by Ian Stephen
Later there would be word of the first salmon. Usually a grilse, a fish that’s spent only about a year in the ocean, but a good eating size, about right for sending whole into the oven, in a tomb of silver foil, not much less bright than the flanks of the fish when it came into the side of the peaty water. Not long from the sea.
Finally, in October, there would be mention of sea trout. The late stock that sprints for the lochs at the tops of systems, the ones reached only by the strides of the fittest of guests.
‘Where do you usually go?’ I asked. And then, ‘Would there be any chance of me tagging along?’ and then, ‘What do I bring?’ And then, ‘Only oilskins?’ And then, ‘No tent, no survival bag, sleeping bag, any of that?’
‘You can bring a wee camping gas stove, for the tea,’ the milkman said.
Of course Anna wanted to come when she saw me oiling the old reel. I was swithering because of course it would be as educational as anything she’d get at school. But it would also be illegal. Despite the efforts of that calm pipe-smoking MP of ours. At least he’d said his piece, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the House, you must understand that in my constituency poaching is not regarded as a crime but a moral duty.’ Donald Stewart, quoted in Hansard.
Let’s try it out.
I’m sorry that we kept Anna from school on the 16th and 17th of October inclusive but it was for the following reasons. She was not available on the 16th because she was walking in to a certain location in the Uig District. This was a lesson in practical geography. She was not available on the 17th because she was sleeping all day to recover from being out in the hills overnight, followed by a three and one half hour walk over wetland carrying her share of a substantial harvest. This will be of benefit for her physical education. And here’s a finnock for your own tea. – Peter MacAulay, parent.
This was composed but not submitted.
I went alone with my friend and so we had no need of notes. I had already drafted my notice to the Coastguard Service so that I could consider the possibility of becoming a full-time juggler. That was also composed but not submitted. The roles of son, husband and father all seemed to involve a lot of building work. Being a husband was also about listening to anxieties and pacing shores while doing so, glimpsing other people going out at sea.
So of course I wanted to bask in the milkman’s beaming smile and enjoy his jovial nature as we slogged through mud. We had to take the wet route because the estate had been granted planning permission to blast a track out through the shorter, higher route. They always do get the permission. There would of course be a spare key for the gate, available for recognised representatives of the community.
The milkman is a fit cove, for one so heavily built. I was glad I didn’t have the weight of camping gear on my back. But you hit a rhythm as you slog through bog and once the cold surface water has seeped over the tops of your boots, it’s done and the layer warms a bit inside.
We were getting close to the top loch and it was late in the day. There would be about an hour and a half of daylight left. I asked why we were not going direct through the saddle but had to climb the nearest hilltop, right to the top.
‘We’ll get a good look from here,’ the milkman said. ‘Some of these toffs are keen. They might still be at it.’
We took a good sweep of the loch, through the glasses and walked on down the glen by the burn. It looked good. There was nothing moving.
The milkman was still cautious as we went quietly down and across to approach that loch, nestled under crumbling inland cliffs. He went straight to the usual bank – a long bed of gravel, broken by a few large protective rocks. We tackled up. I impaled a worm and put the rod back to cast. ‘Impaled’ is a funny word. In this case it means that I threaded the wriggling creature along the shank of a bent steel hook and made sure a barb broke its skin so that it couldn’t fall off. Once upon a time, I made many cups of Darjeeling for a gentle Christian friend, whose studies of the sciences enabled him to explain to me how an organism such as a worm is incapable of feeling pain. I might not be able to argue with that but it can’t be comfortable.
I was threading the fly line through the rings when the reel on the worming rod began to screech. You leave only a little tension on, so a fish can take some line if it pulls strongly. That way, a salmon or a hefty sea trout can’t pull your rod and reel into the water. It’s been known to happen.
I went for the rod and noticed the milkman was into a fish. The light was already fading but you could hear a decent splash. He reeled his fish in, before I saw mine and it sounded substantial. Mine would make runs and half leaps, when it seemed to be tiring, but soon a black and silver speckled trout was gasping, as its tail caused it to beat up the gravel. I pounced and took hold of a fish of about two pounds. I swung its head against a rock and it quivered. Then I reached out for the can of worms. The fly rod was abandoned at that point.
The milkman had three or four and I had two. Then it went dark. Then they stopped taking.
‘I thought sea trout took in the dark,’ I said.
‘Well, they do,’ the milkman said. ‘At least, you get an odd one.’
That was the cue for the hail. You could just about still make out the anvil-shaped clouds, speeding to dispense their electrical discharge. A blast of sleet gained momentum as it followed the gradient of the glen and came right at us.
My fingers were shaking, not functioning properly as I reached for my oilies. More of the road-workers issue than the marine quality we’d need in this high loch, well up from salt. No wonder the sea trout were fit, negotiating that gradient. Hungry too. But it was maybe too cold for them to emerge from their sheltered lies to feed at night. Oh well, only about eleven hours dark to go.
When the shivers came, I had the thought, I’m here because I chose to be here and because I’m lusting after one of the finest fish of all. The look of it and the taste of it. But out in Bosnia and in the ruins of Sarajevo, people were huddling in weather that would make this seem like summer. And they had no home to go to, in the morning.
You get these moments of clarity and concentration.
‘Do you want some tea?’ I asked. But the milkman was dozing. He had a bit more insulation than me. A squat, well-built, unstoppable man. I got the flint in the lighter flicking and the gas flared. There was enough peace behind a boulder, to shelter it, till there was a boiling in the stainless pot. But I didn’t pour it for a long time. I got my boots and socks off and held my feet to take in some of the heat from the steaming water.
In the morning we took another few fish. The milkman was twitchy.
‘We’d better not be greedy,’ he said. ‘They’ll take them off us if they’re up here early.’
So we did the slog back. The fish got heavier as we walked. He’d judged that about right.
Twelve months later, I ran away with the milkman again. By this time, teams of forensic scientists were preparing to travel to the former Yugoslavia to investigate sites in areas coming under UN control.
‘Same procedure as last year?’ But I brought a lightweight sleeping bag and an orange plastic skin. My own body-bag. Once the bites tailed off, I dived in and said, ‘Wake me up when they’re jumping.’
I saw him not so long ago in Engie’s. That’s the petrol station where you also buy tackle. We made a deal for next year, if we’re spared. But it wasn’t only the milkman I met there.
I also bumped into the MP. Not the dead one with the pipe. This time it was the Labour MP who felt that the Kosovo air-strikes had achieved something worthwhile. We talked about the headlines. The Middle East was looking unstable again. The Saddam issue was the crucial factor, he said.
‘Well,’ he added, ‘the precedent is there. We’ve come a long way from being pacifists. We’re up against aggressors with a degree of ruthlessness we thought we’d never see again. The systematic use of rape as a weapon. The herding of people into camps. That could ony be countered by collective action. And the precedent of a sanctioned
air-strike is there now. The Nato bombing in Kosovo.’
On the other hand, I thought but did not say, a strong case could be made out for viewing the pragmatic Nato decision to drop deaths in Yugoslavia as an action which itself became a cause of escalating violence. Subsequent investigation by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia confirmed that the Yugoslav security forces did indeed commit proven atrocities upon the civilian population of Kosovo. Many successful prosecutions at international courts proved that the evidence for these was beyond reasonable dispute.
However, the same body also found that the majority of these acts, which included mass murder as well as mass rape, took place during the bombing directed by Nato but not sanctioned by the UN, rather than before it.
I did speak then. I made the single point that any action had indeed to be collective, not only with the Nato seal but surely with the UN. How could you say it was OK for us but not for them? Them being Russia in Chechnya, China in Tibet, or any other occupying force.
The MP invited me to a Labour Party meeting even though I told him I was no longer a member and it wasn’t an oversight. I said nothing but heard activist after activist warn him that he could no longer count on their support unless he distanced himself from his leader on the issue of the invasion of Iraq. He did not do that. The cove may have been unusual as a politician in that his public proclamations were identical to those he made in private conversation at the gas station. He saw his noble leader’s determination to commit British forces to the second invasion of Iraq as a logical extension of the principle of collective action in Kosovo.
He lost his seat, next election, in 2005. Fast years. By that time I was looking more to our own wee shindig in Edinburgh for informed debate. It’s just possible this might have something to do with an electoral system which kind of represents the votes cast in the make-up of the Parliament. Strangely enough, this is a policy once endorsed by the unseated member when he was engaged in dialogue with Liberal Democrats. I wasn’t able to get excited about the little offered on the devolution menu of 1979 but I made sure I placed my vote in 1997.
The press put Labour’s upset in the Western Isles down to local issues – like the closure of the fish-farm in Scalpay. I’d guess that the blushing Blair’s marriage to George W Bush was a main factor. We just sensed that our then-MP was a bit uncomfortable as a bridesmaid. Thus, a promising political career died.
Interesting though, that the policy of removing the successors of the Polaris class weapons from the Clyde was a clear part of the manifesto of the winning party. Also interesting that the same policy was formerly a key part of the Labour Party’s manifesto, under Michael Foot’s leadership. Somehow this had made said party ‘unelectable’, according to many commentators.
The percentage vote and the percentage swing are documented information. The interpretation of these figures is of course a matter of some debate.
Calbost
What a work is an island. What a greater work is a society of islands. A coherent group. The Monach or Heiskers, where Black John led the raiders to their own Point of Death and so became a hero. Flannans, twenty miles out from Loch Roag, where the lovers, who were not allowed to marry, made their landfall. They came ashore on bare Eilean Mhor and survived in that place, like the voyaging monks who had occupied the terrain long before them. Go down the searoad from there and out a bit and you’ll find the St Kilda group. Hirta at first appears as if it’s joined to the high stacks and Boreray. Then you come closer and each island becomes distinct.
Come home to the North Minch. You might have to run before a gale and find refuge in North Rona first, like the Steward of St Kilda and his wife. Gather driftwood to repair your vessel so you can voyage south to Stornoway in the spring and receive the greeting reserved for the few who’ve come back from the dead. And that was before the good lady gave birth to twins, conceived in that exposed place.
The Barkins in Loch Erisort. The Taransay Glorigs. The impossible Sound of Harris. When the Coastguard Tug contract was awarded, the Chief Coastguard visited and asked my colleague, a master-mariner, if he thought it was viable for a vessel of that draft to take a short cut through there.
‘I wouldn’t take a wheelbarrow through there,’ my watch-mate said.
You can remember all the green-capped islands; the reefs, submerged, breaking, drying and covering but there are still sandbars to contend with. And these shift. The tides do what they want, when they want, washing back and fore through channels and interacting with the cumulative effect of ocean swells and Minch chop.
As an archipelago, the Shiants have it. That’s what Mairi said, when she visited the new Ops Room. Management had found the cash to have a stand made for the huge Doppel binoculars, as a bit of a visitor attraction. These were a World War Two trophy that had come the Coastguard’s way, back in history. But neither of us needed these fine lenses to visualise the coastal territory from Arnish to the Shiants.
Mairi is some talker anyway but I could sense compulsion in her voice once she started to tell me about the last time she had the boat out. I usually brought the tea into the Ops Room for a visitor but I caught something in her tone of voice. This was a story you couldn’t start and stop between bursts on the radio. I got a few quizzical glances as I handed out mugs to my watchmates and brought ours to the restroom. I was entitled to my meal-breaks, on the twelve-hour watch system, though I didn’t always take them.
Some coves don’t understand about being mates with blones. And once you see through Mairi’s tough talk you can see the fine line of her features. The Lochs girl with the Hispanic brown in her eye. Even if she cut back the black mane to give a post-New Wave edge to her look.
She was reliving things, once she got going. That’s how come I can tell her story. I was content to listen. I’m not going to try to imitate her voice, just tell you what she told me.
This autumn, her father’s marks had paid off again. She’d normally put the boat ashore, come October, but she knew she’d get twitchy later in the year when a decent frost would flatten the sea again. Of course she could get the diving-club inflatable down here, launching from the trailer. But some days she just fancied being on her own. Nuffink personal, mate.
That moment when you kill the engine and just let the boat drift in an offshore breeze. Her father’s voice kept her calm. He was always surprised at her staying power. She’d been well wrapped up but most kids her age would find the autumn fishing a bit challenging. And she knew she couldn’t come if he dug out the 303 and the ammunition.
He would have laughed at this technology she carried now. Her rods were near enough as fine as the one he had used for fresh-water fishing. He’d chase off with a bubble float and a Golden Virginia flat can of worms to see if he could pick up a late-season salmon or sea trout. These big walks to the distant top lochs of guarded systems – ‘A bit much for my wee girl yet. We’ll give you a year or two’s growing,’ he’d said. She still bristled at the disappointment.
Maybe she’d always been a bit of a gear-freak. The record player that could stack six singles high. The control on it to vary the speed. It still had a 78, as well as the 45 for singles, 33 for LPs. But this was a new model, bought from Oxendale’s or J D Williams. The Sears and Roebuck of South Lochs. Her mother was always buying her trousers and blouses in crimplene or terylene. Any bloody ylene. Stay-Press, Drip-Dry.
The revolutions per minute reproduced your rubber soul. Norwegian wood. That’s what she was floating in right now. Wasn’t it good? Light pine. A biodegradable vessel imported, from Norway, a fore-runner of the flat-pack. Clenched together with copper nails and little caps. She’d had to back the heads of many nails with the ball from an old anchor-stock before himself had let her try the fiddly part. They’d swapped places. She was inside the growing boat and got the cap down over the projecting nail, using the hollow punch. Snug but not too hard. She hadn’t been able to snip the first point off. He hadn’t tried to take over but j
ust showed her again, the twist you made with the snips. Not just squeezing. Then it was too easy and she was snipping too close to the cap. The rove, you called it. So there was nothing left to beat down to complete the rivet.
He’d given her the look she expected but didn’t say a thing. Just punched out the first nail and then rummaged for a slightly thicker one so it would be tight in the drilled hole. And this time she judged it right. Then you had to listen to the rhythm of the hammers because the round ball of one tool, one side of the plank, was tapping against the other tool’s light touch on the head of the nail. That one will do. Hundreds more followed. They’d swap jobs to keep the interest up. She did most of the riveting at the finish because she was light, standing in the fine boat.
After he was gone, the Rana boat needed some repairs. She knew what to do and could always find someone to back the nails. Cutting the new section of plank was scary but one of her father’s mates had been a chippy in the Merch.
Her father’s friend had showed her how to grind the rivet and punch it out. That way you got the bad bit of planking clear in one piece so it was your template for the new one. You didn’t want to bother trying to scarf them in. It would be stronger and nearly as neat if she butted old and new together and joined them with a backing plate. Riveted through. See if she could get Kenny involved. He had a good hand for the tools. When it was steady.
Now she could identify every repair she’d made since. Some of them with help and some without. Most people who came out in this boat wouldn’t spot any of the repairs. And she felt safe in the Rana because she knew every nail in it, the light, open Norwegian boat, built from a kit. She’d got the big, throaty Seagull firing and nosed out of shelter. Then she turned the small craft out, round the corner. She took it inside the Dubh Sgeir but the sea was still lumpy enough.