A Book of Death and Fish (53 page)
Read A Book of Death and Fish Online
Authors: Ian Stephen
Young Al the undertaker, who’s not that young now, nudged me one time down Sandwick and told me not to worry. The olaid bought a plot for me
and one for the sister too. Bad manners to refuse a present so don’t burn me after all. Go for the standard local option. Anna, you could probably have the sister’s but it won’t be much good to you either if you go diving down Victoria Falls or somewhere like that.
Mr Executor, there’s a bottle of Jura to say thanks for attending to details though I know you’d help, anyway. Please toast the brave and perceptive Mr Orwell when you take the cork off that one. My good friend Michael Armitage, who is very worldly for a minister of any breed, advises me that it is possible that a suitable charitable trust would be able to retain the Kenneth Street house by sub-letting a portion of it.
There’s been discussions on international exchanges. Residencies. It would be great if you were involved in some way, but it’s also great you know what matters to yourself. If Michael’s scheme proves feasible, I’d like to see a room left for the use of exchange students. Even though I won’t be seeing it. But what about encouraging:
• original enquiry in the sustainable energy, wave and tidal action preferred – the wind goes up and down but the sea does that all the time
• historians who believe that harping on about the atrocities of the past may mitigate those of the future
• conservation of fish stocks by a return to working with lines rather than trawls
I did seriously consider seeing if we could do some deal with the Arts Centre, along the road. It’s been grand to wander over for a yarn but their cinema programme has been depressing. I’d reconsider this bequest if there was an undertaking to show
The Last Picture Show
once a year. After all, it is about our home town though I don’t know why Bogdanovich felt it necessary to transpose the thing to Texas.
Anna, help yourself to any of the vinyl or the books that are still about. And that’s a nice record deck and amp by the way, if your mother’s one is kaput. There’s likely to be enough in the bank to finance an expedition you wouldn’t normally do. I’d like to think you might have a bit more thinking and writing time between the treks and the paddles. You see I’m a normal Da with a bourgeois tendency, after all.
I hope you’re not shocked by any of these revelations. I’ve at least two, possibly even three, lost loves in me but I’m pretty sure that most people do. Maybe the lessons of history are only worth serious discussion if we accept the premise that individual human animals aren’t as individual as they think they are.
I still hear the voice of a young lady who had cropped hair and slim fingers. The memory led me back to an area of research which I should have pursued a little earlier. At the age of fifty-seven, I submitted my PhD thesis, which did indeed explore attitudes to the slave trade in one area of Scotland, up to and after abolition.
My own parents made sacrifices so that I had the chance of a University Education. Now I’ve used part of what might have been my daughter’s inheritance to complete it. I can only hope that the published thesis is worth that. Let’s face it, the economy is falling in about our ears. Development at this pace never was sustainable. In the present climate, we can never take liberal values for granted.
You can only analyse events so far. My olman found the hot metal catch to a lid that let him out of a glorified sardine can of a tank. Then he was remembered and found and led up from a collapsed steel bunk in a doomed ship. One of these incidents was on the North African continent and one in North African territorial waters. I suggest that this is not evidence of any divine plan but the accidental circumstances which are part of his own story.
Here’s another one, since I’ve got an audience. I’m very grateful I lived long enough to read the
Guardian
of 22nd June 2012. By the skin of my teeth. And that Michael bought me a subscription. I was well enough for a couple of hours each day to read the paper and well enough to spout this response to the kind Macmillan nurse who plumbed it into the laptop for me.
We are of course all under sentence of death but the timing can sometimes be altered. Liam Holden was the last person in the UK to be sentenced to a legal death, by hanging. The measure was still available to judges in Northern Ireland after it was dropped (sorry) in England, Scotland and Wales. His conviction for the murder of a soldier in Ballymurphy, West Belfast, in 1972 was based only on his confession.
At his trial, Mr Holden described his interrogation by Army officers, before being handed over to the civil authorities. He told how wet towels were applied until he was sure he was going to drown. One of the officers in question had recently attended a training course in interrogation techniques. The jury was not present in the courtroom when this was disclosed. Mr Holden was not hung. He was imprisoned in The Maze until 1989. He has just been pardoned. Out of thirty-three similar appeals, twenty-six have, so far, been successful. Only four convictions have been upheld.
My own father was reprieved at least twice in his life, from drowning or choking. By luck rather than by law. If he had not survived, I would not have been born. I very much hope that none of you wish, in fact, that I hadn’t been brought to life. If you do think that, please keep your opinion to yourself for an hour and enjoy the scoff. I hope the quality of the rice and dhal is sufficient unto the needs of the vegetarians who must surely inherit what is left of the earth.
How can we judge if we used our time well? But I’ve no doubts at all about so much of a second of the time we put in to raising our daughter. In case any listeners have been switched off for a while and are just waking up for the business. Here we go.
T
HE WILL OF
D
R
P
ETER
W
ILLIAM
M
ACAULAY.
I revoke previous wills and codicils and I appoint to be my executor the Rev Michael Armitage of 21 Drummond St, Edinburgh.
In the event of my death I wish my property to be distributed as follows.
1. Split cane three-piece fly rod by Allcocks with Hardy Viscount reel and all ancillary equipment to Ms Anna Richter MacAulay.
2. Beachcasting rod by Abu Svangsta with Penn reel and ancillary equipment to Anna Richter MacAulay.
3. Telescopic spinning rod by Daiwa (with Made in Scotland thistle badge) and Daiwa reel (unbadged but shit, you’ve got to give a bit of business to your economic allies) also to Anna Richter MacAulay with the recommendation that it be used at least once to pursue migratory fish without written consent.
4. Painting titled ‘Bhalaich an Uisge’ dated 1973, by the Lewis artist Donald Smith to remain in the house known as 35 Kenneth Street, if the reverend can clinch the deal to hang on to said house. If not, Anna it’s yours and if you don’t want it, don’t give it to an Lanntair, who have failed so far to show much interest in this local artist’s work but offer it for the public bar in the Lewis Hotel. Smith is a third or fourth cousin of yours, by marriage, via the Griomsiadair connection.
5. Any vessel that may remain in my possession at the time of my death, to be offered to the North Lewis Maritime Society, without condition. They can sell her if there is not sufficient interest in maintaining her. Anna should feel no sense of duty to take responsibility. I love her dearly and am thus aware that she is addicted to windpower and kayaking. I have however made provision with my executor for life membership of Anna to the Stornoway Sea-Angling
Club. And also to the Maritime Society,
Falmadair
. This trust operates several traditional vessels. These two memberships should enable my daughter to sail and fish to her heart’s content without serious personal financial risk.
6. To Kenneth Finlay Macrae of 42 Dumbarton Court, Brixton, London, I leave the set of cooper’s tools which are on display in the kitchen in the Kenneth Street house. These were given to me by a trained cooper who was made redundant. With these go a copy of Morrison’s transcriptions of oral tales, collected by him, in Lewis. He was a schoolmaster turned cooper.
7. To Mairi Sine Nic a Ghobhainn, of Croft no 6, Garyvard, I leave the clothbound notebook which contains my recollections of the transits for fishing marks, located between the Shiant Islands and Tob Lierway, south of Arnish point. There are also drawings of the skylines which should aid identification of the marks. Mairi will know many of these already but I hope this helps pass them on to the children now in her joint care.
8. To Frau Gabriele Richter, I leave nothing because she has already had more than enough stress from disposing of the possessions I accumulated either as an individual or jointly, during a significant part of my lifetime. If it had been in my powers to do so, I would have given her the body of her father to bury or at least a conclusion to that sad story. I think I fully understood the depth of this human need when Seamus MacLean, my mentor in the Coastguard Service, got hold of me to pass on a word of advice during his retirement party. He had a good dram in him but he made this very clear:
‘Keep the search going, Peter, keep it going even after you’ve no hope. I used to dread the night shifts, down at Oban. A woman kept phoning, asking if we’d found her boy yet. Had we tried all the islands? That’s where he must have got ashore.’
9. To all those gathered for this reading I leave the case of white wine and the case of red, selected by Michael. I’m pretty sure I’ll be resting in peace, fully confident that the corks will have been removed or the screwtops turned. The red will be breathing. Which is more than I’ll be doing but please do pause to reflect that at a future date, you will not be breathing either. There will have been no religious observances made during this ceremony. It is, however, my duty to point this out to you at this time. Even though I’m only half a Lewisman, not a Hebridean but a Hybridean.
Friends, as appointed executor of my good friend Peter MacAulay’s estate, I feel it my duty to add a few notes to Peter’s very individual testament, as part of his legal last will.
Some of you may not yet know that, following examination of tissue samples, the cause of death of Doctor Peter MacAulay was listed as COPD. I was myself unfamiliar with the term. The abbreviations stand for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. I understand that this is a term which covers various forms of blockage such as chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or both. It seems that heavy smoking and a dust-laden environment are both key factors which can lead to the development of this problem until it reaches an acute state.
We could consider it a mercy that Peter was spared further pain. However, it is also a great loss that a man who was hitting the stride of his intellectual development was taken from us. We have no alternative but to trust to a greater wisdom than we can presently perceive.
He would not have wished for too morbid a footnote to his life. However, I cannot avoid sharing the thought that the ironies involved in his death are very much in keeping with those of his life. He was a man who loved the sea and who indeed made his living for many years by helping to protect those in danger on or by the sea. He loved to cook and eat the produce of the sea. Perhaps, in this way, Peter revealed his truly spiritual side. Peter made it clear that he wished for no religious observances at this gathering or at his graveside. But he made no secret of his appreciation of the telling of stories in the gospels or of the pleasure he took in comparing the accounts of events given in them. Allow me to read a few words from the gospel of Mark.
And when the day was now far spent, his disciples came unto him and said, This is a desert place, and now the time is far passed:
Send them away, that they may go into the country round about, and into the villages, and buy themselves bread: for they have nothing to eat.
He answered and said unto them, give ye them to eat. And they said unto him, Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, and give them to eat?
He saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? Go and see. And when they knew, they say Five, and two fishes.
And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies in the green grass.
And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds and by fifties.
And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them: and the two fishes divided he among them all.
And they did all eat, and were filled.
I think Peter truly dedicated himself to an area of study he felt important, in his latter phase. This was a part of a major shift in his way of life. Latterly he spent very little time on or near the sea, apart from an occasional short walk to the harbour. His boat was very little used. There are no further extended pieces of writing in his diaries, either handwritten or on print-outs. I could find no further chapters stored in his computer. He seems to have found a focus at last and completed his research and the writing of his thesis in the comparatively short period of two years.
And yet, in a way, he drowned in his own house, in the dust which had encrusted all those folders and files. I was acutely aware of the smell of it, clinging to all his papers and books. As executor, I took all possible steps to contact the relevant parties. It proved impossible to reach Anna in the available time. I feel sure that Peter would have been glad she was able to complete her expedition. His friend Mairi attended with her family. His former wife was present, with her partner. A small number of former colleagues and members of Stornoway Sea-Angling Club, joined our gathering. His sister arranged for a large bunch of roses signed by both herself and her partner.
Some of Peter’s stated provisions, particularly those relating to the menu, were somewhat challenging. But all involved carried out their duties to the best of their ability according to the availability of fish. I did my humble best ‘on the pans’, with Davie’s assistance. You may have been confused by Peter’s use of the word
runag
for mackerel. My research informs me that this is a Gaelic term for ‘sweetheart’. This seems to be a transliteration of the Gaelic word
rionnach
(mackerel) but perhaps, for Peter, the two meanings are fairly close.
Peter was buried in Sandwick, by Stornoway, with no religious or civil ceremonials. A piper was however commissioned to play a selection of jigs and reels before the slow air of his choice. That is the piper’s choice. My recollection of my friend’s last verbal instructions, given to me before he underwent the operation for removal of the cancer, which had spread to a lung, was, ‘Don’t pin the piper down. He’s very welcome to call his own tune, even if we can pay him.’
