by Ian Stephen
‘There’s a Glas Leac, Lochinver,’ he said. Sure it’s KLB?’
I confirmed it with the harbourmaster.
‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Approaches to the harbour.’
I remembered there was also another reef of the same name, out from Ullapool. A hazard of the same name out from each of the three main harbours in northwest Scotland. If you only had the name to go by, you’d be in trouble. The harbourmaster’s voice came back on the open line. I relayed the gist of it.
‘It’s definitely the KLB one and they can’t get right up to him. A hell of a swell. They need to get a line to him.’
I repeated what I heard, out loud. My SWO activated the line to RCC Edinburgh. That’s a military control centre, in Pitreavie, near Dunfermline. He requested a helicopter. Passed the position. The aircraft would normally come from RAF Lossiemouth unless the rescue chopper was already out on a job. It was peak-season for mountain rescue. I heard one end of that conversation too. But I could guess the other. I’d heard it before.
The clear night. The air temperature. The time of year was against us. The Sea King would have to go north about. There was a significant risk in going over the mountains, the direct route. The danger of icing. We didn’t need to do any speed, time and distance calculations for that one.
We all knew it was going to take three hours plus.
‘Time to talk to the boss,’ he said. ‘We could do with a hand in the Ops Room anyway.’
It was going to be a busy night. The scramble was confirmed and the Duty Officer was coming in to give us a hand. Our Auxiliary was putting out the Mayday Relay on three different aerials. Her voice was calm and not too fast. They call them Ops Room Assistants, these days.
‘Five persons on board. Requires Immediate Assistance.’
Other vessels would not be able to offer much help if the sister-ship with a brother aboard couldn’t get close enough. But procedure has to be followed. And there’s an element of luck in what’s in the vicinity. A Fishery Protection Vessel would have a fast dinghy aboard. That could get close. My SWO was driving the telex. I was still hanging on to the handset linked to the red line. Our only link with the casualty.
The Auxiliary was handling the traffic on sixteen. The buzzer on the outside door sounded. The duty officer came through the door. ‘Just carry on guys. I’ll get the picture from the signals.’ He looked at the position on the chart.
As the name Siller Morn was repeated again, on our broadcasts, along with its Fraserburgh fishing numbers, I got a whiff of nausea. Fathers and sons. Willum didn’t want to make it difficult for his loon Andra. He’d a cousin who was pair-trawling and doing ‘Nae baud like, alang wi the brither.’ That’s where I’d heard the name. That’s why I’d recognised it over the crackle of the links in communication.
But the lifeboat was on its way and we could just about talk to him on sixteen, a bit broken. We’d copied his checks with Wick Radio on the big set, 2182. It was quite a steep sea. They were barely making their eight knots. It would be a couple of hours.
The Siller Eve tried firing a heaving-line, from a canister but it blew back in their faces.
The chopper came up on channel sixteen. ‘Rescue 137 airborne from Lossiemouth, best ETA 2 hours 55. I say again ETA 2350 GMT.’
‘Fuck. Will I pass that on through the 999?’
My Senior Watch Officer shook his head again. ‘That’s not going to help them, to know that. Just ask your man to relay that the chopper is airborne. On its way to them now.’
The Ops room settled into an urgent rhythm but under control. I was maintaining the log of actions and times while my SWO followed the procedures of information-flow. The 999 line had to stay open all the time. The radio set in the harbourmaster’s house was still our best link on scene. The boss was informing higher authority. We heard from the coast team on channel zero. It was taking a long time to lug the gear over rocks. They couldn’t get the Land Rover anywhere near. Even with the big rocket, there wasn’t much chance of getting a line out to them.
If you don’t have direct experience of a thing, history can help. The largest ever number of souls rescued by breeches-buoy took place on the Isle of Lewis, not that long after the Second World War. The Clan MacQuarrie tried to outrun a storm by going west of the Hebrides rather than face the short steep seas of the North Minch. She came ashore and all the crew were taken to safety on that tense hawser. There’s a big and a small rocket, to fire a line out to a ship. I was trained to rig at least three varieties of shore-rescue tackle. We’d fired the big rocket on a couple of training courses. Once it had made a sweet arc in the air and another time it had left a strange trajectory.
‘Shit, that would have taken the wheelhouse off,’ someone said.
One member of our course was stationed in Belfast. ‘I hope the boys in the balaclavas never get hold of these bastards,’ he said.
But I was aware of another incident, come to me through oral history. I met up with a man I’d met as a child when the Coastguard depot was on Leverhulme Drive. We were on a search planning course, the days when you crunched the vectors of tides and wind history into an electronic calculator. Computer-assisted planning was to come a few years later. A well-run course left some space for yarns. The man who had pulled my father out from a collapsed bunk on a stranded ship was now an instructor.
As he put it himself, he was in ‘the kiss-my-ass latitudes’ on the run-down to retirement. But he could get his experience across. When he was stationed in Stornoway, a ship carrying salt grounded at Branahuie Bay. Aye, where the Nato jetty is now. He was Officer-In-Charge, on scene. The shore is shingle and the surf was breaking over everything. They could talk to the ship on VHF. He knew they’d never get the hawser tight enough in these conditions. He knew it would be dangerous to pull men through that surf if the breeches buoy was in the water. So this is what he did.
They did get a line out over the ship. Then they kept it simple, got the crew to pull out a heavier endless loop of rope. He asked the Captain, on VHF, to inflate a life-raft and secure it to that line. So it went back and fore, carrying everyone to safety. There was one casualty. It was the ship’s cook, he remembered. A big, big fellow. He’d suffered a heart attack, from the shock. The rest of the guys were fine. They only got their feet wet.
Once all the initial action is taken there’s usually some thinking time. I’d visited Kinlochbervie. I knew our team had a link to a fishing vessel working out of that harbour. If the team had gone out on that boat, with the rescue gear and the smaller rocket-gun, to fire out the light line, we might have had a chance. You could call that the benefit of hindsight.
The crew of the Siller Morn never did get to their own life-raft. The lads couldn’t get hold of their lifejackets. That was before fishermen started wearing suits with insulation and flotation.
Our last message to be relayed asked the crew to get hold of any bit of buoyancy they could. Anything that might help keep them afloat. Anything that would show up in searchlights. I heard the crackling from the radio, over the phone. Still on channel nine.
Then it went very quiet.
I was freed from that phone and took my turn on radio, broadcasting the search area. All communications were now on channel sixteen VHF and 2182MF, as per the book. It was still some time before the chopper and lifeboat were on scene. We went from nine-knot boats to eighteen-knot ones in a very few years. Not soon enough. And this was before RNLI lifeboats could deploy a fast, inflatable boat to get up close when the larger vessel could not.
The chopper, Rescue 137, spotted some of the fluorescent debris in the water, soon after arrival in the search area, as per the ETA. They asked to minimise communications as they sent the winchman down. After about ten long minutes they reported that they had recovered one of the crew from the water.
‘Rescue 137, Stornoway Coastguard. Do you want us to arrange an ambulance to rendezvous? Over.’
‘Coastguard, 137. Channel zero. Over.’
‘Roger. Zero.’ (Channel for dedicated Search and Rescue Units only.)
‘Coastguard, 137 on zero. Sorry but the condition of this man cannot get worse. We’ll keep searching. Conditions are not very good on scene and we don’t have that much fuel endurance. Over.’
‘Roger, 137. Coastguard out.’
A sick feeling in the stomach. You can’t let that into the voice you use on the phone or radio.
So the night went on. Between the lifeboat, the sister-ship and the chopper, all five bodies were recovered. What was left of the Siller Morn slid off the reef and the wreck was quickly broken up.
My SWO attended the Fatal Accident Inquiry. It was judged that all action which could have been taken, was taken.
But my first SWO and mentor, Seamus, had been returning casualty reports for years. They’d often drawn attention to the gap in helicopter coverage on Scotland’s northwest, particularly when there was a danger of icing in the winter months. A survey was commissioned, based on drawing the radius of helicopter response times with reference to probable survival times of a person immersed in water. After that, a contract was awarded, for Coastguard helicopters stationed in Stornoway, Sumburgh and in Lee-on-Solent. They are all still in place. Too late for the crew of the Siller Morn.
The MP for the northwest mainland area, co-incidentally named MacQuarrie, led a successful move to make the carrying of electronic radio distress-beacons (EPIRBs) mandatory for fishing vessels over certain dimensions.
My cousin Willum’s lad, young Andra, was not aboard the Siller Morn that night. He should have been. He’d failed to show up to catch the minibus when it left from The Broch after midnight on the Sunday. As you know, this was only a reprieve.
Smoking
Smoking is dangerous. So is sucking sweets. I liked to go to get my father’s packet of Players from a pocket of his jacket, hung in the hall. One night he brought home a cigar in a tube. I liked that smell better. Another night he said he was stopping. He just did. Like that. But he started sucking goodies – boilings and mints. He never stopped that. I got hooked on toffees for a while but I’ve told you about that. I still like it when my nose catches the sweet stink of resin, lingering amongst the tobacco exhaust, in the narrows or round a corner in the streets of our island city. The purpose of smoking, when I was young, was to take dope.
I’d already been taught about smoking, at school. This is how. The science teacher with bobbed dark hair and a close fitting, medium length, tailored skirt and kinky boots spoke to us about particles. Kinky boots weren’t that kinky. They were just black ordinary boots with flat soles. They started just below the knee. I don’t think hers were anything special. And I don’t think they had heels at all. It’s partly Emma Peel’s fault. Mind you, the original designs for her Avengers outfit are available for scrutiny. Her leather costume was adapted to be more suitable for view before the evening watershed. She was tall enough anyway, without the spike-heels. So was my science teacher.
You looked up to her for sure when you were called out to hold out your hands; the science teacher, I mean. I never got belted by Diana Rigg. I can’t remember if I had to cross my hands or not. Some asked you to and some didn’t. It was better if she didn’t because she might just touch yours with the tips of her fingers so you stretched them out further to receive the strap. She’d put the tan leather Lochgelly right back over her shoulder but it wasn’t that hard when she swung it down so the tails wrapped round your fingers. I think her strap had two tails. Most belts did but I’ve seen one with three. And most I saw were tan, not black.
Then usually you had to hold out the other hand. That was about it but sometimes you were instructed to change hands until you took a total of four of the belt. I never got six. It was usually the deputy who gave six and you didn’t see it done in front of the class. Only once we were all assembled in the gym to watch the boss himself give six to an older guy. I don’t know what it was for. He was a hero.
But we were gathered round the Bunsen burner, quite close, so we could see smoke particles in a tube. She probably didn’t smoke normally because the cigarette didn’t come from a packet. She probably just got one from another teacher for the experiment. She just struck a match and lit it and blew smoke into the tube and put it out again. There was something about the sight of the white from her mouth and the flick of flame and the brief, brief smell.
It was a different class but I remember the glossy photo of the lung. We were shown a smoker’s lung. I still remember it. Heart transplants were becoming more successful after the first operations by Professor Christian Barnard, in South Africa, but I don’t think they’d been able to install a new lung yet, without it being rejected.
So that lung had come from someone who was certainly dead.
It felt good being that close to that teacher. She was alive all right. I must have been about fourteen or so. These were really hard times. I didn’t find the knack of masturbating but it came out one night, in sleep. I can’t remember the detail of the dream.
It’s still strong when it happens; sensing the smell of a woman, I mean, not a wet dream. You just realise you’re close enough to sense the breathing. I’m going to tell you about being at a do. It’s the civil equivalent of Combined Services. Nothing military, though guys from the TA and the ATC might have been there. Definitely a leader from the Boys Brigade and that’s more military than any of them. I’d already been a year or two out of the Coastguard Service but one day I got a phone call, requesting my jacket.
Mairi Bhan was going to this shindig and she had nothing to wear, darling. ‘What’s wrong with your orange boiler suit?’ I asked. ‘And you’ll be coming in town on the Fergie.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a posh do. So I’ll need to take the Fordson Major.’
She never asked me if I’d seen Kenny lately. She just said, it should be a good night but it would be a gas to go in uniform and the Fisheries Office sweatshirt just wouldn’t cook the mustard.
‘Cut it,’ I said, ‘you don’t cook it. You cut it, in the town. Out beyond the grids you probably boil it for six hours with a change of water.’
‘Are you going to keep this shit going or are you going to talk to me properly?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to keep it going. It will be unrelenting.’
‘In that case, you can come,’ she said. ‘You’ll catch up with your old mates.’
She just wanted to borrow my number one jacket, the one with the brass buttons, if it wasn’t on a scarecrow yet. ‘We don’t have scarecrows on Leverhulme Drive,’ I said.
‘Are you still living there?’ she asked.
‘Sort of.’
But the uniform jacket was available. It was still pressed, in wraps in a cupboard. A couple of the other local guys had gone back to sea. So it wasn’t just me got pissed off with being told how the Hebs were like this or like that. But there was still a few guys I’d like to see. I’d paid for the jacket out of my wages so it belonged to me, though I was supposed to hand in the buttons when I left. I thought I might just run the risk of being prosecuted for failing to remove them.
‘If you behave yourself, I might just shine up the buttons for you, before handing it back.’
So I dropped the parcel round at her office, just left it for her there. And aye, it was time to catch up with the old colleagues. Most of the job was a waiting game but we’d ran a few casualties.
You know that feeling? You see someone you know well but it’s like the first time you’re looking at them. I was half aware of Mairi’s style. And I knew she was in good shape. But I looked twice when I met her along with a few folk in the County Lounge. It wasn’t just my own eyes went to her. The jacket fitted her snug so the buttons were done up, looking formal, not just a mock-up. It was a bit longer on her than me, but not by much. She’d grown the hair a bit and had the ponytail tight so the smooth dark strands were slick against her face. She had the dark skirt and dark shoes with heels but not stilettoes. Nothing fancy. Just
total class.
‘You scrub up well, blone,’ I said.
‘Yes, but we could do with a bit more braid.’ As she held up her cuff to show the one rosette.
‘Aye, I never hung in there long enough for another ring.’
We all had one drink and then we were along the road to the Crow’s Nest, top of the Legion. Then I was circulating, playing it cool on the vino collapso. Spacing it with water. I wasn’t sober but I wasn’t drunk.
‘You don’t mind a smell of smoke on your jacket?’
‘You’re very considerate, my dear.’
I don’t know why I followed her out. Just maybe there was a memory of the snatch of a roll-up with something worth inhaling. But I’d only had a toke of a joint a few times in twenty years – just for the memory of it.
And she was in a wee gaggle of folk. Some I knew, some I didn’t. Maybe I was curious to catch the yarn in the community of smokers, the lull from the music. And it was a stunning evening. Yes, you do get them in SY. This was one of these clear September nights. The year was changing. The temperature was dropping and the visibility was burning with clarity. Stars were jumping.
Everyone was saying stuff like, ‘I’m seeing you in a new light, girl. It hangs better on you than on that lanky bastard.’
Affectionate things like that. And then I caught the image. She wasn’t milking it too much. Just lingered for the right pause for effect. She brought the tube out of her inside pocket and twisted the red cap off. Time for a Havana. That was another coastguard connection. A very old-fashioned present. Sometimes we got a bottle of malt for the Christmas do. This time there was a box of Havanas but not many takers for them. So the guys had shared them out with the neighbours in the Fisheries Office.
It wasn’t a huge one, and not one of these really fat ones either, but a proper cigar. I always liked the smell of them. The first smell, before it fades to bitter. She placed it in her mouth and I wished I had the Zippo lighter but someone else clicked a Bic and she was away. Just that surprising first burst of smoke and then it was natural.