Bruach Blend (8 page)

‘You must find some pretty strange things in your nets sometimes,' I prompted hopefully.

‘I'll say we do,' affirmed Willy. ‘Why only last time we were out the skipper was askin' us to put a name to some of the queer beasties we got in the net.'

‘What like were they?' asked Murdoch, taking the pipe out of his mouth.

‘For all the world like red balloons,' said Willy. ‘An' they live in deep water too. On the sea bed.'

‘They'd be some kind of starfish or anemones likely,' suggested Erchy.

Willy spurned the suggestion. ‘Starfish be damned,' he retorted. ‘D'you no think I've been long enough at sea to know a starfish or an anemone when I see one? No, it was neither,' he went on. ‘I'm tellin' you when you pick up one of these things it sends out a great squirt of muddy water an' crumples like a burst balloon, yet when we tried cutting one open it had the stomach an' entrails of an animal. We didn't know what to make of them.'

‘Indeed I never heard of such things,' exclaimed Janet. ‘Surely the sea is full of wonders.'

Padruig Glic (Padruig the wise) asked thoughtfully, ‘Did you say they were red?'

‘Kind of red,' agreed Willy.

Padruig nodded. ‘They would be what the English call a “sea squirt”,' he elucidated, and added with an oblique smile, ‘The name we have for them in the Gaelic means “a long-drawn-out fart”.' Amid wheezes and chokes of laughter everyone looked at me.

‘That's just what they do, then,' said Willy with a grin. ‘Surely there's no language like the Gaelic for puttin' a right name to a thing.' He aimed his cigarette butt at the fire and rooted in his pocket for the packet. ‘If it's strange things we're speakin' of there was somethin' we got only a few weeks back in the net. It was that big an' heavy we couldn't haul the net at all though we tried every which way. The skipper thought he was goin' to have to cut the nets free an' lose them but then all of a sudden up they came as easy as you like.'

‘An' what was in it?' asked Johnny eagerly.

‘Nothin',' said Willy.

‘Nothin'?' repeated Johnny incredulously. ‘What do you reckon was keepin' it then, a rock?'

‘It was no rock,' returned Willy. ‘The way we was haulin' a rock would have torn our net to shreds. When we got the net in we thought it would be damaged but there wasn't a hole in it.' He looked around at the varying expressions which ranged from wide-eyed wonder to carefully concealed scepticism. ‘I'm thinkin' it must have been a monster of some kind,' he went on defiantly. ‘A monster that was able to swim out of the net when it wanted.'

‘Ach, monsters!' broke in Tearlaich with a yawn. ‘If you believe everythin' you hear there's a monster in every loch in Scotland. Half the time I'm thinkin' folks are lookin' at a conger eel through a magnifying glass.'

‘I don't know about lochs but it's true there's plenty of monsters in the sea,' Willy maintained.

‘Damty sure that's true,' supported Erchy.

Tearlaich, who probably had less experience of the sea than any other man present, shrugged contemptuously.

‘Mind you,' conceded Willy with a cheerful smile, ‘maybe it's not just humans who see monsters. We had a fellow aboard once that wore these thick glasses like the bottoms of glass bottles; we called him “Square Eyes”, an' one day when he was helpin' to haul they fell off into the sea. The crew had a great laugh tellin' him they'd landed on the head of a big cod, so there's a panic-stricken cod swimmin' around the Minch thinkin' every sprat is a monster chasin' him.'

‘An' what would the poor man do on a fishin' boat without his glasses,' asked Morag, her mind flying immediately to the serious side of the anecdote.

‘Ach, he was no use at all,' Willy told her. ‘But he wasn't much loss seem' he was goin' off anyway. The skipper paid him off that week.'

‘Goin' off?' asked Mairi. ‘Where?'

‘Off his head,' Willy said. ‘He'd got religion pretty bad when he came aboard but when he started sayin' he was Jesus Christ he properly upset the skipper. “If you're Jesus Christ you make sure our nets come up full of fish,” he told him, “because if they're not you can start walkin' back to that bloody harbour.”'

I felt it was time to leave the ceilidh, but as I stood up to go there was a sudden frenzy of hailstones which rattled like shot against the window and hammered on the roof. I sat down again.

‘Indeed they near deafen the ears off me,' complained Morag when the onslaught had subsided and we could once more make ourselves heard.

‘Aye, isn't that just what I'm after sayin',' Murdoch spoke as if he was replying to the storm rather than commenting on Morag's remark. ‘I doubt there'll be little enough fishin' supposin' it's for mackerel or monsters if this weather doesn't quieten.'

‘It's nothin',' said Willy easily.

‘Nothin'?' expostulated Murdoch. ‘Man, I tell you I canna put in my teeths when I go out for fear the wind will blow them down my throat every time I open my mouth.'

‘You'd best be puttin' a string on them an' tyin' them round your neck then,' suggested Erchy waggishly.

‘Ach, it's nothin' I tell you,' reiterated Willy. ‘Not to a good boat.'

‘She must be a good strong boat you have,' said Erchy.

‘Aye,' Willy's voice verged on the reverential, ‘She's a good boat right enough.'

The knowledge and love of boats is instinctive in most islanders and the talk soon drifted to the merits and de-merits of boats the Bruachites knew or had known. Boats which had been wrecked; boats which had been bought or sold or laid up because they could neither be crewed or sold. And it was not only the men who indulged in the discussion and recollection. The women too participated, though, as might be expected, their observations were more concerned with the genealogies of the owners and crew rather than with the boats themselves. As when, for instance, the widow Hamish interpolated: ‘I mind that man when he was a bairn and if ever there was a wee monster it was that one.' Or again Morag's interruption of an argument as to the qualities of a certain skipper with the question: ‘Was he not yon man who had the wife that was condensed from Church of Scotland into a Roman Catholic?'

As I listened I found myself mentally attaching faces and shapes to the names of people as I heard them mentioned; people I had never known and would be unlikely ever to meet; people who in truth most of the Bruachites had never known except by allusion and who they were equally unlikely to meet, though, as was their custom, they had elevated such proxy acquaintance into a much more personal relationship. The ceilidh voices rippled on; old and young intermingling; some softened by memories, some sharpened by argument. I glanced covertly about me. In too many Hebridean villages the tourist invasion combined with increasing mobility had virtually put an end to ceilidhing as we in Bruach knew it, and not for the first time I wished I had the artistic skill to preserve the scene as I saw it now. The small room with its low wood ceiling and walls stained harness-brown with years of peat smoke, lamp smoke and tobacco smoke; the small curtainless window set square and black against the night; the gay linoleum, or wax cloth as it was known to the crofters, recently laid with pride but already moulded to the rugged contours of the driftwood floor it concealed; the sturdy wooden table, normally in the centre of the room but now pushed back against the wall to accommodate the company; the squat, so solidly constructed water bench on which reposed two full pails of water with the dipper handy beside them; the capacious oatmeal and flour barrels, each holding at least a hundred and forty pounds of meal, standing side by side in a corner of the room and disguised by fancy wallpaper; the salt barrel holding a minimum of two hundredweights of coarse salt which stood in the opposite corner; the peat bucket beside the fireplace piled to toppling height with neatly shaped peats which were the result of Ian's expert cutting. Clinging to the wall at the right of the fireplace was an almost skeletal clock which, according to Marjac, had stopped so prophetically at eleven o'clock on the first Armistice Day after the Great War that no one had since dared to interfere with it. The painted dresser was chock-a-block with everyday utensils and also was the site for the brass-based oil lamp, with its pink glass bow, glamorizing the paraffin it held and its well-polished chimney already smudged by the draught-tormented flame. There was no rug on the floor; the fender was a stout spar of driftwood and the low black grate it guarded was recessed so far into the thick walls it looked as if it was cowering away from the company and resentful that even a fraction of its heat should escape even temporarily into the room before being sucked greedily up the chimney.

But it was not just the setting that was worthy of portrayal. At the ceilidhs, unless one was wearing oilskins, there was no polite suggestion that one should divest oneself of one's outdoor clothes and certainly in winter few crofters' kitchens would have tempted one to do so. We stayed in our coats and jackets and gumboots; the old men still capped, the old women still bonneted, and we sat wherever we could find space. The old men had appropriated the bench below the window while the old women huddled together on the opposite bench like pigeons on a winter bough. The favoured, such as myself, were given chairs; the middle-aged and the youthful perched on stools and barrels, while the children who were present were perfectly content to sit on a couple of dry peats or simply on the floor.

As always it was the old people who dominated the conversation and it was a delight to watch their composed expressions becoming animated as they winnowed their stored memories; the children appeared to be listening attentively; the youthful were only partly successful in feigning indifference and the rest, like the incorrigible Erchy and Johnny, Hector and Tearlaich, while allowing their habitually firm mouths to relax into half smiles, were always ready with some teasing interjection which they hoped would spark off the spirited argument and light-hearted disputation without which no Bruach ceilidh was complete.

I heard Padruig say, ‘She's not a young boat then?' and I realized that the conversation having drifted meantime over a whole fleet of fishing boats and their crews had now returned to the subject of Willy's boat.

‘No, but old as she is she's stronger than plenty half her age,' Willy said staunchly. ‘The skipper was speakin' of gettin' a new engine in her an' if he was to do that she'd be as good as many a new boat that's sailin' the sea today.'

‘That's true enough,' declared Murdoch.

‘Was the engine givin' trouble then?' asked Padruig.

‘Not what you'd say was trouble,' Willy admitted cautiously, ‘but the way the fishin' is goin' these days we could do with more power than we have. Right enough, I believe it would be a good thing to put in a bigger engine.'

‘You would be better to get a new boat, maybe,' suggested Johnny.

‘Aye, an' then you could have it blessed like them fellows from Uist that had their pictures in the paper. I'm damty sure you'd get good fishin' then,' proposed Erchy with sly daring. All eyes swung towards Kirsty, for though Bruach itself suffered no ‘dom papists and their customs' Kirsty was easily the most bigoted. She primmed her thin mouth into an even tighter line but otherwise gave no indication she had heard.

‘Indeed if you told that to our skipper I believe he would give you a blow for it,' said Willy. ‘To his way of thinkin' you don't ever bless engines, you only curse them; he says that's the only way to keep them running. His wife takes him along with her to church on Sundays but he won't have a minister of any sort near his boat.'

‘An' he's right,' endorsed Erchy. ‘Ministers and engines don't agree an' it's myself has proved that more than once.'

‘I wouldn't have any of tsem buggers blessin' a boat,' Hector derided. ‘I was on one of tsese blessin' boats myself for a wee whiley an' it was a wee whiley too long. She was after puttin' me in hospital.'

‘In hospital?' echoed Janet.

‘Aye,' said Hector. ‘Didn't I slip from the mast and land astride a beam across the hold.'

There were shrieks of female laughter and the ever-calfish Elspeth tried to conceal her mirth by biting at her left shoulder as Hector clasped his hands descriptively between his legs. ‘God but if it was blessin' tsat boat wanted she got it tsen from me.'

‘It must have been serious if it put you in hospital,' said Murdoch sympathetically.

‘Serious? Surely it was serious!' said Hector. ‘Didn't it worry tse life out of me for fear tse lassies would no' be wantin' anytsin' to do wiss me again?' His glance challenged the girls.

Marjac returned his look. ‘Well, it didn't quench your ball of fire,' she assured him brazenly.

‘No, tsank God! But I was lucky all tse same,' Hector rejoined. ‘Tse nurses all told me tsat.'

‘Oh, and what a good time you must have had with all those young nurses attending to you in hospital,' taunted Janet, digging her elbow slyly into Marjac.

‘I did not tsen,' refuted Hector, amid exclamations of mocking disbelief.

‘I tell you I did not,' he repeated. ‘It wasn't tse way you're tsinkin' at all. I was after comin' round from tsis painkiller tsey'd given me an' feelin' all nice and drowsy when tsis hand comes under tse sheet and takes hold of my wrist oh, so nice and gentle like, an' here's me tsinkin' what a lovely sight is goin' to meet my eyes when I open tsem. I couldn't seem to stop myself smilin' at tse tsought. Tsen when I did open my eyes what do I see on tse sheet holdin' my wrist but a great, brawny, tattoed arm tsat was as hairy as a goat. It was horrible. True as I'm here. I'm tellin' you I was so sick I nearly bit it.'