A Book of Death and Fish

by Ian Stephen

  The subject of capital punishment led to a comparison of the ideas behind the words ‘justice’ and ‘revenge’. ‘So what about Brady and Hindley?’ he asked. The image of the second of these is also a historical icon with a length of hair sweeping across a partly obscured face.

  Courts are now deciding on levels of compensation paid to workers deported to keep German industry turning, between the bombing. Some chemical companies had to produce the gas that would make industrialised killing more efficient. BMW made aircraft engines as well as army motorcycles. Sadly, we have to admit that Volkswagen Beetles were part of Nazi propaganda as well as the later war-effort. But if we notch up that score we have to look at the man behind the rally Escorts and all these Cortinas. Mondeo sounds neatly universal but Henry Ford published a collection of his strongly held views on the subject of the ‘International Jew’. Maybe it wasn’t so original, his theory that the Jews were the real cause of World War One, but it still won him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in 1938.

  It’s not all about nice motors. Clothing plaid a part too. So to speak. Hitler wasn’t too pleased with Leni wasting all these rolls of Agfa and Kodak on Jessie Owens. But when it came to Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), how could she have infused all that drama into the depiction of the court of the war-gods, if her subjects had not been so very well dressed. You won’t find it difficult to believe that the Hugo Boss firm manufactured clothes for the Nazis, from the plain brown shirts to the black uniforms of the Waffen SS officers. Who says that ‘Dead men don’t wear plaid’?

  I have to point out that the uniforms were not designed by the Boss firm. They only made them. Working to specifications. With forced labour.

  When you’re trying to sort out line that’s fallen off a frame or a spool, you have to be willing to tease out every element to the full stretch. But you’re looking for the cheating heart of the issue. That could be an accidental knot, in danger of being unique. You might never come across one quite like it again. But it’s going to be difficult to find. Each section of the problem will draw you into it. I’m thinking now of the film-stock of these documentaries, the amateur and professional movies which have caught more than they aimed for.

  Kodachrome is about to go out of production. Super 8 is now an expensive atmospheric alternative to digital. The study of the fate of one company could be a tool to use to examine the shifting attitudes which lie behind votes and party memberships. How guilty was Leni Riefenstahl along the slippery scale? Should Speer have been released? He was known to be a cultured man so his dedication to the cause gave the more obvious thugs some credibility. He managed the slave-labour programme even if he didn’t work out the starvation ration. He didn’t live to be over ninety like Hess or over a hundred like Riefenstahl. But he wrote his version of events.

  We seem to be back with the issues of crime and punishment and the elusive notion of justice. Let’s not forget that a terrible murder was committed by an individual or individuals in the midst of God-fearing Lewis people. The culprit might not have been from outside our circles. And the culprit may have been protected by others.

  Over on the mainland, a minister of the kirk, in civilised Cromarty, was an outspoken defender of the trade in slaves. He wasn’t an outsider. That’s the thought which stayed with me, after I’d considered the incredible but true journey of Herr Hess. I needed to get back to the internet, once I’d cleared a tangle, cleaned a route to a toilet, cooked a dinner and had a conference with the literary daughter.

  I can’t leave you in suspense. I got to the root of the fankle. You get through a slough of despond where the temptation grows. You’ve got to resist making a cut in the line. You then have two angles of attack but that’s a divided front. And we all know the dangers of that now, don’t we? A fisherman’s bend will make a strong join when the problem’s been solved but that’s a confusing thing in a line where knots mean depths. After one long, long loop was pulled through another, the problem fell apart. I was able to wind an unbroken red cord on a solid piece of timber and present it to my daughter, with said sounding-lead attached. An aid to navigation and angling. Intermediate technology.

  I also removed the machine from the box and dysoned in the disaster area. I’d been a bit scared Anna would roam outwith allotted territories and find that box unopened. So I was able to remove much of the dust from the lower regions of the kitchen terrain.

  Since you ask, I did monkfish seared in light oil with a sprinkle of fresh red chilli. A few drops of the light Japanese soy sauce, the one with the green lid. Served with a jus made from the backbone of the fish, with other trimmings from other species and lemongrass and coriander. But not thickened, so it’s a soupy bath for the rice-noodles. I think she enjoyed it. Once she’d opened every window she could get near. Must have been the chilli oil. A lot of folk can’t handle that. Suppose I’m just used to it. And the tube on the Dyson wasn’t really long enough. There’s an extension do-for you’re supposed to use for getting into inaccessible pinnacles. I couldn’t cope with that. I think I made a decent effort.

  Language and Literature did lead into Outdoor Education. Anna could be doing expeditions in Canada and in Alaska. Sounds like there’s two women across the pond she has to meet. She never really had time to develop her relationship with her aunt. I told Anna I sent my sister and her good lady Bothy Culture, Hardland and Grit – a hell of a trilogy of albums, mixing heavy dance beats and samples from the voices of Scotland, sung and spoken. A lifetime’s work in a short allotted span of years. Martyn Bennett. I also put in a book by the mother who outlived him. Margaret Bennett has been noting and recording the songs and tunes and stories from a Gaelic culture, surviving in Cape Breton and Québec. A couple of generations’ work in one jiffy bag.

  In The Fish Shop

  Now and again I give my custom to the fish shop. There’s Ronnie Scott’s which is not a branch of the jazz club but is a fine source of rhythmic conversation. I used to enjoy the stroll out to the industrial end of town and a yarn as I selected something for the restaurant and something for my own lunch. I’ve taken to having my dinner in the middle of the day, the way I did growing up.

  My Da, like most Da’s who worked in town, would come round the corner on his bike and the stew would be ready.

  But I’ve taken to the route round Lazy Corner. I used to think the turn in the hoil was called that because of the railings. Whenever there’s a railing in Stornoway there’s some old guy’s foot leaning on it and the other straight beside it. You take a look for yourself. It was a Skyeman pointed this out to me. It’s what we do. Though I’m not an old guy yet. On a good day there’s a couple of coves yarning though storytelling is of course a thing of the past, they tell me.

  It’s called Lazy Corner because that’s where any debris will collect. The tide is slack there and the rainbow of diesel will lie on the surface for longer. I went into the other fish shop, by the fisherman’s co-op. There’s a fellow in front of me but he waves me on. He’s in for a yarn with the guy behind the counter, before he buys his fish.

  ‘It’s all from the east coast the day, Peter, the boat’s haven’t got out.’

  ‘No, it’s been shit weather,’ the other fellow says.

  I knew his voice. ‘Well, hell, it’s yourself. Remember all the Broad Bay haddies you flogged from the Bedford van,’ I says.

  ‘Yes and I used to give you and your pal a spin round Westview and drop you off on the corner of Leverhulme Drive. That’s where you are now, isn’t it? Still with the Coastguard?’

  I told him no, I was working for myself now and living round the corner from here. ‘Think of all the lorry-loads of whitefish we sent from here to Aberdeen market. The by-catch from the prawn trawl.’

  ‘Where did it all go? What happened?’

  The former fish merchant looked younger than me. He took a look at me and he said, ‘You don’t half look like your olman. Sound a bit like him too.’

  ‘So is that you getting young
er or me getting older?’ I asked.

  The guy who was serving was also from these streets. This was his retirement job, three days a week and this was why he was doing it.

  ‘You used to work with old Seamus, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘He didn’t last long after he retired. There was some characters in the Coastguard, then.’

  ‘Aye, first watch with him, he taught me how to skin a rabbit. Tying a bowline behind my back came later.’

  I was there again. That first cut with his neat small knife of German steel. Seamus showed me that. Then he told me to get my thumb in between the skin and the meat and left me to get on with it. I looked down at the skate wings, through glass. They would be local and skate doesn’t have to be as fresh as other fish. My old neighbour behind the counter was the man who showed me how to skin skate. A small cut. Just enough to prise your thumb in. It’s a bit tougher on the hands than a rabbit. But I didn’t buy a skate wing. I knew I shouldn’t be eating a big slab of butter and probably not the capers and balsamic either. It wouldn’t be the same without the old beurre noir.

  Then I saw the razors.

  ‘Somebody diving for them?’

  A guy brought up in the town, a guy who should know better, got done for wiping out a whole bay with some electric gadget. It was worth checking.

  ‘Aye, there’s a cove getting a few from Broad Bay’

  ‘I’ll take six and a few of these mussels.’

  ‘What’ll you do with them, Peter? He’s good on the pans, this one, so they all tell me.’

  ‘I won’t know till I start. But maybe I won’t steam them, this time. Had some in a Chinese in Edinburgh. Sort of place all the specials are in Chinese script. I asked for the fish dish one day and got razors. They just roasted them in garlic and chilli and a touch of soy sauce, on the half-shell. Slit them and gut them and throw them in the oven in some warm oil.’

  ‘I thought you’d go out for the shellfish yourself,’ said the cove who used to have the Bedford.

  ‘I used to. Over in Lochs for the mussels and down Holm for the razors. I suppose I could time it to get the airport bus down but I’d rather come in here than dodge the hail showers.’

  ‘Hell, I’m still seeing your father in you.’

  ‘And you still look like you’re ready to charm the cailleachan of Kennedy Terrace, from the running board of that van.’

  ‘Where did the years go, Peter?’

  The conversation got something going, in my head. I had to sit down, after I got through the door, once I’d put the bag of razorfish in the sink. Catch the breath. I never even put the kettle on. You know when you can hear yourself thinking.

  At last, I knew what I was doing. The strands were all there, the same way the olman’s warps and all those bobbins of wool were delivered to his shed. ‘Christ, I’m weaving,’ I said to myself.

  A Liberal Consensus?

  A re-examination of attitudes to the Slave Trade in Scotland with particular reference to records pertaining to The Royal Burgh of Cromarty and its surrounding districts

  THE PHD THESIS OF PETER MACAULAY

  INTRODUCTION

  Estate owners in the colony of Guyana were in the habit of transferring the names of their home settlements to the Guyanese areas they held jurisdiction over. Scottish names were also given to many people who were brought to these estates to work without payment. Strong connections with the estate owners’ home regions in the United Kingdom were thus maintained. This might help to explain why the burgh council of the trading port of Cromarty opposed the abolition of slavery. It is interesting to set this clearly recorded standpoint against the background of wealth and culture still visible in that burgh, a significant seaport at the time. It is also very tempting to make comparisons with other administrations in which the most repressive of edicts were issued from the most refined examples of balanced, neo-classical architecture.

  The mercantile architecture of Cromarty has still a high degree of integrity. In this thesis we will be examining the declared written opinions of senior members of that community with reference to the Parliamentary Bills which eventually made participation in the slave trade illegal within Great Britain.

  Those who voted for such declarations, at the level of the burgh council, were by definition (according to the franchise at the time) those with wealth and so with vested interest. There is of course no record of how farm workers or dock workers or serving girls thought. This thesis begins with full acknowledgement of that limitation. However we will look at one particular life-story, not because it is typical but because detailed records of its circumstances still exist.

  One Hugh Junor brought a daughter and a son back from that coast of Guyana. He did not bring their mother. The children were called William and Eliza. They were half-casts, in the terminology of the time. Both attended school on the Black Isle. Eliza is still there. She was buried in Rosemarkie. Her brother left that area. He did not go home. Who could say where home was for William Junor? But it seems very likely, from surviving records, that he might have found somewhere more welcoming in Buenos Aries.

  The case-study of his sister will be studied more closely. Her father married. Her father died. Her stepmother married again. Her new husband was the Reverend Archibald Brown. We might well expect that support and protection would have been offered Eliza, from that man of the church, now her legal guardian.

  The Reverend was a pamphleteer and activist but one who supported the slave trade. He is described as clutching a drawing – elegantly done but for a practical purpose. It showed how best to pack the hold of a ship with live cargo, for the maximum profit.

  Eliza was forced to leave the area of the Black Isle, for a time. Later, she and her own daughter returned to Fortrose, where they were to make their living as seamstresses. They marked out their own will to be there, on that peninsula. This was a woman who had once being taken over oceans by her own father, leaving her natural mother behind.

  This is a story but it has been gleaned from a range of extant documents and records. These have suggested a line for further research. The following thesis will attempt to gather and present a wide range of recorded statements and comments, not previously collated and all relating to the trade in slaves, with links to Scotland, prior to the legislation to free all ‘owned’ slaves in 1833. The various Acts of Parliament, to abolish the trade, driven initially by William Wilberforce, were of course passed in a series of gradual measures. The conclusive Act only completed its passage three days before the death of the principal instigator of the process.

  In a Scotland now entering the second decade of a new millennium, it is all too easy to take a fabled liberal consensus for granted. This thesis will give documented evidence of attitudes to one single issue, close scrutiny. The study will be limited to one small part of Scotland during the period 1800 to 1833. We will examine recorded statements, minutes, letters and published texts with a view to summarising an accurate record of local opinion, for and against abolition of the trade and freeing of slaves in the regions under the British Empire, at the time.

  Will and Testament (revised)

  Western Isles Hospital

  Hell’s teeth, that last will and testament set something going like a train. When I say the last, I mean the first one. It got a bit much. I had to lay it all aside. Picked it up at different times and then other stuff happened. Years and years of other stuff. You know how a dictionary is out of date as soon as it’s printed.

  I’m reminded now of the notes on the form which set the whole thing in motion. Off and on. Lengthy though they are, these musings can’t claim to be the product of any perpetual motion. Efficient we can sometimes do but perpetual is tricky. Not even the blacksmith down the road has managed that yet, though he’s come close. It’s maybe no accident that the typeface used in Admiralty charts, for general information, is Perpetua. Come to think of it, the one used to highlight warnings is Univers. Modest people, the Admiralty, as represented by the Hydrographic Office.
It took them a hell of a time before they acknowledged the significant survey work done by one Dr John Rae, of Orkney. Not a naval officer.

  The practical stuff in my first attempt at a Will is a bit out of date now so I’m going to have another go at that now.

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, please accept this as the last and final document to the date fixed thereon and signed by myself and witnessed by my friend the Reverend Armitage, who you may be interested to know is now back in the fold. Or operating the gate to the fold. Anyway, he’s got his old job back. I don’t think you have to believe in God to be an Episcopalian minister. Or priest.

  The most important thing to say is that the cod appear to be coming back. Well, not the same guys exactly, but their progeny. I left a few behind in the fridge in the townhouse kitchen. I hope the message got out. The key’s under the usual stone. People still drop off fresh fish when they know you’re not well enough to catch your own. They came from the west side, of course. The Minch has still not recovered. You might not rate cod but these were line-caught. Their delicate frameworks were not crunched. So the mottles and marbling changed in tone from a kelp-tinged russet to best butter. The very tint of the pats you’ll find simply wrapped in greaseproof paper.