A Book of Death and Fish (40 page)

This is the story I heard from a distant cousin of mine. A
Siarach
. Westsider. This was my last year in the Coastguard Service. You’re not going to hear about any incident we co-ordinated. But I’ll tell you a story I heard on watch. Courtesy of the master-mariner who became a trainee. I’ve got one for you. I’m passing it on, he said. This is it.

The sister and myself were always one thing or t’other. When we got on we were best of mates and when we fell out we did it in some style. I remember one time the minister calling by, for a routine visit. Up the road to Westview Terrace. He was the cove with the moustache and a big smile. He had no objections to me bringing a book along to the services to keep me quiet, instead of kicking my heels. He did suggest
The Water Babies
might be more suitable than some of the texts under my arm.

We were squared up shouting as he walked through the door. The olaid was only next door for a Nescafe and a fag. It’s a wonder she hadn’t heard us. The minister spoke softly, calmed us down. I found out, a lot of years later, he translated Burns into Gaelic.

The sister took her chance to build a new life in Canada. This is a traditional route for emigration, over the years, in The Broch as well as the Islands. It worked out for her. Nursing was a better career there than here at that time – with proper coffee on the go, non-stop, along with first-name terms. You couldn’t return to the hierarchical systems of the NHS after that. Or the coffee.

When she said that, I thought of the paramilitary motifs of my own trade. I was a servant of Her Majesty. I might be there yet if it wasn’t for the residue of post-Thatcher ideas in the public services. You spent so much time accounting for your time that you had very little time left for watch training. Or team building. Or yarning, which of course is both of the previous items combined.

How can you say how resentments build up? My mother’s eyes would light up when her former cycling partner would arrive from the airport.
Not on the first night but on the first day, the sister would rearrange the stuff in the cupboards in the kitchen. OK, she’s a woman and I don’t know much about them. I know more about trout really or I used to at least.

The home-help would be on leave when the sister was staying. Kirsty had her own systems. And they did seem to work.

The olaid made it pretty clear. She wanted to stay in her own house right up till she was taken to the hospital to get ready for satellite re-entry or whatever was going to happen next. If anything.

For me, the sister’s visit was a time to catch up on this, that and the other. And I’d messed up in style not once but more than that. The appointment for the podiatry department was an outing for the olaid. Not a hassle but a wee excursion. I forgot at least one appointment.

The stroke club annual Christmas dinner was a laugh with other people of like mind and body. All of them had plenty of bloody marbles, nothing short there, and they all relaxed in each other’s company, flirting and chatting because they didn’t have to pretend. Knew they didn’t have to prove they were compos mentis, even though they talked with a slur or had lost the use of some muscles. In that setting, they didn’t have to prove a damned thing. A crew, a team. Similarities to the angling society or the boat-owners’ association. The legion. You could rant about your obsession without worrying about being abnormal.

I had a grand time the first year I went. The olaid had the home-help pin the next year’s invite up by the mantelpiece in good time. She knew it took time for things to register in my mind if I was doing research or on the tools. She reminded me more than once because she knew what I was like.

But I still got involved in a moorings operation, because it was the only day, for months, the tide would ebb far enough. After you’ve lost one boat from a mooring dragging, you lie awake imagining wear and chafe and unrelenting forces on the points of strain. The black pram was a modest craft but she was a link with my daughter and she was a link to my uncle and a connection with my surviving mentor. So I came dashing up the road far too late. I could still have got my arse down to the Caberfeidh Hotel to grab the pudding and say sorry and join in the banter and wheel
her out again. But I was stinking of SY hoil mud which smells like nothing else. But not as bad as the shame. I hesitated at the door when I realised I was late and the olaid was down the road in the minibus.

So part of the tension between the sister and me was sheer simple guilt. I could see how the blone’s professionalism was showing up and how my own was wanting. And now that I’d finally quit Her Majesty’s Service, that made everything worse. Of course you’ll have plenty of time now, folk kept saying. They just couldn’t know that you’d never have less, first years of trying to establish a wee living for yourself. Of course the more Gabriele would say, ‘We can get by even if you don’t earn anything at all,’ it made it kind of worse. She was teaching German, part-time. But she had good weeks and bad weeks. I was chief cook and bottlewasher.

So it was a crunch when the sister quietly said that she would only be going back to Canada for a fortnight to tidy up loose ends. She was needed here full-time for this stage. Because I knew somehow, somewhere beyond conscious thought, that she was right.

Don’t know how it came to writing notes to each other. Talking via the home care system – home-helps to give respite to the sis so she could get shopping and get to the few vestiges of normal life. Gabriele and me just somehow stopped having her to meals on her night off. There was a very intense night when Kirsty was round and she just started reliving a case of hers, caring for a terminally ill child. Anna was very sensitive these days and Gabriele and myself were taking turns at trying to catch my sister’s eye. But she had to continue.

Now I know she had no choice. Maybe the timing could have been better. But the need to tell it just surfaced right then and that’s how it was. Better than leaving something that should be said, still unsaid. I think I knew there was something else between us we hadn’t dealt with yet.

Once the note-writing starts, the game’s a bogey. You’ve lost it. So I would time the visits down the road to when she wasn’t there – ‘Phone me when you’re going shopping and I’ll go down then.’ That was good in a way because it meant a continuity of company for herself.

Latterly there were some signs that even the invincible Kirsty was under some strain. She was just needing nights off, out at the movies
which weren’t available then in the city of SY. She wouldn’t take a drink. And it wasn’t going to get easier. The olaid had been diagnosed with a cancer in a kidney. But it could be very slow-growing in a person of that age and it was quite possible that a different illness would appear before it reached a critical stage.

After the last identified stroke the olaid got periods of amazing clarity. She was able to go back for miles in the long-term memory and of course she’d have to ask you more and more about the plans of the day every five minutes. But I’m a bit like that myself at my tender age.

She’d also wake up after two hours of sleep and need help to get to the toilet and then to her chair. And the sis was just cream-crackered. So I was forced to climb down from a standpoint of saying I just couldn’t work along with my imperious sister. We figured out something like a rota.

Things had happened quite suddenly with Gabriele’s mother. That was only a couple of years back. We hadn’t been there to see the slide down the slope. But we were all together at the funeral. I suppose the olaid’s journey was more gradual. But this was another stage.

The first night was tough. My olaid was near aggressive a couple of times. She’d got so used to a way of doing things. Just as well the sis was staying with a mate out of town or I might have had to go crawling for help. The second night, we’d got to understand each other a bit and I’d discovered the right channels on the all-night radio. We had it purring away with the Morsø glowing fine and it looked like we’d all sorted out a workable routine. But there wasn’t a third night.

Kirsty phoned me. A swelling. She was frightened of a blood clot so the ambulance had taken our mother in. We agreed to stagger the visits so the olaid would have the maximum company. The sis sounded bloody tired.

The old girl was clear and funny. She couldn’t cope with the dry heat and wrestled to get her cardigan off. Most of these nurses liked things tidy and full of decorum so they kept buttoning her up. She’d scowl.

When she got hit by an infection on top of every other bloody, shitty thing she was trying to deal with, they moved her to a side ward with one other patient. I could read the signs. I remembered side wards from a previous career that had spanned a full year.

So there wasn’t a lot of need for decorum any more. She kept going way beyond what they thought was do-able by adopting a mission. After breakfast – well a spoonful of porridge flavoured liquid – she’d start on the first button of the cardy. The Count of Monte Cristo had nothing on her – that used to be a favourite book of hers. By my next visit she’d have the cardy off her shoulders and was feeling the cooler air around her chest. And grinning away at the victory. She’d tip a big wink to me. A rebel with a cause.

That struggle gave her a mission and so an extra week of life. It mattered. I cancelled an outboard servicing course because she wasn’t going to come out of this one. But what a fight she gave. I’ve seen fresh run sea trout give up easier than that and they don’t come much tougher or bonnier fighters.

So then you could just about believe she could last for ever. Like her brother. I left in the evening to get back to some weather-dependent jobs. I had the roof off a porch.

But I took the mobile. So I was up a ladder, catching the last hour I was going to get away with a fibreglass skin, when I got the call from Gabriele. The hospital phoned. It might be an idea to get down sooner rather than later. I phoned the sis right then too.

And soon we were together in that room with the olaid. She might have seen it, might have not, but the sis told me she’d got it across to her a day or two before, that we’d buried the hatchet.

Maybe that gave her another day or two boost so Gabriele was able to come in to say goodbye. And I was happy when Anna said it of her own accord. She wanted to see her grannie. Yes, she knew what the score was. She came in with me.

A couple of times Anna had sorted the whole show out before me or the home-help arrived. Incontinence pad changed, the whole lot, no fuss. If that wasn’t an intimacy, what the hell was?

The olaid made it as easy for Anna as it could be. She got her laughing – I forgot what the crack was but they could still be good. The nurses just loved that mother of mine, knowing there would be a smile and maybe a whispered crack as well.

Parents, parents. That’s what they’re supposed to do. God’s sake, show the offspring how to do things right. The Broch woman who bore us showed us how to die.

The sis says, ‘You know, I could do with a smoke.’

I hadn’t seen her smoke for years. So I went and rapped with one of the auxiliary guys. He looked like a surfer and sure enough he had the makings. We might have got some blow from him too by the look of the cove but we didn’t need that now.

So I kept my sister company when we went out the back door. The fresh air was good. Then I found myself skinning up – well a single-skin tobacco smoke. Lit up and passed it to her. I didn’t want any more but it was just that connection. The sis didn’t say anything but there was a lot in that nod.

It was my watch when the change in the breathing came. I just went over and gave the sister a squeeze of the hand, enough to take her out of the catnap. She nodded and came over to join me, our chairs up close.

‘I think she’s going,’ I said. And then, ‘I think that’s it.’

We weren’t in a hurry to go for the nurse. And when I did go over she just nodded to me to say, ‘Yes, that’s it. She went peacefully.’

My sister never said she was a nurse or anything.

Kirsty and me, we haven’t had a bad word since.

Splitting up stuff, any of that – nothing was an issue. Our mother was a magician. Bloody funny with it.

I’d very much like to tell you now of the process whereby a vessel can be born again. This is a technical operation but the main requirement is neither nails nor timber but, my friends, it is faith. If you take a
cuirt
along the shores of Goat Island or Griomsiadair, or enter through the locked galvanised gates of Renfrew or Govan, you will see an abundance of projects. These will be directed at vessels of differing dimensions and type but most of them are unlikely to be completed.

Money is often a concern and we have to concede it is a factor that must be considered. But that is not the main requirement. The proof of this is the number of neglected vessels owned by those who have amassed large shares of the world’s gear. But these owners of vessels and of gear may well be short of time and are almost certain to be also short of faith.

I cannot say that all vessels are capable of rebirth. First the carcass must be found.
Titanic
was found, though she has not, as yet, been raised. The streamlined
Isadora
, of the six-metre class, built to international rules, and last seen going bow-down when under tow at Kyle of Lochalsh – she was never found. There was thus not even the solace afforded by wreckage to grieve over. There was no opportunity to take mementos. Only memories remain.

We could consider example after example but friends, we must not lose the intention of this treatise, which is to prove that rebirth is a possibility. Not a waking dream but a thing you can touch. Better to believe without specific example but as we all have an aspect of the psychology of Thomas – the disciple who admitted doubt – we can study the case of one unique vessel. Should you wish to do so, you can rub a
nger along the last part of the skeleton of the old and witness where it has grown up again from the very keel to be made almost entirely new. But faithful to the curvature and dimensions and displacement of the old. Like the
Titanic
herself, this example was first brought into this world in the year 1912.

She was a whole boat when she was completed but she was still called a ‘half-
sgoth
’. A
sgoth
is just a skiff, as time goes by but there was a large class, a three-quarter class and a half class. At the time of her building, John Finlay MacLeod would have been helping his own father build these craft at Port of Ness. Maybe his olman’s eye was on his work but I’m guessing he was already trusted to complete the smaller craft. There are records of the vessels they built and the length of their keels, the names they were given. But the meticulous notebooks don’t tell a whole story.

Peace and Plenty
survived because she was blessed with such a fine shape that everyone who had anything to do with her was affected by her beauty. Of course, such beauty is dangerous. There’s a tradition in Scotland that you don’t want to make a working boat beautiful beyond the appeal of a good line, well maintained. A decorative touch is allowed – the yellow arrow at the end of the cove line; the scroll around the name, repeated on the wheelhouse. But if you go beyond that, she might be claimed by the sea, for herself. The Scalpay herring boats must have come close to the limit, with their dozen coats of varnish and their perky canoe sterns.

It’s a good thing that
Peace and Plenty
was used to set lines and creels and nets because the wear and tear leaves scars and scuffs. Some of these go deeper than any paint can cover. When you scraped to investigate possible rot you would find that the layers of paint would make their own map and their own historical documentation of her story. As you rubbed sandpaper, the way she would once have been rubbed with the skin of a dogfish, you would see the contour lines. There would be a deep flag-blue giving way to a shade of maroon, named ‘Bounty’. There would be Admiralty grey and there would be Baltic blue.

You would discover evidence that her mast and her oars were carried in different positions, over the years. So you could imagine that sometimes she might have carried a sail, on spars that could fit inside her hull. And at
other times, she may have lay snug at anchor, in the bays of Harris or the inlets of lochs so a taller mast could be stepped. Whatever their shapes, these sails would once have appeared white as cumulus cloud but later they would have been treated with the boiled bark that preserved herring nets of cotton. So a rich russet colour would develop. Suffice to say that our concern here is not with the rig or performance of the vessel. It is possible you will encounter such details elsewhere, for in her own country she is famous. We are concerned with the very fabric of her body.

We must demonstrate now, by this single example, how such a shape can be made again. I must remind you that we left the vessel apparently dead. Her keel was intact but her planking was torn apart and her ribs were shattered. The breasthooks, fore and aft, were torn asunder from her bows and from her quarters. Although I knew that her soul lay not in the lines which gave her shape, I also knew that the preservation of these lines was a homage to her history.

For many years I was custodian of the remains of
Peace and Plenty
. She was transferred in the registry of vessels to the name of MacAulay. A vessel is owned by alloted shares, there being sixty-four shares to a ship. As my own mother provided one half of the purchase price she was entitled to one half of the shares, being thirty-two. In return, she asked for a small share of the catch. She requested a lobster. I never did pay that debt with an indigo scavenger. And it might be very difficult to do so in the future, even should there be an abundance of them come, in traps, over her gunnels.

This is the story of her resurrection which took place many years after the extent of her decay was identified. With reference to our previous discussion of matters of faith I concede that it would be better if we could agree that her gospel is the memory of her own way through water. But some of you will be, like me, in the camp of the doubting Thomas. Therefore I must endeavour to lead you to a site where you can place your fingers on her renewed ribs.

They were making a film about the rocket-post experiment which took place on Scarp. But they were shooting it on Taransay. Just a little more
scenic and the village could be recreated in canvas and paint. There was even a little graveyard and you had to touch the stones to know they were cloth. There was to be a boat scene. The company was attempting to assemble a flotilla of craft, contemporary to the time in the script, just before the outbreak of World War Two.

These were good days for joiners but, as I found, also good days for guys with a good grasp of Kelvins and Listers, Seagulls and Sabbs. Perhaps a recent refugee from the Coastguard Service who had a power-boat ticket and an appetite for shifting boats about.

It was all cash on the table. It would go to help a family find a substitute for
Tante Erika
. A few optimistic mates had looked at the wreckage of our British Folkboat over the years but I’d begun to give away the viable salvage, like the nearly new sail. Of course I’d got the Yanmar going. Once the corrosive salt water is flushed from the innards, you flood the motor with the stuff of life – diesel itself. Of course you take the starter motor and other bolted on electrical components to the alternator-doctor who lives in Newvalley. There’s no need to visit Silicon Glen.

After the coughs and splutters, you nourish the turning motor with new oil and wipe with clean rags and coax her to sweet running. After all that, the last thing you want to do is to leave her idle so of course I’d given her to the guy who’d stored the wreck of the vessel which had contained the unit. Anna still hadn’t given up hope but I knew I could never trust her life to a vessel with a keel that might have shifted, even if we replaced all the bolts. Better to build an entirely new vessel on a wooden keel we could examine throughout. An open boat is like an open book.

That movie helped us on our way. Anna made a bob or two herself, starting to save up, thinking ahead to leaving for Uni. We gave old, dry vessels first-aid with battery powered bilge-pumps. We rafted up the maimed with the mobile. We did everything we could to slow down impatient people who were rudely manhandling the pride and joy of Hebridean maritime heritage. We took care even if we couldn’t always take charge.

This is the story. The island of Scarp is reached by a short boat journey across a Sound that can get out of hand pretty fast. A German engineer
visited the Island in the late 1930s. He proposed that the mail be transferred across the Sound of Scarp by rocket. An experiment was set up. Special stamps were printed. There was publicity.

The mail was charred but the rockets flew. This created interest from the German government. Gerhard Zucker was required at home in the service of the Fatherland. He had scruples and wanted to insist on the peaceful application of his work. But he had family who could be put under pressure until he complied.

Maybe now it’s difficult to separate the layers, like the histories of repairs on old boats. A true story becomes the fiction in a film. There is documented evidence that Zucker went into the Luftwaffe on return to Germany. In the film, he chooses to stand before a firing squad.

Of course there’s also a love affair and a beached whale and a charming poacher and a landlord who really does have a heart. And great scenery in grand weather. The pressure to return to the fold of Nazi Germany is provided by guys landed from a U-boat in a vintage rubber dinghy. They wear excellent coats and doubtful accents. I happen to know from no less an authority than a master mariner from Dundonnell (now deceased) that this is the most plausible part of an unlikely dramatisation of a powerful story. Though maybe the souls of the separated lovers (Hebridean archetype embodied in the song
Ailean Duinn
) did meet in another element that is not terra firma. See also the motion picture
Rob Roy
for use of the same song but somehow transposed to a dry land situation.

We are dealing here, in the film, if not in the documented life of Zucker, with an aspect of death which was only hinted at in the legend of
Ailean Duinn
. Now the souls of the lovers can be observed as carried by soaring eagles in the slow final shots of
Rocket Post
. So, in this case, the transmutation of the human spirit into the animal world happens in mid air. A bit like in-flight refuelling. The pinions of a pair of well co-ordinated eagles ride the thermals over a Hebridean maritime landscape.

We had a breezy day for the rehearsal and probably the best traditional boat festival which will ever happen in the Outer Hebrides. Bright varnished craft were dulled down with black emulsion but they still looked good.
We had to make sure the Yamahas and Suzis were carried on the side that wouldn’t be seen.

But those of you with a healthy interest in sailing or historic vessels or both, don’t hold your breath when you watch the movie. They couldn’t get a camera on us that day. The next one, there were other priorities and the few minutes of film were edited to a fraction of a second of a convoy of various sails flapping in a calm while the boats nonetheless surge along with remarkable bow-waves.

The fees were, however, paid as agreed and we were very well fed. After all that fun, we had a conference which decided that the remains of
Tante Erika
were more viable as spare parts. So we only sold our aunty and not our grannie. I could phone my boat-builder mate to ask him to cut the planks to the lines he’d taken already. We still had the original keel in store, along with fittings and examples of her parts, such as knees and breasthooks.

He said he’d ring me back when it was time for the frames to go in. That was a two-man job and I could save the cost of hiring someone else. That way she would be affordable. We could save another cost if I trusted my daughter to get us across the Minch under sail alone. I could install an inboard after that, in my own time. The fitting out is where the costs could escalate. The boat-builder advised me to keep everything simple. He’s no longer in business, by the way. I have a feeling that the remote situation of his workshop was not the issue.

A kind Fisheries Officer handed us what might have been the last dipping lugsail still stored, dry and sound in the Lochs area. We could have a new synthetic one built on its pattern when I’d made my fortune as an engineer. Till then, this would get us sailing. And there were spars to go with it. She’d get one of the boys to drop them off in Ullapool.

Anna bravely stepped aboard the ferry carrying the anchor from
Tante Erika
over her shoulder. The purser didn’t let her away with that. ‘So you don’t trust us, young woman.’ Next week, when we came aboard, carrying our own valise life-raft, also sheltered from our storm, he just shrugged his shoulders.

Thus
Peace and Plenty
was resurrected. She’s a new boat on the old keel. Of course it was miraculous. The last few planks were a bit more freestyle. The final shape came out of the rebuilder’s head but it was influenced by the grain of the larch. Whatever the mix of heredity and environment, the shape is sweet.

When it came to insuring the boat which was now a structure comprising new planks, from the old shapes, built on the old keel, with her ribs and almost everything else renewed, the insurers asked to know the date of the keel. ‘It’s documented as 1912 in the Fisheries Office records,’ I said. ‘Then it’s still a 1912 boat and must be insured as such,’ the voice on the phone said. So that was official.

Gabriele came across for the launch. No kidding, she was for renaming the boat
Tante Erika
, transferring the nameplate now propped up by her side of the bed. It was Anna who said we’d done enough tempting fate.

But she insisted on
Sekt
rather than whisky, which was fair enough because Anna liked that too. Our shakedown trip took us across to the jetty at Badluarach, along with all the leftover paint and tools and debris. Her planks had been kept damp in the warm weather and she took hardly any water in. We packed the materials and gear in the back of the van and Gabriele set off to catch the ferry. Our own crossing was gentle, with the builder proving his faith in the joint between old and new wood by coming along for the sail. When the wind fell low for a time, we trolled lines for mackerel.