The Girl on the Ferryboat

by Angus Peter Campbell

  I go back to the door and try again. Then I notice that it is not jammed at all: it is merely that I was pushing in the wrong direction. How Alasdair would have laughed, and how Big Roderick would have scoffed.

  ‘You with all your Education! Don’t you know the difference between push and pull? If you can’t pull, a’ bhalaich, then slaod!’

  And I did slaod, and the batten rose and the door hinge creaked and opened before me.

  I entered, and there she was still secure in all her splendour: An Leumadair Gorm, The Blue Dolphin, sitting on her battens like a battleship waiting to be launched, like a bird waiting to take off. She rather reminded me of the way the heron stands on a rock waiting for that unknown moment when she suddenly decides to fly with her wings extended and expanded in that wonderful curve.

  With the door open there was now sufficient light to see the original boat in all her beauty. She really was elegantly crafted, and age and time had only added to the grace with which she’d been made. I felt her in the half-light with my hands: the clinchers and gaffs and braces and thole-pins and all the other little sensuous parts I’d almost completely forgotten about, and which had been so lovingly handled and finished and polished by Alasdair himself. Was this the one who would not fade?

  I placed my hand at the ceann-ùrlair – the head – and stroked the boat, touching the garb and the rebat and the apron and the breast-hook and the rubbing-piece and oh I could go on forever, through the pintle and the hanks and the cleats right down to the yoke and the pin and the sheafswallow. Dust covered my hands as I brushed along the wood. A solid old drum was in the corner and I rolled it over, so that I could stand on it and climb into the boat.

  I sat in the stern with my hand on the tiller and steered her westwards down through the narrow channel between the reefs, out towards the herring banks which lie just west of Fiudaidh. As I sailed her, Alasdair stood in the bow shouting and pointing excitedly out west, where the dolphins leapt and danced in their hundreds. We had a grand catch that day: five crans of herring, and afterwards Katell fried them in oatmeal and butter, and Ruairidh Mòr – Big Roderick – ate so many of them that he nodded off for a while after tea, muttering little indistinguishable things to himself. Ruairidh Mòr, who would now find this world he had prophesied so alien.

  And the pity that she was here hidden, behind the doors of an old barn. Like some kind of dirty secret. A great thing discarded when she could be a swan in the water, sailing in the Minch, across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal. Round Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Cod. Catching lobsters and crabs, herring and mackerel, dolphins and whales and sharks. Her prow cutting the waves, her sails fluttering in the breeze, blowing in the wind. The now so well seasoned wood flying through the water.

  Big Roderick loved whistling. Sailing homeward to Mingulay. Call all hands to man the capstan, see the cable run down clear, heave away and with a will boys, for old England we will steer, and we’ll sing in joyful chorus in the watches of the night and we’ll sight the shores of England when the grey dawn brings the light, rolling home, rolling home, rolling home, across the sea, rolling home to dear old England, rolling home, dear land to thee. Farewell and adieu unto you Spanish ladies as we hunt the bonny shoals o’ herrin’.

  I love you. ‘S toigh leam thu. Tha gaol agam ort. Tha gradh agam ort. I love you. Love I you. Love have I on you. Love have I on you. And how Donald would have loved her too. Carrying summer visitors over to Barra.

  For some reason Abramovitch and his yachts came to mind. I came out of the byre into the sunlight in the full knowledge that what I had greatly loved had diminished every other thing worthy of affection. The boat was not mine, really, so I closed the byre door behind me and walked down the single-track road towards the bike which I’d left by the cattle grid.

  A young boy and girl – they would have been no more than ten or eleven – cycled towards me and gave me a friendly wave as they rode by. I looked back over my shoulder at them as they disappeared down the hill, laughing and whooping.

  I hope they will kiss like I did, and that it will last forever, like a clear, spoken secret which will bind them together like a spider’s glue.

  13

  HELEN WAS LAID to rest in the place that she loved. The place is under the shelter of Càrn Mòr, and as you go there to remember, gives you a wonderful view over Loch a’ Tuath towards Fladda and Lunga, Gometra and Ulva. I too came back here, because the place that I loved was no more, if it had ever been.

  I rented a little cottage at the other end of the island, down near Loch Buidhe. It is perfectly placed – sheltered by Beinn Buidhe on one side and by Beinn na Croise on the other, with shore-side access to the loch itself, where I keep a little engine boat.

  Helen’s will asked for her house to be sold and the monies given to Oxfam and the profits from any of the household contents to be given to the local branch of the RNLI. She asked that I would deal with any personal items as I saw fit.

  I gave all the clothes to the Salvation Army and offered all her books to the local library. I saved her violin, and the lovely old writing desk with all the materials that were on it for my own little cottage.

  I had that horrible day of burning things: watching smoke rise and throwing all the useless little left over things that nobody wanted into the flames. Who was I to decide what was useless? But what was I to do – hand the job over to some stranger, as if that made it any better? Love has to burn as well as glow.

  I remembered my mother’s funeral and how in those days we did it ourselves. The local villagers dug the grave and when it came time for the burial it wasn’t handed over to any professional undertaker. We all lowered the coffin into the sand, and then took it in turns to fill in the grave. There was no final denial that it had really happened: as you flung down the sand with your shovel and then slammed the earth on top to bed it all in, you knew the job was all done. From beginning to end, from head to foot, dust to dust. Here,

  I had to fight for that right, as the official undertakers tried to shoo us all away for tea and soup and scones while they finished the job.

  Some things could not be burned. My father used to say that every crust of bread we flung into the fire would return to us as cinder in the afterlife, and that to tear a page out of a book was a greater sin than stealing. All my life I’ve had a horror about the burning of books, and I can imagine no greater tragedy than to see print going up in flames. I’ve done it of course and even taken delight in screwing up old tabloid papers and lighting the fire, but still regretted it. Even the things I didn’t like. I once burnt a Reader’s Digest and I can still see the words turning to black cinder before going grey and white and out of sight.

  I mind once being in an old woman’s house in Uist as she was trying to light her fire. The peat was damp, and of course there were no firelighters, and just a couple of poor looking sticks, so she went down to the closet and came back with this old book and began tearing leaves from it, scrunching them up and putting them in the bottom of the grate. She lit them and before long had enough of a fire going to put the kettle on the hob. The book was an ancient copy of Dwelly’s dictionary. ‘Donald used to look at it now and again,’ she said. ‘Now it’s no use to anyone. And of course I can’t read.’

  I’m afraid I was too young at the time to challenge her or to rescue the book. And of course she was right – of what use is a book to someone who can’t read? Far better for it to be used to light the fire, to give heat and help in making a cup of tea. And who was I to tell any of my elders what to do with their own property?

  I mind the famous MacMhuirich manuscripts which contained all the great and ancient lore of the MacMhuirich poets of South Uist: they say that the last remnants of these writings dried up and were finally used by a peasant descendent to tie his boots together. And rightly so: for who could walk the boggy moors with flapping boots when a perfectly reasonable set of shoelaces could made out of rolled vellum?

  Helen
left notes and letters and a lifelong diary which I refused to burn. She’d left no specific instructions about them, and of course were not for sale for charitable or any other purposes. They were not ‘valuable’ enough to be given to any university – for who cares about the writings of an unknown individual who has not claimed fame in the columns of the newspapers or in the critical journals of academia? For the writings of the great and the good, of course, are far more important than the scrawls and scribbles of the untutored amateurs. Or at least were, until the great world wide web came along giving us all a global platform from which to spout our thoughts, ideas, notions and prejudices. For now everyone is king of the castle with equal claim to be heard, or ignored. More people now read my twitterings on twitter than ever read MacMhuirich.

  I had a computer for a while, but have now gotten rid of it because it came to possess me. My every moment from dawn till dusk was somehow taken with it, trawling all the news engines of the world for the latest developments, but then being constantly sidetracked by fantastic articles about the Coral Oceans and the Hadron Collider and the decline of the pheasant peacock in Norway and the intricate workings of the steam engines in the old Caledonian trains, and – look – there’s that exquisite goal that Messi scored against Milan right now, once again, on YouTube.

  So one day I logged off, and because I am a man of ritual carried the computer down into the boat, started the engine and headed off towards the Garvellachs where I dumped it into the deepest part of the ocean west of Eileach an Naoimh. Sorry about the pollution.

  I’d been there before, years and years ago, the summer I’d worked on the lobster boat out of Oban. We would sail out late on the Sunday night and spend the week down about the Garvellachs, returning on the Thursday night for the fishmarket. There was just the boat owner and I – a two-man crew.

  We took it in turns to steer the boat, though when it came to the lobster grounds he tended to take the wheel while

  I released the creels into the water. We had about two hundred creels altogether which we moved around from place to place, never setting more than about ten of them in any one place at any one time.

  The best places were always just about a mile or so offshore where the skerries tended to deepen and which gave a wonderful undersea craggy environment to the lobsters. There our creels would lie, maybe for about twenty-four hours, baited with fish-heads, and when we returned to gather them each of them would invariably be filled with two or three fine looking lobsters.

  Gathering them in was of course quite a tricky job. Often there was a swell, and you had to be really careful not to get the incoming rope tangled in the winch. Though some small boats, even then, had a powered winch, we still just had a hand-pumped one so while the skipper kept the boat bobbing in just the right place I winched and simultaneously lifted the lobsters out of each creel as they ascended.

  Often, of course, we got more than we bargained for – all kinds of weird and wonderful things would come out of the sea trapped within the creel, but they were all then pitched over the other side. The only market was for lobster and all other species were useless.

  The worst time was when the creels were coming in fast – so fast that you didn’t really have time to see what was actually in the creel. You turned the winch handle and, blind as it were, with your back to the incoming creel stuck your hand inside the hole and lifted out the lobster, making sure its claws didn’t sink into your wrist. Then with one swift move you wrapped the claws round tight with a thick elastic band and flung the live lobster into the water barrel where you kept them until you came ashore on the Thursday.

  But as I put my hand into the creel something bit and as I turned to look this ugly looking fish – I discovered afterwards it was called a catfish – had bitten into my finger. I stepped back, slipped and tumbled overboard.

  I remember the faint shadow of the side of the boat appearing above me through the sea and I also remember thinking, I shall now float down to the bottom of the ocean, where I shall die. I thought that because I was in an utterly foreign environment.

  I couldn’t swim at the time, and had never actually been in the water until that point. Oh, I’d paddled about at the edge of the ocean and all that, but that was actually the first time that I had ever put my whole head and body under the water. Maybe I should add that I had not even done that in the bath, for I am old enough to have been brought up in a house which had no electricity or running water and our weekly bath consisted of a family dip into the zinc tub in front of the peat fire on a Saturday night. We washed our heads first and then sat in the bath up to our necks. It never entered our minds to sink into the whole water with our whole bodies.

  So there I was in sinking into the Atlantic in that way for the first time. And then I surfaced and gasped for breath and sank again. My heavy sea boots dragged me down and I knew for certain that this was it. Had I read or heard somewhere that you sink and rise three times, and that was it? Or was that an old wives’ tale too? And I surfaced and there was the skipper at the side of the boat holding out the boat hook towards me. I lunged and miraculously grabbed it, and he hauled me aboard. We lost the creels, but who cares?

  I think now of the insanity of it all. How we take the greatest risks in innocence, and how we die through ignorance. I think part of it was purely practical – that sea-going communities felt it was pointless to learn to swim because if you fell overboard far out in the Atlantic, it was best to drown quickly rather than prolong the agony. But a good part of it too was mythological: that to dip with the devil was to invite him in. Better to leave him to his deadly devices. However, what this ultimately meant, of course, was defeat. The sea was too powerful. The wind was too strong. The rain was too heavy. The port was too far away. Power lay elsewhere, far away – over the headland, towards the mainland somewhere. For what can I do when the storm comes, or the catfish bites, or the words run out?

  Helen’s notes and letters and diaries lay there for a long time. Then they gave me voice. I remember the day I finally persuaded myself to look at them, to enter that dead territory where I imagined they lay, only to discover that this was not a cobwebbed crypt but a living gift.

  It was a Saturday morning – one of those pleasurable autumn mornings just after the mist has risen off the loch and the whole world is bathed in a soft glow. The coffee bubbled in the pot and once I’d poured it into the mug I made for the small glass porch I’d built at the front of the house. It gathers the sun in the early morning, and it was such a morning. The door to the small study where her papers lay was open and a shaft of light was pouring in through the window directly on to her diaries. I went over and handled them again and took them with me out into the porch.

  Do you need permission to enter private territory? And the sun continued to shine. The coffee tasted perfect. What a beautiful rounded hand she had with the Cs and the Fs and the Ls curved and smoothed. Later they turned into a slightly finer script, but kept the open quality which made them so attractive throughout.

  Here was her life, or at least those little segments which she’d happened to jot down: the time she climbed Ben Nevis, the time she holidayed with her mother in the Seychelles, the day the dog died. I only glanced for a couple of minutes, not really reading anything, and understood my sin: reducing things to the recorded. Our voice really lay in the gaps. What courage love requires. In the end it is nothing but courage.

  And I think that’s when it dawned on me that talking wasn’t an extra to be done when all other options had run out, but was life itself. For when all doing ceased, then nothing was left but being. We hadn’t shared enough. Blethered enough. Spoken, laughed, cried, hoped, planned. We hadn’t spent purely nonsensical hours telling jokes or playing cards or making love or singing old hymns or cutting each other’s toenails bellowing, ‘Oooof – what a smell!’ Natasha was right: silence was the real crime against humanity.

  When she wrote she used an old-fashioned ink pen.

  I finished
my coffee and went to her desk and sat down. Her fiddle was resting on its stand by the wall next to the bureau. The unlined foolscap paper she used still lay on the left hand side of the desk. The ink well was dry so I rummaged in the drawers and found three unopened ink refills in the bottom drawer – one marked ‘Red Ink’, one marked ‘Black Ink’ and one marked ‘Green Ink’. I wondered whether she used one for her notes, one for her letters and one for her diaries but didn’t wish to check: that belonged to the gaps. I opened the ink bottle marked green and poured the contents into the inkwell on the desktop.

  The pen too was without a nib, but in the other drawer I found the case marked ‘Nibs’. I’d forgotten the variety of nibs that were available, and how beautiful they all were in their individual ways. I spent an hour or so trying them all out: the long thin elongated one which gives you a spiral-like hand, the shorter more stubby one which gives you the rounded cursive, and all the ones in between which alter your writing – or at least your writing style – depending on which way you hold them.

  I was back at school with the dip pen. The school master carefully pouring the black ink into all our little wells. It smelt tarry. Then standing there teaching us how to hold the dip pen – the thumb on the inside wood firmly but not too firmly about a quarter of an inch above the nib, and the forefinger and the index finger balancing the other side. A slight dip of the nib into the ink, for too much would clog it all up and too little would be of no use, and then lifting it gently without dripping over the paper.