The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  But it was not enough. We were losing money weekly in formidable sums, and our printer, knowing that we had long since said good-bye to the petty initial finance, was coming to the warrantable conclusion that the money we were losing was his. He used to summon the pallid proprietors to his office in search of reassurance, and there was no one to whom we would more willingly have offered this diminishing commodity. We pointed optimistically to the certain profits of the next winter; but our debt to him talked in a louder voice, and by the time the harvest was due the figure would be prodigious. Seumas and I had now nothing to lose but our hopes and our health, and the printer must have noted that the latter asset was also draining away with the rest of the called-up capital. On the whole, the decision to stop printing was doubtless the wisest business course from his point of view.

  These events are only the preliminary to the story told here: but they are in a consistent pattern with everything which came after. We were now left without money, heavily in debt, jobless, and in precarious health. Still we were, however, our own masters, and we put this privilege to work at once in day-long indulgence in sleep. One forgets readily a past sense of exhaustion, but neither of us will ever fail to recall the weariness that muscle by muscle, cell by cell, had to be driven out of us. We soaked in sleep, and soon were men again.

  Cheques from the wholesale newsagents for the sales of the previous month began to come in, and we laid this little capital aside for a new springboard. We had at once to get back to fitness, and to earn some living. What we needed was some sort of holiday which would pay for itself. For the past year we had been in the habit of creating out of nothing a setting for ourselves, and in a day or two such a situation had emerged again and was being shaped.

  Some months earlier we had discovered a manufacturer whose work appeared to be of such adventurous significance that we accorded it the only accolade which lay in our gift – a descriptive story in the Claymore. John Marshall of North Queensferry had a genius for design. He had the trick of building things to do a job well. After a recent study of the economy and habits of poultry he had designed a hen-house which won a medal at the Highland Agricultural Show. For some time he had been pondering, at first for his own pleasure, the problems of small boats, and had eventually evolved a light-weight canoe which, he believed, would take a skilly man anywhere in the waters around our coasts in all but the most severe conditions. For his design Marshall had harked back to the low-slung secrets of the Eskimo kayak, and especially to the more rigid Rob Roy pattern evolved by John MacGregor three generations before our day. With this canoe he had gone into production commercially in sheds beside his home above the Firth of Forth, and at this stage we took him up enthusiastically in the Claymore. In the spring of the year, while the paper was still a going concern, we had embarked five of our Glasgow editorial supporters on an eight-day trip among and across the Isles of the Hebrides, and the diary of the trip, with its log of inshore Atlantic voyages, shooting of Uist rapids, portages across the bogs, and aquatic encampments, and especially of encounters with the Isles folk, made a first-rate series of articles on our insistent theme – adventure in Scotland.

  It was to the canoes we turned, after the failure of the Claymore. The plan took shape quickly – as it had to, for the summer was passing. We would attempt an open-sea voyage from the Clyde to the Outer Isles. The obvious hazards of the trip would no doubt bait enticingly the stories we would write for newspapers, magazines, and the radio. In the course of an adventure story we hoped to tell, this time to adult audiences, something of the urgent purpose of our beliefs. In the doing of it we should expect to become at least as expert as any others in the state and possibilities of those neglected areas, and we believed that, unless the Highland fate was to be planned desolation, this hard-won expertise would be an asset.

  Although, if the voyage succeeded, the publicity value to the canoe business would be immense, it would be more than cancelled if we met with disaster – an outcome which, as the best navigational advice quickly pointed out, was only too greatly to be feared. John Marshall, however, co-operated generously from the beginning, and immediately set to the construction of two superb canoes.

  But first we had to build up a starting fund of physique. Except in heart, we were sadly stooped and flabby. We looked around for a method of growing hard.

  The Claymore canoeists on the Heb: Seumas and AMD on left.

  * The name should be pronounced Shay-mas.

  CHAPTER 2

  CHANGE!

  Our steel has rusted in the night;

  We fail, unless we make it good

  Seek increase of our little might

  And gather up our hardihood.

  A survey over the familiar and barren field of our resources brought to light a small asset which might still, we hoped, have a marketable value. At the start of the Claymore, Seumas had paid three guineas to Charlie Cotter’s Gymnasium in Leith Street. This had entitled him to three hours’ physical training per week for a period of ten weeks, the assumption being that he would thereby remain suitably toned up for his new labours. As we have seen, the business of the past year had made derisory the expenditure of three hours per week on mere matters of personal health, and the subscription had lapsed after Seumas had enjoyed only a single week of muscling.

  Emboldened by poverty and a winter of selling improbabilities, Seumas went to interview Charlie. He returned hoarse with sales-talking, to announce that Charlie had sportingly agreed to take us both on every day for three weeks, for as many hours as we could stick it. All this for the long-since lapsed balance of the three guineas. It was noble salesmanship, but the most persuasive argument, Seumas admits, was the sight of his own podgy slackness. This deterioration, however, in a measure prepared Charlie for the repellent spectacle of the other half of the contract upon which he had to work – my own meagre frame, stripped and presented bashfully upon the gymnasium floor the next day, when we started. I have lost weight steadily since the age of 17, but the process had lately been accelerated, and the skeletal chest against which Charlie thrust a rough ear in the attempt to discern a heart-beat must have appeared the least promising piece of raw material with which the maestro had ever grappled.

  Charlie Cotter’s Gymnasium is a large single room in a draughty Edinburgh tenement. Here the devotees of physical culture perform their tasks, later to be brutally described, while, in a corner, those released from the agonies stand in a bath and take a punishing shower of icy water. Hot water is not included among the amenities, thus giving point to the only authentic jest in the place. Each time the gymnasts still in the throes hear the hissing of the shower, they beg: ‘Don’t use all the hot water!’ I believe Charlie took a special interest in preparing us for the canoe trip in the hope that he might add us in some way to his gallery of famous pupils, to be quoted to suitably awed new-comers. This list includes such diverse characters as Tancy Lee, Sir lain Colquhoun, Bart., of Luss, The Duke of Hamilton, Jimmy Guthrie, the TT rider, and Albert D (‘MacNib’) Mackie, formerly Universities boxing champion at his weight, and lately better known as the editor of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. I do hear that we are in fact still quoted furtively among this galaxy, as examples of the extremism to which orthodox training is occasionally subject.

  We started, as I have said. The Cotter System is a series of arm, head, neck, shoulder, trunk and leg exercises performed in a non-stop series while holding iron dumbbells. In cold weather the dumb-bells are heated on a small stove before being handed to the performer. Charlie’s excellence is that he knows to a hairbreadth the particular stage beyond the limit of endurance to which a man can be hounded, and still live. He, or his son Richard, would stand us on the floor, say ‘Begin!’ and leave us nodding and swinging at the first exercise. We carried on with this until long past breaking-point, as it seemed, until at last, when hope had almost gone, would come the welcome word ‘Change!’. This is the signal, not to pause or rest, but to start on the second exerc
ise. The relief is so pronounced that the movement to the different form of exertion is itself a comfort. You can always recognise a Cotter pupil in any part of the world if his eyes light up when he hears the word ‘Change!’. Exhaustion soon creeps deadly along the new muscles until they too are squeaking. In the meantime the man you are paying to do this to you is absently looking out of the window, or massaging a limp figure on a bench. ‘In-out, in-out, in-out,’ you say to yourself. ‘Good God, he’s forgotten again! In-out, in-out – hey, I’m dying! Hey! … in-out, in-out … I can manage three more … in-out, in-out … in-out … another-another-more … in-out, in-out …’ (until the sweat closes the eyes) ‘… in-out … in-out … I’ll stop! In-out … he’s made a mistake this time! … In-out, in-’ ‘Change!’ ‘Up-down, up-down cheers, this is wonderful! Slash into it – up-down, up-down, up-down …’

  A more refined series of evolutions is performed lying on the back and thrashing the legs in the air in circular and scissors movements. This bears hard on the stomach, an encumbrance with which Seumas was much better endowed than I. It is also a method by which one can come to a rapid dislike of one’s legs. They are extremely heavy objects, and look repulsive when airborne, and trembling with the midriff effort which keeps them aloft. Here too the ear craned for the cry of ‘Change!’, and the stomach muscles – such as they were with us at the time – stood in stringy ridges like breaking spines. It was during one such early session that Seumas drooped his legs painfully to the floor and moaned accusingly: ‘Charlie, I’ve ruptured myself!’ Charlie prodded at the area, obviously grudging the halt. ‘Ruptured naething!’ he said. ‘You’re just no’ gaun’ hard enough. On ye go again!’

  Leaving the place on the first, second, and third days we hirpled down by the banisters, with our knees impotent. But we hardened quickly, and before half our time was out Charlie was taking well over an hour to tire us thoroughly. We added, as a luxury, the rhythmic hammering of punch-balls, and soon felt our muscles standing out firmly under the grey-sharp needles of the shower. I was filling out, and Seumas was filling in. It was a triumph of the disciplinary hand. By no conceivable process would an individual force himself privately to the effort to which we submitted ourselves at the hands of Charlie Cotter, and it was his skill which brought the canoe trip within our powers. It was to become an act of physique as well as of faith.

  All this output of energy disturbed our careful housekeeping. We had to eat more. These August days in Edinburgh were hot and sunny. There was plenty of fruit to be had cheaply, and we ate strawberries at sixpence a pound as a change from dry bread and oatmeal brose. We drank milk by the quart. The source of these luxuries was of course the small cheques which still arrived from the wholesale newsagents. Paid over to our printer they would have made no immediate impression on the debt we owed him, and we suspended these payments, letting the small liquid reserve accumulate as the stake out of which he, and we ourselves, would win back a sounder sum from the new hazard. Our minds were in no way burdened with thought of the future. We were preparing for it as thoroughly as we were able, and the present seemed to glow quite brightly by the stimulation of our fed and fit senses.

  Now we fell in with a stroke of luck – the first fortunate coincidence which had come our way for a twelve-month. About the end of our second week at the gymnasium there arrived a man whom Charlie described casually as a ship’s officer. He was heavily built, appeared to us to be somewhere in his thirties, and he was apparently an intermittent pupil during his spells ashore. From the start he buckled into his tasks with red-faced grimness, knowing the suffering that lay ahead. In a voice accustomed to command, but softened somewhat by present agony, he would, from out of his writhing, coax Charlie, in vain, to shorten the separate ordeals. Heavy-limbed, he found the leg-waving a bitter task, and once jerked out the appeal: ‘Have a heart, Charlie!’ ‘Hert?’ exclaimed Charlie, with the air of a man whose kindly nature constantly defeats his judgment. ‘It’s a’ hert thegether!’

  It was soon evident that all this was preparation for a nobler art. In a day or two there arrived, by arrangement, a companion for our fellow-pupil in the squat shape of a sparring partner. The newcomer had a gentle disposition out of character with his corpse-like skin and the crumpled ears of the professional boxer. The two of them donned gloves as big as marking buoys and pounded each other doggedly in a manner to rock the building. We were entranced by this authentic demonstration of toughness, and in the following days allowed our imaginations to place the seaman in the role of bucko mate, preparing to embark on a voyage round the Horn, with a rough and salty crew capable of being disciplined only by the strong arm.

  We were, fortunately, wrong. Captain Campbell, shortly to achieve his present status as one of the famous Clyde river pilots, was at that time navigating officer on the West Coast of Scotland fishery cruiser. Here was, brought together with us under that Spartan roof in Edinburgh, probably one of the best living authorities on the seafaring problems of the chancy Hebridean seas. He knew that coast as intimately as he knew the planks and cracks of Charlie Cotter’s floor. We could have consulted a hundred fisher and coastal vessel men, friends of our own, learning from them of the sheltered bays and tricks of the tide that lay all along the orthodox routes. But Campbell had for years taken a sizable craft constantly off the usual tracks, using hides and anchorages that were not even charted, to find and intercept the poachers of the sea fishings. He knew how the waters ran in every creek and off every headland, and what they did with the wind in each airt. Gathered up within him was the knowledge that might have been shared by the dozen best smugglers of the 1790s, but which had not likely been before in the possession of one man.

  His knowledge was a treasure to us, and we grilled him for it daily after the shower. At night we worked over the charts we were to take, marking the white sheets with Campbell wisdom. When climbing, or sailing, one is always cautioned to seek local advice and information. These are gladly given, and are misleading with shaking frequency. On our trip, where local knowledge conflicted with what Campbell had told us, we always found that Campbell was right. He was, in addition, one of the only orthodox seamen we encountered before the trip who did not dismiss the affair as an adolescent escapade, and too dangerous to succeed. But then a master mariner, and a Campbell at that, who spends his shore leave in paying a professional boxer to punch him hurtfully, no doubt learns to be careful about which forms of juvenile folly he condemns.

  The time had come to get our seafaring equipment in order. Over in Queensferry the canoes were almost ready. We bought charts covering the Clyde to the farthest Hebrides. I have mentioned their white sheets, although they came back from the voyage with us sodden to a tattered limpness, stained with salt and sweat, and ribboned here and there into veteran strips as a result of urgent consultation on seas which were violent and wet. Such traces of usage follow when the chart tables of an expedition – our knees – are mostly under water.

  We pooled our existing climbing and camping gear, to discover that over the past year most of it had been in use, to comfort our sojourn in the Claymore office. Somebody lent us a tent, a splendid sturdy square little creation six-feet high with twelve-inch walls and a central pole. I wonder at what age people like ourselves cease to have more affection for a tent than for a house. This one was greatly loved by us from the start, although we did not know then how often in the next three months its cloth walls would stand like a rampart between us and our discomforts and doubts. It was a tent whose interior knew more hopeful joy than most houses.

  Only a few essential items remained to purchase, and we thought we could see a way to do this without the rash expenditure of money. Many of our advertisers had been firms catering for the outdoors market, and they had wisely seen in the Claymore the ideal medium to put them in touch with a new and youthful public eager for camping accessories. There was a Glasgow firm whose proprietor had driven a very hard bargain with Seumas in the matter of space-rates. Moreover, hi
s bill for the last series of insertions was not yet paid, and, knowing our man, we guessed that it would remain so as soon as he discovered the paper to be no longer a going concern. We felt it only right that one of our advertisers should get our personal business, particularly as we had no intention of paying for the articles. We hastened to his premises, happily outdistancing the news that our journal was defunct. Attended by the proprietor himself, we were supplied and carefully fitted with a wind-and-waterproof jerkin apiece, a couple of paraffin pressure stoves, and some lightweight cooking utensils, to a total almost equal to his debt to us. ‘Send the bill’, we said, bearing off our parcels, while the proprietor bowed us out as one businessman to two others. It was clear the hint had not reached him that we had abandoned this role.

  At another shop, also our debtors for recent advertising, we fared in a softer-hearted manner. When we got there to place our modest pro-rata orders, we found the concern about to close down, and in the first stages of selling-off the entire shop stock at throwaway bargain prices. Failures were in the air, it seemed, that summer. We came away, by choice, empty-handed.