Growing up was going further out to fish, stage by stage, year by year, from slipway to pier, from pier to pierhead, to the breezy point of the Blocks, and eventually out to the furthest ledges of rock, where the rock cod swam invisibly, like silver mines on the move, glittering far beneath our feet. There the surface of the sea was a blurred black ripple of chords, and whatever came to the hook would snap out of the dark unseen. When it happened to me for the first time the sudden tug sent a shuddering up my arm and lit a fire in my groin, the urgent dark excitement of the huntsman, feeling the flick of life, and taking the strain as it turned into a bloody struggle. I was secretly glad they were hidden, these blind dumb shrugging mouths that couldn’t see the sky, couldn’t cry for mercy, couldn’t look into my eye as I hauled and hauled at the live umbilical, my finger aflame.
I watched the other boys disengage the taut rubbery mouth from the hook, smash the soft head twice on the square stones of the pier, wrench it with an expert twist of the wrist and hurl it bloodily to the swooping gulls. Never destined to be a fisherman, I always threw my fish back into the water. But the boys who became fishermen went on from there to throw out bigger and bigger lines, further and further from shore. Offshore fishermen used harlins or handlines, baited with crab, or if they were drifting instead of lying at anchor, they used sprools or jigs, unbaited hooks that relied on the shininess of the scraped metal and the jerking motions of the lines to attract the instinctive snapping jaws. Leaving the shore well behind, they used the strangely named small lines, each fifty fathoms long and carrying a hundred and twenty hooks, until they graduated to the highest class of all and threw out the gartlins or great lines. These could be shot in the firth but were often taken out in the spring up to two hundred miles away, to what the old folk called ‘the far-aways’, or even as far off as the Faroes, and there they went down over four hundred fathoms into the sea, searching for cod.
From a bent pin at the slipway, dangling in four feet of water, to a hundred-hooked line four hundred miles away, sweeping the bottom of the world – it was a long progress from boy to man, and some of us never made it. But the hook in the water was what counted.
Grandfather always went to the spring lines with something of a shrug. ‘I’m a net man, not a line man,’ he would say.
Herring would never take bait, he said – they were too fine a fish to be deceived by this primitive device. They were taken by the drift-net, by night-time and moonlight. So he thought nobly of the fish he killed and often sang about them.
Of all the fish that swim in the sea
The herring it is the fish for me.
But he praised the Dyker and his fellow villagers as being the most intrepid great-line fishermen on the east coast. Some of the crew of the Venus would even quote the Cellar-dyke motto when the nets were being shot for the first time in a new herring season, as if the driftermen acknowledged the sharper reality of the hook as the badge of the fisherman’s calling. Semper tibi pendeat hamus.
I saw little of grandfather in April and May when he was at the great lines, too far from the firth to come home for more than a sore night’s sleeping in between the long hard hauls. But before he left he insisted on the spring cleaning of the Venus and all her gear. My head high among chimney-pots and blue sunlit breezes, I perched on a mountain of white nets that were bumped along by horse and cart to the mouth of the burn. There they were spread out in the clear fresh water to wash away the weed and scum and salt of a winter at sea. Then they were wheeled up the brae to the backyard for boiling and mending. The boat’s boiler was cleaned out and overhauled, the stove lacquered, the cabin revarnished and its roof white-enamelled. New ballast was taken on and the Venus was tarred and left to dry, while the white winter nets were stowed away in the garret and the narrowest bait nets brought out for setting down on board. These would trap the smaller herring to be used as bait for the lines that would in turn catch the cod. We dragged the lines in stiff heavy coils from underneath the benches, where they were stacked for ten months in the year. Grandfather examined every coil before they were hoisted down to the yard for mending and carrying to the boat.
A great line was no thicker than the pencils we used at school but was made of Spanish hemp. It consisted of six strings, each seventy-five fathoms long, which meant that the whole line reached four hundred and fifty fathoms into the sea. Each man carried with him five lines to the boat. And so, with a crew of seven on board, grandfather’s boat had over fifteen thousand fathoms of great line to be paid out.
Each of the main six lengths had twenty snoods – finer sections of hemp with hooks attached by pieces of cotton tippin. The entire line carried a hundred and twenty hooks three and a half fathoms apart. So each man brought six hundred hooks to the boat, and over four thousand hooks were let down into deep water every time they shot.
The hooks themselves were a ferocious four inches long. Tying them on by whipping the hook to the tippin was a monotonous job carried out in the week before grandfather went away. That week always brought to the braehead house a musty dark circle of old men, all of them long retired from the sea. They used to come up to the house sometimes on their slow quiet walks to see George, and now they came to earn themselves an even slower ounce of tobacco, mending the nets and hooking up the lines on which their hands were now too old to take the strain. But their tongues were still supple enough, and as they worked they talked, telling stories of sea and sail. The old remembering hands saw giant cod on the newly fitted hooks, felt the shuddering strength of the huge halibut hammering on the line, the long hauling on the Spanish hemp, sodden and heavy from the grey North Sea.
‘You see this gartlin hook?’
One of the old ones laid in my hand the four inches of iron he was about to whip on. It was longer than my palm.
‘How big a fish do you think it can hold?’
I shook my head.
‘I once caught a halibut of sixteen stones on a hook like that.’
I held the hook between my finger and thumb and tried to imagine the terrible thrashing torment of the thing.
‘That’s more than three times your weight, I’ll be bound. What would happen, do you think, if you bit on this hook now, and I started hauling you up four hundred fathoms? Do you think your gums would hold?’
The old one spread his lips in a grin. There wasn’t a tooth in his head. He looked as if he himself might have come up through four hundred fathoms.
‘Do you think you’d be lippy enough to hold on?’
‘Stop frightening the boy,’ said grandfather.
The old one persisted.
‘I think your jaw would come off – and you’d go back down to the sharks.’
I handed him back the hook, my jaw dropping.
‘Leave the boy alone.’
George had come down the transe and into the yard behind us.
‘There’s worse things than sharks,’ he said.
‘Not for my money,’ said the old man. ‘But I’ve never seen anything fight like that halibut. Sixteen stones if it was an ounce. It was the last hook on the line. We were so close in to Peterhead we trailed it behind the boat, and it was sold alive on the scales, still twitching.’
‘George will have seen greater sights than that at the whales,’ said another of the circle.
George seldom opened out – unlike the black book in which he spent his days. But sometimes the breath of talk would stir one of his pages.
‘The greatest sight I ever saw was not at the whales,’ he said. ‘I was just a fisherman on a small sailing boat, and it was the turbot that impressed me most of all.’
‘I’ve never heard of one that took the scales at sixteen stone.’
‘It wasn’t their size,’ George said quietly, ‘it was their faithfulness.’
And he told the story I had already heard from grandfather, about how they lived in loyal pairs – just the way God had ordained it, added George – and how the free partner always followed the one on the hook al
l the way up, breaking the surface even as the great line was coming out of the water, so that the man hauling could sometimes scoop up the loose one, if he was fast enough, when it swam up into the blue air beside its doomed companion.
‘Yes, they were like Saul and Jonathan, these fish,’ said George. ‘Lovely and pleasant in their lives. And in their deaths they were not divided.’ And he walked back upstairs to his bible.
I knew what happened next. The great lead-weighted club called the gowking stick hammered them into stillness as they came struggling on to the wet slippery deck. It was easy to see a youthful George as the cold killer who’d gone on to wrestle with leviathan in his age. It was harder to picture grandfather slaughtering such faithful fish. Couldn’t he have thrown them back into the waves just for the beauty of their love?
But he was a fisherman. ‘We live by the sea,’ he said.
And I was secretly glad that sometimes the fish died together, and that one partner was not left to live out its life alone in those cold lonely depths.
Once ready, the lines were looped into the sculls, separated by layers of dried grass so that they would uncoil cleanly, and the hooks were arranged with great care round the borders of the baskets. Everything had to be lugged through the transe and out on to the braehead, where uncle Alec was waiting with a horse and cart to take the gear down to the boat. The bait nets and the lines were loaded first, carefully, and the rest of the equipment piled in after them, dahns and lamps and tins of paraffin, and on top of the heap the big bundles of corks used as floats. I carried down from the garret the terrible gowking stick, shivering at the thought of sixteen stones of living silver being first stunned, then clubbed to a brutal stillness as it drowned in the bright blue air.
On the Saturday before grandfather was due to leave, I went with him to Gerrard the fish merchant to collect two tons of ice. Gerrard’s cold store was like the North Pole, only it was reachable without sledges and huskies and berg-breaking ships. The ice lay stacked in huge blocks as high as the mizzen masts of the drifters, and they smouldered cold emerald in the green sunlight that leaked through the thick dim windows. Gerrard’s men attacked the ice with picks and sledgehammers as if they were fighting polar bears on giant floes. Crushed and sparkling, it was shovelled into boxes, swung into the cart and jogged down to the boat.
Some of the crew were waiting to load the boxes into the hold, where they were covered with a layer of coarse salt and stacked neatly away. I stood for a second or two in that frozen space, shivering and staring into the empty wings. There the fish would be buried in ice after they had been caught and gutted, a dense dead shoal that had lost its lustre, freed from the flux and flow of tides. They were all lying there – Epp and Hodgie, Chae Marr and Miss McNeil, they all swam out at me again from their black fathom – and Shuggie too, breastless and gutted and packed in ice, to be kept fresh for roasting in hell. And we would all have to join them on one tide or the next. Grandfather took my arm and brought me up into the blue heavens.
After that we went to Agnes Meldrum’s and Lizzie Reekie’s for the stores. Tea, tinned milk, tatties, ox-tongue, beef, mutton, pork, flour, butter, raisins, suet – and dozens and dozens of eggs. The outby boats went off to distant waters, taking on much more ice and stores. But by the time I was born, grandfather was an inby man, staying at sea for no more than eight or nine days at a time. He was too old now, he said, for the Faroes, and he never left for the far-aways.
But it seemed far enough to me that they were going as I stood on the pier watching the black-and-yellow funnel of the Venus bobbing and ducking in the choppy waves of the firth, the boat soon diminishing to a speck in the distance. I could see it long after it disappeared, saw it from all the remembered stories round the fire or heard at the head of the pier, which was as far as the feet of the old men went when they headed for the sea.
So grandfather quickly cleared the brisk fluctuations of the firth and reached the deeper northern water with its longer slower swell. Then he waited patiently for the light southerly which he knew always provided them with plenty of bait.
‘A cold east wind is no good at all. I’ve gone back to harbour in an east wind after casting nets all night long – and I’ve never shot a single line.’
The lines were baited with one whole and one half herring time about, and shot across the wind from the quarter starboard deck. When fully shot they stretched for twelve or thirteen miles, each man paying out nearly two miles of great line in a curving zigzag. It would take them six hours or more to haul them back in. With the wrong wind or weather a fleet of lines might take a whole day. Sometimes the wind would change to dead ahead for days at a stretch and become thick with rain, the boat sliding through endless curtains of wetness and not a single fish on the lines, so that the shooting had to be done all over again, and maybe again and again and again.
‘It got to the stage you couldn’t shut your fingers. Us old ones had to steep our hands in hot water to help the blisters. And the younger ones sometimes cried with the pain.’
Even in good times, grandfather said, their hands could be blistered with the greater strain of bringing in a bumper crop.
‘A herring in every mesh – that’s a myth. A haul that size would sink your boat. But a fish on every hook I’ve seen with my own eyes. A hundred and twenty fish on a line and not a hook missed out.’
And sometimes every single great line on the boat grew a shoal of its own, coming up heavy with the harvest, not just cod but haddock and ling, turbot and halibut and skate and the big eels – all kinds of eating. In that way they fished the North Sea all through the spring, coming into harbour on an ebb tide and landing their catches at Shields, Aberdeen, Newhaven and Dundee.
Often when grandfather was away at the lines the thick cold weather came in again from the sea, the east coast curse of hot air meeting cold, and we were plagued by May mists, with strong easterlies and drizzling rains that made the cattle stand still and quiver in the fields. The farmers called it the ‘coo-quawk’ but even the lugubrious Leebie managed to see the positive side of it.
A misty May and a leaky June
Brings the corn home soon.
I quoted this to the Dyker one May morning when he and his older brother took me fishing with them in the Jonathan, anchored just offshore. The two of them spent the whole day arguing about the meaning of the word ‘leaky’. Did it mean a wet June or a June so hot that the staves of the old water barrels would shrink, if not made by a first-class cooper, and the water leak out between the joins? Two bleached old statues sat murmuring about this, deep into their graven beards, as the boat bobbed softly on the swell. There was nothing the Dyker loved better than this, to be talking the day away while hauling his creels or trying the handlines off Cellardyke or the Billowness, with the sea like blue silk and the sun standing still in the sky.
So for all its blights, May remained the Dyker’s favourite month, and he always blessed the first fish he caught at this season with another of those sayings that have gone the way of the people who said them, and the skills they knew.
One drink of the May flood
Makes all the fish in the sea good.
After the mists the intense heat always returned and the country burst in an explosion of colour and noise and light. Crab apples flowered, hawthorns were thick with scented snow, the woods misty with bluebells, the ditches rouged with campion, and the first poignant smell of foliage and cut grass lingered over the damp evening fields and gardens. Thistles took the field again, wild roses and raspberries were in leaf along the liquid green lanes. The hum of insects was loud at noon.
It was the time of year when we were able to tear off our socks and shoes and go barefoot and blissful in the clear rock pools.
The first thing we looked for was a ‘pellan’. These were the shore crabs just about to cast their shells, and at this stage in their lives they provided the best possible bait. We grabbed them from behind and snapped off the small joint of one of the l
arge claws, telling ourselves that crabs not only felt no pain but grew their limbs right back on again. When the jointed claw was snipped and the nipper came away cleanly, the crab was useless as bait, but if the flesh stuck out like firm white velvet, then it was pronounced a pellan – and this was a death sentence. Killing it between two stones, we scooped it out of its armour and cut it into segments, keeping the flesh of the toes for the finest bait. Crabs that had just lost their shells we called ‘bubbles’. After that they became ‘softies’, till they grew their suits again, and we spared them, as they brought no fish to the hook.
Once found, pellans were easy prey, as they were quiet and comatose when the shell was about to go, and never nipped our nervous fingers, unlike the large bally crabs that would bite us at every opportunity, giving crabs a bad name among boys. The most ruthless of us punished them by relieving them of all their pincers, giving boys a bad name among crabs. In their quiet condition the female pellans were especially easy prey for the rampaging male ballies that scuttled about the shore, like black knights searching for half-drugged damsels in distress. Rape, not rescue, was the name of the game. They clasped them to their jointed breastplates and mated with them mercilessly. During mating the ballies carried their prize pellans around with them like spoils of war. As soon as we saw this double-act we knew that one of the crabs was potential bait and our penknives became sword-sticks of chastity driven between the two. Then we hurled the frustrated rapist into the sea and set upon the poor female, giving her death before dishonour.
Grandfather had his own expression for that glorious time of year. ‘It’s Tammie Limie time,’ he used to say.
Tammie Limie had a small sailing yawl called the Fisher Lass. His wife Jess ran a draper’s shop in the basement of a huge house in East Shore Street. Her constant complaint to her customers, rolled out regularly across the dark wooden counter with the bales of linen, was that the awful spouse, as she called him, would never wash his feet.
Hellfire and Herring Page 18
