by A D Swanston
Our cousins, the Patersons and the Allans, were flat out too. Cousin David’s father, Uncle David, had Quest which usually came back with The Angel, and Uncle William was steersman for father.
At about six o’clock each morning we all went down to the harbour to wait for the fleet to return. As soon as they were secured safely inside the harbour wall, the families were on board, unloading the catch, rolling up nets to be taken away for mending and sluicing down the hold with seawater, ready for the next trip that evening.
By that time cotton had largely replaced hemp and linen. It was much lighter so that more nets could be carried on each boat, but it broke more easily, even when soaked in linseed oil or alum water, and the mesh had to be regularly measured to ensure that it had not shrunk below the legal minimum of one inch square. It all made for more work.
At sea the nets were allowed to drift on the wind, moving in harmony with the boat and the swell. When they returned to harbour at dawn the skippers and their crews made their weary way home only after they had made sure their catches had been unloaded and sold to a merchant. Some boats were tied to one merchant who bought their catch at an agreed price; most skippers looked for the best price they could get.
Willy reckoned he could tell how good a boat’s catch had been when he saw it approaching the harbour entrance. A boat making slow progress and riding low in the water held a bigger catch than one riding high. He and James put his eye to the test by making straight for the boats he thought were the most heavily laden and offering, for sixpence each, to help unload the catch. If he was right, and he usually was, the skipper might well be pleased to pay a shilling to have his fish unloaded quickly.
At home, while Father and Robert rested, we made sure their nets were ready, dried their boots and clothes and filled their kit barrels with food for the night. When it was time for them to set off for the fishing grounds again, Mother carried Father on her back out to the boat and Margaret carried Robert. It was a tradition that the men should start their voyage with dry feet, although they seldom stayed dry for long. Luckily, I was not expected to carry more than a kit barrel or two and could nip through the water quickly. It was still cold enough.
Once at the grounds, the fishermen set some of their nets and waited an hour or so before hauling one or two in. If the catch looked promising, they stayed put; if not, they moved on. When all the nets were set they might drift for up to two miles, trapping the fish by their gills.
By the middle of August our hands were rubbed raw from the nets and the salt, and our hands and hair reeked of fish. The Drave seldom failed entirely but daily catches varied. Robert claimed that a poor catch was due to the herring ‘having a clear eye’ and being able to see the nets. He also complained about ‘jigging’ – the practice of catching herring with lines and hooks made from knitting wires. ‘I don’t like jigging,’ he said. ‘It frightens the fish away. The catch is always smaller when folk are jigging.’ At twenty-one, Robert had a habit of pretending to be fifty.
Once the shoals had been located, their size made the fish relatively easy to catch. But their movements varied and their exact location was not always predictable. Father was a typical Fifer, believing that the movements of the shoals were affected by the selling of herring for manure, by catching fish that were too small, by fishing on a Sunday and, above all, the by ‘wickedness of the people’. If he was right, the herring must have occasionally got wind of some particularly wicked goings-on because they disappeared altogether. Perhaps they had information from the Church Elders.
The Drave was a constant bustle of men and women at their daily toil and big, pungent smells. The sounds that remind me most of the Drave are those of feeding gulls and the smells not just of fish, but of horses mixed with fish. Flat, two-wheeled carts were pulled by sturdy ponies, chosen for strength rather than beauty, often blinkered, seemingly impervious to the hubbub of the harbour, well fed and producers of large amounts of excellent manure.
And every year in time for the Drave an assortment of itinerant characters arrived in the villages, all of whom Willy seemed to know, and insisted I meet. Among them were Mac the knife-grinder, ‘Toy Tommy’, who sold toys and puzzles, and a Tyrolean family who played horns and flutes and dressed in leather breeches, braces and felt hats decorated with feathers and flowers.
Willy’s favourite was ‘Wee George’ Macgregor, a cadger who travelled about selling fish door-to-door from his two-wheeled cart. This was known as ‘caller fish’. George was a huge man, very tall and very fat, with a black patch over his left eye and not a single hair on his head. He looked terrifying but spoke softly and was as gentle as a kitten. With a glass of whisky in his hand and a willing audience, he had a good store of tales to tell, all of them reflecting well upon himself.
‘I lost this at Balaclava,’ he told us, lifting the patch to reveal an empty eye socket. ‘Now that was a battle. I must have killed a dozen Russians before they took my eye.’
He also claimed to have been a champion prize-fighter in Edinburgh and to be descended from Rob Roy Macgregor. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a story is in the ear of the listener. My mother dismissed him as a scapegrace, saying that there was less to him than met the eye and advising me to stay clear of him.
‘He’s always cheerful, Mother,’ I pointed out.
‘I daresay he is but you never hear a cadger cry “stinkin’ fish”.’ It was an old saying.
Miss Farthing, known to all as Penny Farthing, was another regular. Penny was no more than five feet high and looked frail, but she must have been a tough old soul. Her face reminded me of a walnut. She had been in service with a wealthy family in Dundee but cheerfully admitted that she had lost her position when she stole six silver teaspoons, intending to sell them to raise money for her sick mother. Without a job and with no hope of a reference, Penny had been forced to eke a living as best she could. She did this as a travelling mender.
Like the fisher lassies, Penny followed the fishing, not gutting and packing as they did, but mending nets. She worked outside in all weathers, mending the nets with astonishing speed, a clay pipe clenched between her teeth. She used a thin wooden mending shuttle with a bone tongue to hold the cotton and took the pipe out of her mouth only for talking, eating and scratching. She did a lot of scratching.
‘I’ve got the swithers again,’ she often complained. ‘They’re driving me mad, little beggars. I suppose I’ll have to take a bath.’ Hot water might have got rid of the invisible mites which made net menders’ eyes red and their skin itchy but Penny showed no sign of ever putting it to the test. She smelt like a rotten haddock.
After her experience in service, Penny did not much care for those she called ‘the ships’, her contraction of Lordship and Ladyship, and used for anyone she thought of as at all grand.
‘I asked the ships for a little money for my ma,’ she said. ‘I told them she was sick but they didn’t care. They said it wasn’t their concern. So I stole the spoons, only a handful mind, and would have sold them for a few shillings. Well, wouldn’t you? But Ma never got the money. They put me out on the street and Ma died soon after. The ships told me to be thankful I wasn’t in prison. Still, I don’t regret it. Following the fishing’s more fun than scrubbing floors and you meet proper people, not ships. Mean as old mutton, they were.’
George and Penny were harmless enough, which was more than could be said for some. The gangrels, who begged for rags, sold pegs and sometimes played tattered old sets of pipes, were rough types. They too came and went with the seasons, setting up their makeshift camps in the trees outside the village; we never understood quite how they survived or where they spent the winters. They were travellers, feared by some for being different, but apparently content with their precarious way of life. We saw them, and heard them speaking their strange, guttural dialect, but were under strict instructions never to approach them.
Mr Foggo, true to form, was among the most vociferous opponents of the gangrels and h
e based one of his fiercest sermons on them. ‘These ungodly people are a threat to our property and the safety of our children,’ he thundered, ‘and should be removed at once.’ At home that evening, we discussed this. ‘It is a view neither charitable nor Christian,’ said my father, and as an afterthought, ‘nor practical. Who is going to remove them, I wonder, and where will they go?’
Mr Foggo could be alarmingly unchristian. I never understood why he went into the church.
* * *
The merchants who set the prices for cured herring, bought it and transported it to market, were never short of customers. Many of them became very rich. Mr Nevin, our school teacher and an admirer of Charles Dickens, had a habit of giving Dickensian names to local people. There was a Uriah Heep in the Town Hall, an Oliver Twist and a Little Nell at school and a butcher known as Micawber. The prosperous merchants had names like Pickwick and Scrooge.
Before the merchants could take the fish to market, it had to be cured and packed. This was done by the fisher lassies, though some were hardly lassies. They started as young as fifteen and often went on beyond sixty.
It was an extraordinary life and the lassies were extraordinary people. Many of them came from the northern fishing communities of Wick and Lerwick, travelling in groups around the coast from Shetland in early summer to East Anglia in autumn, following the fishermen and the fish as they travelled south. Their train fares were paid by the curers whose livelihoods depended upon their skilled labour. Very few of them ever set foot on a boat, although they did help the fishermen’s wives carry the men out to the boats on their backs. Even when a lassie married a local man and settled down in one of the villages, she seldom gave up the fishing altogether. The draw of the lassies’ life was as much social as survival. Willy thought they were wonderful.
When the lassies arrived that year, Willy gleefully introduced me to Effie and Annie, cousins, both in their twenties, who had been sorting and packing herring since they were younger than I was. They had big, open faces, toothy smiles and fishy hair.
‘Stand up straight, now, Willy,’ they said when he took me to meet them, ‘and let’s look at you properly. A year’s growth on you. That’s good. You look well. And handsome too.’ And, with a glance at me, ‘No wonder the girls have noticed you.’ I must have blushed but her flattery was ignored in favour of more pressing matters.
‘How are the fish, Effie? Better than last year? How many crans have you done?’
‘Now Willy, it’s only August. The Drave and the winter herring are still to come. But it’s been good so far. Just you look at my hands.’ She held them up for inspection.
Like all the fisher lassies, when she was gutting the fish Effie protected her fingers with linen cloots tied on with strips of rag. But still her hands were red-raw and cut. The gutting knife and the salt were cruel workmates. ‘They’re not like this till November, most years.’ she said, laughing. ‘They would hurt terrible but the shillin’s in my pocket make them better.’
When they were working, the lassies wore long skirts and leather aprons, linen or woollen shirts rolled up at the elbows and a neepyin shawl on the head. At the end of a working day of anything up to fifteen hours, the aprons and shawls came off. They were cheerful, gregarious women and, working outdoors in all weathers, were as tough as their short leather boots.
Once a sample of the catch had been inspected by the auctioneer or merchant, the baskets of herring were carried by labourers from the boats to the farlans where the lassies worked. They worked in teams of three – two gutting and sorting, one packing. My sister Margaret and cousins Agnes and Jane made up a team at the busiest times. The fish were tipped into the troughs and mixed with large amounts of salt by the coopers, then the lassies gutted, sorted and packed them into barrels. Every catch was made up of fish of different weights, so the herring had to be sorted into one of the approved sizes – matties, full, and spent – then carefully packed with brine into the barrels, which were sealed and left for several days to settle and soak. Finally, the excess brine was tipped out, the barrel topped up with fish, resealed, and branded by the local agent with the official Fishery Board mark. Only then was it sent off to market by carriage or train. The fish guts were sold for fertiliser.
As many as a hundred thousand crans of herring were landed in the East Neuk each year. The curing process, known as ‘The Scotch Cure’, called for skill and stamina and the lassies were vital to it. Herring are fatty fish and have to be cured quickly to prevent their rotting, as well as being sorted into the right barrels. So the lassies were paid bonuses on top of an hourly rate and worked very fast, each team aiming to fill over fifty barrels a day with up to a thousand fish each. Their wages were never very high but at the end of the season they took welcome money back to their families.
On warm evenings, they sat outside their lodgings, chatting and knitting. Knitting was as regular as church-going on Sunday. They knitted even while going for an evening stroll and were astonishingly adept at it. They knitted ganseys, drawers, sea-boot stockings, mittens, scarves and ‘guid socks’ for Sunday wear, with a bewildering variety of needles and wools. Designs were copied as they went from port to port and some could even copy a pattern they had only seen worn by someone in the street. The patterns all had seafaring names like anchor, flag, and herringbone.
The village did come alive during the Drave and every family depended on it. Without it, we would have had little to live on. But still I dreaded it. A month of unloading fish, cleaning and mending nets and even, sometimes, gutting and sorting the catch, was more than enough for me. When term started again at the end of August I breathed a sigh of relief, offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Mr Nevin and Miss Brown and left the others to it.
* * *
As expected, Beautiful Star was not finished for the start of the Drave and her launch was set for the first Saturday in September which, all being well, would see her ready for the English fishing.
The launch day of a new boat was a big occasion and that morning the piers and The Shore steadily filled with onlookers. Both Paterson families, ours and Uncle William’s, were there in force – eight of us and eight of them. So too were the Allans, ten more of them, including Uncle Andrew who sailed with Thomas Fyall, skipper of Thane. Uncle David’s boat, Quest, had been launched the year before. Of the twenty-seven family members present, ten would be sailing south with the fleet.
As soon as the Drave had finished, the visiting boats had departed and our own would soon follow. The harbour, which during August had been packed, would be deserted, and wives and children would have to wait patiently for the fleet to return from the south. But on Beautiful Star’s launch day we were all excited. We had come to see a grand new boat making her entrance.
Father took Robert, Uncle William and his son, also Robert (in our two families, there were two Jameses, two Roberts, two Julias, two Margarets, two Agneses, two Alexanders and two Janets – it could get very confusing) to join the crew in the yard where Beautiful Star was waiting. Willy stood with us among the knots of spectators who had found good vantage points on the piers and, at ten o’clock exactly, Beautiful Star, her registration mark KY1298 newly painted on her bow and flags strung between her masts, was ready. When the wedges holding her were knocked out by the joiners and she began to accelerate down the slipway, a huge cheer went up. No-one cheered louder than Willy.
On board, Father waved proudly to the crowd and, with a graceful dip as if taking a bow, she hit the water and immediately righted herself. The crowd cheered even louder, bottles were opened and flags were waved.
Once afloat, she was pulled swiftly in to the fitting berth where the crew would spend the rest of the day carefully checking her planking and fittings, before her masts, rigging and sails were fitted. An enormous frame, shaped like the letter ‘A’, would be used to raise the pine masts on pulleys and drop them carefully into place. Finally, with nets and equipment loaded, she would be ready for her first voyage.
As the crowd dispersed, Willy had a surprise for me. ‘I asked Father if I could go out on Beautiful Star before she starts the fishing,’ he said. ‘He spoke to your father, who said he would take me as long as the weather is good. We’re going to sail round the Isle of May next week. James is coming and Robert, of course. I wondered if you’d come too?’
‘Willy, you know I don’t like boats. I’d probably be sick.’
‘Nonsense. Beautiful Star’s brand new. Not a hint of fish about her. You’ll enjoy it.’
I was unconvinced. ‘I’ll think about it.’ I said, not intending to.
* * *
Surprisingly, it was Father who persuaded me to go. ‘It’s a short trip,’ he said, ‘and it’ll be your only chance to sail on Beautiful Star. Once we start fishing, we’ll be much too busy to take passengers. It’s a long time since anyone went round the Isle of May, thirty years or more. New boats always did it but there was an accident. Some children drowned and the tradition died out. It was called a Dance on the May. I’d like Beautiful Star to start it up again.’
‘There’s an old monastery on the island and a lighthouse. Will we be going ashore?’ I asked.
‘No. It’s too rocky. We’ll anchor offshore. You’ll be able to see the lighthouse. There’s not much monastery left since the Vikings got to it. Robert and James are coming, and Willy Miller.’ Father wanted me to go, so I agreed.
At eight o’clock sharp on the following Tuesday, James and I presented ourselves at the harbour, dressed for the short voyage to the Isle of May and back. Father and Robert had left earlier to prepare the boat. Willy was already there, complete with kit barrel filled with enough homemade lemonade, apples, cheese, slices of cake and hard boat’s biscuits for all of us. He seemed to be expecting to be marooned on the island.