Once (22 page)

The
St Tudno
was my maiden voyage, innocent and virgin. The few trips that would follow later, putting out from Conwy on the fishmonger Mr Arundale's trawler were last nails in Queequeg's coffin for me. Call me Ishmael. They still haunt me, above all biding the tide after nightfall, to enter the river and come home to harbour. The
What-Ho!
was a decked lugger of a once-popular local design. I doubt she was much more than a forty-footer. She had a mast and a short brown sail. Above all she was powered by an Ailsa Craig, over-powered it might be said, but all to the good, by a big engine.

The name ‘Ailsa Craig' meant a lot to me, the mysterious, burdened way names can mean to us. I had seen the Ailsa Craig, also known as ‘Paddy's Milestone', with the naked eye of childhood, the granite dome off the Ayrshire coast, from which the engine took its name. This pleased me and merged the two in my mind. It made me remember the harbour at Girvan, with its trawler fleet of those days.

Curling stones are traditionally made of Ailsa Craig granite. I have two for heirlooms on my doorstep at home. My Wigtownshire farming relations and their like used to put such stones on the gateposts to their retirement bungalows. So the name ‘Ailsa Craig' weighs for me resonantly, the full weight of its granite. What's in a name? Worlds of meaning, ‘Ailsa Craig':

 

I voyaged with you once

beating like my heart

right through me,

whatever the opposite is

to weak knees, weakness,

a balancing act, and now

I anchor in memory

on those wild seas.

 

I cannot ground but fathom

where I am, sitting on

a doorstep, here at home,

running a hand over

a granite curling stone,

an heirloom and horizon

sixty million years ago,

I remember seeing you.

 
Mr Arundale had been a commander in the Navy during the war. He loved the sea and knew it like the back of his hand, saw into it with his grey eyes, and read the weather as if he knew it by heart. He had just that much of Ahab about him to keep you guessing. I suppose he was a hobby fisherman, but it was a hobby that served his shop with the freshest fish on the coast.

So it came that I shipped aboard the
What-Ho!
under Mr Arundale, first with my father and then, far better, on my own. I remember being early and killing time on the quay, haunting there, relishing the expectancy in the morning air, as the tide rose in the river and the river rose in the tide, and the vessels beat a foot to the gathering rhythm and kicked their keels to be off. I felt myself into it, into the role of the sea-going fisherman, deckhand trawler-man. Compared with the all-weather real thing aboard the boats that would go away for several days, it was like poaching in Collins's Wood: all the kicks without the risks. But drowning is drowning. Just as you might say never trust a horse, never trust the sea.

Nor was there anything half-hearted about it when Mr Arundale arrived amid the bustle of fishermen and mid-morning idlers and holidaying lookers-on. He took command. You had to look lively and haul in the pram and lower the supplies and lower yourself. The pram only took two, oarsman and crew of one at a time. It sat deep in the tide at that, quick to turn on an oar, like a gull on its webbed foot turning smartly to feed on something passing swiftly by in the stream, the flood from the mountains. There across the way where the river ran hidden the
What-Ho!
rode at her mooring, all ship-shape. She looked somehow businesslike, as if a vessel might put on its experience and purpose and wear them with vigour, restless as a thoroughbred for the tide-race, throwing her head up against her mooring.

So then you got aboard her and looked back across the waters at the floating harbour and riding castle town. Who'd ever want to live ashore again? Who'd want to come back to the humdrum world of the dull lubber, the hidebound burgher? Except that coming and going, putting out and making landfall, are heart and soul of it. In which spirit I commend to you the fare forward of it, and fare well but not farewell, as the Ailsa Craig starts up with a great throb, like a heart throb, and the waters rouse with a deep churning as she gets the bit between her teeth. Is this the death-wish under us as the stern bites in and takes a step down, to bring the prow up, or so it feels, like an orgasm, an acceleration, a surge? I always think so. And so too at this moment, as away we went, it felt not so much as if we were bound to our fishing ahead, as rushing from our haven astern.

Down the channel we ran between the now submerged shellfish banks, out by Morfa, and round beyond Penmaen-bach to shoot our net down the Fairway, down to the Lavan Sands, beyond Penmaenmawr. There are few things more intoxicating, in all the fishings I've undertaken, than being slewed there between trawl and tide butting down that sea-road, like driving with the brakes on, as the otter boards resist the flow and keep the wings of the net wide. From where you are, the sea runs round the world, and you feel part of its immensity, suspended in time, until it's time to haul and gravity returns for a while, against the backdrop of the floating world.

We'd have a couple of shots down that way, the bulging sock of the net when we swung it up, spilling plaice, flounder and thornback skate, barnacled crabs and cobbles, shocks of glistening weed, a bather's plimsoll but happily no bather, and so on. Then we'd run out round Puffin Island, trolling for mackerel, with hand-lines, four and six at a time, and if we hit them, pause to wallow and hit them hard, feathering vertically, so the boxes rattled and splattered with them as they filled, before we shot again by Table Road, out off Traeth Coch.

It seemed we had all the time in the world there, shoaled together. But the tide waits for no man, and with one last haul on board, we'd beat for home, the Ailsa Craig drumming hard, vibrating under us, the
What-Ho!
with the bit between her teeth, galloping, and night rising up and the stars shoaling so near you'd think you might shoot your net at them, in the topsy-turvy seaborne world. Now we've been too quick for it and must hove-to, to nose forward little by little. Mussels crunch under us. At the water's edge, all round, oyster-catchers and sandpipers make their music, pipe their chorus to the stars, as the dark engulfing tide chivvies them. Up they wheel into the chill night air, piping and whistling, to re-alight and fish for their supper and sing for it, again. Over and over they retreat with the water, heard but not seen, unless as a faint glimmer or aura, until the tide is in, and silence seems to fill the world, for a moment if no more.

So it was. There in the midst of it, the Ailsa Craig chugged and spluttered and sang to us, and the
What-Ho!
told us the story of her life, in every creak and dark recess of her, wooed to it by the river at her shoulders, the sea at her stern. We had our catch all gutted and sung for, except not all the thornback skate were skinned. So we worked on at them, feeling the cold now, hands cut and raw, the very dream itself, except for the one behind it.

I'd up and walk from my wage-slavery tomorrow to do that again. Though there's no again only another time. Once it would be, in itself, however freighted with past remembrance. But no one invites me. Mr Arundale is long-gone under the sea. I know no one with a boat. I'm a mere harbourer of thoughts and memories. All I do I do in mind, then set out in pen and ink, a fisher of tropes and expression. Make fast. This is the last fishing ground, as yet not known to any other. Shoot your sentence here, I urge myself at break of day this morning. Run out your spillet and trammel, your seines of sense, trawl-tales as tall as the sea at the mind's stormy rim. Be buoyant in spite of all. Why? To show courage in ignoring death. Pour encourager les autres. Fare forward. Plough on. Having put your hand to the wheel, don't look back. Even at the cry ‘Man overboard!' hold to your course, go overboard with a passion. Haul in your catch. Live with your luck. Make your luck. Be a Makar. Don't look back.

But it's all looking back and longing too.

Just so I'd look back after the Welsh girl when we passed. Look back I did and long, even for simple acknowledgement. But she showed no interest, no matter I studied hard to cross her path, to gaze on her, her pale cheek, her raven hair, her attitude so composed and quietly purposeful. I didn't exist for her, which only heightened her allure. The fateful afternoon was now not far away when I'd wait at the far school gate by the canteen to ask her, stepping forward from the wall, to speak to her for the first time. No one ever waited there for any other purpose. Though it wasn't the first time I'd waited. Just the first time my courage held and she wasn't with her friends, two other medics in the making. How absurd my aspiration! But such is or was the onus on the male to propose and the female to dispose. She took no time disposing of me.

‘I'm going out with Max,' she said without pause or blush and stepped back on her way. It was a blow, as you can guess. Yet, incorrigible, I found comfort in the moment as well as disappointment. She could have shown outright scorn but she didn't. She'd spoken to me at least, and I to her. There was no put-down but the knock-back made me deliver papers much earlier for a few weeks, so as not to run the risk of meeting her. But nothing changed. I did not move on. And now, little by little my passion grew beyond obsession into the wilder realms of idealisation. It was as if I lived a script by Petrarch or by Dante, though I'm sure I'd never heard of either. My day would come.

Or night, anyway, the night of the school dance. They'd given lessons in the Gay Gordons and the like, the waltz, over several evenings before the night itself. I was no dancer. Nor was she among the girls with whom we tried to learn our steps. But I went to all the lessons. No rock-and-roll here.

I remember my mother scoring the soles of my new black shoes with a kitchen fork to give them grip. I remember plunging off down the black lane, skidding about, turning my ankle, in those inappropriate, pinching shoes, and walking the three miles to school, in a suit and tie. The hall lights shone out and for perhaps the only time in my life I went to school with a light and eager step. Did I know something? I did not. I didn't even know if she'd be there. I merely hoped against hope. But there she was, in a white dress with blue polka dots, and her hair newly cut the way she wore it, short, so the hairline ran just below the jawline, and parted in the middle so she seemed to look at you with her big hazel eyes from between two black curtains, each ending in a little sweep, upwards. I can see her now, and those bottle-green suede high heels she turned on as she danced.

It should be said that by this time, while I kept as ever my two worlds, moving between the scholars and the wilder boys, with the strongest friendships in both camps, I'd drawn attention to myself. I was the literary one. Now and then I'd taken one or other of the more priggish masters by surprise with my eccentric reading. As with the one I thought a stuffy one who eventually deserted for an English public school in the South Downs where clearly he'd be more at home. What he said – it was about Maupassant – I don't remember. Something perhaps about realism and peasant life. He was the junior French master. He alluded to W.H.
Hudson. He was sure we'd never heard of W.H. Hudson, a wonderful writer. But indeed I had read
A Shepherd's Life
, the very book he had in mind, as I could tell. I knew a good deal about W.H. Hudson. My father revered and loved him. I can still see the surprise on the master's face. Reasonably enough, he'd always thought we were every last one of us as ignorant as the day we were born.

W.H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies had been for a spell my staple reading, though Synge was my master, the orchestrator of the dream. So pleased to realise all this was the poet manqué Leonard Brookes, my English teacher, long since not of this world, that he gave me his own copy of Edward Thomas's life of Jefferies, the first thing by Thomas I ever read. I was blessed in all this and advantaged in coming from the home I did. I had a head's start, for once. It no longer mattered that I was an innumerate daydreamer. Though I was no scholar, as you know. Though I wasn't really a reader but one for the kickstart tasting, as still I am. I was none the less no longer entirely beyond the pale.

So at one point or another in the latter part of the evening, I caught the Welsh girl's eye between dances, and in that look saw what I'd lived and died a thousand deaths for: a come hither, a louch look as they say in Scots. I danced with her. Nor would I be backward in coming forward. I monopolised her, we monopolised each other and danced the three last dances together, and the last smooch more intimately than any of the others dared. Nods and smiles and jokes there were among the supervising teachers. It was as if we'd gone just a step to the very edge of going too far. But would she let me walk her home? She would if she could but she couldn't. Her father etc etc.... So I walked home alone, or flew. For I was in outer space, and my thoughts went flying everywhere.

But where did this leave me when I came back to earth?

I don't know where it left me. But it found me the next night after a day's euphoria braving the doorbell to my fate. My body took me to her door, as if in slow-motion, as if dragging the Earth behind it.

‘I knew it was you,' she said with quiet passion, ‘I knew', in a hurried whisper. How with the foresight of hindsight we know these things when we're in love.