of veg or a string of fish dangling from the handlebars.
My cousin Willum (Sandy’s Andra’s loon) was collecting LPs to play on the Dansette. I’d seen the same player in my mother’s catalogue but knew not to ask right then. I’d to keep the paper-round going, when I got back, that was for sure. Willum was going to be doing Navigation at the College but my cousin had his own sideline, for the summer.
He’d point the head of that old yole in towards the boulders strewn between Fraserburgh and Rosehearty, as long as the wind was taking us offshore. I’d haul up the few old pots he’d patched up, with him bumping the clutch of the big Seagull. A few kicks of that crazy big prop were enough to put her nose back in. I’d be dangling half over the side, looking for the first sight of a dark blue shape. Seen as a break
in the block colour of the netting – a dark patch within International Orange. Willum showed me the net knot, come from his yellow plastic needle and I thought of my own olman, missing something about him for the first time, that holiday. He’d put his own flash of colour into the shuttle. It might look weird to anybody else till they saw the effect of it, against some other background shade.
So the pots would tumble back aboard, one by one. There was a transformation of that dark blue into sunburn red, shouting from a blue-patterned plate. This would be the centrepiece of the supper table, that night, at West Road. Willum had a wee contract with our grampa. A lobster in exchange for two-stroke mix, for the outboard.
I asked if it was a marrow, that strange torpedo-shaped vegetable, laid out as a centrepiece.
Even when others were laughing, our grampa was defending me. A homegrown cucumber wasn’t all neat and regular like a shop-bought one.
‘As close a relative tae a marra as you’re a cousin o Willum though ye widna ken that fae the colour o your skins.’
I was as red as that lobster and Willum had gone black-brown. Granma or Grampa or both of them had matched the money that lobster would have fetched so it could sit here and get scoffed by folk that had as much right tae it as the toffs. Aabody kent boats hid expenses.
And now the old couple just weren’t here. Their pre-fab was that few hundred yards down the same road but it wasn’t their’s now. A mercy they’d gone, so close together, people would say.
When the olaid had to go back south to work, there was no objection to the idea of me shuffling into the back room made up there wi naebody bidin in it. Willum didn’t mind having somebody to do the hauling for the rest of the holiday. Looks like he’d be waiting forever for the hydraulic capstan that Andra was working on. Aye he kent ye couldna hurry an inventor. ‘Watt an Simpson and Curie an aa yon crood widna hae produced the goods if somebody’d been hoverin ower their shouder half a the time.’
First day with them, Andra took me to his work. He hid a big share o the responsibility o keepin The Broch alive. While Maggie was pumpin they wee bitties o history and geography an readin an rithmetic intil aa the loonies an quinies, he wis seein til his section o production at the Toolies. Hydraulics maistly.
He’d learned his engineering in the Army. The units were being finished in paint as bright as skoosh. Queueing up for export.
‘Hydraulics are simple, ken. Naethin bit oil in a tube. Jist the pressure. Bit aa your fittins, your crimps, hiv tae be up tae the job. That’s fit it’s aboot, lookin for a weak spot. Sortin it. Still I willna hae to rush that hauler for young Willum noo. He still his the teuchter cousin tae pull up his bitties o string.
‘I wis at the big Macfisheries afore this. Nivver mind the bloody Common Market. We hiv to keep oor ain fish. They Icelanders hiv the richt idea. Writin on the waa. That’s fit wye I took the job when it was offert. We’re exportin aa over the world jist. Be supplying a station on the moon next. Bit the stock tae keep the processin and smokin on the go is gettin gey tricky tae find. I’ve seen us buyin in herrin fae Canada tae mak Broch kippers. Maybe caught by Brochers or Lewis fowk wint oot across the Atlantic fan there was nithin left tae eat here. I’ve a sister oot across the pond yet. Yer ain auntie. And yer Grampa workin at the coal, barrowing it on tae the drifters and trawlers, we were nivver short o fish. Best o stuff and we’d aa be saying, nae fish again. My ain faither, he’d said it often enough like. There’ll come a day. Ye’ll be mindin back tae aa this fish, an ae day – nae aa that far awa – it’ll be rich man’s food.’
Young Willum gave me the justification to go daily to the pier for podlies. Just big enough to be bait in his pots. The prickies were our cuddies, the same species but smaller. What they called harvesters in Kirkcaldy. I’d taken one or two there when our car was on the road. My father just smelling the sea while my mother and sister were at the shops. I watched the coming and going of the bigger boats through the gap in Kirkcaldy breakwater. They had white painted whalebacks at the bow and rows and rows of marker buoys. The last of the great-line boats.
Here in The Broch, the flags were still flying over the beach. Red for danger. The breeze was too strong today. But the miniature railway was pelting its way among the dunes.
Everywhere, I saw colour. Even the telly was colour now, as opposed to black and white, which was the only possible thing, back on the Island. The technology was no problem in the Central Belt but colour cost more ready money than we had now.
In Fraserburgh, the podlies would show an orange hint through the dense green of their backs, until the moisture burned off their skins and dark spread over the whole fish. Just the white of the lateral line, loud and prominent.
The Toolies, on the Aberdeen road, was a neutral sort of concrete colour. But, all outside the building, you’d see rows and rows of orange and green compressors, all checked by my uncle. They sat, waiting, on their new tyres. And, just across the old railway, were the boatyards. All the brushes were cleaned on the wall outside. Remnants, weakened with spirit, were brushed off against the rough-cast.
‘You tak a piece o that waa back wi ye like, loon,’ Andra said. ‘Bloody Picasso, man – naethin on The Broch, ken.’
Six of the seven weeks of the summer holidays had gone by. Just gone.
I phoned and got the extension for the last week. I’d need to get the train from Aberdeen to Stirling, on the Friday. Change at Perth. My auntie Maggie would be back at work, The Broch schools going back earlier, this year. Willum said I could tak the boat oot fan he was at the College, startin Monday.
But I wasn’t confident enough, on my own.
I got stuck into the books. There wasn’t that many in the house – no book club editions but there was a whole library of paperbacks. Twelve volumes. They had black and red covers with Churchill’s name at the top. His History of The Second World War. Once I started reading I was stuck in it. Things must have looked bad that first two years. Andra would come back from work to find me turning the pages.
‘You and your sister still hae the Churchill croons your auntie sent doon?’
He told me my grampa had been against the idea of getting one for all the cousins. The aul man remembered Gallipoli. ‘That wis a disaster, sending these great ships intil a tight corner to git hammered. And leaving all these good men, the Kiwis an Aussies, all jist stranded. Churchill gave these orders. Maybe so but it was the same chiel’s speeches held it aa together afore the tide turned, next war on. Peace and love is all very fine, trying to stop that nonsense in Vietnam but it widna hae stoppit an invasion nineteenbloodyforty. We cam close enough. And it widna hae stoppit Rommels Panzers in North Africa neither.’
I could make the quote now and I think my uncle might have joined in it then. ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
That was 1942. A lot of deaths to come but the myth of the invincible enemy was shattered. A poor start to the war at sea, that same year. The code machine used by the Germans was adapted so there were four rotors instead of three. I might not have been great at maths but I could guess that was a hell of a lot more combinations. Our codebreakers had been ahead of the game. They’d been given a helping hand by Polish intelligence, just before the 1939 invasion. This change was a huge setback. It was going to take a long time to crack the combinations delivered by the new model of machine. So we lost the power to intercept key messages and more and more ships went to the bottom.
But in the autumn of that same year a U-boat forced to the surface of the Mediterranean was going to cough up a codebook. These clues would be fed into our own tonnage of machinery, manufactured by an American cash-register company. The results would prove decisive in the Atlantic.
I learned that the battle against the Nazis was gaining hope, by the end of 1942, in the desert, the sea and the huge snowfields surrounding Stalingrad. Churchill’s rhetoric probably helped. So did his ability to hug uncle Joe.
&
nbsp; Andra let me show off my new knowledge but then he pulled another book off the shelves. Another volume by Sir Winston, The World Crisis.
‘Aye, the same chiel had the giftie o the gab richt enough but ye ken he blew his ain trumpet that much in this book, it’s what led to the German code machines in the first place.’
And sure enough, my uncle read me the passage where the cocky author is boasting about the British ability to anticipate every move of the German High Seas fleet. Even then, I could see the writing was over the top. Stuff about the Russians picking up the body of a German sailor from the Magdeburg, clutching the cipher book to his breast. A bit unwise for an ambitious author to go revealing privileged information in 1923 when an enemy laid low by the Treaty of Versailles was wanting for an advantage.
History really shouldn’t be written by the people making it. It’s either unreliable or dangerous. Or both.
Never mind 1942, there was a fair bit going on in 1967. By the end of the year there were 500,000 American troops in Vietnam. In one demonstration, that same year, marching in Central Park, New York (neighbouring city to Stornoway, looking west) near enough the same number was claimed, by the protesters. And it was all coming in, sometimes live, to the TV in West Road, Fraserburgh, a few miles along from the United States listening installation on Mormond Hill.
Next day when I switched on the news, Andra was not yet back from the town, on his day-off and Maggie was not yet back from the first half-day of term.
All these rows of rifles. This time it was Washington D.C. Last time I’d seen all these tanks on the telly, in black and white, I was in Stornoway and it was Poland and the Russians were taking over. Now it was the National Guard, in colour. Strange thing was, all these people in uniform were frozen in black and white. The colours all belonged to the people in long hair and long clothes.