Bruach Blend (7 page)

‘Were you after sayin' one of your mates was marrit then?' asked Morag. ‘I thought I minded you sayin' once you were all bachelors aboard your boat except for the skipper.' Morag's memory was like a bulging file.

‘I did say that. But one of them got married about a year since an' now there's another got himself engaged or somethin' like it,' said Willy. He gave a short bark of laughter. ‘He's no very pleased about it either,' he went on. ‘I was ashore with him one weekend an' there was this girl waitin' for him. He'd been havin' it off with her for a whiley an' she wasn't a bad looker either. Anyway, he brought her into the pub an' after he'd had a good drink he goes out the back to open his trousers. When he comes back he's lookin' as vexed as if he's lost his taste for whisky. “What the hell's wrong with you?” I says. “Life's hell, that's what's wrong with me,” says he. “I wish I hadn't come ashore. I go to try an' make a telephone call an' the telephone's engaged; I just go out to the lavatory an' that's engaged an' now haven't I got to make an honest woman of this lassie I've been goin' about with so now I'm engaged. I tell you, Willy, life's hell, an' I'll be damn glad to get back to the boat.” '

‘It's yourself will be gettin' marrit next then,' said Mairi Tonag (Mairi with the broad bottom) when the laughter had subsided. There were renewed titters from some of the young girls but Willy ignored them.

‘I might at that,' he admitted. ‘I was nearly engaged myself once anyway.'

‘You engaged?' Mairi's voice was sharp with mockery. ‘Who would be thinkin' of gettin' themselves engaged to you?' she teased. ‘I don't believe you would stay with one woman more than a week without she would be waitin' on the quay to grab you every weekend.'

‘There's plenty would have me if I gave them the chance,' countered Willy. ‘An' this one I was speakin' of was good an' ready to have me.'

‘Then she couldn't have had much in the way of looks to her,' Janet said with a wink at Mairi.

‘That's not true, then,' Willy refuted. ‘She was a lovely girl an' a lot of the fishermen was fallin' over themselves to get her.'

‘What did she do to you then?' Morag asked.

‘She did nothin' to me,' replied Willy. ‘But she used to work at the kipperin'.'

‘The kipperin'!' repeated one of the girls. She wrinkled her nose and there was a confirmatory chorus of ‘Ughs' from the other girls.

‘Aye,' said Willy sadly. ‘That was the trouble. Every Friday night for a while I used to meet her for a drink an' then take her to the pictures. She used to smother herself in that scent they call “Californian Poppy” so I wouldn't notice the kipper smell. God! but she made herself smell lovely. Honest! I used to love that scent. But then as soon as the cinema began to warm up there comes the smell of kippers. Ach, I couldn't get away from it. The time would come when I'd be thinkin' of a nice hot cuddle an' there on the film would be a lovely garden maybe with the heroine smellin' at a rose before the hero gives her a nice smackin' kiss, but when I turn to do the same to my girl up would come the smell of kippers. Terrible strong it was.' Willy sighed. ‘Aye, she was keen enough on me, right enough, an' she was a lovely girl but I never could bring myself to marry her. All the same, I miss her. Whenever I get the smell of kippers I think of her an' what a nice girl she was.' There was a reminiscent smile on his face.

Main Tonag shook her head, and still teasing said, ‘I don't believe she would have got to marryin' you all the same. A woman wants a man that will stay with her an' not be goin' away with any woman that takes his fancy.' Willy did not see her wink at us.

‘I'm no' the one for that,' he protested indignantly. ‘Now if you were speakin' of Thigh Jim that crews on a neighbour's boat I'd agree with you. God! He's a right one, that one.'

‘Thigh Jim?' echoed Morag.

‘Aye, they call him that because he never takes his thigh boots off if he can help it.'

‘Not even to go to his bunk?' asked Morag incredulously.

‘Not even in his bunk,' affirmed Willy. The only time you'll see Thigh's boots off his feet is when he's got a woman somewhere.'

‘He does take them off for that?' queried Johnny with pretended surprise.

‘Aye, he's made a habit of that,' agreed Willy. ‘Too much of a habit. God! He's a laugh, that one. I mind he was in a bar once an' this tart sneaked him into the ladies' lavatory. After a while the barman got to suspectin' somethin' an' went an' banged on the door, shoutin' to the tart to get rid of the man she had. The tart shouted back swearin' there was no man with her. “Then who the hell does this great stinkin' pair of thigh boots belong to?” asks the barman.' Willy briefly inspected his fingernails which were as thick and ridged as cockle shells before turning on the company with a saucy grin that was the equivalent of a dig in the ribs. ‘That's how habit kind of lets you down,' he said, and glanced ironically at the excessively virtuous Kirsty whose eyes were closed almost as tightly as her lips.

‘Ach, the man!' said Morag scathingly.

‘He would not be an island man, surely,' defended Anna Vic.

‘Ach no. He was from the east coast somewhere,' Willy said. ‘They come pretty rough from those parts.' It was possible to detect something like a sigh of relief at his assurance that it was no island man.

‘I'm wonderin' where you were yourself while he was off with his tart, as you call her,' taunted Johnny. ‘Likely you would be off with one of your own.'

‘Indeed no, I'm not much of a one for tarts,' Willy denied. ‘Though God knows there's plenty around waitin' for us lads when we get ashore, particularly when they've heard we've had a good week. Some of them are as old and ugly as the Devil himself too. I don't know how Thigh can go with them. Honest,' Willy went on, ‘there was an old cow tried her best to get hold of me once when I'd a good drink on me. Right enough I was drunk but I wasn't drunk enough to look at her. I would as soon have gone to bed with a beast. “Away with you, woman,” I told her. “Your face makes me sick.” “You're not so good-lookin' yourself,” says she. “Maybe not,” says I, “but if I had a face like yours I'd go down an' stand in the Square an' pay the kids a shillin' each to throw shit at it.” ' Willy's grin broadened at the gasps of remonstrance; the sly grins and the appreciative chuckles with which his story was received. ‘She left me alone after that.'

‘I should think she would indeed,' gurgled Janet.

‘Mind you, she got her own back on me, the bitch,' Willy continued. ‘She worked on a couple of Irish blokes that was in the bar to pick a row with me an' we started fightin'. I ended up spendin' the weekend in gaol.'

‘Oh, be quiet! You did not, surely?' reproached Janet.

‘I did so,' insisted Willy. ‘A crumby little gaol it was too. Nothin' but a wooden pillow on the bed they gave me. I had to take off my seaboot socks an' put them under my head before I could get to sleep an' there was I dreamin' all night there was a stinkin' corpse in the cell alongside of me.'

‘Did you see the woman again at all?' asked Morag.

‘I did not then,' said Willy. ‘I didn't go ashore for a week or two an' then we were away with the boat some place else so thank God there was water an' not land between me an' her.'

‘I'm thinkin' you deserved whatever you got,' Kirsty told him righteously.

Willy turned and bestowed on her an impenitent grin.

Marjac put down the sock she was knitting and lifted the bubbling kettle from the chain above the fire over to the hob. Picking up the empty teapot, she fondled its shiny brown plumpness for a moment and looked a little vague as if she had forgotten something. We understood so well. This was Bruach's famine period: the hens were having their winter rest from laying; most of the cows had gone completely dry in anticipation of the spring calving and even those which continued to milk yielded only a few squeezings, barely enough to provide milk for the family ‘strupaks' and, as if to emphasize the scarcity, the weekly grocery van had disposed of its entire supply of tinned milk before it reached Bruach. ‘Milk in winter is like honey to the palate,' the old crofters used to say and anyone who has had to endure winters of milkless tea and coffee and has had to eat porridge or cereal without even a dribble of milk to help it down will fervently agree. We all felt deprived by the shortages but to someone as naturally hospitable as Marjac it must have been truly distressing not to be able to offer her guests a ‘wee strupak'.

With a sigh she replaced the teapot on the hob and again took up her knitting. A brief, slightly awkward silence was broken by an outburst of protesting shrieks and giggles, the result of young Uisden having furtively produced a dried ‘sea wash ball' (the dried cases of whelk eggs) and scraped it along the back of Catriona's hand. Erchy got up and helped himself to a drink from the water pail; Ian reached for a glowing peat from the fire to relight his pipe; Johnny flicked a cigarette across to Willy, and Ian then turned, proffering the glowing peat as a cigarette lighter. Two of the younger children helped themselves to dry peats from the pile beside the hearth and used them as seats. Outside the wind continued to thump against the walls of the house and roar full-throatedly down the chimney.

Murdoch spat into the fire. ‘I'm thinkin' there'll be no much fishin' if this weather gets any coarser,' he observed.

‘The Dear, but it's wild, wild, wild,' corroborated Padruig amid a rumbled chorus of assent.

For ten days and nights the gale had been romping through the village, fortunately not with the near-tornado force of the severe storms which, during the next three months, were likely to beset us, but still with strength enough to make outdoor work at least three times more difficult and tiring even for the tougher Bruachites, who almost from the cradle had been learning the skill of combating the wind. This was a boisterous gale rather than a savage one; it had changed direction frequently and had sometimes been accompanied by a mixture of sleet and snow; sometimes by hard-driven rain that was as cold as snow, and sometimes by fusillades of hailstones that ranged from pill to mothball size, and we had now reached the stage of fretfulness when we longed for even a brief respite. But as yet there seemed little prospect of the wind abating.

I tried to imagine what it would be like on the open deck of a fishing boat in such conditions, contending not only with the weather but with the merciless, unpredictable sea, and my gaze rested on Willy's sturdy body, his weather-taughtened face and his hands, broad as wash-basins and with rough, stubby fingers that stayed permanently half clenched as if they could never quite relax their grip on the salt-hardened ropes.

‘Ach,' said Willy, dismissing Murdoch's doubts. ‘The weather can do what in the hell it likes but it won't make any difference to our skipper. That's a man that's mad for the fishin'.'

‘Did you get good fishin' last season?' asked Erchy.

‘Good enough,' replied Willy. ‘The prices weren't so good though an' a lot went for fish meal.'

I said, ‘It seems tragic when good fish is made into meal that's often used for fertilizer when in other countries there are people dying from starvation.'

‘It might seem that way,' agreed Willy, turning to me earnestly. ‘But you see, Miss Peckwitt, it likely wouldn't do them any good if they got it. I mind our skipper tellin' us about a firm he knew that once dried a lot of the herrin' an' sent it out to one of these foreign places where the folks were supposed to be starvin' to death. An' he said the natives didn't know what to make of it. They thought they'd been sent a load of roofing tiles so they nailed them on the roofs of their huts to keep the rain out. As true as I'm here,' he said, seeing my doubtful smile. ‘The firm got word back sayin' they didn't want any more of the same sort.'

Murdoch said, ‘Your skipper doesn't mind how much sea there is, then?'

‘I'll say he doesn't,' responded Willy. ‘An' he'll have us shoot the nets supposin' we tell him they're likely to come up as empty as a hake's belly.'

‘As empty as a hake's belly?' I said quickly. ‘I've never heard anyone use that expression before. Why do you say that?'

Willy looked surprised at my sudden interest. ‘Why wouldn't I say it?' he replied. ‘There's nothin' as empty as a hake's belly can be when you catch it.'

‘It sounds so strange,' I pointed out. ‘Why particularly a hake and no other fish?'

‘Because a hake's not like other fish,' he explained. ‘I reckon a hake can digest its food quicker than any creature in the sea. The only time we ever get a hake with food in its stomach is when it's been able to eat the fish caught in the net along with it.' Willy looked across at Murdoch as if expecting the bold man to contradict him, but Murdoch only nodded.

I sat back, cherishing this new snippet of information and wondering if some day I should be able to confirm Willy's theory in some reference book. I doubted it. Fishermen acquire so much knowledge of the mysteries of life in the sea; strange facts which they accept so easily yet do not bother to disclose so one does not necessarily find what would be called ‘expert' confirmation. I lived near the sea; the sound of it was so constant that unless I made myself consciously listen it was inaudible; I watched it, rowed on it, even fished in my small way but I was always aware that relatively speaking I was but an observer. Except by reading and by listening to the talk of men who at some time in their lives had sought and fought the sea for a living, I would never learn more than a fragment of its mystery.