By Saturday morning the gale was blowing itself out, and we took up the anchor and ran for Mallaig. In a whole week, not a net had been cast. There was the ship, and her hunger for coal, for nets, for paint, oil, gear. There were ten men, and behind them ten homes. All that the sea had given them in these six fishing days had been the two gift lobsters from the men of Canna.
CHAPTER 15
NORTHWARD
To magic green shores the horizon is hailing there,
Luck shall not lack, nor fortune be failing there;
Give me the sea and soon I’ll be sailing there,
Swift to the Islands of Glory.
Peace will be sweet when at last I can go to you,
Then all the seas of the islands I’ll show to you;
There I shall sing all the songs that I know to you
There in the Islands of Glory.
It is probably characteristic of our trip that a chapter bearing the hopeful title ‘Northward’ should commence with a trip to the southward. Seumas, who made that trip alone, had the best of reasons. For the last two nights aboard the drifter at Canna he had lived in a daze of toothache. When we landed, his jaw was stiff and starting to swell. We got some tea for him and bundled him aboard the midday train for Glasgow, where he might possibly combine some business with relief, if not pleasure. There he sat, in a crowded carriage during the seven-hour journey, and his cheek swelled and puffed into a tight glistening apple whose angry billow sunk his left eye. Passengers sitting opposite stared in a fascination at this display. One of them leaned forward at last and said: ‘Excuse me, your face is swelling.’
‘I know,’ mumbled Seumas sideways. He tramped the streets of Glasgow that Saturday night, straight from the station, in search of a dentist at home. Late, he stumbled, with his tale of a Highland train journey, into the chair of a man in Partick who tore out the tooth. Recovering in a mist of lifting pain Seumas heard the dentist making small talk with the question: ‘You didn’t see anything of these canoe chaps when you were up north?’ When Seumas had knocked at the surgery door the dentist had been actually reading some newspaper story of ours, and here he was clinking among the very molars of the expedition.
This trip allowed Seumas to pay some press calls and harry an editor or two into an even greater awareness of our progress. He also collected overdue payments for stories published, and set off north with some fresh shirts to see us over the last stages.
In the meantime I had been living, quietly and be-kippered, in the now roomier tent, and capturing such photographs as were wanted for publication. The kipper reference is to the main meal of our Mallaig story – warm new kippers, fresh from the ovens and requiring no further cooking. They were made in millions from selected herrings, split and hung from rods, which are latticed in racks up the inside of the kippering sheds: these are merely great hollow funnels of buildings. A loose heap of oak-shavings smoulders on the floor, rising and reeking among the racks of herring and surging in savoury billows from the shuttered roofs. After 36 hours of this the kippers are tanned and done – the cheapest and the richest gourmets’ food to be had.
‘They’re bad to beat!’ was the tribute of one kipperer, whose palate was in no way dulled by the circumstance that he spent his working life up to the elbows in kippers. The herring, as a food, has this strange regality – that he preserves undiminished the loyalty of those who work for him. No fisher, cooper, gutter, nor kipperer that I ever met had tired of herring. So few herrings were being caught at this season that the normal great contracts were not being filled, and it was easy to glean a few each day for our own kitchen.
With Seumas’s return, his face reasonably symmetrical, we were eager to get on. From Mallaig it was to be a pull north up the east coast of Skye in the hope of making the dash over the Minch before the winter hardened. It needed conviction still to believe in this plan, since summer seemed by now to have passed into winter. South-westerly gales ran straight up the Sound of Sleat in their three-day cycle; subsided for a day or two, or only hours; and blasted up again. At night, cold pervaded the tent, and even the inside of the sleeping-bags. We kept sometimes one of the stoves burning low all night, and in the morning would take our first bare footsteps on frosty grass. There was even the conviction of truth in the one or two voices which here, as elsewhere, delivered the warning: ‘It’s too late in the year!’ Even our friends now said something of the sort. ‘You’ve done well enough, boys, and the weather that’s been in it this year. Put these damned canoes on the train and away with them while you’re still safe!’
One afternoon we struck camp hurriedly and paddled away from Mallaig. A gale was blowing itself out, but there was still plenty of weather outside, even if it was now more or less with us. There was a very hard press of wind from the west. Once sheltered from the wide open sea by the edge of Skye, we missed the great manageable swell, and got instead smaller fussy breakers. Nevertheless, Mallaig diminished astern, and we knew that wherever we slept that night, it would not be there. On our right, Loch Nevis ran away in among its growing mountains, and then the shores of Knoydart were pushing at us. To round their westerly boundaries we had to force out into the Sound, until, once past the mainland point opposite Armadale in Skye, we ran free up the coast. The day was already darkening with twilight and rain when, with only a short passage made, we turned in behind the shelter of Airor Island, and landed in a small sea-meadow in the bay beyond.
Leaving Mallaig: the bundle at the stern is the tent, lashed there to break the overtaking waves before they reached the cockpit; even in Mallaig harbour, there was plenty of weather.
Here we found a surprising and pleasant little hamlet. There were few houses, and a fine school building, now empty, and needing maintenance to pull it back from the start of decay. When they told us, in the houses, that the school was likely to be closed permanently, we spent the rest of the daylight surveying it, round about the walls and tattered garden, and through the windows. The memory we have of Airor is one of the most compelling of all those we retain. Had it possessed even a serviceable cart-track it would have been still a thriving community; and with a metalled road it would have made a tourist heaven. Lying amongst its green alluvial fields, it looked towards Skye. The view of that rewarding island in the windows of the little school and schoolhouse was as splendid as any we had ever seen from any point of the mainland. Here, if anywhere, one could stay and put to the test those things that otherwise might only be preached of. Here, queerly revealed by a hazard, was the house that one might have vainly sought elsewhere for a year. In these bounds the task of the hands would have dignity and endless self-respect; and, minding the building’s first purpose, there might well have been scholarship too. So we proposed and speculated: but we have not yet been back to Airor.
View from Elgol in Skye: Eigg is on the left, Rum on the right; Muck is in the distance between them, and far on the left lie the hills of Moidart and Ardnamurchan.
There was a short evening spent in talking to this one and that, and the usual launching and display of the canoes. Rain slanted in heavily with the darkness, and we lay in the tent hoping for an early start with the first light. Later, a swinging lantern came down towards us, and the squelch of boots in the brimming bog at the edge of the meadow. It was a tall young shepherd we had been with earlier, come over to advise the pulling of the canoes in higher above the mark, as the rising wind would pack up the midnight tide and might float them off. He helped us to carry them up, and then was off through the fusillade of rain to his house five miles away at the end of a hill track – a brave figure; a reminder that, whatever switches and fuses and gadgets come to illuminate rural life, much will still depend on the stalwart strong fellow with the swinging lamp.
In the cold of the next morning we paid little attention to the weather, except to note that it was still going roughly in our direction. How roughly, we knew as soon as we forged out from the group of Airor Island and held north-north-east towards the mist
ed distance of Loch Alsh. The Sound of Sleat was white from shore to shore. Skye on our left, and the mainland Glenelg district on our right, formed a narrowing channel up which the weather and the tide gouted, and took us hissing along. The old routine started of the following breakers. We took them with what luck we could, welcoming them under the sterns, riding and fighting them when they burst, and springing for passing new ones, as if they were circus horses, when the previous mount had expired below us. It was brisk work, but it kept us warm and busy, while the familiar hamlets of Skye passed away to port. From that direction also came gusts of wind, diverted by the Skye glens, and hitting us from straight out of the west.
One of these gusts almost ended our journey. We were half a mile south of the Sandaig Islands, heading so that we might slip close round their weather shore and travel on in some shelter under their lee. We were level, 50 yards apart, surfing and bucking, when I heard a shout from Seumas, who was on the mainland side of the channel. All that was to be seen was the bottom of his canoe, turned to me as he skidded on for mad seconds on his right side, and his port blade paddling in the free air above. He had been untwisting himself from the debris of a corkscrewing breaker when a gust, which carried a small extra sea to ram his port side, put him over. With his arm submerged over the shoulder and his face awash he paddled on like a fury with the sunk right blade. He even contrived to feather his blade under water and to keep way on, for a back paddle would have pulled him under. In this way they travelled on their right ear for some unending seconds; then another breaker gathered. The new surge of this one gave Seumas an extra force against which to thrust, and he heaved himself and canoe upright. He came up like a grinning seal, even to the sodden moustache, which had not lately been trimmed. At the sight of me he laughed with great delight. I was gaping in consternation, and shipping water heavily through my open mouth. However, I considered he was entitled to the laugh. The paddle stock had been cracking in his hands as the wood had started to spring with his underwater flailing.
Hereabouts we met other seafarers. A cutter appeared from near Glenelg, and was in sight of us ahead for about half an hour as she made wide and wet tacks southward, pecking across the channel on the wind from shore to shore. She was making very heavy weather of it. Three figures could be seen, and one presently came forward from the cockpit and hung on the weathershrouds to get a view of us. We could guess her to be a small craft of which we had read, in which some young Danes had undertaken to sail round the world, and which, we learned later that day, had almost been wrecked on the Plock of Kyle, having been towed off its lee shore the previous evening by a Portree fishing skiff. At every plunge of the bow a barrel of seawater was coming aboard, most of it over the figure at the shrouds. But he stared doggedly until we hailed and waved, when they all waved back. What they saw were two figures waist-high in the sea, wearing red-tooried bonnets and towels for scarves – our winter uniform, as it were. As they passed at 20 yards’ distance there was a shouted exchange, and we skipped by them, hearing the drumming of flung water on their close-hauled sails.
Our opposite shore narrowed now to form the channel of Kyle Rhea, while we edged in near the Skye shore to find the smoothest route. Here we expected as much trouble as at the Dorus Mor, and for the same reasons. The tide, as it comes and goes, bores forcibly through this gap, and any small boat in the neighbourhood would rather go with it than try against it. We had, of course, the tide with us, but could recall at least one occasion when that alone was no guarantee of comfort.
The tidal run started opposite Kyle Rhea village, where the facing shores, from being two miles apart, crowd suddenly to a width of a few hundred yards. As if we had slipped over the tilt of a water-chute, we skipped forward, taking the water with us, so that we had to look at the shore to believe we were travelling at all. And to look at the shore, from our level, was to see a revolving blur of rocks and bushes, circling away from us constantly. It was a passage of no terrors; the canoes hardly wagged off their course, and there were whole stretches where paddles could be shipped and the travelling left to the sea, which was so eager itself to quit this squeeze. After three miles the water, grunting with congestion, expanded in a hiss with us into Loch Alsh.
Turning that easterly point of Skye at the perch, we were into water more sheltered from the weather. There was a four-mile plod to Kyle of Lochalsh, and a landing at last below the station pier, on a beach which had positive foothills of sea-wrack. It was here that we met one of our later ‘Spanish Armadas’, in the shape of an enthusiastic person who came tripping down the jetty to see us, summoning his friends with ‘Hurray! Here come the Scandinavians!’
Being in funds to a trifling extent, we installed ourselves for one night in the hotel, where the rain, drumming against our bedroom window, sounded much more threatening than when it smote on our tent. On Skye, now only half a mile across the ferry strait, we had still not landed. But we were this far, and it was easy now. What we should attempt beyond this was something to be decided at once.
Kyle is another Mallaig, in a sense; railway and shipping terminal, ferry point, tourist stage; but with a much smaller stake in the herring industry. Like all the larger Highland communities which are looked at with a close eye, it has its examples of enterprise. The village baker showed us his contribution. The Glasgow bread factories had captured a great Highland trade with wrapped loaves, and this baker had set up a hand-wrapping undertaking of his own. It was a simple device. An iron oven-plate was heating above two paraffin stoves. His loaves, new out of the oven, were wrapped on this slab, the heat being sufficient to seal the ends of the waxed paper. These loaves, infinitely fresher than the Glasgow products, were crossing the ferry by van daily and carrying a local and highly competitive product into the glens of Skye.
The same baker also showed us, perched and clinging securely on a rocky parapet near to his own shop, a strongly fixed fence. It ran round a field of which the fence was a boundary escarpment. The contract of fencing this field had been offered to two separate town contractors, and each, after survey, had turned it down at any price. A local craftsman was persuaded to try it, and he did the job. It is to be remembered that when the Highlander is told to help himself, the task referred to is usually abnormal. He will be criticised for failing to make a road to serve his own village, and one will discover that what is asked for is not a pathway but a mountain goat-track. He will be nagged for not keeping his pier in repair, and will be too polite to request that someone should come and hold back the Atlantic first so that he can get at the job. This is the same citizen who sets casually and eagerly to build a house, plank a boat, or strip an engine – undertakings to baffle even the most intelligent of his town critics. The Highlander has surely got faults enough; but it is time he added to them a sense of impatience with his advisers.
For the sake of being able to write from the actual territory ‘we have reached Skye’, we paddled over the ferry, landing and drawing up on the stone jetty of Kyleakin. This loveliest village of Skye takes its name from the strait on which it stands, and that kyle of water is called after Haakon, the King of Norway who is also remembered in the name of Kyle Rhea, and whom we met faintly off the island of Kerrera. The Norse left us many names, and little else. One looks for Vikings in vain, although the islesman who most resembled a Viking in my experience was once the ferryman on this very kyle.
Still hopeful of winning at last a break in the weather, and a gentle spell – less than a week would do – to take us up the coast of Skye and place us ready for the Minch crossing, we camped near Mrs Cameron’s tearoom. In that welcoming hostelry we had our meals. In the mornings the daughter of the house would come across the frosty grass and announce: ‘Your breakfast’s ready!’, and, freed for a little time from the oily slavery of the pressure stoves, we would dress and wash, and go in to eat, shivering at first until the first dozen spoonfuls of porridge had gone down. This was pleasant enough, for all our impatience. But the weather did not come. O
ctober was waning, and there was never even a tide when we could have gone off hoping to make a useful stage.
Still hopeful of the Minch, we came to a last decision: to travel overland to the northwest corner of Skye, nearest the Outer Hebrides, and to wait there for even one likely day. So for the first time on the trip we dismantled and packed the canoes folded, loading them and ourselves one day on the Dunvegan bus. For five or six hours we swung and jolted, on a road most familiar, across the dear island of Skye – by Broadford, the kyle of Scalpay, Ainort’s fiord, round Glamaig to Sligachan, the flight from the Cuillin to Drynoch, the fantastic double loop that takes the road climbing round Braigh Aluinn, the Splendid Hill, with a cheering glimpse to the other shore and the roofs of Talisker Distillery; and so thumping on by Bracadale and Caroy to Dunvegan; where, in the half-dark, we dropped the canoes on ourselves from the bus roof where they had ridden.
That night we slept in the new youth hostel, being the only guests for a week. At our own special request, the neighbouring farmer, who was acting as warden, issued us with six blankets apiece from the store. We needed them, in the great winds and the cold of these days. In the mornings we were no longer baling rainwater from the canoes, but chipping ice out of them. So indoor comforts were necessary, and we had them snugly installed – with the kitchen plenished by our own stoves and pots; the days spent in well-muffled visits here and there; the nights in ceilidhs round our own fire or somebody else’s; and a prayer always for the one good day.
The Canoe Boys Page 21
