by Ian Stephen
He let me take the oars and that was about it. Anchor, warp, spare fuel, spare plug and spanner. No lifejackets, no flares.
The sky didn’t look too good to me. There was a couple of old guys yarning by the boats, leaning against the archetypal harbour rail.
‘No yous are not going out today, boys, not far anyhow?’
Robbie told them he’d just get out to lift a few pots. He’d to recover them before the sea got up.
‘Well if du lads are set on going, it’ll have to be da sooth way.’
Robbie grinned. His look said, Aye, northabout as planned.
The trim of this boat was important. He sat me on the forward thwart then pulled her out clear of all the moorings. Then dropped oars and pumped fuel through the engine. It fired, second pull, on its bracket of bent galvanised bar. This was bolted to the stern post, where the rudder would have been hung.
I sat as directed. The Shetland Model seemed narrow, to the Lewis eye, and the seas were building up. It took them well, punching in.
‘She’s good in a following sea too,’ Robbie shouted, over the motor. ‘You won’t ship a green one in this.’
That was about as much as we could say, over the engine. That type of unit vents directly to the grey air above the shifting water level. Water coolant gushed out in a healthy jet. The rich fuel mixture was smoking, even in this breeze.
He throttled back a bit and it was quieter or maybe I was just getting used to it. I asked if it was a ten-to-one mix.
Robbie nodded.
‘You get a wee kit now,’ I started, ‘to convert the carb to take twenty-five-to-one.’
Shit, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
‘Ten-to-one sounds fine to me,’ Robbie shouted above the exhaust. ‘Keeps it smooth on short runs. Around the pots.’
I noted the direction of buoyage as we passed a cylindrical port-hand buoy. It was across from a yard. Just like the Arnish buoy at Approaches to Stornoway. The one that replaced the fallen beacon.
‘Norscot,’ Robbie said. A lot of guys who used to throw fishing gear out here were working in there, now. Lucky for him. Otherwise there would be no lobsters left for us. One for the fuel, one for the table.
‘Da kens i Norscot recipe for kippers?’
On the night shift, you wrapped them in newspapers. Shoved them behind a radiator at the start of the shift. Dug them out at the meal break. That was it.
He throttled back up. I saw the seas were getting longer. Less breaking waves. Had to be deeper water.
He signalled me to move to the middle thwart. He was wanting to keep the prop down so it would bite more. I realised that I wasn’t too happy. I’d been out in a lot worse seas but there was something about the situation. Not being in control.
Bare islands were close now. Could just as easily have been the entrance to Loch Erisort. Skuas dodged in the airways above our heaving boat.
‘That rain’ll keep the wind doon.’
But I came close to mutiny at the narrows. Robbie cut the engine.
‘My gear is in the lee o that lot. It’ll be no bother to haul. We can git through wi da tide like this but it’s safer just to pull.’
Without thinking, I took up one of the narrow-bladed oars as he took the other. In the short swell, I missed one stroke.
‘It’s easier if there’s only one guy pulling,’ he said and took over my oar. I went forward to look for nasty stuff. It was worse when you had nothing to do with guiding the boat through. I swallowed words.
It was like a lagoon, through these narrows. He’d known it would be, of course, in this wind. I hauled the gear while Robbie handled the boat. That thrill of gambling with traps is the same everywhere. A few crabs, just big enough to be worth boiling up. Two indigo snapping shapes, but just under the limit. And one decent lobster. I found the rubber bands in the fish box and doubled them round the claws then placed it in the other end of that box, with an old oilskin separating it from the crabs.
Robbie then motioned me to go forward while he stowed the six or so pots, with their ropes and buoys placed inside, to avoid tangles. When he was happy that the boat was back in trim, we were back on the go, him on the stern thwart. He told me then, he wasn’t going back to Aberdeen.
He’d heard so many local versions of his own story, it was getting kind of difficult to explain the real one. He’d heard he’d failed his last ticket. He’d jumped ship in the Pacific, over a woman he was involved with. She was younger than him of course but he didn’t know if she was Polynesian or not. Then there was the older woman theory, Unst, Walls or Yell versions. Met when he was playing music on one of those islands.
Let’s just say the ticket he did have would do him for any North Sea job he wanted and he’d be back home for the two weeks off. He’d probably not get sponsored to carry on but so what? He wasn’t so sure of the ring of Captain Sinclair anyway. Too many of them round here.
Sure enough, in front of our window in Aberdeen, the lines had been getting longer and thicker. Converted trawlers, built high to be reborn as supply ships. Painted in new liveries. Between that boom coming and the Lerwick connections, he’d be OK.
More important to him right now, to keep the music going, the two weeks at home. He was lucky. His father wasn’t the sort to put pressure on him. He was glad of the company in the house.
He still didn’t give me the tiller on the way back. I knew for sure then that I’d tried to steer him more than enough in the recent past. You think you know someone but maybe part of the person you think you’re seeing is only your own impression.
Maybe it’s difficult to really get to know anyone. For all the animated dialogue and shared meals. It takes more time maybe to be aware of what’s particular.
Take a Shetland vessel, broad-planked for strength with lightness but also for speed of build. Primarily a beach-launched boat, held by a bare minimum of sawn frames. Double ended and narrow in the beam. Light and strong. Like boats in Faroes and Fair Isle. But something unique. And this one that Robbie’s father had once got built for him might have had more flare here or there, than specified. The cut of the larch. The way it grew. The way it bent.
Even if everything was scrupulously done to templates, it must have had additions or subtractions over the years. An eye bolt added or galvanised pins for the oars to replace worn iron ones. An anchor permanently aboard but carried in a slightly different position every trip.
All becoming factors of the vessel’s own individual nature. Its own resultant deviation, valid for the time it has its effect. Causing a swing east or west of the magnetic bearing.
You couldn’t put complete trust in any swinging needle. Any dial.
Sine
The room that’s a haven for a while begins to constrain you. Your own legs start to hit against those of the table. You hear the door close behind you and you’re on the stairs. Whatever the weather is doing, out there, it’s welcome.
If there’s a harbour near your room, that’s perfect. There could be high jibs of cranes that run on tracks. There could be the spurts of unburned diesel as big Caterpillars start up in the early hours. There might be landscaped surfaces. Restored buildings. There could even be cobbles (surface of rounded stones) and cobles (flat-bottomed beach boats for salmon fishing) and rows of parlour-pots, stacked up for the photographs.
At Stonehaven you could round the shore towards Low Water and then see the smaller commercial boats discharging their codlings and fluke. The radars would still be spinning. All this in the foreground. A step or two back shorewards, you’d see the signs of leisure activities. Racks and racks of bright sea kayaks. And signs of dinghies, under canopies. A shelf of aluminium masts.
I slept in a garret right over the Bridge of Cowie. Might have been possible to catch a sea trout from the window. I was a bit preoccupied though. Trying to get right back into the studies. Final year. Comes to the stage you just want to get shot of them. Get back out into the world again.
Whatever the hell the
real world is. Trouble is, the more you get into a subject, the harder it is to keep it tidy. What’s the point of studying history if you’re not making comparisons? To get steady good grades and deliver on time, you need to limit the fields. Or unlimited time.
I emerged, rubbing the eyes, to phone my mother. I was too late. Poor Sheena had gone down fast. A mercy, really. The funeral had been yesterday. I should phone Ruaraidh or send a card.
You know how it is. Memory sweeps by at a pace within the confines of a regulation King George the whatsit cast iron kiosk. Between the lines of a phone call to your mother, hours and weeks can flash back and fore in time.
Brave woman. I saw her with her hair gone, in the hospital. She was teasing me about the dungarees. Real Soviet-issue job. Very appropriate for the history student. I was thinking back to the summer holiday I’d spent with herself and Ruaraidh. She’d come back from work to find me and my uncle in the living room with the telly on. Newsflashes. I was not away on the bike, fishing. Unusual. She sat to join us, hardly believing the imagery of the tanks. She would call herself a Socialist. We were witnessing something different. That poor Jan Palach. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My arse.
I’d never heard her swear. Never heard any aunt swear. Not even one by marriage.
She was always witty and wry but she had nothing to say, that time. She never even went for the kettle, never put her shopping bag away. I was shocked when I saw some tears. She was tough and always won arguments.
Last time I saw her, she was home in bed. In remission. But there should have been a meal together. Ruaraidh was to pick me up after the early shift. A fank. Just like we used to. Business as usual. Back to the town homestead after. It would be marag and bacon and eggs though. Maybe get a bit of fried duff with it.
But we stayed over at Griomsiadair, at the next croft, for tea and sponge cake and stuff and this is the weird thing. My excuse was that the timing was getting tight for a meeting I needed to get to. But my stomach was in a knot all that year. I couldn’t see me coping with a fry-up after a daft bit of light cake. As the saying goes, you’re not cracking up if you know you’re going crazy. But I didn’t think I was going crazy.
In the phonebox on the Bridge of Cowie, about one year later, I knew it, all right. Fucking meeting. After the olman’s funeral, there was only one meeting that mattered that year. That was eating with Ruaraidh and Sheena. And I’d ratted out of it. Aye, a brave dame all right. Probably the first local woman to a graveside on Lewis. Unless she was being carried. Brave cove, Ruaraidh. Maybe it was no bad thing he liked his dram.
When the olaid sent me the Gazette I saw the notice. That was the first time I realised that this woman who had fed me so often was called ‘Sine’. I’d thought of it spelled the way it sounded – Sheena – not like the word from trigonometry. But of course it was a Gaelic name. Sometimes people called her husband, my uncle, Roddy. I knew his friend as Angus but he would be ‘Aonghas’, pronounced Innes, in the villages out of town. Many people on the island had to answer to two names.
Recovering to sound OK for the olaid. Mind, we’re still in the phonebox. Bridge of Cowie.
No problem, no bother. Grades a wee bit down on before but the tutor said there was a good platform to work on. Sure, sure, I wouldn’t leave it so long.
Fidelity
I couldn’t go back up the stairs after that conversation in the phonebox. A good healthy whiff of exhaust down my lungs might help. I walked along the road first, not sure why. I’d got used to the traffic noise and lights. That was before the bypass. Sharp night.
The shadow of the swimming pool – it was closed in winter. Remember outdoor pools? Spaced along the east coast, Tarlair, Stonehaven, Arbroath, Eyemouth.
The olman had driven us from one to the other, one summer holiday, since we’d learned to swim.
And, of course, that night I took the path away from the bridge, the one that led round to the sea. Heard the sifting of pebbles down the shore. Heard a Gaelic song in my head. A tune I never knew I knew.
Coming by the breakwater. The smaller trawlers were landing. A few boats still worked longlines. Then there were smaller boats still, ones that could take the ground, as they say, fall over on one side when the tide dropped, keel in the mud.
Amongst them I saw the Fidelity. PD. Registered in Peterhead. But when you said the two letters it could be peedie, as in the Shetland way of saying wee.
She was half-decked, rigged with a bowsprit. The details, again. I was seeing with a close-up lens and the focus was sharp. When you’re fucking hurt, guilty to the core, the perceptions burn bright.
A man in a fishing gansey and a Hamburg or Breton-type cap was checking her running mooring, taking up slack. There was a bit of a blow coming in.
When I admired the boat, he said I was from Lewis, had to be, from the voice.
‘You’re not, though. Northumberland? But how come you caught on to my accent so fast?’
Well, how had I caught on to his? Pretty fair stab, that.
‘I went to hear some guys play tunes. Tapped along with them. The small-pipes player, he was Northumberland.’
‘Aye, and so were his pipes. But I lived on Lewis enough years, to recognise a voice from SY. Well, I’ve started all over again here. New family. Come on up to the house.’
James led me, one street back from the harbour. Wilma was an artist; graphics, drawings, mainly. His boy played the piano. Electric one, though. They just called it playing keyboards, these days. Mostly jazz. One of his girls had made a career of music – clarinet. We could put a record on later. On the high-fidelity.
We talked about fishing boats.
The shape of the Fidelity was a forerunner of the decked drifters, great black smooth ships that carried a massive dipping lug forward and a standing lug aft, not much smaller. This was a little craft, maybe nineteen-foot six. The scaffies had often been built to thirty-foot or more. He didn’t know of any of those which had survived. Being open to the skies, a lot of them were lost in famous storms. Government Inquiries recommended a move to decked boats.
There was a toddler and a baby. A large fish tank. Oriental rugs on the walls and on the floor. The hangings all had a twist to the warp or weft and the colourings were something.
The wee girl led me up the stairway to see the trains. We bypassed a blue painted spar with a white cotton sail bent on it. Aye, I’ve a very understanding wife.
‘A wife as flipping crazy as himself, more like,’ Wilma said.
The trains seemed huge to me. I forgot what gauge they were but many of the locomotives and trucks were handmade. Wilma came up and got it going and showed me photos she’d done where the speeding engines looked huge.
We usually spoke about boats. Now and again tunes were mentioned.
‘Wait now, here’s something you’ve got to hear. A new pibroch, off the radio. I been working on it all week.’
‘Aye, tell me about it,’ Wilma said.
But it was me glancing to the clock which said ten o clock. I thought he was going to produce a chanter or a set of Northumbrian pipes. But no, the big Highland pipes appeared from their box.
‘That wee madam will be up another half-hour yet if I know her. She had a sleep in the afternoon and we’ve trained the wee guy to sleep through anything. And the natives are pretty friendly. They like the pipes here.’
‘Just as well,’ I said.
James played the pibroch, pacing slowly all the time. Their house was amongst others, a fine group of stone shapes but sandstone, not granite. The whole swaying big music with no-one banging on the wall to interrupt.
He took me for a dram, then. There was The Ship and The Marine. And I came close to breaking the tack. Taking a drink, I mean. It was a bit difficult when it came to the pub, here. Back home it was no bother. Folk just assumed you had the cùram or else you had a problem with the deoch. So it was an orange juice and another knot in the gut. And then back to my high room, able to work on for a bit, in iso
lation.
The Brails
The walk round the pier to their house became a feature of life in Stonehaven. Wilma tended to get the frying pan out as soon as look at me. Knowing that I couldn’t fight against eating when she’d gone to the bother. Besides, my nose would be twitching, on its own. She’d dig out stuff like lambs’ kidneys or a bit of frying liver. It was like being in Ulysses. I could still see that scene in the film with parts of a pig sizzling in the pan. I’ve never read the book but I read an extract somewhere and that was the bit.
Once, I stayed a day or two after the end of term, to get sailing. He’d recently installed a wee Ducati diesel. Very little vibration.
Wilma thought he’d sold out. They’d had some good cod last year. It was mostly long-lining, inshore here, which had saved the fishing. So far. I had my dinner with them and we waited for the wind to fall. Sides of cod from the freeze. Must have been a good-sized fish.
Did I like mine bare naked, like my women, or with a bit of sauce?
‘A bit of HP,’ I said.
‘Oh well,’ she said.
James and me walked as far as the seafront to check on the barograph, viewed through glass, at the corner. These were installed all round Scotland. Before outdoor swimming pools. After drownings.
It was steadier now, after a steep fall in pressure. We’d give it a go. Should moderate by evening.
‘First, these are the brails. The light lines gather the canvas and pull it up tight. Faster than lowering the sail by the halyard, if we have to. We might need to. We should get the Ducati running and warmed up first. She’ll probably fire, first go. The dynastart is pretty good.’
She did fire up, not too much smoke. James looked proud.
‘We’ll keep her running,’ he said, ‘till we clear the pier. A bit of tide off there. OK, I’ll hold her nose in and you get that sail up but don’t lose these brails whatever you do.’