Quo Vadis

I helped discharge the Quo Vadis. These were boom years. All the records were tumbling. There were different ways of doing things. Like in Athletics. Things had never been the same since Dick Fosbury made the straddle-jump seem just as outdated as the scissor-jump, when you saw people doing it, fast time, on old newsreels. You couldn’t see how it could work, just coming in from another angle, turning and then he was over the bar backwards with his feet up in the heavens. Everything was changed. The heights went up and the times went down. Everything was moving faster.

The scale of Quo Vadis scared us all but we were in awe of her, the high red steel and the turning radars. The antennae that made you glance into the bridge – you could hardly call it a wheelhouse – with all the dials and screens. If anything, the talk had played it all down.

At least the herring wasn’t going to fishmeal. All these Norwegians and Faroese tied up with their stock of whitewood barrels lashed on deck. They fixed a price with the skippers, then took on casual labour. That was us, Kenny F and me, in the line with the rest of them, queuing like the dockers in our history books.

I stuck close to Kenny and usually got picked. He was heftier than me and had the reputation of being a grafter. Flat rate, no overtime, no tea breaks. You worked right through till the load was done. And one woman of the few amongst us, spread a sweet, maroon salt on the fish as they wriggled up the conveyor. She was just old enough to remember this from before, with the belching steam-drifters. And the crack flying with the knives.

‘But the hours, a ghràidh, the hours we worked.’

And we worked them again in the here and now. So the Quo Vadis could get out for another shottie. I took my turn, pressing the electronic counter, the Norskis’ tally against the East Coasters’. Got distracted when my opposite number told me there was talk of a Daimler, for a bonus, company car like, if the accountant could swing it. No point givin it tae the bloody taxman, like.

The top fish they scooped for the sample looked much like the herring you’d cadged on a string from the Daffodil, the Lily, the Ivy – the Scalpay drifters. Deeper down in the hold, they became faded and soft. So the further into the shift you went, the more dull the fish became. There wasn’t a lot of shine to them. No firmness left. That’s it, you saw what was missing in the herring, not what was there. Except for the eyes. The bloodshot eyes of seven hangovers in a row. And hardness now in the sockets that contained them, the bony sunken mouth below it.

I met the Quo Vadis again a couple of years later. She was anchored to her quota, out in Loch Shell. She’d taken the lot on the first night of the season. Most of it had gone to the fishmeal factory. Markets weren’t ready for them. They’d slapped the ban on fishing herring in the Minch. That included the Scalpay boats, and the last of the drift-netters amongst them – they were all tied up too. These boys were out of a job.

I had a summer job, up that loch. Up, over the burn, into fresh water. I’d to row anglers around and try to steer their casts towards the sea trout. It was as dry a summer as I can remember and the sky just got heavier.

Colin insisted on these patrols in the estate launch. We fired up a Merc inboard with a push-button start. A sweet piece of engineering in a planing hull. It was a novelty for me, being free of the laws of displacement for a while. It was supposed to be serious anti-poaching stuff but the real reason was just to get away from the Lodge for a while.

The paying guests were getting restless on a red diet of heather lamb and netted salmon steaks. There wasn’t a fish could get up over the dry stones to be caught by these people.

Sometimes we’d take the old boat and leave it on a running mooring, the other side of the loch. We’d get up the hill so Colin could get the telescope out. Once, he took me over the hill, right to the wreck of a World War Two bomber. Forget the type but it wasn’t a Lancaster, Wellington or anything I’d seen in Airfix models. Maybe an Anson. It was impossible to get near by sea or road so it had just been left where it fell, once any bodies or survivors had been removed.

Belts and belts of ammo. Even the machine guns in the remains of turrets. Whitened needles, gone like bone that would never shift again, round black dials. Good bloody job the Orinsay boys hadn’t taken the arsenal back across the loch yet. One of these ex-Merch engineers with a lathe in his lean-to would probably get these guns going. Then woe betide any gamie and ghillie trying to flex muscle in the environs of Loch Shell.

That one didn’t win a smile from big Colin. Now at the end of the ridge, looking seaward, he’d get muttering when he caught the glint of monofilament as someone was cleaning their net. Maybe, in turn, the Lemrewayites were glancing across and seeing the flash from that glass – we were the Hun in the sun.

Colin knew better than to ask the ghillies to go with him to pick up any of these nets. I didn’t mind angling all day, weeding radishes and rowing out to a few pots in the bay. Non-combatant role only.

But on our way back from the outpost, he had me pull quietly upwind to the Quo Vadis. She was in good holding ground, good shelter and no tide to speak of, this far up the loch. If this ban continued, they’d have to steam for Cornwall, for the mackerel. Say what you like about Colin, he knew the tricks. Right enough, the grey floats, not that easy to see from any distance, were out astern and he pointed at once to the few that were down. He took one drowned fish out of it and laid it on the bottom boards while I kept to the oars.