A Book of Death and Fish (45 page)

It was time I phoned Kirsty. I’d sent some books, a few small things around New Year. I was never going to make the Christmas Airmail deadline. I was burning the late lamp oil, doing a bit of research, so the time difference wasn’t a problem – minus five hours.

Quite civilised. She was off shiftwork now.

It rang and soon there was a person on the end of it. Her twang seemed more pronounced. Not much Lewis in it.

‘
Ici ton frere,
’ I said but that was about my limit. Even without the accent and the lack of hand and lip movements. Her voice slipped back a bit.

‘Now I’d know you’re an Islander,’ I said.

‘Yes, a Montreal islander,’ she said. ‘West side though, so there’s a lot of English spoken. Suppose I should have settled down the coast in Long Island. Hardly a change of address then.’

There was a bit of a pause, nothing awkward. Kirsty said, ‘Is everything OK? I mean, it’s good to hear from you but…’

‘Aye, no worries, Anna’s fine. I know, you’re expecting something wrong. It’s not like we talk every day. And yourself?’

‘Back to routine.’

‘Yes, Gabriele’s OK – well, physically anyway – we know a bit about that now, the last parent passing. She’s never really got back on track. But that’s kind of why I’m calling.’

‘You’re no longer living with Gabriele?’

‘That was quick off the mark.’

‘Well done,’ Kirsty said.

‘What?’

‘Well done. Nothing against Gabriele but…’

‘Most people said they were surprised.’

‘You made too good a job of putting on a show.’

‘You saw that?’

‘I saw you were under a lot of strain. You can only do that so long. Part of my job is to see that, remember. Doesn’t give you immunity, though.’

‘And how are
you
doing? Really.’

‘Well, strange thing is, brother, I’ve been thinking of giving you a ring.’

‘Everything OK?’

‘A bit better than that.’

‘So what’s your news?’

‘An invitation.’

‘Not a head to wet?’

‘Hell no – a bit late for that. A ceremony. A civil ceremony. A marriage in the law.’

I don’t think I said anything.

‘You’re shocked?’

‘No, just didn’t see it.’

‘Well I could have been more up-front earlier. Suppose it was that religious stage. First it was the Bahá’í list of beliefs. I remember the exact phrase,
does not condone homosexuality
. Then it was the hardcore Christianity.’

I went quiet.

I was back there, in the students’ union building. They did a decent, cheap liver and onions. People were always giving out leaflets.

A gay activist challenged me head-on. Very reasonable arguments. He said, ‘This may not be directly relevant but please take a look.’ I said, ‘I’ll read anybody’s viewpoint of anything.’ He said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ I knew the tone in my voice had come out all wrong because really I couldn’t claim to be open to his viewpoint. He’d clocked that. I ducked and dived.

My sister’s voice came through again. ‘So you weren’t at one with the party line when you were still going to the Free Church? You told me you were there for the psalms and the stories. I remember tackling you on the
letters in the
Gazette. The whore that is Rome. The plague of homosexuality
. But that was pretty much the official line. You dodged that, too. That’s a lot of strain.’

‘I always kept the L-plates on. Never even tried to go forward to take the test on dogma.’

‘No wonder you were such a tight bastard. Do you remember when Free Kirk councillors were lobbying to cut the grant to the film society because they showed
My Beautiful Launderette
? The hardcore wanted to refuse them the lecture theatre in the school. I was home then and so were you. You were talking about histories of oppressive regimes but it was me who wrote the letter in reply. How the film was not
about
homosexuality. It was a political film about values in Thatcherite Britain. The correspondent had just proved the absolute need to show such films. And by the way, I thought the boys were quite funny and cute. But you must have wondered at my own lack of boyfriends?’

‘Suppose I thought it was career. You knew what you wanted to do. Nursing, then the District, then the Community. Then Policy. Sharp cookie dot com – the Canadian sister. The two languages. But…’

‘And you never guessed from my letter to the
Gazette
?’

‘I think I was too bound up in the values of Thatcherite Britain. Who was it said her legacy was that greed was now legitimate? I was arguing against it all while I was developing the property. But I could see it, at work. You saw it in the detail.’

‘Give me a for instance.’

‘For instance, I got a mooring transferred to a colleague with a boat. Free, gratis. In the firm. He got a shift back to the mainland as soon as he’d done his three years and the boat had never been on it. I knew someone else looking for a spot so I said, will we just pass the mooring on? And he says, well he can have it for a bottle of grouse or two. He’d never even seen the bloody mooring.’

‘That would be a cove from away, then. See, I can still remember the lingo.’

‘I’ll give you one more. Another guy lends out the garage he isn’t using so we can fix up a boat. Very decent. We give him and his wife a bottle of
champagne, real McCoy, rather than breaking glass on the bow. A new lobster creel falls off a lorry outside his house. He traps it and asks us what it’s worth to us.’

‘That’s a for instance. Should be one word. Maybe it is in Stornoway.’

‘Tell me about your lady.’

‘About time you asked that.’

‘Please.’

‘OK. Denise was born in Paris. Algerian father. Toured Québec with a dance company. Stayed.’

‘So how long…?’

‘Have we known each other or been living together?’

‘Been an item?’

‘Fifteen years.’

‘What?’

‘Poor line, is it? No, but there’s been ups and downs. Time out. That year, looking after the old girl. That was for me too. Working things out. Remember Canada’s a federal set-up. Québec has had civil ceremonies since ’92. I proposed right away. Denise wasn’t ready. I thought I’d lost her.’

‘So poor old Mary was more stable than her carers?’

‘I think she might have been.’

‘Hell.’

‘So are you coming over?’

‘It’s a fucking long way in the
Peace and Plenty
. Need a tanker behind us.’

‘Remember the Wright brothers?’

‘Just bought a house, with the settlement. A daughter still at Uni. There’s nothing in the kitty. I’ve a slate roof over me, roughcast walls round me and nothing else.’

‘All you need.’

‘Aye. Trying to build up the work. I’m on the pans these days. Sous chef. Relief chef. But getting a wee bit of a name in the town. Got to keep it going. I really fancy getting over though.’

‘I’ll book you the flights. My treat.’

‘Look, really glad you asked me. Call you back on that one, OK?’

‘OK. Don’t leave it too long.’

‘I won’t.’

‘And Peter?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I like you in skeptical mode. Don’t let it go.’

I went for the pouch when the phone was back in the dock. Crossed to the window and let a bit of night air in.

Shit, I was supposed to be looking at past human experience because something might be gained. The idea was to compare what’s happened in different places at different times. When I was studying interpretations of events, I was suppressing my own powers of interpretation. I wasn’t the only believer who ignored the awkward bits. How many good Christians in the Third Reich reluctantly abided by the State restrictions rather than face the show-down? And there are the good Communists who noticed the shadows of their comrades as they disappeared. But kept quiet. They couldn’t have swum against that tide. What good would one more death do?

The lessons of history? You’re not the only one. And hindsight does indeed help. Now for our homework question. At what date did sodomy cease to be a crime in the United Kingdom? It’s easy to forget that too.

Not soon enough for Alan Turing. He was a main player in the battle of the Atlantic. He was largely responsible for designing the computers which led to reading transmissions encoded by Enigma machines, when enough clues were provided. It takes time, even for mathematical geniuses. The breakthrough, from a captured codebook, happened late in 1942 but it was midway through 1943 before the numbers of lost ships fell again as the moves of the wolf-packs were anticipated.

On the 7th of June 1954 my sister was already out in the light and I was a twinkle in the olman’s eye. Alan Turing died from cyanide poisoning. The verdict was suicide. He was facing prosecution for homosexuality. It took until Gordon Brown’s leadership for Her Majesty’s Government to apologise for that treatment of a man who had put his mind into the fight against fascism.

I’m not really a sailor, not like Anna, but the relationship with
Tante Erika
did something to me. It must have done because I’ve woken with the sense of cloth on my hands. Terylene doesn’t do it for me. It sounds a bit sexier when it’s called Dacron. You think of these rows of zig-zag stitching. Sometimes they’re picked out in a pale orange shade against the off-white. You can see why a company markets clothing and kitbags made from sails that would be dead. But Dacron is merely a trade name for common or garden polyester fabric, in the version first marketed by Du Pont fabrics.

When you’re not fully awake, your mind works on good bearings. Glides. Like rope through Harken blocks. Small and light items of racing hardware, they’re definitely sexy. For a while, there was no doubt about what to get Anna for birthdays and Christmases. Anything that might get a dinghy going faster. First, there is the material to consider, in lightweight metals or innovative synthetics. Then there is the design element where material is removed wherever possible. There are more holes than metal so it is as light as it can be without sacrificing strength. These are elegant structures and they function well. I understand the attraction but my own kink is the retro sense of soft tan sailcloth. As long as I don’t have to depend on it for propulsion.

In fetishist terms this might be equivalent to silk stockings with seams at the back. The period detail would be about right. Then nylon arrived. When it was available. Not really a cargo priority aboard the liberty-ships which were escorted across the infested North Atlantic.

I accepted custodianship of what must be one of the last sails to be manufactured on this Island. Mairi Bhan was storing it in the house in Lochs. It had come from her father’s shed. There are layers of repairs but most of the stitching has been done by hand. She thought my attic was the place for it – returning it to where it might well have been made or repaired. A loft in a house close to the hoil.

Maybe her thinking was that the best way to make sure an object is looked after is to keep it in use. It was briefly back in commission to drive
Peace and Plenty
home across the Minch. Now I was trusting the little air-cooled Italian job.

I did think of giving the sail to Gabriele and Anna but it’s too valuable for everyday use. Whenever the Historical Society have a display relating to this Island’s maritime history, they know where it is. There is a characteristic smell, maybe from the last time it was treated, and the cotton is quite soft to the touch among all the hardware.

Go far enough back and there’s Captain MacDonald from Great Bernera. First, he’d ask the mate to go aloft to check the rig. Then he’d hoist himself up on a wire and study the details for himself. If he was satisfied, he’d really drive the ship, the Clipper
Sir Lancelot
, till the mate was shaking with nerves. But he’d inspect every detail himself first. Even MacDonald had to order the sails reefed, when the winds climbed the scale. That’s the image. The men are spread out along the yard with only a boot on a rope to brace themselves. They pull away at sodden canvas and shake the hail off the cloth. So each seaman can tie his pennant that will help reduce the area of tensed wing, which will drive her through building waters.

It wasn’t so much later that pioneers tensed the fabric to make a fixed shape that altered the flow of air and therefore the comparative velocity of it from one side of a wing to another. Soon after that, spluttering motors propelled these coated skeletons to stay in the air that bit longer. Until Bleriot crossed the Channel and Lindbergh covered 3,600 miles to land the
Spirit of St Louis
in France.

And it came to pass that seaplanes and aircraft with wheels that dropped on struts, were stationed at Stornoway airport during a large part of the Second World War. You know that one of the bombers failed to return
from the South Lochs area of Lewis but, much later, a Shackleton, named after the great survivor, failed to clear a south Harris mountain during a social expedition in the 1990s.

And further out west, forty miles clear of the Sound of Harris, more than one aircraft failed to clear the hidden high ground of the St Kilda group of islands. But there is one more story of one more aircraft which did stay in the air until the west coast of south Lewis was under it. Then it collapsed, between the end of the road in Brenish and the end of the road in Hushinish. Very, very close to the territory selected to be of use for the development of rocket science. But this wasn’t just a movie. Neither was the rocket-post adventure, in its original form.

I got this story from a tall young man who died young. An Auxiliary Coastguard. I missed his deathbed and I also missed his funeral. I was told off for it too because I was on the Island at the time. ‘You should have been there.’

I said nothing because the former colleague who said it was right. I’m not expecting miracles at my own deathbed, if it happens that way. If I haven’t set aside the time to say, ‘What can I say?’ then why should any bastard bother to remember me?

This dead man, who was gentle and enquiring and liked to take photographs with a long lens, was interested in aircraft as well as shipping. This led him to meet a former American airman who was returning to Lewis to visit the territory where he’d been stationed. This was his story. I’m filing it as a report, as I remember it, as he relayed it to me.

That phrase could well have been used in 1944 or ’45 in official reports on the Allied side, by a writer oblivious to the specific meaning the phrase possessed, in its German version, in documents signed by very senior SS officers.

That treatment came in the form of a road. There was no necessity for a section of
Autobahn
on Lewis, to bring the wreck out. That was only to come much later, thanks to European money, granted in implicit exchange for a lot of dead fish.

As I understand it, from the memory of an airman as passed to a colleague now in a condition which makes the checking of detail something I think we can safely term impossible, the road built to enable removal of the remains of one aircraft was nothing ordinary. It was engineered so that light vehicles could access the crash site and transport the shell. It may have been removable tracking. It may have been part of the development of a system which could prove useful in moving instruments of transportation and death across what was left of the continent of occupied Europe. D-Day was coming soon.

There may be traces left between two road-ends for devotees of industrial archaeology to catalogue. It could even be that the Uig road ended in Brenish rather than Islavig before the pioneering track left a foundation to surface later. But I don’t know and I do want to carry on with the story, rather than research this detail further.

Except that this is really the end of that story. It’s a bit abrupt, I know, but
c’est la guerre
. Aircraft became more ands more efficient. Sir Frank Whittle’s jet engine idea proved viable. Except we now know it’s not sustainable but we still use it anyway.

You know all about the Allied advance through Europe, concurrent with the advance of the Red Army. Many Lewismen had been
imprisoned in what is now Poland since their capture at St Valery while others escaped at Dunkirk. There’s the story of the two guys from SY who escaped from one such camp and walked or brassnecked their way to the Baltic only to find the harbours frozen over. They could row and sail and start motors but they couldn’t skate on thick ice. ‘We’ll try again in spring,’ they said.

They gave themselves up before they starved and so joined the later Long March, a few steps ahead of the fast Russian advance. One autobiography, written in Gaelic, describes the mountain of sugar in the outskirts of a smoking city. It might have been Hamburg. Described by my own late olman as Churchill’s Revenge for Coventry. Quite a long name. One German officer marched the thin men to the site of the bombed sugar refinery. They thought this was their end but no. They were allowed to gorge on the syrup-like residue till they had energy to continue.

There was no huge tragedy like the loss of the
Iolaire
as the survivors came home. Only a large incidence of dysentery and some isolated accidents. One vehicle skidded off a high bridge into a gorge. The uncle I never met was aboard. He is pasted into later history. Amongst all the boxes with photographs in frames and photographs in albums, there is one that haunts me. It’s the golden wedding of my Broch grandparents. The last image of the lost brother is superimposed in a gap in the line of brothers and sisters.

When does a story stop? I’ve got one more for you now. It’s a jump but I can make a good case for its relevance in respect of our discussion on structure and the framework that is essential to most vessels or modes of transport.

My olman did say more than once that the body is like a machine and I’m not going to argue with him just because he’s dead. When a body is under strain, it’s component parts can fail. It’s not always the skeleton or the flesh on top of it. It can be the mind within it. If you’ve ever been awake for most of a night and been unable to jump free of a needle caught in the groove of a repeating record, you’ll appreciate that.

And that’s where we should leave it but I won’t. I’m taking you back to a crash site we’ve visited already. I can’t really take you to that one past the
Uig road-end and I can’t take you up the hill in Hirta because I haven’t personally witnessed wreckage in any of these places. I have seen tangled propellers by the pier on Hirta. They’re tidying up the Second World War relics though the cold war portacabins are still in use.

But I have personally sensed the remaining relics in the crash-site in the inaccessible hills of South Lochs. So come back with me to the shell of an aircraft which has shed its belts of ammunition, in knotted moorland. These came from machine-guns, now seized. And of course the ghosts, snug in their flying jackets, shrug off the mist that is often dense, round about five hundred feet up from sea-level, in a position round about five eight degrees north and six thirty west.

Some ghosts are more prominent than others – coves I failed to keep in touch with and failed to visit. I never managed to shake or touch their hands. I have at least to pass on their yarns.

But of course it’s easier to tell you, about the tangled wrecks of aircraft on hills. Shipwrecks are more difficult for me. Less distant. My olman never talked directly about being trapped in either a tank or a bunk. I heard the details only when someone else drew them out.