If I was in the back garden when the first rumble of a train began, I’d go down to find some empty cans. They’d usually be Ind Coope or Skol. They were from Alloa breweries. Old ale was out. Even the girls on the Tennents cans were perfect. No signs of wear on their skins, hair or costumes. And the colours were pure, no fuzziness from area to area. I’d lay the beer can on the rail, bashing it down a bit so it would hold in place. Then I’d retreat into the whins. The locomotives were all diesel now. When the train had passed, I’d go to inspect the compressed steel. These clear pictures went psychedelic when the metal was pressed to follow the profile of the rails.
You could follow the line out away from the housing. That’s how I got fishing. That’s how I met Torcuil. I thought Torcuil was from Dollar Academy when I first met him by the Devon river. The railway line formed the boundary between public and private houses. The garden of our own house ended right where the embankment started to slide. So we were at the edge. The rails went to Dollar Mine. That sounded like the goldrush but it was on its last few seams. One or two people from higher up our hill went to school in Dollar. Tall and hairy guys walked around in flannel shorts. Their knees and their ears must have got hardened to it all. Sure he was disguised in jeans for the Saturday but I thought he’d just escaped from the Academy boundaries, to throw a line out. Maybe he wasn’t much older than me but he looked it, the fair hair already well over the ears. Once I took that in, I knew he couldn’t be at Dollar.
It turned out he lived just up the road from me, the next village out towards the hills. He showed me a trick. The track passed over a high steel bridge, down from Tillicoultry. We’d find a boulder that took the two of us to roll it. Then we’d lift it by getting our weight under it and lever it over the edge. Like a depth-charge.
The splash would come all the way back to us. It would cross all that height very fast. The power of it came close to scaring you. Maybe one day we’d see a huge salmon there, stunned by us after straying up the Devon, from the Forth.
Torcuil’s father was a Merchant Navy skipper. He didn’t really like us following the railway line out, even if the trains were slow and scarce. But that’s all navigation was, these days, he said, following rhum lines.
When you left port you followed electronic railway tracks on the water. Only thing was, you had to keep an eye out for some bastard coming the other way along the same line. These would take you out a few hundred miles. Then you steered along your course-line. That’s when the sextant and the chronometer came in. You took a sun sight or a star sight to determine where exactly you were in relation to that theoretical line. Within a certain margin, of course.
I’d been nudged away from Torcuil’s collection of LZ and Jethro Tull. His olman was from Dundonnell way and still spoke like it. He was pretty shocked to find I didn’t have Gaelic. Torcuil had been on the move quite a bit, only going back to the northwest for holidays. He had an excuse. But someone growing up in Stornoway? That was demoralising. But did I ever go sea fishing? Aye and what gear did we use?
‘Only the dorgh.’
That wasn’t bad for someone who didn’t have Gaelic. And what was our dorgh like?
So I described the paternoster of bent galvanised wire. A lead weight cast in the middle, swivel above it. You’d feel the bottom and pull up half a fathom so your baits would be out of reach of the crab. Somehow the bite was transmitted, amplified by this gear so you’d feel the nudge at the line on your finger. Even at twenty fathoms.
‘Like sonar,’ he said. ‘And where did you fish?’
‘The Dubh Sgeir.’
His eyebrows were a bit scary. It’s amazing how many men in authority have eyebrows like that. Deputy headmasters. Just greying. Under them, everything would be neat. Torcuil’s father had a white, open-necked shirt. The V-neck looked new. I saw the Pringle label and knew that my own father might have checked it. It was mostly women seated along the line. He was the supervisor. He didn’t bother with the beret any more. People called him Yul Bryner, of course.
Torcuil’s olman reached for a book. Indicus Nauticus. It didn’t go out of date like charts and almanacs. He showed me the page with about fifty rocks of the same name. Some variations in the spelling, he said. I wouldn’t know the Lat and Long, but did the southern approaches to Loch Erisort sound about right?
It did.
And on the soft ground, between the hard patches, it would be mussel bait for adagan. And lugworm for leopag. I nodded. And what did we consider leopag on Lewis?
That was any flatfish, I said, the way my mother said dabs for all small flatties. My father said leopag to mean flounder, plaice, lemons or dabs.
Next he tested me on peat. I found I could go through this grammar for him, not realising where the knowledge had come from. Our own cul-de-sac in Stornoway or the sorties to Griomsiadair. The fad was just under the cep. You cut the outer one thick because it was fibrous. They did not dry so completely but were good for finishing off the cruach. Regular, even peats from the top row went to build the shell. Then creelfuls of darker peat, broken smaller, were just piled inside. Some places they did them herringbone style like tweed because they said it kept the water out better. The caoran was the bottom peat, cut last so it wouldn’t go to smoor, which was peat–dross. These were the ones your grannie wanted to start the fire and to get heat up in the Rayburn for baking. The dampened smoor kept the fire smouldering overnight.
Torcuil’s mother, coming in with cups of tea, said it was easier to be interested in peats when you were sitting in your armchair in the south of the country, well clear of them. There was a lot of heat in peats when you were cutting them. Plenty heat when you were lifting and turning and gathering them. Only time there was no heat in peat was when you put them on the fire and tried to burn them.
But Torcuil’s father was back in the Indicus Nauticus. Gob Rubha Usinis, not too far south from the Dubh Sgeir. A lot of people confused it with Usinish light in Uist. There, at the Sound of Shiants. Did I know that place?
I told him I knew a spot just north of there. You kept a house in Calbost open on a point. We put on bigger hooks if we had a drift off there. One day there was a thumping on the line like I’d never felt before. A big green head came to the surface and a long white full belly under it. I saw the hook, not looking so big any more, just in the skin of the mouth, above the barbel. Someone tried to get a hand in the gills but the fish rolled over and flicked a huge tail and was gone. It didn’t sink. It swam. It was alive.
Aye, he said, it’s the ones that got away you remember best. He had a story about that. It had happened not that far out from Calbost, out on the Shiant Banks. But when it happened he didn’t know anything about it.
I could see that Torcuil and his olaid had heard this one before more than once but I was hooked.
I was second mate on the Loch Ness during the war. We were always chock a block, taking fellows only a few years older than yourselves, on the first leg to join their ships or regiments. There was a scare or two but we never saw much trouble.
A couple of years ago, I met this fellow at a conference. He was very well turned out. We all were but he was noticeably smart. I thought he might be Danish. He wasn’t giving away much. The smoked salmon and tab-nabs were getting passed around. He asked me if I’d served in the Merchant or Royal Navy during the war. So I told him I was in the Merch but on the ferries for most of it.
He asked me which ferries and he seemed to know the area. He said it must be rough for a surface ship in that place when the north wind blew.
The hairs were standing on the back of my neck then. I had a feeling. Sure enough he described the Loch Ness pretty well. Told me we were making good about fourteen knots.
‘We had you in our sights,’ he said.
The thing was, their main mission was to gather information on the places where Atlantic convoys mustered. They had judged it was not good to give their whereabouts away. They would find other prey out to sea after they had passed their information.
I wasn’t going to thank him for my life. I didn’t get through the war without seeing the destruction that follows a torpedo-hit. The smell of burning oil is something you remember.
So, in this case, we were the one that got away. That’s why he remembered our ship so clearly. The way you remember that big ling, off Calbost.