A Book of Death and Fish (2 page)

I was born one street back from the hoil. My arrival gave the olman and the olaid the points they needed to get their first council house. They already had a healthy daughter but one child was not enough to get up the list. They had to escape the brush. The cove in the flat down below would bang the end of a wooden handle on his ceiling, their floor, whenever the baby cried or there was any other sign of his tenants surviving. My father had survived a war. He wasn’t scared of what lurked under the stairs. He just didn’t want to lose the rag. Shoving that brush-handle up or down an orifice belonging to the landlord. I never saw or heard this, because I was only the baby who brought the points for the council house. But he talked about it himself, later on.

My mother’s health wasn’t that great then, he said. It wasn’t an easy time for them. A weaver was self-employed. If you didn’t get the hours in, you didn’t finish your tweeds. No tweeds, no money. And you were down the list, for the next delivery of warps.

I don’t remember the flat we escaped. But Westview Terrace is loud and clear. This was and is a pebble-dashed house, part of a row, wearing a blaeberry roof of best Penryn slate. The individual houses have faces and I’ve seen similar groupings of similar shapes in towns on the mainland and on other islands. Kirkcaldy and The Broch. Kirkwall and Lerwick. But the harling or the slate can vary. I don’t suppose anyone was making concessions to local architectural styles because there wasn’t a lot of any style, in towns that had grown big on the backs of squashed herring or on long rolls of linoleum.

We couldn’t look out to sea but it was never very far away. Stornoway was still a herring port. I would be sent to the corner shop to buy a score. A different fish from the ones you saw swinging over, in dripping baskets. But the same species. They came from a firkin. That sounded like one of the measures laid out, black on pale blue, on the back cover of our school jotters. You had to know how many chains were to the furlong. Down the hoil, some cove off a boat would let me gather one for every digit I could hold out. I think I said that, instead of finger, because it’s like a cubit, which maybe wasn’t on the jotters, but it was in the Bible. The fry was taken from spillage from the crans, swung ashore in creels filled from the hold. We’d go back to the Terraces with handfuls, held out ahead. We’d leave behind, drying on the concrete, the cuddies we’d caught. These were small fry of lythe, saithe, cod and whiting.

Later I learned that the cuddy was strictly only the young of the saithe or coalfish. In other parts of Scotland the word means horse. Coves from away are welcome to use the word any way they want but we know what it really means. These fish had gone for a sliver of bait, torn from the bone with your hand. That was offered on a halfpenny hook to brown cotton line. When you had a bite, you pulled so the fish made an arc through the salt air to finish against the weeded concrete. I don’t know why we had to kill them.

One of our neighbours worked on a boat, not a drifter. She was stacked high with pots. It was lobsters then. Prawns were trawled up, amongst the fish. These days, an occasional fish appears like a miracle among the prawns. We’d get a bucket of tails now and again from a Broch boat with a Strachan or a Tait
fa kent Sandy Sim’s quine
. That was my olaid.

She’d do them there and then. The sister, Kirsty, and me would get to wait up. You’d to let the pale pink prawns cool that bit so you could give them one squeeze inwards, one out. The white meat would then come out clean and whole, from the shell. You couldn’t stop till they were all gone.

Then we’d sleep. We didn’t know then that the lobster and langoustine, the high-status shellfish which boil red, are the scavengers of the seafloor. They tear and eat dead things.

When you interrupt yourself in a story, for any reason, you go back. Not always the full way but you backtrack before you gain forward momentum. It can be long enough before you overtake your original point. This is good. The first telling has raised ghosts but their friends have had time to wake up by the time you’re on the second.

I can’t go back further than Westview. This is no dead end. All the houses are double-skinned with cavities left between the walls, linked only with galvanised fixings, spaced for additional strength. I’ve seen enough being built to know the construction. We were already in ours when the streets around it were still to be completed. Finished in that pukey pebble-dash.

Round the backs, space was left for the peat-stacks and tattie patches. Most tenants had only just moved in from the rural parts of the Island. They brought their ways of life with them, in the removal vehicle. Usually it was a works’ lorry, out of hours, driven by a mate, on a dry evening. My uncle said we had enough ground at the back to keep a cow. We did too, but he was only joking. That’s what folk were leaving.

The front was for show, with annuals and roses and cured paths. People who cared for their gardens got upset when the football went over the privet. The hedges were slow to get going. In a few years, they’d be dense and cropped or high and wild.

Westview turns on to Jamieson Drive, which turns on to KT. Kennedy Terrace. I don’t know who Kennedy was. Jamieson must have been from Shetland but we said it as Jimson. Cul-de-sacs, mapped into the overall design, made a turning place for these peat lorries, rubbish collections, mobile shops. It was also a self-contained stadium with a lamp post for
a floodlight. At first, no-one had cars so there was nothing to interfere with the games. It was mostly football by day. At night, those who had been to Cubs or Brownies taught their own versions of British Bulldog. Whatever the chants or questions in these games, you always had to run for some base. Get home to an established point. Kick the can. Start again from that.

There were groupings of names in the guessing games – Gold Flake, Woodbine, Bogey Roll. Our Kirsty was great at them all. There would always be a sprinkling of older kids with the main gang, all about the same age. She would organise us, a bit.

My mother sent me for ten Embassy tipped and a packet of Ryvita. The word Embassy wasn’t in our game yet. These fags only arrived after the tape was cut on MacLennan’s Corner Shop. I had money for a thru’penny toffee. I didn’t have to run to Johnny Og’s on Bayhead for the plain loaf. A baker’s batch or two now came up the road in the van for eight o’ clock. You could ask for your rolls soft or crisp. The loaf was always crisp, the top was near-black, over the pure high sides.

Going into it from the top was dangerous. By the time you got what was left home, the thing would fall apart. You could usually get away with tackling it from the side. First, the flakes which naturally came off in your hand. Then you found yourself pulling a bit, like with a scab. Instead of blood, steam would spill out. You could remove and swallow some of the doughy bits, as long as you concentrated. If you didn’t, you could easily arrive at the back door with a good crust and a hollow loaf. You weren’t too popular.

You’d to watch for the herring coming in. Maybe a notice would be up in the shop saying that salt-herring were in at two and six the score. They wouldn’t have been long in the small barrel of bleached wood beside the ha’penny tray of spongy goodies. That was just the word we used. It sounded childish when a visitor said sweetie.

In
Commando
books or
The Victor
, you were either a Kraut or a Tommy. Some editions had Nips as well. An older guy might call you ‘my china’ or just ‘mate’. You wouldn’t find these words in the lists on our jotters but you’d find how many drams were to something else. And a gill wasn’t a
part of a fish. It sounded like a girl’s name and it was another measure. But you’d soon get to know that a gill was also a quarter-bottle, the way a firkin was a quarter-barrel. It was a full, whole container and then again, it wasn’t.

The gang would get out to the castle grounds. They were given to the people of Lewis by Lord Leverhulme. He realised at last he could only do things for this Island if there were no strings attached, so my olman said. You could imagine him addressing a gathering of peasants and soldiers and sailors and curers and labourers, with a sprinkling of the more educated. ‘Here’s all this bloody ground, bought courtesy of Sunlight Soap. Now do with it what you will.’

But we didn’t set out to destroy the bushes we dived through, launched from rocks. Maybe it was seeing Elvis doing a dive from Acapulco. In the ninepenny seats, you were that close to these big stars that you were blinking for half the movie. There was always a chance of a runner to the back-rows when the torch was on someone else. They were mostly empty, on a Saturday afternoon, the snogging seats.

Sir James Matheson Bart commissioned these forests, mostly broad-leaves and conifers, native to the United Kingdom but interspersed with Tibetan rhododendrons, South American monkey-puzzles and North American sequoias. There was yew and there was cypress. This cove, the great benefactor, was only modestly represented under a life-sized marble statue of his noble lady. She lost her stone hand, like the statue of Venus in the Arthur Mee books. Sir James’s head and shoulders just came out a few inches from the marble block that supported his wife. This was better than the trees for scratching your initials. The script doesn’t hold back on praise, for himself. I wonder who wrote it.

All these grounds, for the marble lady to stroll through, sprouted from opium. That explained the bulging poppy heads, frozen in marble, repeated as a decoration all around the canopy above the pale dame’s gentle head. None of us noticed them, back then. They were a lot higher up at that time.

The other place was the pier. In the evening we’d go down to observe the
Loch Seaforth
berthing. We’d bide the time by leaping on bales of wool. I always thought these were related to the fanks my uncle brought me out
to. The olman didn’t want too much to do with the family croft. People were giving up on the single cow and going more for sheep. You got wool from sheep. So I thought this was used by the weavers in a park of sheds, round the corner from the auction mart.

I was beginning to notice that common sense didn’t always work. We went down the road, in a gang, to the Nicolson Institute buildings. We started off in the clock-school and moved across to Matheson Road. These were the original sandstone buildings. The pink-school was bigger and newer. I think it was yellow, by the time we got in there. We still called it the pink-school. Still do.

We learned that Manscheefend was to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. It took longer to find that the first word was three words. And some day we were told that our Island’s wool normally went for carpets. So the bales on the quay were Cheviot wool, from the Borders, imported to make our tweed softer. As sure as linoleum was made in Kirkcaldy. Jute and marmalade were both Dundee.

Our Island had fishing and tweed. Kenny F lived across the road from me, in the house with the garden full of lobster pots. We’d both have to stand, in turn, and say what our fathers did. You usually got offered an extra bottle if you performed like this. One third of a pint. Another full container that wasn’t. In the clock-school, your bottle of milk would be heated by the coal fire, if you wanted. I didn’t like the taste or feel of it warm. The crate would be divided into milk for sheep and milk for goats. So my own bottle was left out in the cold, by request.

Kenny F took his milk cold, as well, but he had treacle on his porridge in the morning. Tate and Lyle. The tin had the lion from the bible story. Out of the strong came forth sweetness. In black and red. Golden Syrup tins were green and gold. If I called for him on a Saturday or a holiday, I’d get that porridge with the black swirls, as a second breakfast. I took it, joining in the grace before it. These patterns are connected with their religion, in my mind. Free Presbyterians. The olaid said that fishermen were mostly very religious. She loved to see the kirk full, if there was a big gale and the East Coasters couldn’t get home. Sometimes we’d have a visitor, in his best gansey, a Brocher fa kent her people.

Kenny F’s olman never seemed to be around. He was always out in the boat, along with Kenny’s big brother, except on Sunday. The only time you’d see him was when he was mending creels, stacked in their front garden. They didn’t have any flower beds. The two of them worked away with what they called needles. The tools were called that but they looked more like the shuttle my olman sent skelping through the warp. These guys didn’t talk to you much.

Not that my olman, the weaver, talked much more, when he was setting up a tweed, in the shed. But Kenny F and me would earn extra money by filling his bobbins, on the machine by the door. Maybe six feet from the loom. That was a fathom. I can’t remember how much of a chain or furlong. The oil from the wool would smell, along with the oil from the Hattersley, but the door would always be wedged open. On a windy day, it would be held by two hooks and eyes. The shed could be shaking. The olman never shut the door completely.

Mostly it was grey herringbones. I remember once there was a glut, with American markets saturated. The word made me think of guts and more fish landed than could be sold. That happened sometimes too. My olman carried on weaving. He’d to keep the loom and himself in condition, he said. And he couldn’t go laying off his squad whenever things went quiet. So Kenny F and me still got to fill bobbins.

In these quiet times, the colours were different. He would be trying this, trying that. He talked to us more, not having to go all-out to finish three tweeds for the week. And how was the fishing?

He said this, only to hear Kenny F say, ‘
Mì-chàilear
.’ It wasn’t just the word but the tone and the shake of the head with it. The other stock answer was ‘I suppose we’ll just about cover the diesel’. I think that meant a good week.

‘You fishermen are as bad as farmers,’ the olman would say. The Inland Revenue chasing them and them writing off everything from their underpants to their pork chops, against the tax. The weaver got his standard self-employed allowance and that was that. No negotiation. But you couldn’t grudge the fisherman what he got when you saw some of the weather he was out in.

Funny thing was, he said, they always say the weather’s
Mì-chàilear
. If it’s any better you don’t want to risk breaking it by saying so and if it’s worse, that’s a thing you don’t spell out.

What sort of night is it? This time
Mì-chàilear
meant something damn near a hurricane. Same word, different tone of voice.

I knew the word but didn’t know it was real Gaelic. Thought it was maybe like a stroll down the hoil for a fry of mogs and skeds. Our own words, found nowhere else, except for a pocket or two in Drumchapel or Christchurch, New Zealand. This means going down by the harbour to scrounge mackerel and herring.

Gellie is another of our words. This one sounded Gaelic to me. It could be any fire, like your own living-room one, when the shovel of coal was flashed up by a good draught. Or at Kenny F’s when a bucket of
caorain
was thrown on. We’d all gathered these up. Most people in and around Westview still cut peats and everyone helped to bring them home. Us kids gathered up the broken and small bits and got goodies while the grown-ups were at their feast, the work done.

My olman said he hadn’t moved in town to import big chunks of the moor in with him. He wondered who the hell ever discovered that the brown soggy mass was combustible.