Coasting (35 page)

Even as I was delivering the latest glazed Icelander to the bed of one of these tolerant women, I found it hard to think of their trade as “prostitution.” It was so flat and easygoing, so lacking in vicious glamour; it was a domestic service, like home nursing, as profoundly unsexy as the administering of bedpans and catheters.

I crisscrossed the city until it became a matter of pride never to need to ask for directions to any street, however short and tucked away. Taxi drivers share with gangsters and policemen an arcane urban knowledge which is deliberately kept hidden from the ordinary citizen. I knew where you could buy a bottle of whisky at 4 A.M., whom to go to for an abortion, which chemist still stocked Benzedrine long after the stuff had been officially outlawed; I knew one or two things that I mustn’t write now, twenty years later, because they might still interest Hull’s Chief Constable. Nor was this knowledge confined to the lawless underside of the city’s life. I was part of the before-dawn stir in the fish docks, with the fog standing thick round the deckhouses of the trawlers, the “bobbers” piling crates of cod on the flagstones of the market, working under blurred and yellowed arc lights, the tea stalls, painted up in bright circus lettering, the strolling Owners, in vicuña coats and bowler hats, the trawler skippers, grand as kings, standing on bollards armed with whistles, raising a scratch crew for a voyage. My private-hire license was a sedentary man’s ticket of entry to the strange, dangerous, smelly culture of The Fishing.

It was a world that was romantic even to those who lived inside it. Trying to teach English to fifteen-year-olds from Hessle, the trawlermen’s suburb of the city, I had a tough time for my first week or two. My Anglican curate’s voice gave girls fits of the giggles every time I spoke. Their satchel flaps were biroed, in enormous loving letters, with the names of John, Paul, Ringo and George. They were all looking forward to brief and flighty careers in Woolworth’s and Birds Eye Foods. But every boy had a serious faraway look in his eye. He was “going to make a deckie learner”—to be an apprentice deckhand on one of the boats in the distant-water fleet.

Neither girls nor boys made much headway with the reading I set them. They failed to thrill to “Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas, were indifferent to the animal poems of Ted Hughes, stared blankly when I roared out Vachel Lindsay’s ballad of Simon Legree, and picked their noses through the most exciting bits of my dramatized readings from
Great Expectations
and
Wuthering Heights
.

They liked writing, though. From the girls I commissioned stories based on a day in the life of John/Paul/Ringo/George, and received a pile of loopy epics in which the life of a pop star was presented as a round of unmitigated luxury and indulgence, soured only by the absence of the love of a good woman. From the boys, I asked for essays on the theme of “Where I’ll Be This Time Next Year.” The essays came in misspelled, mispunctuated, big letters jumbled up with small ones, blotted, food-stained, often illegible, but vivid and passionate in a way that none of the girls’ efforts came anywhere near matching.

In the boys’ writing, frozen decks soared and plunged in black waves high as houses. Nets, throbbing with fish, were winched in under floodlights. Wild formations of ice grew on every shred of rigging, and had to be hacked off to save the trawler from growing top-heavy and turning turtle. Just before the winchman’s leg was amputated by a loop of flying chain, the deckie learner sprang to the rescue. Down in the saloon, Skip himself poured the boy’s tot: “I knew thee for a good lad,” he said. “Thee’ll do right enough.” Outside the wind roared and the waves, tall as houses before, were as
big as blocks of council flats, as the trawler wallowed home to Hull and Mother.

Every sentence was salted with technical jargon. The boys knew the raw material of their world better than most novelists do. Their fathers and brothers were all in The Fishing, and a few lucky ones were already “down for a boat” as, elsewhere in England, one might be “down” for Winchester or Eton. The ones who were down for “beamers” jeered at “sterners” as the softie’s option, while the “sterners” ridiculed “beamers” for being as risibly old-fashioned as coracles.

This fishy culture had settled deep into the brickwork of the city. When the wind blew from the south, one breathed dead fish from miles away. Fish got into the drawer of socks and shirts, permeated one’s books, clung to the thin curtains of the bed-sitter. On hot summer afternoons, the reek of cod was so thick in the air that one could have bottled it and sold it for fish manure. No stranger, stepping off the train at Paragon, could possibly have been stupid enough to ask what Hull “did.” Hull went fishing.

Now, cruising up to it at midmorning on the river, I felt a surge of high elation. The town had been hideously bombed (people said “flattened”) during World War II, but from the water it still looked old—a weathered fringe of domes, spires and warehouses, straddling the junction of the enormous Humber and the piddling River Hull. I had arranged by radiotelephone to be at the entrance to the Albert Dock at 1215, close on High Water, and for the best part of an hour I loafed slowly along the wharves, already home, nodding familiarly at the Victoria Pier where one used to catch the ferry to New Holland (you could drink all day as long as you stayed aboard the boat), at painted names like Rix and Marr and Parkes and Boyd, at Holy Trinity Church, at the bird-shitty cupola of City Hall.

I had known that The Fishing was dead—had been dead for nearly ten years now, killed by Britain’s losing to Iceland in the Cod Wars. But when the lock opened to let
Gosfield Maid
, and only
Gosfield Maid
, inside the Albert Dock, I wasn’t equipped to take in the enormous empty hole which the death of The Fishing had left behind.

“Where shall I go?” I called to the lockkeeper.

“Anywhere you like. Anywhere you see a ladder.”

The Albert Dock was nearly a mile long and nearly two hundred yards wide. No one used its proper name. It was just the Fish Dock. You could walk from side to side and end to end across the decks of the boats—as I knew from having once had to lug, with the help of two amiable Danes, the sack of a twenty-stone Norwegian back to his quarters after a happy night on Hessle Road. It was a self-contained city of ships, with a city’s non-stop lamplit clamor.

It was just water. From the open lock gate it yawned ahead, colors marbling on its oily surface. There wasn’t even a herring gull in sight.

No, that was not quite true. Once my eyes had got adjusted to the shock, I found: to port, one trawler flying the blue cross of Norway and apparently unloading a catch; to starboard, a square-rigged sail-training vessel with a troop of kids swarming up in the yards, and another big trawler, a 200-footer, flying no ensign and bare of visible crew. That was it. In this huge dock, the four of us appeared to be here for the same reason that stage directors order a warble of birdsong to accentuate a long dramatic silence: we turned the emptiness of Albert Dock into a spectacle.

It looked unbelievably lonely, more than enough to make one sob for want of company. I tucked
Gosfield Maid
under the stern of the sail-training schooner, and my ropes were expertly taken in charge by two of Hull’s many unemployed teenage boys. It occurred to me that these boys’ mothers might have
George, Paul, Ringo
or
John
written inside the flaps of their old school satchels—a thought which brought on an unpleasant twinge of vertigo.

I said: “It’s amazing. When I was last here this dock was packed solid with trawlers. It was … nearly twenty years ago.”

To someone of sixteen, twenty years might as well be a hundred. The boys looked down at Rip Van Winkle. “Ay,” one said indifferently, “The Fishing’s long gone now, mister,” as if he were speaking of the slave trade.

This was how wounds healed in a civilization. Almost as
soon as they were inflicted they became part of History—the deadly pleasure indulged in by old men blathering on with stories that make young men yawn. The Fishing now was just part of gaffers’ talk, and the boys steered clear of me, fearing me as a carrier of further anesthetic reminiscences.

I walked the mile-long wharf. The flagstones were beginning to tilt and split, losing the battle to the creeping greenery of ground elder, thistle, willow herb and cow parsley. Rusty hawsers and piles of old fishnets had been swallowed by the vegetation. Ahead of me, a nervous rabbit nibbled and scarpered, nibbled and scarpered, as if it weren’t sure whether the wharf was now a legitimate meadow for a rabbit to browse in.

At the end of the dock there were the low, crooked lanes where the riggers, chandlers and compass-makers had their shops, where you could buy cheap jerseys, thermal socks, gutting aprons, smocks and sea boots. All shut, all gone. Their windows were frosted over with a cake of oily dust and there were padlocks on every door.

Beyond the shops, the small fish dock had had its lock gates removed. At low tide it was a hillocky swamp of soft mud, its only occupants the hulks of bikes and junked washing machines.

There were very few people about. One or two ancients were walking their dogs among the ruins—all men, no women. I was watched from a cautious distance and could feel that I was cutting a curious figure here. I had spent the previous night in Grimsby, getting ready to return to Hull in style. Bathed, shampooed, in a fresh denim suit and a Leonard of Paris tie, topped with a floppy wide-brimmed brown felt hat, I knew exactly who I must be in the old men’s eyes. I was The Fishing’s first foreign tourist—a portent, maybe. After me, the deluge. You could land coachloads where you used to land cod, and make a Rye-style killing out of History and desolation. Even now there were plans to turn the Humber dock into a yacht marina. Perhaps … perhaps … Could Hull turn into the Lymington of the North, with the riggers’ shops as seafood restaurants,
the chandlers’ as nautical boutiques? Clearly someone was hoping so.

I got the story of what had happened since I left in the pubs round English Street over the forgotten taste of Tetley’s No 1 Bitter Ale. The old men had all the time in the world to talk. Nor were they bored with strangers, as people were in the South. Hull, as yet, was no tourist attraction, and it was easy to sidle along the bar and into the conversation. My lonely berth in the Fish Dock was almost as good a passport here as my private-hire driver’s license had been twenty years before.

The story came out in rags and scraps, but pieced together it had the clear, inevitable arc of tragedy.

Britain had been bound to lose the Cod Wars. The few gunboats which were sent to protect Hull’s deepwater fleet were no match for the Icelandic Navy; and in 1975 Iceland’s claim to a two-hundred-mile fishing limit was ratified by the International Law of the Sea conference in Geneva.

Excluded from the North Atlantic, the trawler owners dreamed up a scheme of salvation. They could go south, base themselves on Port Stanley in the Falklands, and fish there. There were already a Soviet and a Polish fleet working the cod grounds of the South Atlantic; why not one from Hull? But the British government, from which loans were needed to fund this logical migration, was not enthusiastic.

“It were that Mr. Ridley,” one man said.” There’s plenty of fish here,’ were what old Ridley said. ‘Why d’you want to go all the way down to the fuckin’ Falklands when we’ve got seas full of fish at our back door?’ It’s like all them people in the government. None of them ever understood The Fishing.”

The Falklands project foundered. In Hull, everyone was at loggerheads with everyone else. The owners squabbled about the future with the masters. The mates and deckhands, who were paid on a share system with a percentage of the catch, saw themselves as proudly independent capitalists and despised the idea of forming or joining a union
to protect their jobs. The great thousand-ton trawlers were sold off one by one.

Some went to Australia and New Zealand. Some were converted into oceanographic survey ships. Some became supply vessels for the North Sea oil rigs. Some were sold for scrap. With each boat’s loss went fifteen or twenty jobs for the men on board her, and another seventy or eighty jobs on shore. When I’d last been in Hull, there had been one hundred and fifty registered ships working out of the Fish Dock; now there were none.

But what about the people? I asked. Where were the exuberant would-be deckie learners of 1964? What had happened to the men whom I used to take on epic pub-and-club crawls, for whom the end of a good evening was the contented discovery that you could no longer walk?

If they were lucky, they had seagoing jobs in the oil business, down in Yarmouth or up in Aberdeen. Some had taken to seine netting over the shoals in the North Sea, fishing out of Whitby, Bridlington, Lowestoft. Many were on the dole.

“History’s not been very kind to Hull,” said Jimmy Johnstone, who had retired after representing a fishing constituency in Parliament for thirty years. “It’s just History we’re up against here. You can’t blame it on Mrs. Thatcher. It’s just bad luck that the Law of the Sea conference went against us, that the Humber Bridge came too late … We’ve had a dollop of bad luck here, and it’s made people sort of … doleful, you know?
Doleful
. It’s an old-fashioned word, but then Hull’s an old-fashioned town. But it’s no worse than that—it’s just
doleful.”

“We’re still the world’s capital of fish fingers,” said another man at the bar.

“But where does the fish come from now?”

“Oh—well, some of it’s landed at the Fish Dock off of Norwegian sterners, but mostly, nowadays, they truck it in by road.”

Fish? By road? To Hull?

“And they’re putting up that new hotel by Victoria Pier, where the ferry used to go from. It’s going to be a grand place, that, when it’s done.”

“For tourists?”

“Ay, and what’s wrong with that? We’ve got some good museums, in Hull. People who are interested in History—Germans, and Dutch people and that, they all like Hull.”

It was true that Hull was doleful, but it was a long way from being morose. There was too much spiky pride in the city for that, too much skeptical good humor. If Hull was going to have to endure hard times, it was going to see them out with good graveyard jokes and a face cast in an unflinching, if lopsided, grin. It was taking the death of The Fishing in the same spirit in which it had taken the Blitz.