A Book of Death and Fish (3 page)

Kenny F’s olman went fishing in the
Stella
. I thought it was called after his big sister. She was a nurse, away on the mainland now. But my olman told me it was a name for a star before it was a name for a woman.

The
Loch Seaforth
took passengers and sheep. Now and again you’d see a car slung in a net. The
Loch Dunvegan
took cargo. You got boats and you got smallboats. The
Stella
was a smaller boat than most of the smooth black hulls. But, she did have a yellow-gold line, finished near the bow in an arrow shape, just like the big boats. My olman would look and comment now and again, on all the piles of creels. Old ones, taken home for repair or new ones, rigged in fleets. That sounded like something to do with the Navy. If you had all that gear shot and there was a big blow coming, you were forced to sneak out, trying not to look at the sky, just to haul and haul, recovering what you had. If you managed in time, you had all this gear piled up high on your decks, round your wheelhouse, cluttering everything while you ran for home.

The olman knew a lot about fishing though he had no time for it.

Here’s how it happened, on the day of the gellie. Apart from being a big fire, any big fire, it was also our Guy Fawkes fire. Two cul-de-sacs and a long run of street, two Drives and Terraces pulling weight together for a month. We’d be wheeling lorry tyres, bigger than ourselves, up from the tip between the pink-school and the shore.

A green van had come to our site, with a full load of cardboard and wooden boxes. Someone in the next street had a relation who worked for Liptons. Amongst the boxes were white shop-coats, clean but frayed. We wore them as a uniform, trailing to our ankles but tied at the waist with
twine which we also found amongst this load. There was a freshening wind all day, but it stayed dry and we had all of the lighter rubbish weighed down with broken timber and tyres. We marked every single tyre with a number and our code, in chalk. A protection against raids. Three months of gathering.

Keeping them moving was the thing. Kind of tricky, crossing roads if anything came along. They didn’t come with brakes. Even now, just before the gellie was to be lit, you could expect the Goathill boys, or a squad from Manor, to come and snatch stuff for their own pile.

So you could see the white coats milling about. Smaller guys like Kenny F and me nearly tripping up. It was always the coves who collected the tyres. We were the warrior gang. But a few of the blones helped gather and pile the other stuff. Kirsty was allowed into our gang then. Some big coves thought she was too bossy. But the big sister and her pal got the wee fellows running about for them. Kenny and me were now in the middle.

We were soon gazing up to recognise the big vinyl armchair or the dark, heavy-looking cupboard that hadn’t been any bother at all to tumble up there. Matchwood all right. A sprinkle from a bottle. Plenty of Esso Blue about. The match going to the thing and getting a hold so it didn’t matter when the cold rain started to come. We never realised there was so much wind. It blew right into the crevices of the pile. Soon our white coats had to go over our heads as shields from that heat. But it wasn’t long before everyone started to look away, ready for the fireworks. We were the builders so we remained, loyal to our gellie, even after it had started to die down. Kenny F and me staying close to the fire, after the others were drifting to where the boxes were being opened by someone’s Da. Of course Kenny’s olman and the oldest brother, the crew, weren’t home yet.

Then his mother appearing, nearly running, gathering her young son in to her, then hunting amongst all these white coats for his middle brother. Everyone starting to shush amongst the talk and roar of the gellie. The rockets were going up in Goathill. Then still more powerful booms from round the corner, at Leverhulme Drive. The Coastguard depot. You’d think you’d never know the sound of these maroons from all the other sounds that night. A bad time to get in trouble at sea.

But people had started to run. That’s for us. It was the signal for both the Lifeboat and the LSA – boat and shore rescue parties. No-one in our scheme had phones at home then, so they depended on the maroons. The fire station, round one more corner, had a siren fixed to the roof. That went off most Guy Fawkes’ nights, but not, so far, this one.

There was nothing anyone could do about the fire, short of calling the brigade. It was in a clear space and could be left to burn out. Flat, bright boxes were getting closed again. They had pictures that might have been from the
Dan Dare
. Rockets were taken back out of bottles. I was crying. Kirsty grabbed my hand and hauled me off. My crying was nothing to do with realising why Kenny F had been dragged off home. I thought that was just his mother, laying down the law on heathen bonfires.

The olaid quietened us, dishing out pancakes by the fire, after our baths. The radio purring away with a serial we liked. She only said it was the weather, a big storm coming. I got going with divers from the cornflakes packet. You used baking soda in a bottle with a screwtop. They were grey and ascended and descended slow and calm. Some of my mates had
sea-monkeys
. You could create life from dry seed in a packet. A bit of salt water, you could do anything. Walking on water was tricky but the word was, it had been done. We’d all had a good go at it but nobody had lasted more than a second. Better not try it down the hoil. Big bastard conger eels down there.

I did hear the gale, through my sleep. Slates rattling. But I was exhausted and got back down under.

In the morning, the curtains were still drawn in Kenny’s windows, across the road. Before I went to school I saw people going in, wearing their church clothes. My olman didn’t leave at the usual time, to go to the shed. Instead, he also had his good clothes on, dressed as if he was going to church though he never did. He went across the road for a few minutes. The olaid went over when he came back. She took some packets of tea and some sandwiches she’d made up.

My olman said he’d get me up and down the road today. Kenny F wouldn’t be going to school. He met me at the gate. On the way home, we had to pass the Coastguard store at the bottom of Leverhulme Drive.
There was a stack of creels and buoys. Some of them were crushed, the bamboo hoops all splintered. They’re like chimney-rods, bent to take the netting over them. Everyone was whispering things.

About two weeks later, Kenny F was called away from school again. A teacher’s car took him home. When I came in for my cup of tea and a roll, to keep me going, my mother told me, in a low voice, that Kenny F’s father and brother had been found. No, no, they weren’t alive, poor souls, there had been no hope of that but it still meant a lot to the family to get them back. Now there would be a funeral. Kenny would be off school for a few more days. I’d to promise not to ask him anything.

So I was left wondering about the return of the bodies. I imagined them in clothes like all the neighbours wore now, going to visit. They weren’t in their bobbin-wool genseys and overalls. There weren’t any haloes or anything. Just the father and brother in dark suits, the older one in wider trousers, big lapels and a wide tie. The younger with the thin tie over the white shirt and tighter suit. Probably I had seen them dressed like this on Sundays. But I heard it from someone at school that they’d been found in a fisherman’s net.

I could see pure bodies, from the Bible, returned from the nets as a present. Dressed in these suits. The nets were not the usual black stuff but made of something silvery. Those cast on the starboard side of a vessel afloat on the Sea of Galilee.

I asked the olman about it. He said it didn’t matter how the bodies came back, my mother was right, it made a big difference to the family. It was the same in her town – The Broch. They’d lost two lifeboat crews there, at different times. Both within sight of the harbour, everyone watching as the boat went to help someone who’d been caught out.

It was so many years later, more like twenty, that the olaid told me how my father had gone across the road, when everything was quietening down. He went to sort out arrangements that nobody else could cope with. Everything from legal statements to insurances. The way he put it, there was plenty of people to see to the spiritual side. Since he wasn’t so tied up with prayer meetings, he could do his own bit. The olaid told me the
tweeds had picked up, about then. The markets he thought he’d escaped from, had recovered. He was one of the few with a stockpile because he’d kept on going to the shed, not really because he saw it as an investment but because he wanted to make cloth. There also seemed to be a demand for these unusual designs.

That’s when they spoke to him about coming into the Mill, setting up patterns. But anyway he was doing all right just about then.

So he’d gone to gather together the gear collected by the Team and still stacked at their store, down the road. Uninsured loss, it was called. The creels, ropes and buoys, what was left of them. Seems the way he put it to Kenny F’s mother was there was plenty at the lobsters down in Lochs, now, crying out for gear. He’d get her a fair price for it.

He got hold of a van. I was in tears, not allowed to come with him. This was one time I couldn’t come. Me grabbing at his arm and crying louder but still not allowed to come.

When he came back, his boiler-suit didn’t smell of my grannie’s shed the way it should have done. There was something I’d only smelled before each year on the night of the gellie. The paraffin hints around the burning wood. Then he went across the road to give the widow her money.

The blue of these doors was deep. It was a dark, navy shade, no green in it. Stornoway harbour was pea soup and the beaches you reached out to, on Sunday school picnics, were as much green as blue. A colour I’d seen called ‘mallard’ in the plates of the Arthur Mee encyclopaedias. A locomotive was called that and coloured it too.

Three words, ‘Life Saving Apparatus’, were painted across the double doors, in white and you couldn’t see any drips from the letters. When you passed by here, it was always worth a look to see if anyone was inside. Same thing, passing the fire station. Just round the corner. Doors open. Abandoned bicycles. A car or van left with its wheels on the pavement, parked in a hurry.

Sometimes I’d walk down for the paper, with the olman, him stretching his legs after pedalling at the loom all day. This was before we had the car and before he moved to that other office, up the far end of town, near The Battery. It was while he still got the
Express
. We’d to remember the
Woman’s Weekly,
if it was the right day for it. Then he’d wind me up. ‘
Harold Hare
for you, isn’t it?’ But he knew fine I got
The Eagle
now. A
Bunty
for Kirsty. I’d learned it was no good asking for a
Beano
or a
Topper
. He’d always get our
Eagle
and
Bunty
, our choices, and a
Look And Learn
to share.

Back up the road, this day. The small door, set into the big double LSA doors, was open. It was there so you didn’t have to go undoing all the bolts to get in. You only opened the big doors if you needed to get all the gear out. Some of our neighbours were in the team. We might see Uisdean, a neighbour, sorting out stuff.

Then one of the big doors opened. A man appeared. He had a white
shirt and a white-topped cap. I wondered how he’d managed to bend through that small door, to open the big doors from the inside. Like in
Alice In Wonderland,
I thought, though I’m sure I didn’t say that.

‘What do you have in the Aladdin’s cave, these days?’ the olman asked and the tall Coastguard said, as it happened, he was just going to do his inspection so we’d get a look.

The second, wide door opened to brass lamps, wooden crates painted the same blue shade, wooden pulleys, shining with oil, neat coils of rope. Faint creosote. Dusty hemp. My father lifted one of the pulleys and said there was quite a trick to it.

This was the snatch block for the hawser. The breeches buoy would run on that, pulled out on an endless whip of lighter rope. I liked the words but couldn’t see how that gear could rescue anyone, till the Coastguard started chalking a picture on a blackboard for me. Now I could see it, how people were brought ashore from wrecks. First the big rocket took out a light line. Then the crew had to pull out the thick rope – the hawser – so it all went from the shore to get tied round the mast of the wreck. That big rope was pulled tight and then it was like a runway for a cable car. The whip was the lighter rope that pulled the thing like a lifering back and fore, running along the thick hawser.

Survivors had to climb into the buoy. It had thick canvas leggings roped to it. Just in case you didn’t get the idea, there was dark lettering which said, ‘Sit In Breeches’. You were pulled ashore by the endless rope as your breeches ran along the thick hawser line. The empty buoy was then pulled back out again, for the next survivor in line.

The olman had gone very quiet. I thought this was just his usual trick of stepping back to let me figure things out. Then his voice came but it was very low.

‘So why couldn’t they use all this stuff at the
Iolaire
?’

‘Feel the bloody weight of it. Even if you rounded up ten hardy crofters and a horse and cart, in time, it would be a struggle. When it gets wet, it’s heavier still. No Land Rovers then. The access at Holm wasn’t great either. And it was New Year’s night – the first one after the War. It would take time to round up your squad.’

At school, we were always told the story of the
Iolaire
. It wasn’t a proper warship. Just a big motor yacht trying to carry the survivors of the First World War home for the New Year. Most were lost, about a mile out from Stornoway. The Beasts of Holm were really close to the shore. My olman took me out a walk to the memorial a few times. Most of the lost men were naval reserve. Most could have piloted the ship into harbour.

My father and the Coastguard were talking about it. One lad swam ashore with a rope. A few got off. What’s the tide doing then? Falling. That’s it, then. She’ll be over. A watch was recovered, stopped at the time water entered it.

‘And the
Stella
?’ It was my father’s voice again. Kenny F’s olman’s boat.

More recent history. They were all running for home but she was behind the rest of the fleet. He’d been on watch, at Holm. She was still showing her fishing lights, as well as her steaming lights. Red over white, up top, for fishing other than trawling. Most of the boats never bothered to put out the fishing lights, when they were steaming home, and most of them showed green over white – the trawlers.

‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’ the Coastguard said.

I saw him get a nod from my olman. Something passed between these two then, I wasn’t sure what.

Knowing she’d be stacked up with gear, he’d watched her go under the blind spot at Holm. Off the Beasts. You could start counting then till you saw the lights re-appear. A slow count to fifteen or so, usually. But she never came back into sight. He called out the lifeboat and LSA then.

‘Aye,’ the olman said, ‘the word is she just lost steerage, surfing in there and couldn’t turn in time. Could have been the same with the
Iolaire
. Or maybe just underestimating what speed she was making in that following sea.’

‘So you’re a seaman, right enough?’ the Coastguard said.

‘Not now and you still don’t know me, do you?’

Then my father did something I’ve only seen him do in our own house. Took his beret off. You didn’t even notice it was on, after a while. Outside the house, it was always there. But that wasn’t too unusual, round the town. We even have a word for it – your caydie, not just any hat. Like your trademark.

When I say he was bald, I don’t mean just in the centre. He didn’t have any hair on his head. You didn’t even notice this after a while, even when he had the caydie off, in our house. And I suppose our neighbours were used to it, too.

But as soon as he took the beret off, the other man knew him. He couldn’t say a word.

‘I’m not a ghost yet. Remember, you got me out alive,’ the olman said. ‘There was nothing wrong with our own steering that night. Just the guy on the bridge.’

The Coastguard was recovering. Leaning against that rescue equipment. Remembering. Then he could speak.

‘Most of the boys on the
Iolaire
didn’t get away with it,’ my father said.

‘He was some lad, the man who got the rope ashore. The boat builder at Ness. The Royal Humane Society gave him a medal but they say he never talked about it.’

‘No, I don’t think he did.’

I heard the olman say that, even though I was getting stuck into the chocolate ration. That’s all he said.