A Book of Death and Fish (50 page)

I don’t know what this collection of writings was meant to be. It’s just happened. Made without any plan. So it might indeed be like boatbuilding by eye. But there’s a big danger in that. The possible gain is fluency of line. The risk is that you come up with a shape that’s not quite there yet. It only suggests what you should make next time. This is degenerating into a diary – a life story. That suggests there ain’t gonna be no next time, to make it better. Building by eye – that takes a lot of tobacco. It’s the standing back. You watch these guys at it. There’s a lot of stepping aside and looking at the way the lines are developing. You’re at a serious disadvantage if you don’t smoke. The guys who don’t, they’re all big talkers. That’s what gives them the space – but it’s not as meditative as smoking tobacco.

This kind of diary’s a good aid to thinking. Like taking time out to make a roll-up. Masking the tea. Do you use that phrase other places? I’ve heard an English colleague talk about letting the teabag mash. Up here, we let it brew, let it brew, speaking words of wisdom of course. A wee bit heat under the pot. Got to be a metal one. I don’t like aluminium. I do like blue enamel. Well, it was blue, once upon a wenter. Hell, that’s another word I’ve not heard for a while. Where did that one come from? Westview Terrace?

There’s a difference between yarning and telling stories. The Old Testament is better on stories than rules to live by. Not everyone on Lewis would agree with me on that. But I think a parable is its own meaning. The word we use here is ‘powerful’.

It doesn’t have to be like anything else to work, the vineyards, the seeds, the stony ground. The stories carry you along. The images are not
decorations. They’re the meaning as well as the means of telling the story. There are layers. A good yarn also has layers. A story has its shims – moulds or templates. A yarn is a discovery. It’s only after the words have come out, you know what you’re getting at. The literary daughter’s been keeping me posted, over the years. It was James Kelman for a while – the stories more than the novels. Did you know that his daughter is eligible to play for the Lochs football team? I liked a lot of these stories, a line getting unravelled.

Then there’s that Carver guy. I got into some of them but I thought some others were a wee bit tight. Anna thought the sun shone out of his bachoochie. Last time I saw her, she brought me a page from the
Guardian
. Turns out it was this editor insisted on cutting and trimming Carver’s stories. Getting them tighter. But the old Coastguard in me thinks in terms of losses as well as gains. I don’t think tighter is always better. I liked that paperback with the black cover. Think the name was in red. Japanese writer. Anna brought me a thick novel too but I didn’t get going on that. The Murakami cove. I’ve read the stories a few times. I go back to them. You’re discovering something, along with the guy who wrote it.

Red and black. Funny thing is, that’s what the kitchen was like just before she came. Like a trailer for the movie of the book of the stories.

I wanted to get the kitchen half-decent. And the downstairs bog. OK, the smell of parazone would make it obvious, this wasn’t the normal thing. But even bohemian townies have got to maintain some social graces.

It took about a week to get sorted. You don’t see how it builds up. I had the energy all right. Just needed a lot of sitting down. In between moves. The cooker and the pans were not too bad, to start with. I got most of the rest done but then I got sidetracked.

I wanted to hoover the floor. It’s slate tiles. Maybe Spanish. I like this black floor. I just wipe the brush over it. But I opened the window and all that light showed up the crumbs and dust and fluff. So I opened the box. It’s been in the hall cupboard for a while. Gabriele and the daughter had this wee conspiracy, the joint Christmas present. A couple of years ago. It was still in the cellophane.

I don’t know how much the daughter chipped in but it was from the pair of them. A Dyson – no bags. I’ve been meaning to fire it up. The old wee hoover died, a while back. Only thing is there’s no road wide enough for it left in the house. Where did all these books come from? You leave books and papers and discs behind you in a former address and you fill the new place up as the years whirr by. But you know the right answer to the question –
amazon.co.uk
. Will all our desired goods soon be shipped from three warehouses, each bigger than a football stadium? Better make that four – Northern Ireland will need its own and it all seems pretty much settled down for now. Who could have imagined that, in the 1980s?

A fellow called Colm Tóibín provided the reminder, lest we forget. There’s accents in his name. He writes lies too – novels. Anna thinks a lot of them. I haven’t read any of them but I did read his account of walking the border, posted to me by said daughter.
Bad Blood
shook me, even though I read it when it looked like the worst was over. One day, a van is stopped and the Ulster Defence guys pull out two Catholic guys and kill them. Might be a reprisal. Next day another van is stopped. The guys in the balaclavas ask if there’s any Catholics in there. There’s one amongst a dozen or so. The boys try to protect him. He’s a good neighbour. But he’s told to get out of the van and keep running while the rest are gunned down. It’s the other side. Maybe it was Mandela’s team showed the way, Truth and Reconciliation.

‘You live twenty yards from the back of the library. Could you not just borrow the books? Or read then in there?’ That’s what the daughter said. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It might be out of hours, when you need the link to the next piece of information.’

‘The magic internet?’

‘Aye, handy tool but I need the printed page to get right deep in there.’ Photocopies and print-outs are good but they don’t half mount up. As bad as books. So it’s a bit like close-quarters pilotage, getting from one room to another, in here. A bit of a slalom course through the methodical piles of research material. Shove them all aside and I’d be in trouble. Lost, in fact. I admit it’s a bit dusty and that’s not so healthy.

So I had to get the kitchen-to-bog route sorted. A realistic objective in the available time. The dinner was easy.

Only thing was, I came across the old handline frame, loaded with thin red cordage and a sounding-lead. Mark 1 echo-sounder. Very low on battery usage. Anna was beginning to see the light. She’s been giving the
Peace and Plenty
a run when there’s no breeze for sailing. She came back with a lythe and a couple of
cnòdan
. She was talking about a sounder, to spot the reefs when the drizzle’s obscuring the landmarks. ‘Of course I remember the war memorial on the turret and the tit on the hill, Da.’

I’m not going to start drilling a two-inch hole in the bottom of the boat, for the recommended transducer, in bronze. You can get a hand-held thing these days but that’s all a bit fussy, getting someone to hold a tube over the side and keep it steady. So I thought I’d just give her the lead-line. You’ll be amazed to hear it’s daughter-friendly, in metres, not fathoms. Two knots, two metres and all that. No codes.

But the frame was bust. I mean that whitewood was only about seventy years old – we should take it back to the shop but the receipt might be tricky to find. What a boorach that line got itself into – with tight circles in tighter ones. See once you get involved, with cordage and gear. I don’t know if it was the dangler or the Coastguard in me kicking in but I started unravelling. Every chair in the kitchen was commandeered. The way my mother used the backs of them for hanks of wool to be made into balls for knitting. The trick is to tease all the tight bits out, so the loops are longer. Then you see what’s fallen into what.

I stopped for breath. OK, you could call that a
ceò
– a wee thoughtful drag of a roll-up. Tobacco Kills. But it’s been a friend to me, last few years. It’s an action, an aid to thinking. I don’t know if I could have thought things out without that space. Tea and coffee are good as well.

The thin braided line was in a very strong shade of red. Just like the red in that book cover. I remember looking for the traditional brown, the stuff you normally used for a handline, then I saw that the red polyester cordage would be thinner for the strength – better for a sounding-line. Less drag. Now the coils and loops made their own pattern over the black slate. I did nothing but look at it for minutes and minutes. Maybe longer.

I was still in the photocopies and print-outs. The memoirs of the Field Marshal.

Keitel knew the game was over in ’41, once nobody had been able to dissuade the
Führer
from the invasion of Russia. After that, the only chance of victory was to take Moscow before winter. When that didn’t happen, geography and numbers would make the result inevitable. But he’d no thought of resigning. He was still looking at the chessboard – if there had been a swift strategic withdrawal at Stalingrad… the formation of one short line of defence which could be supplied and reinforced.

But these things had not happened. So the Red Army broke through. When he says that Germany lost a whole army, he’s looking at a map and the bulge of a line. There’s no word of all these soldiers of skin and bone, in a slow march into fenced off areas. Just like all these Red Army troops photographed as prisoners in the Volkhov Corridor, a few years before.

There are these weak protestations to Adolf all through. But Keitel never considers standing down. Like when there’s an outburst of rage from the Boss, at the mass escape from Stalag Luft 3. They must be taught a lesson. Special circumstances. Special treatment. Hence the orders which will allow for the execution of prisoners of war who are following their duty to attempt escape.

So that’s what was behind Steve McQueen doing the jump over the wire. Or rather Bud Etkins. And it wasn’t a BMW. It was an adapted Triumph T110 with strengthened forks and a few tweaks to make it lighter. McQueen took lessons from Etkins and became a competitive driver of racing bikes. But they didn’t let him do the stunt in the movie. The machine which became an icon was resuscitated, years later for a museum-piece. And Triumph collaborated with McQueen’s estate to launch the Bonneville T100.

Did you know that there was another production motorcycle based on a machine which became a historical object? The Harley Davidson MT350 is called the Corporal Lee Scott in remembrance of a soldier killed while serving with the Royal Tank Regiment in Afghanistan in 2009.

Please excuse the length of that loop of red cordage, teased out of the fankle. It will fall into its place in the sequence. We’re back in the main strands. There’s street-fighting in Berlin. The deaths of all these youths continued even though it was clearly impossible to stop the advance into the city. The certainty of the outcome did not prevent Keitel from driving round the city outskirts, berating the shirkers and calling back the retreating gunners as the whole show was closing. As his leader was preparing to put a pistol to his own head. As Frau Goebbels fed cyanide pills to her beautiful children.

I’m still seeing the red loops on the black floor. The blood of Russians and Germans and Ukrainians and Belarusians, Latvians, Italians and Romanians. (What did you make of it all, Queen Marie, first monarch to embrace the non-political Bahá’í Faith?) And men from Alsace-Lorraine, drafted in with a bit less freedom of choice than the Field Marshal. And the Polish and the Czech and Slovak and Yugoslavian and Hungarian and Austrian citizens. And all the other lost souls, of named states or the stateless ones.

I did listen to the daughter. I did go across the road and round the corner to enter the front door of the library. There were two display boards, just inside. One was new fiction. One was recent non-fiction. I picked up
Bloodlands
by Timothy Snyder. It’s an account of the forces acting on the territories between Berlin and Moscow. Between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second. Stalin’s realisation that the tool of famine was an efficient means of fighting his own ideological war. Hitler’s dream of the same Ukrainian bread-baskets feeding his chosen people. Their means of eliminating those who didn’t fit in to the plans.

I read the book in long bursts between coffee and sandwiches. I returned it and followed up some strands on the internet.

There’s a charity which even now is excavating the ground in the Volkhov Corridor, and sieving the swamps, to trace the tags which still hang round the necks of some skeletons. These can then be properly buried and their descendants, whatever the nationality, informed of the location of their fate. That’s what’s between the black lines of Keitel’s soul-searching on strategies.

My own vocation could well be in teasing out a few remaining tangled lines. There’s more to be done yet on the Eastern Front but, for me, that’s a bit like poaching. This research is the province of a former classmate of mine, a man elated by swimming in cold sea without the benefit of a wetsuit.

At my age, I’m allowed to leave all that restless exertion to the daughter. That’s the swimming, I mean, not the research. Mind you, her mother ran the London marathon last year. Anna told me Gabriele was back on the bike, the drop-handlebars. I’m happy she looks like winning her own battle.

I can hardly walk to the bloody end of number one pier. There’s a big gate halfway along anyway and it’s not the same since the Art Deco transit shed got removed. It went out in style, with half the island turning out to dive into Norman MacDonald’s community play,
Portrona
. A Hymn to the Herring.

I’m going to go for my own marathon. I’ve got as far as writing to Aberdeen Uni. They were interested enough to offer a meeting. We talked over a few ideas for sustained research. The focus has to be tight. There won’t be another lifetime to search the nooks and crannies.

I thought of a close analysis of certain types of machinery in warfare. The motors which propelled invading and retreating forces in the Second World War. But a lot of that is covered, now. Then there was the aftermath. Did you know that Rolls Royce sold a large number of small jet engines to the Russians? A very competitive version of the Mig fighter used them. The word is that our American friends were a bit offended by this trade.