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Authors: Lillian Beckwith

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BOOK: The Spuddy
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During all the hours of daylight Andy and the Spuddy were down at the pier, mingling with the fish porters and watching the comings and goings of the boats. His eye was becoming trained to the lines of boats and to their different responses to the sea so that he could recognize each boat long before it reached the harbour. He knew most of the crews and was accustomed to being thrown a rope to hitch round a bollard or being told to bring a hose or even being called aboard to collect the empty pop bottles to take to the grocer with the instruction that he could keep the ‘penny backs' for himself. Andy was glad of the ‘penny backs' because they helped him to buy more food for the Spuddy and so augment the scraps he saved from his own meals. Uncle Ben helped too by saving his own scraps and if Aunt Sarah ever noticed the total lack of food on her table at the end of their meals she made no comment. So long as Andy did not offend the neighbours by allowing the Spuddy to hang round the place she felt it right to hold her tongue. After all, she conceded, maybe a dumb boy needed a dumb friend and at least the dog kept Andy out all day so that he wasn't constantly under her feet.

After a long lingering autumn winter howled in with wild sharp-toothed winds that scraped the skin like a steel comb. The hills which had been snow-capped became snow shawled and soon snow-skirted; the pier puddles were skimmed with ice and fishermen and porters flapped their arms across their oilskinned bodies trying to keep warm during the minutes of inaction. Andy, snug in the thick sweaters his aunt knitted for him and in the ‘oilies' she had bought for him began to worry anew over the Spuddy's sleeping quarters. He suspected that wherever the Spuddy spent his nights it was too exposed a place for him to with-stand the severity of winter. There were mornings when the dog's coat was unaccountably wet and one day Andy noticed him shivering a lot. The next morning, after a night of blizzard, Andy found the Spuddy waiting for him in snow that was up to his belly; his ears were drooping and snow from the last flurry was still melting in his coat. Andy was sure the Spuddy was sick and resolved to go to Uncle Ben and somehow persuade him to help find a safe, warm place for the Spuddy to sleep. Down at the boatyard Uncle Ben watched Andy's passionately expressive mime with complete understanding and after feeling the dog's hot nose and cold ears he led them to the far corner of the work-shed where there was a great pile of wood shavings and cotton waste. Andy looked at his uncle with grateful comprehension and began to arrange the shavings into a nest-like hollow which he lined with cotton waste. Even before he had finished the Spuddy, without waiting to be invited, stepped into the centre of the nest, turned round twice and settled himself down with an audible sigh of relief. For three days the Spuddy hardly stirred from his new bed but lay there showing little interest in anything, even food, and Andy, fearing his friend might die, stayed miserably around the boat shed, rarely leaving it except at his uncle's insistence. On the fourth day when the Spuddy saw Andy he got up out of his bed to greet him. On the fifth day he was prepared to accompany Andy down to the pier and on the sixth day Andy was overjoyed to find the Spuddy waiting for him in the usual place near the main road. But henceforth instead of the Spuddy escorting Andy most of the way home in the evenings it was Andy who escorted the Spuddy to the boatyard and saw him comfortably settled in his quarters.

Chapter Seven

For skipper Jake and the crew of the ‘Silver Crest' the fishing season had proved a disastrous one. It had begun with a broken con rod in the engine which kept them tied up at the pier for close on two weeks and when that was repaired there had followed a run of bad luck which included fouled nets, a seized winch and gear damaged by heavy seas. When at last they managed to get a good spell at sea they found the herring shoals elusive and instead of ‘Silver Crest' coming into port with fish holds so full that skipper and crew felt justified in taking a few hours rest and relaxation she was arriving with a meagre cran or two which necessitated their turning round straight away after unloading and going back to sea to search for new grounds to set their nets, perhaps snatching only two hours rest out of the twenty-four. From being one of the highest earning boats in the port they had dropped to being one of the lowest – a source of chagrin for any skipper with pride. The crew were dispirited and worried by the superstition that the bad luck which was dogging them might yet bring worse catastrophe. But Jake dismissed their fears. Despite discomforts, disappointments and danger he would allow nothing to affect his driving ambition to catch fish – more and more fish to earn more and more money for himself and his crew. And since Jeannie, his wife, was so much away from home visiting her parents Jake was also goaded by loneliness – loneliness and the recurring pain in his stomach which only hard work or deep sleep could dull.

Before he had met Jeannie, Jake, in common with most Gaymal fishermen, had been a heavy drinker, spending all his weekends ashore in the local pub downing whisky after whisky and when the pain had first insinuated itself into his stomach he had drunk even more whisky in the hope of alleviating it. Eventually its acuteness had driven him to see his doctor.

‘You'll have to keep off the drink,' the doctor warned after examining him. ‘I can give you medicine but medicine can't fight the damage the whisky's doing you. It would be different if you took a bit more care of yourself but ach!' The doctor shook his head. ‘You fishermen are all the same. You abuse your bodies all week, working like galley slaves, going without sleep and bolting great wads of stodgy food and when the weekend comes you're away to the pub and pouring whisky into your stomach as if it was an empty barrel with holes in the bottom.'

Jake had intended to heed the doctor's warning but Gaymal offered only two places where an unmarried man ashore for the weekend could find company and relaxation. They were the pub and a district up at the back of the kipper yards locally known as ‘Chinatown' where the itinerant ‘kipper lassies' had their quarters. Jake had nothing against the kipper lassies; indeed he preferred them to the local girls who, he considered, suffered too much from what he called the ‘I want disease', but not being by nature a wenching man he had settled for the pub and since neither the Gaymal pub nor its customers welcomed teetotallers nor even moderate imbibers Jake had continued his drinking. Continued that is until Jeannie had come into his life.

From the day he had first seen her behind the counter in the local paper shop he had wanted her for his wife. Her smallness and primness delighted him and he liked to observe her pretending to frown at the teasing remarks of the fishermen while all the time, the enamoured Jake was sure, she was really finding it difficult to restrain her demure little mouth from breaking into a smile. He reckoned she was about half his age and he wondered if she would think him too old for her so he was both astounded and delighted when she responded to his first tentative approaches and when, after they had known each other for about two months, she agreed to accompany him on a visit to his sister in Glasgow he felt the time had come for him to ask her to marry him. As they wandered with apparent aimlessness along the city streets Jake intentionally edged her towards the windows of jewellers' shops and when she had exclaimed over the displays of rings he suggested with stumbling diffidence that he should buy her one as an engagement ring. She had declined at first as he had expected her to but noting the sparkle in her eyes when she studied the rings he could see the temptation was strong and when he pressed a little she soon yielded. He was earning good money at that time and the ring they chose was an expensive one; so also were the coat and jersey and skirt which she fell in love with and which he, in a glow of devotion, insisted she should, have. What did it matter if he spent in a single night what had taken him a month to earn? He had a boat, hadn't he? And there were plenty more shoals of herring in the sea waiting to be caught.

The change Jeannie had brought into his life had been at first dramatic. In her company he found it easy to stifle the urge to drink and during their courtship and the early weeks of their marriage and even during her first two or three absences from home Jake steadfastly renounced his visits to the pub with the result that not only was his pain less constant but his whole body reacted with a renewed vitality that reminded him of his youth. When Jeannie's visits to her parents became more frequent and more prolonged Jake, disillusioned as to her feelings for him and hating the emptiness of the house at weekends, relapsed into his former ways, beginning by drinking himself into a confusion of thought that he hoped he might mistake for happiness and culminating at closing time when he staggered home from the pub to drop on his bed in a stupor of intoxication through which the pain bored itself inexorably. In an effort to deaden the pain he conjured up the image of his wife's pale face, framed as he liked best to recall it by long tresses of her fine hair and, as drowsiness teased him he saw that her face was floating on the sea and her hair had woven itself into a net – strong net – fishing net in which several replicas of her face were caught and, as the net was hauled in through the swirling water to break surface there were hundreds more replicas and the hundreds became thousands and were no longer faces but herring – the ‘silver darlings': huge bursting netfulls of them pouring in a writhing, leaping, coruscating stream over the side of the boat and into the hold. Jake tried to clear his befuddled brain. If ever a fisherman needs to woo sleep he does not do so by counting sheep going through a gate but by counting herring: baskets and baskets of herring, cascading into the hold. How many? Again and again Jake tried to estimate but perversely, as always, sleep overtook him before he could calculate the worth of the catch in hard cash.

Chapter Eight

It was in the early hours of a Monday morning after just such a heavy weekend that Jake, grey-faced and bloodshot eyed, came down to the boat. The crew glanced at him with concern before turning to grimace at one another but they waited until they were gathered in the fo'c'sle and Jake was still in the wheelhouse before they commented on his appearance.

‘A drink's a drink,' burst out the youngest member of the crew indignantly. ‘But the skipper's killin' himself with it.'

‘It's that wife of his who's killin' him if anybody is,' supplied another. ‘She knows fine he goes on the batter whenever she's away from him. But she won't stay, not her.'

‘He's too good to her, that's what's wrong,' put in the cook.

‘It's just not decent the way she leaves him,' said the youngest member again. ‘If she was mine I'd take my belt to her.'

‘Island women!' exclaimed another. ‘That's them all over.' The speaker was an east coast man and found the islanders utterly baffling.

‘It's a bloody shame!' the young man continued. ‘He's a damn good skipper an' I don't like to see him made so little of by a woman.' He frowned. ‘Particularly now he has the bairn,' he added.

It was the oldest member of the crew who corrected him. ‘It's herself has the bairn,' he said quietly. ‘An' I'm thinkin' there's little Jake will get to see of him now she's got away with him.'

As he spoke there was an ominous clanking noise. The engine slowed, then ceased altogether. They rushed up on deck to see the skipper coming out of the wheelhouse.

‘Take the boat!' he shouted at the man nearest to him. ‘That blasted engine's done the dirty on us again.' He ran quickly down to the engine room. The old man looked at the cook. ‘That's it, then,' he observed. ‘It seems as if our bad luck's not done with us yet.'

After an hour or so of wrestling with the engine Jake managed to coax enough power for them to labour back into port where a worried looking engineer was waiting for them on the pier. Together he and Jake inspected the engine, while the crew waited gloomily wondering how long they were going to be delayed. The engineer came up on deck followed by a glowering Jake. ‘Not before midnight,' he was saying as he wiped his hands on a bunch of cotton waste. ‘Not a hope.' As one man the crew set off in the direction of the pub.

BOOK: The Spuddy
4.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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