by Anne Cholawo
Dianne, also from Orkney had met Tex’s son Duncan when she was training to be a teacher and he was studying agriculture at Aberdeen University. Duncan had lived on Soay since he was three so the island had etched itself into his very being. He had always wanted to return to Soay so after they married that is what they did, and Duncan was now working as a creel fisherman to support the family.
Anne, Dianne and Donita were all smaller than me; none of them seemed over five foot four inches. Dianne and Anne were really petite, only Donita and I were a little stockier. I was by far the tallest at five foot eight, but I was the certainly the weediest. When it came to carrying bags of coal, I could hardly lift a bag, let alone move one up the beach. My heart hammered and I thought my arms would drop off. As I was puffing up the beach, stumbling and fumbling with my first bag, Dianne rattled past me having been down for a second bag, carrying it as easily as if it were a newborn babe, and chatting away merrily. The same went for Anne and Donita; they were all inured to the work. My contribution to the coal heap was a fraction of everyone else’s. The coal was piled up in a line against a dry-stone wall by the track some yards away from my house. All I had to do now was get it up the track. I carried a few bags every day and it seemed an endless task, it took me nearly two weeks to move it all to the house on my own.
A ton of coal is forty 25kg (or half-hundredweight) bags of coal. In 1990 it cost £60.00. Today it costs over £300.00.
Apart from my total dependency on the goodwill of my neighbours, I had a growing sense of helplessness over the general disrepair of the house. The kitchen floor was rotting at high speed and I felt frustrated by my inability to achieve some improvement around the place. I had left the sitting room in a mess as I had no sand or cement to finish the wall in there. I needed to find something I could do to create at least the illusion of progress. With no wood preserve, paint or brushes yet, I couldn’t do much about the décor.
The house just did not feel like my own. I looked at the partition wall in the kitchen and the darkened inner room with the sink unit. Even on the sunniest of days, I had to light a candle every time I used the sink. I had shifted the two ringed gas cooker into the main part of the kitchen but the gas fridge was too heavy to move easily and still sat in permanent gloom. A torch was required if I needed to get anything out of the fridge, or to find it at all, for that matter.
‘Really,’ I thought one day, ‘really, this is just a wooden wall, the sort of partition you would find in a shed . . . I don’t have to worry about the quality of the work, all I need is to be able to see what I’m washing up, or putting away in the cupboards and make the room easier to keep warm. The materials are here to do it and I just need to do a bit of rearrangement.’
I convinced myself. I had brought some tools with me. They had been mostly my father’s tools shoved into old metal tool-boxes and canvas bags. I had also bought myself a new wood saw, some chisels, a stonemason’s mallet and one small hand axe. I had (or rather, my helpers had) humped over to the island my father’s large heavy metalwork vice. It weighed up to 30kg and was made of solid cast iron complete with an anvil, all in the one mould. I had dragged it around with me since leaving home, more for sentimental reasons than for any other. It had never been properly fitted to a bench since I’d inherited it, not ever having been in possession of a workbench to bolt it to. Yet it had its uses, and I was loath to get rid of it. I noticed that it had attracted hungry looks from a few of the male islanders who instantly spotted a useful tool. They didn’t have to say anything; I could see it in their eyes. ‘Come, come little girl, why would you want to keep that nasty lump of old metal? Best hand it to someone who knows how to use it.’ I mentally clutched my vice to myself and squirreled it out of sight as quickly as possible. No one was going to take my vice away from me!
I digress.
I decided I would take the partition wall down, but very carefully. I didn’t have enough nails or screws to do what I had in mind, so I would have to recycle them all. Using a claw hammer, pliers and making a lever with a screwdriver and hammer for the more difficult nails, I dismantled the V-lined wall and took down the wooden batons that formed the wall supports. I then constructed a rough framework with the batons around the stairs (the stairs were sideways on to the kitchen, you climbed them via the back hall), so the stairway would no longer be exposed to the kitchen once I had nailed the V-lining on to the batons. In a very rough fashion it worked. There was enough wood left over to make a sort of top cupboard, and I found a cupboard door left over from the homemade kitchen units that I could use to make a boxed-in space under the stairs where I could store all sorts of junk. I hand-sewed a curtain to hide the under-stair space. Now all that was left to do was to deal with the door-less doorway. I had brought all the curtains from my previous house. There was a pair of full-length sage-green velvet curtains which had covered the French windows at the rear of my cottage. I hung it on an old broom handle I found in the shed, with some wooden curtain rings and added a couple of large hooks to hold the pole. I now had the means to cover the doorway and keep some heat in the room. I also had a large, L-shaped kitchen. The only light source was the kitchen window, but the whole area was infinitely brighter than it had been and much roomier. I only needed to use a candle at night or on a really dark, wet day.
Ah, yes, the vice . . . I’d rested my vice on a stone bench built into the shed. It was a bit wobbly as the top of the bench was uneven, but I could straighten out the recycled nails in the vice, either by squeezing them straight, or holding them in it and hammering and bending them to the right shape. I definitely couldn’t have done the job without it.
This was my first ever attempt at any major carpentry work. It would not have been considered particularly wonderful if I had attempted it on any normal building, but these island properties lent themselves well to bodge-it-and-see workmanship and it blended in happily with the rest of my house. I intended it to make-do until I could come up with something better, but twenty-six years later it’s still there . . . with a few tiny additions for aesthetic purposes.
CHAPTER NINE
Fishing with Tex
I don’t know how it began, but very soon after my arrival on Soay I started to go to sea with Tex and Biddy every now and then. Just as an observer or guest, you understand. I might be allowed to try my hand at lowering lobster creels into the depths once or twice, or to steer Petros toward Elgol while Tex and Biddy were sorting their catch before meeting the fish lorry at the jetty. Mostly I made the tea down in the little fo’c’sle below the wheelhouse using the single ringed gas burner attached to the bottle.
By the time I came to live on Soay, Tex had become just a fair-weather fisherman. He would only go to sea in near perfect weather conditions, not every day of the week. When the mood took him, he and Biddy would be on their way to sea around ten in the morning and back home by five in the afternoon. Past seventy years of age, Tex had eased back on the hours he spent at sea. If it hadn’t been for Biddy I think he could have retired from it altogether quite happily
Biddy was a few years younger than me. She had come to live and work on Soay in 1982 when she was around eighteen. At that time she was living with her parents on Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides where her father, an officer in the army, was stationed. Biddy had seen an advertisement in her father’s Country Gentleman magazine asking for crew on a prawn fishing boat on a Hebridean island. The idea really appealed to her so she applied. She was one of only three youngsters (and the only female) to get as far as an interview with Tex and Jeanne. All three spent the night on the island and it was Biddy who was offered the job on Petros. Mainly, Biddy believes, because she was the only one to help Jeanne clear up after the meal.
Apart from Biddy’s obvious willingness to muck in, she was capable of any task she was asked to undertake whether on the boat or croft. Tex’s working relationship with Biddy was perhaps far better than if he had employed a young lad. He was very proud of her abilities. She was m
y role model.
Going to sea with them was wonderful for me; it was such a contrast with the congested, colourless world I had left behind. Here I was on Petros on balmy, sunny days with nothing but blue sea and sky, and the Cuillin Mountains, Rum, Eigg, Muck and Canna shimmering in the heat rising from the water. There might be the odd seagull or gannet passing overhead and sometimes the sound of Tex’s cassette tapes belting out a wild Scottish reel on the fiddle or some haunting piobaireachd (pibroch) melody on the bagpipes. Or occasionally it would be Abba screaming ‘Waterloo’ or ‘Mama Mia’ to the skies. And Tex and Biddy working together in an unhurried rhythm, deceptively fast and well practised.
Petros (Greek for stone) had been aptly named, and I suspect that it was Jeanne who’d had the inspiration. She was built from cement (Petros not Jeanne), over a metal-mesh frame. This had been a fairly innovative material for boat building in the early 1970s when she was constructed to Tex’s specifications in a Scrabster boatyard in the North-east of Scotland. Tex required her for more than prawn fishing. She had to be a cargo boat as well, carrying not only coal, fodder and supplies, but also cattle and sheep too. The wheelhouse was small and placed far forward, leaving a large area of open deck. There was a spacious hatch that took up most of the deck, covered by a fitted tarpaulin. Under this tarpaulin was a hatch-cover made of thick planks safe enough to walk on. These planks could be lifted off leaving the hold open. It was big enough for about twenty sheep or four or five calves and deep enough for the livestock to be well below the deck-head. There used to be a small derrick on board too, for loading or offloading heavy objects, but that had corroded badly over the years and had to be removed. She was a heavy boat to handle and slow to respond. The ship’s wheel had a hydraulic system which made steering lighter, but removed the feel of the boat when handling. It took a while to learn when to expect a response from Petros and I would not have liked to be the one to take her alongside any pontoon or jetty. She only had a forty-five horsepower Lister engine and made perhaps just seven knots at full steam, but she took some effort to stop because of her weight. Tex handled her as easily as a rowing boat.
The electronics and navigational equipment inside the wheelhouse were primitive even for the early 1990s (the radio cassette player was a relatively new piece of equipment). Apart from a large compass, there was serviceable old-style VHF radio, and an ancient depth-sounder that used a paper scroll and a graph needle to record sonar readings. The needle traced out the seabed’s contours and could also pick up shadows from shoals of fish or larger sea mammals. It scratched out a continual scribble of high and low peaks in black ink as the paper moved steadily from right to left across the machine. I found it interesting to think that every roll of used paper contained an indelible record of the travels of Petros. With these apparently unintelligible marks, Tex would know where to find the sandy patches he was looking for to ‘shot’ the next fleet of creels. He could point to a smudge and be pretty sure if it were fish or weed, or whether that peak and trough were sand or rock.
I’ve been using words such as ‘shot’, ‘creels’ and ‘fleets.’ If there are any real creel fishermen reading this, I apologise now for any technical mistakes I may be recording here. This is my own understanding of the names and techniques used in creel fishing from observations and explanations made over twenty years ago. I hope you will forgive me for any errors.
Where to start? Well . . . a creel is a Highland name for any kind of basket, for example a basket for carrying peat is also called a creel. A fisherman’s creel is a cage with a flattened base and four hoops, so it looks a little like a Nissan hut or the ribs of a polytunnel. The frame is covered with net, and the bait (usually salted fish) is held in the middle of the creel. One end of the creel opens like a door to retrieve the catch. Once a prawn, crab or lobster enters through the tubes of nets to reach the bait they can’t get out again. Not too long before I came to the Highlands, these creels were still being handmade by the fishermen of Soay and Elgol, often constructed from scrap wood such as old pallets. Hoops, made from a kind of cane, were steamed into shape and the net was woven by the fishermen or locals. Creels were tarred to preserve them and weighted with stones tied to the base so that they would sink. This used to be winter work for fishermen; making the creels one by one. That was until the mass-production of pre-netted metal creels made it easier and quicker to buy them instead.
Each creel was attached to a length of rope – perhaps a fathom (six foot or 1.8 metres) long – called a snood. These snoods were spliced into a much longer rope, the exact length depending on the number of creels attached to it. Creel ropes were spliced into the longer rope at precise intervals. There was a lot of precision involved. The distance between each creel was measured by how long a creel would take to be ‘shot’ over the side and into the water before the next creel was ready to be shot. That depended on the size or speed of the boat and/or the working pace of the individual ‘shotter.’ Such precision measurement represented years of experience and practice. There would have to be enough rope at either end of the creels to allow them to lie on the seabed and for the rope to reach the surface as well. Buoys were attached at either end of the rope for location and for hooking up the creels later. If the rope were too short, the buoys would be dragged under at high tide, if too long there was a danger that the rope could end up floating along the surface causing a hazard to other boats at low tide. Plastic rope will float so Tex used to splice in a couple of links of chain every few fathoms to help them sink. Before being shot, the creels were stacked in strict order at the stern of the boat. Some creel boats have ‘cow-catchers’ – large cages attached aft of the stern allowing for more deck space on board. The stacking was very important too. The roped creels had to pay out smoothly with no snarl-ups.
When the sonar had identified a suitable area of seabed, the skipper would take his boat in a steady, graceful half circle above it. Most boats from the Minch fished for prawns in those days, and (then as now) that requires particular knowledge and skill. Prawns like to be on sand but also close to areas of rocks so they can scuttle into them for protection from predators. The trick was to place the creels on sand but as close to the rocks as possible without the creels landing on the rocky parts of the seabed. Not easy if you’re relying on a blurry sonar image and keeping an eye on wind and tide at the same time. When the moment seems right, the crew tosses the first buoy over the side. As the boat moves forward the rope runs out and the crew waits for his cue to start shotting the creels, just as the main rope trails off behind the boat. The fishing boat steams on at a regular speed but not too fast, and in this way the creels get thrown off by the crew one by one to sink down onto the seabed at equal intervals, hopefully in the right place. To me, it sometimes looked like a graceful rhythmic dance with the boat, skipper and crew working together. A line of creels such as this is called a ‘fleet’. In my opinion this is probably the most eco-friendly way of fishing: creels catch only what you need and if unwanted fish are caught by accident it is possible to put them back still alive into the sea. A shellfish license for a creel boat or trawler means that it is illegal to sell anything but shellfish from their catch.
Tex had six fleets and each fleet had perhaps twenty creels. This was a small number compared to the majority of fishing boats, but there always seemed plenty of prawns at the end of the short day. To my untrained eye, the prawns they caught looked huge. In comparison supermarket shellfish sold as prawns seemed like shrimps. Some of the prawns that came up in the creels in those days looked like small lobsters!
A working day on Petros was always the same. Three fleets in the morning, stop for lunch and cups of tea, then three fleets in the afternoon. Biddy could winch in the creels, pick, sort, and rebait then stack the creels for reshotting like lightening. They usually threw any fish accidentally caught in the creels back over the side, except for dogfish, that is. I think they saw them as pests and competition for the prawns, but I just couldn’t bear to seem
them gasping on the deck, so when they weren’t looking I used to push them though the scuppers and back into the sea with my foot. They had such dog-like eyes,
If there were a squid or octopus in a creel Tex sometimes performed his own little show for guests on the boat. Before sending them back over the side, he would throw one at the front of his oilskin over-trousers. It used to stick there with its suckers, looking just like an enormously oversized pair of male ‘dangly bits’ while Tex jiggled about to whatever happened to be playing on his cassette player. I can never listen to ‘Take a Chance on Me’ by Abba without thinking of Tex and his performing octopuses.
CHAPTER TEN
The piano
June 1990
I hadn’t forgotten my dreams of painting. I don’t think of myself as a creative artist – I’m trained in observational draughtsmanship. My college course and working experience were all about detail and accuracy – the kind of technique that’s difficult to unlearn. I had never had time to keep a personal sketchbook. But what was to stop me now? On walks round the island, when rain and midges weren’t in the way, I started to sketch the landscape and made my first tentative watercolours of shags, seagulls and guillemots.
I wish I could say that I was so inspired by my surroundings that I produced sketch after sketch, painting after painting. I was indeed inspired by the breath-taking landscape about me, but it was as though I were inside a living work of art. Anything I produced seemed a poor, pale imitation and I realised then that I had been drawing and painting most of my life to escape my urban environment, creating mere shadows of where I now stood. It became an act of pure will to sit down to sketch. I just wanted to be in it . . . that seemed enough for me