Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  Recognising the potential, two men equipped boats to hunt basking shark commercially. One of these was Gavin Maxwell, an SOE instructor at Arisaig whom I remember only as a vaguely sinister solitary figure loping around the village – but perhaps this was coloured by Father’s dislike of him: ‘Frightful little pansy, wears dark glasses.’ The other was Mother’s brother, Tony Watkins.

  Tony’s first successful attempt to catch a basking shark had been with a hand-held harpoon from a rowing boat, the two on the oars backing off fast the instant he’d planted it in the fish. Diving, the shark towed the boat for thirty-six hours. They brought it to shore at last on the Irish coast. Slitting it open, they measured the liver and took a sample for processing. The results had encouraged Tony to continue with the venture.

  Mother’s modest inheritance had been safely invested, and never touched. Never spend capital was an article of faith to her, emphatic as thou shalt not kill. Tony used his to buy three West Coast fishing smacks, each capable of sleeping three in considerable discomfort, and a trawler which he equipped as a factory vessel. The hunting boats were fitted with a specially strengthened bow platform, solid enough to absorb the recoil of the Norwegian whaling guns mounted on them. Aged twelve, I passed a summer working on one of those boats.

  Each day was spent at sea searching for shark, and in the evening the small fleet made its way to one or other of the little harbours on the islands or mainland coast. No more than villages with a jetty, they consisted of only a pub, a shop, and a few cottages. Situated at the edge of the world, and in many cases connected to it only by sea, these were extraordinarily primitive places. All the inhabitants came to stand on the quay in silence watching us as we put into harbour. Once there, we used the ‘bathroom’, a bucket on a rope, then ate supper fried up on a Primus stove.

  After the meal some of the crew went ashore to try their luck with the local girls – often with success, for to them they were rare and exotic visitors – while Tony, three crewmen and I sat on deck in the endless northern twilight and played poker. He taught me the game, ‘Never draw to an inside straight … If you’re going to bluff you must come in strong.’ He was skilled in poker, he’d published a book about the game and played professionally.

  During the days at sea I passed the time belayed securely to the top of the boat’s wheelhouse, scanning the waves with binoculars watching for prey. In the rain with a sea running it was almost impossible to make out the black dorsal fin rising clear of the water that betrays the fish. Like the rest of the crew I was on a bounty system, paid a pound for any shark I spotted and that we succeeded in catching. It was an enormous sum of money to me, my pocket money at the time was a shilling (5p) a week.

  After days aching for the opportunity, Tony asked if I wanted to take my turn as harpoon gunner. Thrilled out of my mind, I was worried by the responsibility. To fire at a shark and miss meant hours, even half a day lost before we were in position for another strike. The whole crew would be let down; it would be unbearable to flunk it.

  Next morning it was light at 4.30 am. Our little fleet sailed an hour later, the hunting boats spreading out a mile apart in search pattern with the factory trawler following well astern. A breeze was blowing and the sea quite rough, but as we rounded the southern tip of Skye the sun pierced through the clouds to light up the mountains on the Isle of Rum ahead of us on the horizon.

  Just before noon one of the boats radioed that they’d sighted shark and we closed up into a pack behind the fish. I felt a thud of excitement as I spotted their fins in the troughs between the waves.

  Moving at a speed only slightly faster than our quarry we crept up behind the school. One shark separated from the rest, and it was this we went after. Tense with thrill I took my position at the bow, freeing the lock of the harpoon gun so I could move it.

  The shark was directly ahead of us now. It was hard to judge distance on the broken water, at times the tall black fin looked like a sail, then it would disappear beneath the waves. I was terrified it would dive before we were in position. Minutely increasing speed, we moved up on it. The steady pulse of the low-compression engine seemed to lull the fish, but I knew any sudden movement could alarm it. As we nosed up slowly behind the fin the monstrous bulk of the shark became visible beneath the surface, its black hide streaked with algae. It was vast, awesome in its size. I trained the gun on it but the boat was pitching in the waves and I couldn’t keep aim. My heart was locked up in my throat as I guided the man at the wheel behind me with careful handsignals until we were right behind the slowing waving tail. Ten feet short of it I fired, aiming for a spot just behind the dorsal fin. With a loud bang the twenty-pound harpoon arced out, the tie line snaking after it. In a rush of exhilaration and terror I saw the harpoon bury itself in the shark, the shaft fall free. For a second I was overwhelmed by panic, then tumult broke loose in front of me. The water churned in spray, the tail rose eight feet clear of the surface, swiping the boat a blow that shook the deck and buckled the metal band reinforcing the bow. The shark went down fast, the coiled harpoon rope whipping across the foredeck as I jumped clear.

  Towing the boat, the shark swam strongly for the open sea. Astern of us the other hunting boats were still stalking the pack, and far beyond them I could make out the distant mountains of Scotland. We let the shark tow the boat for an hour to tire it. Then, slipping the rope when the pressure built, the skipper winched the fish up cautiously, taking twenty minutes to do so. At last I could see its huge shape below the bow, the tail moving strongly in slow broad stokes … to become a flail as it broke clear of the surface, smashing repeatedly at the boat in a storm of spray, confusion, thuds and shouts of warning. Tony and I struggled to sling a chain around the tail so the shark could be secured.

  We made fast the catch. The great fish was the length of our boat, it lay tied alongside while we sailed back to the factory vessel to deliver it. As I stood on deck looking down at the shark different emotions streamed through me. Triumph, pride – but also something close to dread. A horror that I had done this, that this gigantic sea-creature had been swimming along quite happily in the ocean … and I’d killed him.

  A year later, while hunting in the mountains with a rifle, I wounded a rabbit which I could not reach to finish off but had to watch and listen to it die. Unable to put it out of its pain, I was torn apart by pity and guilt while I heard it suffer. The experience had such an effect on me I never killed any animal, fish, or bird again.

  For me Arisaig was the kingdom of heaven, a savage unpopulated wilderness of beauty and adventure where wild roses bloomed behind the reed beds on the loch’s shore, where calm blue sea lapped white island beaches and the empty hills rose steep and silent but for the harsh cry of the raven and hooded crows. At the time we moved there, few of those remaining in the depopulated village had ever left it. Most had not travelled even as far as Fort William. Now, because of the war, no able-bodied men between eighteen and fifty were left. Those few I saw loitering in the village, who when it wasn’t raining sat on stones by the shore outside the shop, were physically handicapped or soft in the head.

  The lives of all were governed by the Church. All pleasure and enjoyment was frowned on – the only recreations available were watching the single street from behind lace curtains, gossip, and drink. And, every two or three months, a ceilidh.

  This took place in the village hall, a ramshackle wooden building with a leaking roof, separated from our manse’s garden by a hedge. It had an old petrol-driven generator which often broke down but usually produced enough power for a dim electric light. Seated on hard wooden chairs, or on benches fixed to the walls, the whole village attended, even the infirm and mad. All had dressed in their Sunday best. The men had wet-combed their hair flat; in threadbare suits and shirts without a collar they perched stiffly along the benches, silent and attentive. Almost all were smoking, either pipes or thin handrolled cigarettes they held cupped in the hand. Seated apart from the men in the body of the hall
were the women. They wore woollens, long skirts and heavy shoes, their capes and oilskin hats stowed neatly beneath their seats. None of the women smoked. None wore make-up and their stern craggy faces showed an impregnable fortitude. Even the young looked middle-aged.

  The hall filled up with cigarette smoke as the ceilidh continued, it coiled in the beams of the rudimentary spotlights trained on the small stage. The talent was native to the village, the acts familiar: Donald the Post dressed up in kilt and sporran played the bagpipes; Marjorie Post, his daughter, performed the Highland fling and sword dance in full costume, kilt, ruffled lace blouse, tartan stockings and buttoned shoes; Bella Shop did recitations she composed herself; Wee Ian, a retired seaman whose eyes floated in sagging pouches filled with blood, reeled off epics in a hoarse wrecked voice, coughing abominably between verses. But mostly the evening was song.

  Illuminated by the flickering yellow light, in itself a novel luxury, these evenings in the hall were magical. The performers sang of doomed causes, slaughtered clans, defeat and loss, and their laments were of a piercing sadness:

  Ye’ll take the high road

  And I’ll take the low road

  And I’ll be in Scotland afore yee…

  In the past they’d left their crofts only to accompany their clan chief as a warband in which many would perish, hacked to pieces on alien soil. They had to find their way back to their ancestral home; ‘the low road’ was death.

  The villagers were not a happy lot – poor souls, they had little to be happy about. Their voices were held low, they rarely met your eye, showed no reaction. Their harsh lives had taught them to endure, but not to smile or ever to show emotion. Yet listening to those laments of parting, failure, loss and death, whose words they knew by heart and murmured as they heard, they were transported. Their faces became rapt; many wept. Despair unsealed their true being and they came alive.

  Although it was our home, as a family we were never accepted by the villagers; only Nanny was asked into their houses. I was always the foreigner, the English boy. I left the place aged sixteen, not to return until I was sixty. Then, on my second day back I walked down to what was still the only shop to buy bread and milk. Having got what I needed I started home; while climbing the hill from the village to the manse I drew level with an old fellow resting on his stick while regaining his breath for the ascent. I glanced at him as I went by and within the broken-veined wreckage of his face I glimpsed the ghillie’s son I’d been at school with fifty years before. ‘Good day,’ I said, and he peered at me.

  ‘Och it’s you,’ he said after a few moments in an absolutely flat voice. ‘You blew up the wasps’ nest with a bomb; you’ve been away.’ He paused and asked accusingly, ‘When are you leaving?’

  It was the sort of welcome I was used to, but I persisted; we lingered and we spoke, and over the dram or two in the manse which followed our chance encounter on that rainswept slope I told him something of what had happened to me in those four and a half decades since I’d left the kingdom and headed south into the world that lay outside its bounds. In time he departed, but in the ensuing days the gist of the personal history I’d related to him spread around the village for, despite TV which now almost everybody possessed, gossip and prurient curiosity in others’ lives still remained the principal activity of the place.

  Over the next week as I went about the village (now more populous, prosperous and better dressed, with street lighting but essentially unchanged) I became conscious of something extraordinary taking place around me. Running into people I hadn’t seen since childhood, I met not hostility as before but instead cordiality and welcome. Their stony natures softened, they warmed to me in a way they never had before. In my defeat and destitution, which all now knew about, I’d proved myself to them. They could accept me; I was received as a native son come home; the prodigal had returned, suitably ruined.

  3

  Stirling

  Hurst Grange Boarding School for Boys, in Stirling, was not a ‘good’ school. It would not be true to say it came bottom of the league of Britain’s prep schools, for the sad truth was it didn’t even feature. No pupil from it had ever been known to win a scholarship to a public school and, though its cricket and rugby teams did compete against two equally unknown prep schools, they resolutely failed to distinguish themselves. But Hurst Grange had one compelling advantage, it was cheap. For with Father still away at war, the remainder of my education had been safely left with Mother, and Mother was pathologically stingy over money. She was stingy in the way some people are born with green eyes or the Y chromosome in their blood. She couldn’t do anything to alter it, it was part of her. And the fees at Hurst Grange were just so temptingly lower than anywhere else.

  This trait was certainly not inherited. Her grandfather had been rich; his only son, her father, Colonel Watkins, recklessly extravagant. As a child she and her brothers, Gino and Tony, had been brought up in a house in Eaton Place and cared for by Nanny. Colonel Watkins was in the Coldstream Guards and spent little time at home. Jennie, his wife, ran the household on accounts with local shops, principally Harrods. When the bills were sent in at the end of each month they were forwarded to her husband’s elderly mother to settle.

  Colonel Watkins was a lean man with a thin straight nose and moustache, who looked the world boldly in the eye without particularly liking what he saw. His regimental duties were undemanding but he enjoyed an active life, travelling, skiing and hunting chamois in the Alps. Hopeless in business, he soon lost the capital he’d inherited. Leaving the army at the age of forty, he became a king’s messenger. On an errand to Moscow he bought two half-grown bears as a present for his children. On a later mission he was despatched to Cairo by sea. It was inconvenient to participate in the liner’s social life with a briefcase chained to his wrist so he removed it, and on arrival in Port Said it could not be found. When reporting to the British ambassador, he had to explain that he’d lost it. The ambassador roared with laughter, assuring him that anything of importance was sent by cable, but on his return to England he sadly found himself without a job.

  By this time in life he knew he had TB and moved to a sanatorium specialising in the illness in Davos, Switzerland. This became his home and his wife, children and Nanny joined him for skiing holidays. When they were not with him, which was most of the time, he led the cosseted life of an invalid, sat in the sun with a rug across his legs, and increasingly coughed blood. An entertaining if capricious man, he took up with a glamorous Austrian in her thirties, Countess Hoyös. After a time it became clear he would not be returning to England.

  In Eaton Place Jennie, his wife, found herself in an impossible situation. She had three children, Nanny and the servants to support, and school bills to pay. For money she depended on intermittent cheques from her husband’s ancient mother in Florence. One morning after breakfast Jennie Watkins put on a hat and coat, kissed her children goodbye and caught a train to Eastbourne. There she took a taxi to Beachy Head, a headland plunging to the sea below. Then she simply disappeared. Presumably she walked to the cliff’s edge and jumped, but her body was never recovered and she left no note.

  The effect upon her three children and on Nanny must have been devastating, but her death was never admitted. As with Gino’s in the Arctic a few years later, it was not mentioned and her name never brought up in conversation. Mother and her two brothers continued to live at Eaton Place, looked after by Nanny. Although the house was large, Nanny slept in a cot in Mother’s bedroom until Mother was eighteen years old, was presented at Court, and ‘came out’ as a deb to do the London Season.

  Hurst Grange consisted of a pair of stern nineteenth-century houses overlooking Stirling Park, joined together by a cheaply built wooden annexe. The once-white paint on the rickety plank façade of this annexe had over the years turned grey, flaked and curled back in scales, but the severe frontages of the twin houses supporting it were built of dark, almost black granite like the rest of the town. In the wet their ap
pearance was particularly forbidding.

  To get to the school from Arisaig at the start of my first term involved a six-hour journey, two trains, and a linking country bus. ‘Now you stick up for yourself,’ Nanny told me as I set off, aged ten.

  It was necessary to do so. Again I was the only English boy, surrounded by two dozen Scots. Understandably I was regarded with extreme suspicion from the start. My memories are of being almost always cold and always hungry. Fees were so low it must have taken diligent planning and strict control for the school to break even, let alone show any slim margin of profit. Mr Pope, the headmaster, played his part by selecting teaching staff whose personality or academic shortfall made it impossible for them to find other work, while the domestic and catering side was administered by Mrs Green, the housekeeper, who ran it as a private fiefdom. A large woman with swelling forearms, she was married to Mr Green, the small fox-faced French and games master. Their 18-year-old daughter, a repressed bad-tempered miss who cuffed the heads of boys she had it in for, was school matron.

  But the syllabus and spirit of the school was set by the headmaster, Mr Pope, a one-armed zealot and crusading Christian fired by such ecstatic fervour he’d beat the edge of the pulpit as he preached and the empty sleeve of his tweed jacket would jerk free from his coat pocket in a frenzy. When he taught class or walked the school’s dingy corridors and shabby dormitories he held himself upright and stiff. He twitched though, and even to a child – perhaps particularly to a child – he looked to be in a state of extreme tension. At times his control snapped and, scarlet and perspiring, eyes swelling from his face, he gave way to bouts of almost insane rage. It was an alarming sight, and fortunately these occasions were rare. Usually he remained imprisoned within a tight constricting rectitude destined one day to shatter under the strain and bring him to disgrace.