Bleak: The Mundane Comedy

Part I

Growing Pains

‘Island exports’: The Loch Seaforth with herring barrels, 1960s. From the T B Macaulay Collection, by kind permission of Mrs Kirsty Maciver.

Cur-na-Mara

After the war, my father worked as the Collector of Dues for the Stornoway Pier and Harbour Commission. He met my mother in the ticket office at the ferry terminal for MacBrayne shipping company. Soon after, in 1955, they got married. I was born in 1956. Two years later, my brother Iain arrived, then Donald in 1960 and Kenneth Malcolm in 1964. It’s how things were done.

At the time, the mainland connection with Stornoway was the railhead at Mallaig with a stop-over at Kyle of Lochalsh. The mail steamer that plied that route from 1947 to 1972 was the Loch Seaforth. And in all that time it only ever missed one sailing as a result of bad weather: the 31st of January, 1953, when the 7,000- tonne cargo liner Clan MacQuarrie ran aground at Borve on the west coast of Lewis, resulting in the largest ‘breeches buoy’ rescue in history.

Much was made of the barely imaginable ferocity of that storm. But it was the fact that even the Loch Seaforth had not sailed that night that emphatically put it into perspective.

As an adult, you are the sum total and resolution of all your mistakes. In time you might stand at the same vantage point your parents once did, recognise the place and experience a kind of retroactive empathy. As I have. Even so, I still find it baffling as to why they thought it a good idea to take four young children on a near twenty-four-hour round trip to Mallaig on the Loch Seaforth. They told us we were going on a cruise.

My youngest brother was still a baby, so I could only have been eight years old. The outward leg was overnight and, just before midnight, long past our bedtime, we got a lift into Stornoway and drew up outside the art deco ferry terminal on Number 1 Pier, boarding via the dimly lit, steep gangplank. The weather was not remarkable enough to recall.

With her graphic black, white and red livery, embellished with gold, the Loch Seaforth was the flagship of MacBrayne fleet. An impressive, imposing vessel, she embodied the stout values of pride, order and competence in the established tradition of British merchant shipping. Her handsome nautical trim an ensemble of wooden railings and decking, lifebelts and lifeboats, coiled ropes and fluttering flags.

On board, my parents talked and smoked with acquaintances in the haze of the saloon while we ran around and explored. There was an air of general conviviality and anticipation. A chatter and hum. Soon after casting off, we were taken down to our quarters towards the bow on the starboard side.

It was not spacious. Or comfortable. The mattresses were unyielding and covered in a bristly, stippled material while the ground tone was the thundering thrum and smell of the engines, counterpointed by the pervasive aftertaste of the galley. None of which mattered in the broader context of this huge adventure.

As we cleared the harbour and arced our way out to sea, the initially benign motion of the ship gradually matured into a slow, metronomic swing. The ominous development reaching its optimum when the porthole above our berths began to submerge under a green and white froth and then yaw up to the night sky as a recurrent black hole.

Bottled in our cabin, we watched this hypnotic ballet as excitement fought exhaustion and an encroaching queasiness, until exhaustion and oblivion prevailed.

And morning arrived. At around 6am we entered Loch Alsh and approached Kyle in a pale grey, smudged drizzle. Dense, low cloud cropped the surrounding mountains. The vessel was stable and although sleep had quelled the nausea I had incubated during the night, it had not dispelled it. I had no appetite for a full breakfast of porridge, bacon and eggs, or even tea and toast.

Out on deck, there was activity. Crew members paced, shouted and flung ropes as the ship manoeuvred and docked. We were on the mainland. And the thrill of exploring Kyle, if only for an hour or so, was restorative. Fuelled by our imagination, my brother Iain and I raced down the gangplank and along the pier. The main road turned to the right along the seafront but straight ahead it rose. We set out to crest the low hill and explore the town hinterland, only to find, two minutes later, that there was nothing beyond that point but mountain and moor. We had plenty of that at home. It was an early lesson in expectation management.

A couple of hours later, we were in Mallaig in the rain and spent some time in a chandlery, looking at fishing lures, gamely maintaining the sense of adventure and novelty. We had tea and scones in a nearby hotel. By now I had learned that Stornoway was a huge town. Another lesson: appreciate what you have.

Still, I felt better. Soon be home. In fact, we were only halfway.

The sheltered waters and relative calm between Kyle and Mallaig banished the half-memory of the overnight crossing, and as we made our passage back up the Sound of Sleat we sat in the dining room as a family for high tea. The setting aspired to a floating Grand Hotel: a small-scale, budget version of the imperial aesthetic of the great ocean liners. We were formally attired for public viewing in shirts, ties, V-neck pullovers, school blazers, short trousers and knee-high socks, with polished shoes and combed hair. My parents, a snapshot in Sunday best.

The serving staff in aprons and white tunics brought fried chops, liver and onions, steak pie, mashed potatoes, boiled vegetables, side dishes, bread rolls, pudding and custard in lavish portions. As if it was intended as personal ballast. Emblematic amid the colossal spread was a jaundice-yellow pickled cauliflower floret.

Growing boys, we ate heartily, and as we finished our meal the Loch Seaforth headed out of Loch Alsh and into the open waters of the Minch and the final leg of our cruise.

And then, a suggestion of motion. A saucer slid tentatively towards me. I pushed it back but it came at me again. More assertively. More aggressively. Soon the condiments, cutlery and crockery began to skid and skim across the counters and table tops in choreographed chaos, and the serving staff began to collect all loose items from each surface. The room swayed. The horizon dipped. The ship began to climb and plunge at ever more improbable and alarming gradients. She rose and fell, fell and rose, rolled and rolled.

The wind whipped plumes of spray and spume across the decks and lathered the windows. The sea was a sullen, angry, colourless grey, streaked with white. Horizon blended into sky. Passengers who stood up became silent-movie comedy drunks ridiculously compensating for each lurch, slew and stagger as they slalomed through the tables. The crew waltzed on, collecting ashtrays.

Intensified by the suffocating heat, the smell of diesel, galley and cigarettes now infected everything. In no time, it had become oppressive, overpowering, unbearable. And there could be no escape, respite or sanctuary in the cradle of sleep or the bosom of the Sound of Sleat. Iain and Donald looked and felt like I did. Pale, clammy, unhappy. We’d stopped talking.

My father took charge, led us outside, and we emerged into a shockingly cold, violently windy brine-wash. A saline slap in the face. But still the better of the two hopeless options available: inside or on deck.

Now sickness broke inside me like a malignant egg. My stomach tensed, tightened, began to spasm, and I blurted out my first instalment of vomit, at pressure, downwind. And again. And again. And yet again.

It became an uncontrollable, autonomous function, like your heartbeat or metabolism. Helplessly, I watched as a viscous eruption, cobwebbed by the wind into a long spiralling ribbon, whirled past a startled passenger who had emerged on deck. An ethereal, graceful thing, it flecked the shoulder of his mackintosh before it atomised and vanished in the haze.

Time telescoped, misery condensed and distilled. The universe collapsed, concentrated, foamed and churned in the crucible of my being. I retched until there could surely not be a thimbleful of nutrient contaminant left. And still it kept coming. Heaving, hoiking, gagging, my viscera a clenched fist, until there were only dry cramping contractions. Crushed with exhaustion, my ribcage vacuum-packed by the relentless, unstoppable internal effort.

Only if Hell was a worse version of what I was going through did I want to stay alive. But what could be worse than this?

Pitilessly, mercilessly, it went on. Five hours, six hours. What did it matter? It was incurable. I didn’t even have the energy to care when there came a perceptible lessening in extremity and severity as we neared and took shelter in the leeway of Lewis.

The gyroscopes began to rebalance. Equilibrium and stability slowly returned. The transit was now exclusively forward. Enough to tip the balance of choice from the wretchedness, shivering cold and saturation of the passenger deck in favour of the stifling warmth and disgusting ambient flavour of the saloon. Where my mother was breastfeeding.

And we docked. And it was over. I had survived. Yet, on the pier, I lurched, teetered and staggered as the ground angled and tipped, lifted and dropped. I skewed my way to the waiting car while the earth itself stood still. The sea within me.

Crammed into the back of an Austin A30 with my mother and three brothers, convalescence could begin and the ordinary and mundane re-established during the seven-mile drive home. I only remember an overwhelming vacant tiredness. Later that night, I was astounded to find that I was starving and was offered a sausage roll. But I just couldn’t do it.

As a life experience it was formative. A rite of passage, indeed. But later, in a peculiar sense, I came to regard it more as an inoculation: where a tincture or derivative of a disease is introduced into the body as a means of developing a resistance to it. And this only because I have not been seasick since.

The Hook

Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.

Don Marquis

Fishing was as much a religion as it was the defining recreation of my youth. A moral, philosophical value system. There were disciplines and processes, rites, rituals, mythologies.

The River Coll at the bottom of our croft still had salmon until they were wiped out by netting. And there were rock-fishing stations all along the coast with resonant names, now forgotten. Rubha nan Gall (The Headland of Strangers), Creag na Saille (The Fat Rock), Na Pollan Gorm (The Blue-Green Pools), Slighe-Brìghe (Drift-path), Caiptean Làthair (the Captain’s Place), Gob an Rubha (the Beak of the Headland)…

My father was interested exclusively in trout and salmon fishing. He would go down to the Coll or Gress rivers each night after work, or fish for sea trout with a spinning rod from the beach at the estuary. He went on expeditions to some of the innumerable lochs that colandered the wilderness of the Ness and Barvas Moors. Or, on occasion, would get a permit to a salmon loch on the Creed system, or Loch Langabhat, at seven miles long the largest body of water on the island. Anything outside the district was restricted and rationed by transport requirements. Cars were scarce.

In time, we got to accompany him on these expeditions. Shorter trips at first, but increasingly on more ambitious forays. I suppose he couldn’t get out of it. Maybe he accepted that we were an unavoidable handicap, the going rate to prosecute his passion.

All the lochs could be categorised. As if they had a personality. Moody or fresh, frivolous or deep, serious… It could be based on remoteness and accessibility; the profusion, type and size of trout; the clearness of the water; whether it had steep banks, deep pools or shelving beaches. Whether it was exposed or sheltered. And so on. Some lochs were rarefied. A stiff loch meant that fish were few and far between. Shy, unaccommodating, reluctant or too clever to be caught. But if you did catch one, it was almost certain to be huge. Loch Sgeireach na Creaga Briste (the Loch on the Cliff of Broken Rock), on the Ness–Tolsta moor, was an excellent example. You might sit there all day in perfect conditions and see nothing. As we used to say, you only needed one worm for the whole day. You might leave convinced that there were, in fact, no fish at all under that dead water. But you’d go back. And the same thing would happen again.

These lochs denied and defied you. Challenged your skill, your patience, your character. Going there was a commitment of serious intent. A virility test.

Loch an as Sgeil, on the Barvas Moor, was another such loch. Rigid, resistant and miles away. And we were going there, so the preparations began.

The night before was for digging worms. Typically, these were kept in a Golden Virginia tobacco tin that had a few holes punched into the lid. Then getting the rods ready. Spare line, bubble floats and hooks. For this loch, lead weights were the order of the day. All the other stuff – sandwiches, biscuits, a tin of condensed milk, flask of tea – was what my mother did. And it was always an early start.

My brother Iain and I were to be joined by Alec, who lived across the road. He was a few years older than us. Not academic. He couldn’t string a sentence together without saying all the time. Which he said all the time. Even if we were speaking Gaelic. Latterly, all he ever did was sit at his window watching the intermittent traffic. But he did have abilities. Forty years on, he could remember the number plates of cars and vans that had passed through the village, all the way back to the Sixties. It was as obvious to him as reading it off a card. Nor could he understand how this was remarkable. That’s just the number, he would say. Perplexed as to why you might doubt him.

We set off at about seven o’clock in the morning. It was an overcast day with intermittent sunshine and a light westerly breeze. No rain, midges or wind from the north or east. Good conditions. Propitious.

Loch an as Sgeil was a long walk. Longer for an eight-year-old. A car would have knocked a mile off it, but we didn’t have that option. Out the tarmac single track road for half a mile and then the peat road for a further mile up the Coll river, past the striations of village peat banks and, finally, the open moor.

In the World at War episode about the German invasion of the Soviet Union, narrator Sir Laurence Olivier describes the demoralising effect on the German troops as they become like ants in the endless, flat, featureless landscape of the Russian Steppes, with its eternal horizon. It resonated. I knew that state of mind from fishing expeditions like this. The moor stretched ahead as if we were doomed to walk it forever. Our destination unreachable, held at a continuous, consistent distance by the pressure wave of our expectation.

The terrain varied: knee-high heather, mòinteach bhriste (broken moorland), sucking bog, springy turf, long stretches that were like walking on a wet mattress.

But there was an electric thrill to that first glimpse of the loch reflecting the sky in a distant dip. A shot of adrenalin. Suddenly, there was hope. Suddenly, there was a point to all this. We were nearly there. Only we weren’t. The trudge had to continue for another half hour.

On the steep banks of the lochside, there was a frantic fumbling and urgency to get the rods out. As if we only had ten minutes and not ten hours to sit and fish this dusky lapping water. Miles from anywhere with only windsong and birdsong.

My dad helped thread the nylon line through the rings of my split cane rod, and we tied on the lead weights and skewered the sacrificial worms onto the hook. The same for Iain, and a bit of help for Alec.

There’s a sacred space between the infinite and the particular. It lies in these preoccupied, concentrated moments under the enormous canopy of the sky, trying to push a barely visible eight-pound breaking-strain nylon line through the microdot eye of a fish hook. Like darning a sock in a vast open field, oblivious to the universe.

What would now happen is that the three rods would be cast and my father would leave us where we were and make his way round the bank, whipping the water with his fly rod, or spinning a Mepps, covering every inch of loch. Doing what he loved doing. Serious focused fishing on a rare, blessed day off, while we sat by ourselves for hours. Taken care of. We would check the worms from time to time, get bored, mess about, tell stories, eat biscuits, catch glimpses of him on the far side of the loch and perhaps see him again in the early afternoon after he had completed a circuit. He might even have caught something.

That was the script.

What happened was that Alec took his rod, swung it back to cast and slammed the hook, worm and all, into the crook of my leg. Right behind my knee. It went in all the way, past the barb up to the shank. I buckled. It was like being punched and punctured at the same time. Only a doctor was going to fix this.

As a fishing trip, the whole day was now finished. Wrecked. Kaput. We had spent well over two hours walking to the loch and been there five minutes. Now, not only did we have to pack up and head straight back, my dad would have to carry me all the way.

I can only imagine what he thought. What he felt. Concern? Despair? Frustration? Fury? That this was some kind of cosmic joke? Probably a potent cocktail of all of these. Perhaps he wanted to throw Alec into the loch. I can’t say. I could say, at least, that it wasn’t my fault.

I didn’t know and didn’t want to know how they were going to get the hook out. But that was a problem that lay miles and hours ahead. We packed up everything and I was hoisted onto my father’s back while rods and rucksacks were redistributed between Iain and Alec.

The trek back was of a different emotional hue. Instead of anticipation and optimism, there was resignation, defeat. It wasn’t just another failed, fishless expedition; we hadn’t even had the chance to fail. So it felt longer and took longer. Longer squared. For my poor father in his role as pack pony, it must have been a gruelling, dispiriting slog. Still, these guys had been in the war.

Our party staggered home in the early afternoon. As usual, my mother and Auntie Peggy were talking and drinking tea by the window in the living room. Probably their eleventh cup of the day. Once the consternation and alarm had subsided, a car was procured and we got a lift to the doctor in Stornoway. In the surgery, I was rested on my belly over a wooden laboratory stool and, with a pair of pliers – and without anaesthetic – the brusque medic forced the hook deeper, so that the point and the barb curved back out and through my skin. Then he snapped the tip off with wire cutters and pulled the rest of the shaft back through.

It was, of course, painful. I never saw what it looked like, but I imagine with the entry and the exit so close together that it was like a vampire bite.

Because of the nature of the lesion, in that it had an earthworm and a plenitude of microbial life on it, he applied a hot poultice. And for days, this was regularly changed, re-applied and bandaged. I remember my mother boiling it up in the scullery on the electric cooker.

Walking and Falling

I’m still primary-school age when my father takes us fishing to Loch Sgiobacleit in South Lochs, my two brothers and our friend Callum. It’s a decent salmon loch. A vast T-shaped body of water at the top of the Seaforth Head river system. Too big and distant to be effectively policed by the Eishken estate, who own the fishing rights.

After a long winding drive in our MG Magnette, we park in a small, disused quarry and traverse a low rise and a