I was born one street back from the hoil. My arrival gave the olman and the olaid the points they needed to get their first council house. They already had a healthy daughter but one child was not enough to get up the list. They had to escape the brush. The cove in the flat down below would bang the end of a wooden handle on his ceiling, their floor, whenever the baby cried or there was any other sign of his tenants surviving. My father had survived a war. He wasn’t scared of what lurked under the stairs. He just didn’t want to lose the rag. Shoving that brush-handle up or down an orifice belonging to the landlord. I never saw or heard this, because I was only the baby who brought the points for the council house. But he talked about it himself, later on.

My mother’s health wasn’t that great then, he said. It wasn’t an easy time for them. A weaver was self-employed. If you didn’t get the hours in, you didn’t finish your tweeds. No tweeds, no money. And you were down the list, for the next delivery of warps.

I don’t remember the flat we escaped. But Westview Terrace is loud and clear. This was and is a pebble-dashed house, part of a row, wearing a blaeberry roof of best Penryn slate. The individual houses have faces and I’ve seen similar groupings of similar shapes in towns on the mainland and on other islands. Kirkcaldy and The Broch. Kirkwall and Lerwick. But the harling or the slate can vary. I don’t suppose anyone was making concessions to local architectural styles because there wasn’t a lot of any style, in towns that had grown big on the backs of squashed herring or on long rolls of linoleum.

We couldn’t look out to sea but it was never very far away. Stornoway was still a herring port. I would be sent to the corner shop to buy a score. A different fish from the ones you saw swinging over, in dripping baskets. But the same species. They came from a firkin. That sounded like one of the measures laid out, black on pale blue, on the back cover of our school jotters. You had to know how many chains were to the furlong. Down the hoil, some cove off a boat would let me gather one for every digit I could hold out. I think I said that, instead of finger, because it’s like a cubit, which maybe wasn’t on the jotters, but it was in the Bible. The fry was taken from spillage from the crans, swung ashore in creels filled from the hold. We’d go back to the Terraces with handfuls, held out ahead. We’d leave behind, drying on the concrete, the cuddies we’d caught. These were small fry of lythe, saithe, cod and whiting.

Later I learned that the cuddy was strictly only the young of the saithe or coalfish. In other parts of Scotland the word means horse. Coves from away are welcome to use the word any way they want but we know what it really means. These fish had gone for a sliver of bait, torn from the bone with your hand. That was offered on a halfpenny hook to brown cotton line. When you had a bite, you pulled so the fish made an arc through the salt air to finish against the weeded concrete. I don’t know why we had to kill them.

One of our neighbours worked on a boat, not a drifter. She was stacked high with pots. It was lobsters then. Prawns were trawled up, amongst the fish. These days, an occasional fish appears like a miracle among the prawns. We’d get a bucket of tails now and again from a Broch boat with a Strachan or a Tait fa kent Sandy Sim’s quine. That was my olaid.

She’d do them there and then. The sister, Kirsty, and me would get to wait up. You’d to let the pale pink prawns cool that bit so you could give them one squeeze inwards, one out. The white meat would then come out clean and whole, from the shell. You couldn’t stop till they were all gone.

Then we’d sleep. We didn’t know then that the lobster and langoustine, the high-status shellfish which boil red, are the scavengers of the seafloor. They tear and eat dead things.