THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
NORMAN AND TO MAIRI MACDONALD,
A FINE POET AND TEACHER
The excerpt below was first written as the lines for the character of a fisherman on a herring drifter in a large-scale community play, written by the late Norman M MacDonald and performed in the transit-shed, number one pier, Stornoway. It was later included in Portrona, a spirited novel which gathers together several strands from plays by MacDonald.
Always you stare at the purple water, looking for the smoking signs of the herring. It’s good when the water’s dark for then you can imagine it swimming with fish.
When the day’s clear you’re sailing over safe sandy bottom, nothing to be seen but the smooth green ground. A crab slides along sideways. A speckled plaice stirs up the sand like a puff of smoke, gone at once like blood in the water. Yes we like the deep indigo sea. Even though the colour also hides the rocks, it hides the fish from us, we say, planting the nets.
We say to each other, “They’re down there in shoals, millions. Soon they’ll be in our net, a year’s money in one night.”
After the psalm and the supper and the waiting, the hauling of the nets, the capstan turning, we shake out the gasping fish, the hold fills, the boy coils, coils in his wet cubbyhole, in his weaving world of black wet rope.
We turn for home. Portrona beckons in the pearl and gold dawn. The wind with us, she takes it, hear her hiss through the water. The Zulu boat heeling, straining boards and sheets and canvas.
Hear her chuckle past Tiumpan, Bayble Island, The Chicken. She heels so far, at The Beasts, herring slips from her decks back into the sea.
Arnish, Goat Island, Number One. Portrona Quay before us. We’re not the first but we’re not the last either.
from Portrona – a novel by Norman Malcolm MacDonald
(Birlinn, Edinburgh, 2000)