Klondykers

‘Not a McDonald’s,’ Anna said and I couldn’t let it go. My daughter was growing up. Fast.

‘Time was, we had to drive all around the outskirts of various blooming European cities just to find a Burger King,’ I said. ‘Now you’re moaning because here it is, the big high yellow M, where you didn’t expect to see it.’

We’d been well warned. The former East was changing fast. We drove by skips full of fine old windows with bronze furniture. It wasn’t fair – these guys wanting neutral uPVC draftproof windows, just like their neighbours. They’d soon have to install vents, to provide an alternative airflow to that caused by expansion and contraction in natural materials, like the timber items they were throwing out.

How can anywhere be the former East?

The night-driving and the Autobahn gave way to A roads. The route took us across a long steel bridge.

We came upon a narrower road with high poplars swaying. We were still on that avenue and then another sign said ‘Pitbus Circus’. We used to have to go and hunt the lions and tigers and efelants on loud posters. I remembered further back than that, when the Circus came to Stornoway. No big cats or bun-eating landwhales but I did remember the clown on stilts. Couldn’t have been viable because they never came again. All these trucks, suspended in nets from the derrick of the Loch Seaforth. That was the best bit. When the show was all up in the air. Before the Hebrides worked the shorter Minch crossing, putting in to Tarbert, with its turntables and a lift to the car-deck.

I was curious to see what Baltic water looked like. I’d grown up with the Baltic shoeshop, where they had a foot gauge to get the right width of Clarks sandals. Now Birkenstock rules OK among the sensible casual brigade. If my uncle Ruaraidh bumped into me in the metropolis he’d steer me into the Baltic bookshop and if I was slow to choose between this and that, he’d take the both of them to the till. Dinny Smith Comes Home by Angus MacVicar and RM Ballantyne’s Among the Bushrangers. I’d get all the Enid Blyton I could stuff down me, in the library, if I still wanted it.

What about herring? If there were still Baltic herring to be caught, how come all these Klondykers crossed the North Sea with their decks stacked with empty barrels, for the stated purpose of filling them up in SY? Gabriele said the Baltic fish were small, sweet and seasonal. It’s a matter of quantity. I thought of the sister and my olman wrestling over the last salt herring from the score the olaid had boiled. She’d have to change the water at least once, sometimes twice. I wouldn’t fancy eating a salt herring raw. I remembered the olman going to Henderson’s on Bayhead for a bottle of wine to go with the New Year dinner. It was a once-a-year thing, then. I couldn’t figure out why he was asking for salt herring in a shop that had nothing but bottles of drink. I found out much later it was Sauternes.

The grey empire, recently folded, couldn’t have lived on pink salami alone. There were a lot of mouths to feed. Even though Adolf and Joe had managed to wipe out all these millions between them.

The herring shoals were now chased with electronic sensors on the purse-seine so the bag wasn’t pulled tight till it was worth it. But then the markets might not be prepared for them, so the catch might get ground to meal.

And then you fed that to caged salmon or caged furry animals. We no longer had glossy minks in wire cages, back on Lewis. Only the escape artists whose teeth had coped with chicken wire, applying jittering leverage till the staples sprung. The escaped mink bred. They dined well, on hens, ducks, eels and salmon though they killed far more than they ate. Like people.

Frozen Minch and Westside herring, which had found no ready market, for human consumption, went to our neighbours who farmed both mink and salmon. And bizarre blocks of frozen sand eels. So our own puffins and sea trout had to cover more air and water to fill their bellies.

Klondykers had never paid the top price. But they bought in bulk. My own account of my first work, after school, is now definitely historical. Basket after basket would swing over the SY hoil. The Faroese would want them coated in sweet red pickle but the Baltic market wanted a dense packing in plain brine. I’d worked, topping up barrels, till a few midnights. And just maybe Gabriele had eaten some of the fish I’d packed. Matjes, taken soaked but raw, with boiled potatoes. Just possibly the produce of my home town.

Her and her father, the architect-sailor, eating as you only do when you’ve had the boat leaning and spray on your lips, and she’s tied up secure, springs and stern lines, with a small amount of slack. The sweet Baltic herring might still swim but the shoals would be smaller and more scarce. Dense numbers ran for limited periods only. That’s what we say. The herring or the mackerel or the salmon are running. Draw that picture.

Baltic herring were more suitable for frying whole. Minch herring had for centuries provided the full, pregnant matjes. There was a complete grammar of grades and stamps. Our words for different qualities of peat had nothing on it.

The talk of herring sustained us along the avenue and took us by a few missed turnings, a couple of backtracks. Gabriele was getting tired. Maybe this right side of the road was now an extra bit of concentration, after years on the left. We drove into the Pitbus Circus by sheer accident. There were no tigers, no clowns. It was a grass circle surrounded by a curve of buildings. Restrained neo-classicism. Robert Adams might have made a wee sortie over this way. If he’d been as far as Bath for a job, this was possible. More likely, the columns showed how the same movements in the arts went in waves across most of Europe.

These showcase buildings had been maintained. But driving on towards Sassnitz, looking out for the turn to take us out the northern coast, the streetlights showed an island in transition.

Interior sides of gable walls are just like the inside covers of books, when the elevation is exposed, during demolition. Generations of wallpapers are caught in the glare. Abandoned picture frames tilt on their nails. The residue of soot and conversations hold to lime. A suspension.