A Book of Death and Fish (34 page)

I’d get progress reports, at watch handovers, before slumping, already tired, into the driving seat or knocking off to chase builders or building control, engineers, surveyors, joiners or plumbers. Robert’s ex-wife had come to stay, along with her new man, and unlikely though it sounded, the care and support was working as well as anything could. Aye, I’d be welcome, sure he’d like to see me, but remember he was at the morphine stage now so you couldn’t be sure how much reaction you’d get.

Time passes at different speeds. The months were a blur of watch-keeping and arrangements and sheer physical graft. Good days and not so good days.

So I didn’t manage to visit Robert’s deathbed. I did go to his wake. I’d almost forgotten he’d grown up in Dublin. There was an old family tradition of well-heeled Protestant lads going into the British Army. Robert had been a Marine Commando before he became a Coastguard. He would never travel through Northern Ireland, to visit his mother, though he had never served there. I shook her hand as I left.

This was in a house just a stone’s throw from my own mother’s newly completed renovation. Robert was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met and I was privileged to work with him though I didn’t even get my arse along to witness his pain.

It’s possible that the generation before my own had a blind faith in education. Especially the members of that generation who only got the minimum of it, like my mother, my father, my uncles and aunts. I had the chance they never had and I probably didn’t make the most of it. But I’ve a thesis brewing. What if you could combine their way of telling a story with the accurate details which come from research. Isn’t that what good history books are made of?

I’ve noticed, when some people get ill they tackle it by gathering information in a very systematic and determined way. When I realised that part of the delay in moving my mother into a house specially adapted for her was caused by pallets of brittle slates, I began to find out more about the material. The research was never put to test in a court of law. In fact it led me up a ladder. But it seems to have found a story. Here is our starting point.

There’s a wide gate across the wide mouth but it’s padlocked shut. You can get in through a smaller side gate, so folk can walk their dogs. There are warning notices about sticking to the path. Quarries are dangerous places.
Even disused quarries. It’s pretty quiet in here now. There’s still a lot of slate. Even though twenty-eight million of them were cut and packed and shifted out. There was serious money to be made from quality building materials. As long as you kept your overheads down. And of course if your workers kept
their
heads down.

Then there was the iron. Iron’s a quality material as well. Corrugated iron is a bit of a rival material to slate. Victoria’s Albert had a serious interest in the material, hence the tin ballroom at Balmoral.

The grading of slates is a skilled job. Remember how the blueberry Penrhyn, one of the Welsh products, is graded by weight. So these are passed in piles, heavies, mediums, lights, as you go on up the pitch. To the apex of the roof.

The softer, saltier Easdale and the hard black fruits of Ballachulish – you work these Scottish varieties in a different way. So the long ones are down low and they get shorter as you climb towards the apex. And there are cheek nails here and there to keep them from pivoting on the single top nail. You get short heavies here and there near the top. It’s what gives it character. All these fine Church of Scotland houses. The Mission House at Kinloch Resort and the one at Uidhe Bay, Taransay, that’s Ballachulish. The Telford manses at Aignish and on the former Island of Berneray, which is now connected by a causeway to North Uist.

The slate lasts longer than the nails. The sarking – the wooden slats under the felt – will normally fail before stone. This structure makes a bed for Scottish slate. In England, they usually nail slate on battens. The ventilation is better but they rattle more.

The cutters worked in basic shelters. A sheet of corrugated iron was pinned to a few spars of timber to give them the most basic roof, while the blasting went on. (If that’s not irony, what is?) That’s how they broke into the mountain. The dynamite would bring down manageable slabs. Stuff they could work with. It would rain stones after a blast. They’d get used to it, swinging their own cutting knives, when all that was going on. Counting out their own slates.

Seated in the dust, in their moleskin trousers. They would swing the slating knife at the slab where they sensed the seam ran. Then they split
and trimmed each individual slate. One man might cut two thousand of them in a day. Enough for half a cottage roof. He needed to keep that pace up, to get a wage. Rain was welcomed. It would dampen the dust.

Of course there were injuries. I wouldn’t say they didn’t blink an eye, when that happened, but injuries were common. Even if they escaped unscathed, the workers were prone to illnesses, caused by these conditions. It wasn’t healthy, working in damp and dust, swinging heavy tools. That’s what they did in Siberia and that’s the sort of programme the refined architect, Herr Speer, organised for the Third Reich.

It was about the turn of a century. 1900. A good time for engineering. That’s the year they completed the lighthouse out on the Flannans. They were doing things that just didn’t seem possible. But there was a cost in illnesses and injuries. Working men were learning to get organised. But very few employers were willing to eat into their profit margin to help the march of social progress. So they just had to organise themselves. Dr Grant was not employed by the quarry owners. They were not far-sighted enough to see that the health of the workers was in their own interests.

The doctor would ask what was causing the coughs, the accidents. So he’d be worrying away at the company, negotiating improvements. They got fed up of him. So some bright spark decided they’d sack him. But how do you sack a man you don’t employ?

We’re speaking about a company that made its own rules. You couldn’t just club together and buy a job-lot of tools. That wasn’t allowed. You’d to supply your own but you’d to buy them from the company.

Dr Lachlan wasn’t happy with any of that. He and the men became a strong team. When the company tried to exclude the doctor employed by their workers, the men all pulled together. It was a very early example of the lock-out. They took the bread out of their own mouths. But they couldn’t hold out alone. And the doctor did his bit, writing for the campaign. The boys from the Clyde, they backed the quarry-workers. One day there was a visit from another man in a suit. His name was Keir Hardy.

They won but that’s not the end of this story. This was not just about one quarry, gaining acceptance of one doctor’s right to be there. Dr Grant broadened out the aims. The Highland Development League, the start
of an idea for a Health Service – an entitlement not a favour – he was a leading light there.

I might have taken this research a bit further. As it stands, this is only an approach to a line of investigation. I was getting hungry for the details – the data that hints at the story. But I got wind of another cove doing a book on the same subject. Now I do realise that there is more than one work on the bureaucracy of the Third Reich, for example but the timing wasn’t great either. There was a completion certificate to win and I’d need to organise my own working space. When I signed off watch I’d grab some rest then get up a ladder. I couldn’t get the image of the slate-splitters out of mind.

The past lives of workers, nibbling at slate. The crimps putting the pressure on, gradually, so the slate snapped in the right place. An art to it. Like everything else.

I recently helped place some of their work on a roof in SY in the year 2000. It should last longer than the member of the generation sheltered by it. And it should also outlast those who graded the slates and nailed them in place, for her, even though we used galvanised clouts rather than copper.

I told the builder he could have the door from the yellow van. That was a bit of a score we’d acquired, for spares to try to keep the red one going. Our long-term project. We’d sell the Type 3 when the red van, last year of the Type 2, was roadworthy. That’s the Hebridean idea of progress.

I didn’t want anything for the door. But he wasn’t to tow the van away. I needed the other bits.

He asked me again how much I wanted for it. I said that was OK, he’d have a bit I’d need sometime. Next time he saw me he put some notes into my hand. Worrying.

When I went out to the yellow van, for parts for the red one, the door wasn’t there. Fine. But neither was the bumper I’d come for. And the factory-made towbar just wasn’t there either. My watchmate, Charlie, had got that for me quite a while back. Perfect for towing a dinghy. A long connecting bar distributed the load to another strong point.

It had been cut off at the connecting bar. Must have been done in the dark otherwise the guys would have realised it was only a U-bolt in the middle and two studs either side to take it out clean. I’ve done it with a socket-set in three or four minutes.

I had a look at the builder’s blue, two-litre, Type 2 crewbus, when it came out of wraps. It had a newly sprayed bumper and a fitted towbar. This was no longer the standard, factory-built version that went all the way back to the rear axle to distribute the load. It had been adapted. I just asked him where he tracked all the bits. See that place you pass, near Ellon, on the Aberdeen road. You must have clocked a yard full of VWs. That guy was good for spares. If I needed anything, he’d have a look out next time he had the works wagon away, to pick up a kitchen and stuff.

‘Aye, strangely enough, I need a bumper and a towbar.’

Weird things happen. One of his squad did us a couple of big favours. This was the guy who was ace on the grinder and spray paint. Another of these dudes, like Charlie, who can fix anything. But Charlie had got word of his promotion move so our dream team could not last much longer.

‘You were looking for a nice stone slab for under the olaid’s stove,’ this cove remembered.

A piece of Penryn but not just any piece. It was part of the slate bed from the billiard tables in the castle. Guys were just throwing stuff like that from a height into skips. He’d another bit set aside for me, too.

That’s how we acquired a section of the bed of Leverhulme’s billiard table. It might even have been an original purchase for Matheson, the opium lord of the Long Island. Under new legislation it could probably be confiscated as the proceeds of that trade even though supported by the then PM of the realm. Of course we had to go to war in China to protect the interests of our merchants. It’s difficult to say PM out loud without thinking of post-mortem but we’re talking about Mr Disraeli, another prolific novelist.

He was the cove who coined the name McDrug for a character bearing a close resemblance to the fabulously wealthy Sir James Matheson Bart. You can’t say the old PM’s name without thinking of the Cream album. Disraeli Gears. Tales of brave Ulysses, how his naked ears were tortured, by the sirens…

Our heroes. But for the sake of historical accuracy it might be worth checking out Mr Clapton’s reference to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Total psychedelia was fine but it looks like at least one of those guys was against the idea of any more black in the make-up of the UK.

Talking of colours, think of the whin-yellow, the loganberry-orange and the raspberry-red of Type 2 VW vans. Pretty well the shades of the skoosh I used to find in cupboards in a pre-fab in West Road, Fraserburgh. I don’t think any pineapples were damaged in the making of that pineapple-ade. We’re looking at a coastal town situated not a million miles from the rural empire of a VW buff, on the outskirts of Ellon. But let’s move on from that. It’s circumstantial evidence.

Except that something even more strange happened. Now I wouldn’t have said that any builder I’ve come across so far was in a great hurry to give you anything buckshee. The finishings were being put on the olaid’s house just when I got the raspberry and cream van through the MOT.

With some help from Charlie.

‘I never thought you would do it,’ the builder said. ‘And you found a bumper?’

‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Just went for a Brazilian one from German and Swedish. I went over it with yacht enamel on the roller. Charlie Morrison’s paint. Came up OK.’

‘What did that ross you?’ he asked.

‘There’s a word I haven’t heard for a while. About a hundred notes,’ I said.

It turned out, the original door I’d got stripped – to go back between the kitchen and the porch – was warped. No use. And the reclaimed flooring that Charlie and me stripped for facings so it had that proper old pine look – that didn’t go as far as we thought it would. But the builder found a half-decent door and more wood and didn’t charge for extras. Interesting.

I no longer have the appetite required for the maintenance of Type 2 vans. Our red one got legalised and went on for a few years but then we found severe rot in the chassis. Not impossible, just what you’d call beyond economical repair. And yet, if you had the time or money, you could have brought it back to near-new condition. The body might be like a machine but you can’t really do that with humans. I’m in reasonable nick for my age, for example, but some parts have muscle damage which is beyond renewal. Like an area of my lower back. There was no drama. It didn’t happen up on a roof. It happened when I was bending to stack the bramble fruits of Ballachulish, on a pallet.

Then again, there are generations of vehicles as there are of people. As far as I’m aware the Type 4 VW is a very common van, these days though there might be a Type 5 or 6 when you read this.