And Oban is a beautiful town, stretched along the curve of its spacious bay. Its house fronts, white and yellow and grey, brightly reflected the sinking sun. It would have stood comparison, we felt, with any classical town of the Mediterranean, and we wondered at a round building, high on the hill behind, like the Roman Colosseum. For Scotland, it had, in truth, a southern air, something captured from a brighter clime.
When we went to draw water from the well under the tall monument, to which the fisherman directed us, we lay on the grass in a perfect evening and stared across the many anchored craft. It was the perfect spot and perhaps the perfect hour for beholding this attractive town. Behind the sea-front, the ground rose steeply, deeply wooded, irregular, with fronts and gables of many fine houses. Even as we looked, we saw the smoke of a train approaching through a valley behind so as not to disturb the harmony. The passenger steamers, with their dark hulls and bright red funnels, swept from the piers at speed. Along the esplanade, the crowd sauntered slowly. Railway station, piers and fish market were all grouped together to the right of the esplanade and gave an impression of lively business, balanced in design by the uprising of wooded Pulpit Hill still farther to the right, with its irregularly placed private and boarding houses.
It was inevitable that a town should arise here, for such a situation must have been of social importance long before the days of recorded history. In digging foundations for houses, workmen have in fact laid open caves where the primitive hunters and fishers lived and loved and multiplied. Many strange craft crossed Oban Bay before King Haco of Norway entered it in the summer of 1263 and dipped his colours to the castle that is now an ivied ruin (though still prepared to wave a noble flag). Here he waited for his allies from the West Coast and the Islands before proceeding to the Clyde to teach Alexander III of Scotland a lesson he would remember. The grand fleet of 180 craft, with Haco’s own Christsuden in command, must have been reviewed by the lads of Oban village with considerable respect.
And fine sweeping lines the vessels had, with high beaks, striking colour, and banks of rowers. The beak of the Christsuden was a gilded dragon’s head; the hull was all oak and ornamented with more dragon heads overlaid with gold. And right princely courtesies they had in those days, too. Ewen of Lorn refused to help Haco, even though he held land from him; for he also held land from the Scottish king. Honourably, he offered to give up the Haco land, but by no persuasion could he be made to assist Haco. So Haco held on to him, until negotiations began between the kings, when Haco set him at liberty with many costly gifts; and on his part Ewen promised to do his best to make, peace between the two kings.
But Dougal (of the ivied ruin) was all for Haco, who gave him fifty-five galleys to plunder Cantyre and Bute, which ‘King Dougal’ so thoroughly did, that by the time he had also plundered Loch Long and Loch Lomond he was too late for the Battle of Largs, where Haco was defeated, and as he thought he had better not take on the victorious Scots by himself, he followed Haco and met him again in Oban Bay. There they took their breath for a little, while the lads of the village did some private thinking, and then King Dougal convoyed the defeated king of all the Vikings as far as Tobermory, where he bade him farewell and returned to the castle, not yet with the ivy on it, to await the next move by Scotland’s king.
In the well the water was crystal clear and we decided we should cleanse our tank of the brown moss of the Bull Hole before filling it with this remarkable liquor, so strangely without taste. Tall foxgloves grew about and large buttercups. But there was no hurry, so we climbed up to the needle monument and found it commemorated one David Hutcheson by whose energy and enterprise the West Highlands had received the blessings of steam navigation. A far far better reason than for being a landlord or even (as we had expected) a clan chief. Oh that we had his like with us now to amend the transport to suit the age! Still, a lighthouse and a monument, both for merit, in one day! And when, later, we investigated the Colosseum, and on a tablet over the entrance traced the words: ‘Erected in 1900 by John Stuart McCaig, Art Critic and Philosophical Essayist, and Banker, Oban,’ we were moved.
‘And Banker,’ murmured the Mate. ‘What a conjunction is there!’
The more we thought, the more were we moved.
Alas that the building had never been completed, that it should be no more than the round shell of that strange conjunction! For what a project had been envisaged:
Statues he willed that his trustees should raise,
His parents’, brothers’, sisters’ effigies. . .
We hurried to buy a guide book in the town, from which I beg permission to quote a descriptive passage so admirable for its conjunctive ease:
‘When the Tower was begun, the half-dozen ancient cannon, 32-pounders, which had long lain overlooking Oban from their semi-lunar battery (which originated the adjacent street name, Battery Terrace), were removed to the un-levelled centre of the interior, where they lie derelict, objects of curiosity to visitors. They were brought to Oban by the second Marquis of Breadalbane, ‘dear Lord Breadalbane’, Queen Victoria called him in her Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands (written twenty-four years later on the occasion of her Majesty’s visit to Oban, 10th August 1847), when on the Royal Yacht coming in sight, they boomed forth a hearty welcome (Walk No. I). They were not again fired till 1871, when there were rejoicings all over Scotland on the marriage of the Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorn, eldest son of the Duke of Argyll. The Queen had seen the Marquis as a child at his home, Inverary Castle, in 1847, and described him as a “dear, white, fat, fair, little fellow with reddish hair”, never dreaming that in after years she would have him for a son-in-law. It was of this marriage that an old Argyllshire woman on hearing of it exclaimed—“And it’s a proud lady the Queen will be, whatever.”’
If only John Keats on his visit to Oban in 1820 had left us a sonnet our cup would have been full, but our wild uncouth scenery inspired little poetry in that English wight.
And that was a little difficult to understand, for from David Hutcheson’s monument such magnificence was disclosed as surely must have touched to fugitive response that most magnificent and sensuous of poets. Across the firth lay Mull of the mountains: Dun da Chaoithe (the hill of the two winds) over William Black’s lighthouse; Mainnir nam Fiadh (fold of the deer); Sgurr Dearg (the red sgurr); Creach Bheinn (ben of the plunder); Ben Buy (the yellow ben), to far Ben Mor (the great ben) veiled in mist; all ranging from about 2,500 to over 3,000 feet. Southward the Firth of Lorn, to the Isles of the Sea in its glittering waters. Northward, the long island of Lismore (the big garden), with mountainous Morven of the legends and the songs rising behind. Beyond Lismore, the bright light on Loch Linnhe, leading to dark Glencoe. And east of us Oban—and all Argyll.
There is a magnificence that can be terrifying. A vastness, a grandeur, so removed from the conception of an inwrought jewelled creation, that perhaps one can dimly understand the reaction of so sensitive a mind as Keats’s. Even over Mull, on this fine evening, great shafts of slanting light penetrated dark caverns, and as one gazed, the dark and the light reformed, so that one saw without ever quite catching the moments of change: vast fade-outs and fade-ins as imperceptible in transition as they were inexorable in effect. But when sun and wind and cloud and rain set themselves to project on sea and mountain their best effort at a gloom fantasia, the stage-thoughts of ten thousand human minds could be drowned in the tail-end of its distant shower. Not used to it, the human mind must rebel. Used to it, it can at least gaze, and possibly appreciate, and even—for adventure is life—criticise.
On this lovely evening, with the Torranan Rocks like laughter in our minds, we came down to the well and filled our buckets. From the fisherman’s boat, blue smoke was ascending. He was cooking his evening meal. Later, we found that he lived on this boat all alone, winter and summer, occasionally shifting over from one side of the bay to the other. During the time we were there we spoke to him frequently, and found him courteous and helpful, but did not care to intrude on his privacy, though I should have liked to have found the conclusions he had arrived at concerning life, explicit or implicit. Undoubtedly he had solved the problem for himself. On the second day he left us and went across to the Oban side by Pulpit Hill, and we wondered, with remorse, if our near presence had disturbed him. But in the evening he came back, his big sail of many patches and small holes bellying in the light breeze, anchored by the rock, and sent aloft his smoke. The contrast between his way of living and that of those of a tall-masted white yacht, with a string of fifteen portholes, indicated no doubt the progress of civilisation, but somehow not conclusively. His was a solitary life, but obviously neither morbid nor alone. When he wanted company, he commanded it, and spoke to his guests in a fine resonant Gaelic. But to our gross eyes in the darkening, his company was invisible.
The esplanade that evening was thronged, and we sauntered along like strangers returned to a life which is not quite real, its preoccupations and tricks of conduct and speech having a curious echo quality. That contact with nature (even if in her wilder moods, when emotions and capacity for action had been unusually quickened) for a mere handful of days should produce this effect is, I think, remarkable. We experienced it pointedly more than once. In fact we never lost it during the whole trip, and after two days in Oban we felt we had to move on again to things we could get a solid grip of. Even the food in the hotel seemed desperately reminiscent. We had been looking forward to a magnificent feed of quite a few courses; really doing ourselves well; and had joked about it in happy anticipation. And now out of the corner of my eye I saw the Crew, with an odd sort of dismay on her face, unable to finish her meat. She explained that she had been given too much, that it was a bit tough, with too many vegetables; too much on her plate. She was almost hurt, as if her toy had got broken. When the Mate, having finished all that went before, took a plateful of apple tart, with cream, she revolted. The coffee was quite good, but somehow still and oily, not with the steaming fragrant top we had got used to. Possibly we were too physically tired after our strenuous day (with the Crew unknowingly exhausted from over-excitement) to enjoy much eating. Whatever the reason, the feast was voted dull and stodgy.
‘I never realised before’, said the Crew, ‘that man is just a cannibal.’
Though I had eaten pretty well myself, I admitted handsomely that I would have swopped the whole lot for one of her salads.
For what she does not know about internal combustion engines, she makes up on her salads. Like these weather effects over wide areas, they are pretty marvellous affairs, with a universal reach across the vegetable kingdom and a skill in selection and blending that would make any critic, pure and undefiled or gorged by cannibalism, offer up a soft sigh.
Basic ingredients may consist of lettuce, tomato, beetroot, bits of sliced date, banana and orange, with nuts, peas and other evasive pellets, until complications are introduced from grated turnip and carrot to parsley and mint, and whatever luck there may be with the more usual elements from onions to cucumber, not forgetting stoned raisins.
A revolting conglomerate, in turn? All I can honestly say is that it has its perfect moment, and not least when it is sweetened by the fruit to that point—and that point only—when the juices of the mouth naturally flow. And when anything is just so sweetened one is inclined to eat of it on and on. Just as certain unfortunate persons, finding a drink palatable, may drink on and on. And even on.
It was, in fact, the temperature of the drink that proved the hotel grand. We made acknowledgments there, and in the wide lounge, looking out on the sea front, we listened to the travelling world.
Two French women behind us had not been able to get rooms and talked much but not volubly. In front, the head of a family indicated an arresting sunset, for it must have been now about ten o‘clock, but the daughter, slim and brown-haired with nails tapered and delicately pink as her flesh, hardly bothered to look out, as if all the beauty were a setting for that which her petulant brows suggested she hadn’t got and for which she was so palpably prepared. A thin alert old man with grey hair talking of sunsets! And a thin bony-faced woman backing him up! She picked up a slightly soiled copy of the Tatler. Three men and two women discussed the dinner, which clearly had had its good points for them. One of the men read out of a newspaper, approvingly, about Royalty in Scotland to illustrate something. In a corner, male heads bent over a table and listened to a low voice and jerked back and laughed. ‘That’s a good one!’ said one. ‘Dem good!’ A steamer arriving unexpectedly at the North Pier caused a slight commotion by a window. The Mate was still awaiting his telephone call, but we were in no hurry, and the waiter was a thoughtful young man. We had nothing to catch—or lose, and far away and multitudinous was the hum of the sea in our ears—even if the Crew implied that it was no more than the hum of our blood from over-eating. But she herself now and then put her hands to her cheeks to still the glow from the day that now, more than ever, she would not have missed.
With good news from the telephone, we rowed across the harbour in a state of pleasant well-being, glad to head for our own quiet corner, where we called a good-night to the Islesman and lit our lamp. The Mate pumped, and then put his head in at the door.
‘Do you think’, he addressed the Crew, ‘that he has anything good in his heart? The well water is here.’
I never yet had a nice little private store of something very special but it was stolen from me.
In our short stay, we got to know Oban fairly well. Down a side street we found a plumber’s shop with a smiling girl and obliging workmen. We had suffered nothing less than torture from the water tap. It had been hit by some wanton hammer in Skye and the cock, fitting badly, leaked, so that we had had to screw up the under nut very tightly, and as the handle of the tap was missing and the best-fitting spanner too big, drawing water was a matter of stresses and slips and barked knuckles. Often, too, when we got it opened, the spanner would slip when we tried to close it, and manners were temporarily dislocated as the precious water gushed over the flooring and into the bilge.
Though perhaps precious is hardly the apt word, for the Crew had reached the stage of rebelling against using the water itself, alleging impurities which I assured her were no more than gravel and healthy brown peat moss. So I had screwed out the tap, and then, I must confess, it took the Mate and myself the better part of two hours, using countless buckets of salt water, to clean out what must have been the accumulated deposits of twenty-five years. But let me draw a veil over that noisome business and get back to those plumbers who in no time ground in the cock, fitted a handsome brass handle with a black grip, and charged a shilling. It was carried through the streets of Oban in triumph; it fitted perfectly; it turned with one finger; and the well water that came through was crystal. After that anyone would fill the kettle. Occasionally it does happen in life that one can purchase a shilling’s worth of magic.
So we were disposed to think that everything in Oban was flourishing, but I knew I had yet to visit the fish mart, and there alasl was not even one phosphorescent scale of magic. What had once been the busy herring-curing stations was now a waste land boarded round and overgrown with grass. Of the first four of the fish-salesmen’s offices, one sold ice cream and three were vacant. I had a long talk with a fish-salesman and his story was depressing. Already at Mallaig and elsewhere we had seen that the herring fishing on the West had this year been a failure.
‘But what if a late herring season comes along?’
‘Make no difference,’ he answered. ‘Mallaig and Castlebay will handle it easy—particularly as far as the Scottish boats are concerned.’
‘You mean?’
‘The Scottish boats are so much in debt that they can’t fit out for a late fishing—very few of them, anyway.’
I asked him if the Herring Industry Board’s report was out. In the same laconic voice, he said it was. Later, in the press, I read extracts from it and recognised it as the most desperate document yet issued on the subject, amounting in pith to little more than a statement endeavouring, by the aid of analytic reason, to show the inevitability of the early death of the whole Scottish herring fishing industry based on the system of the family boat.
It gave countenance, wittingly or not, to a recent press campaign against the Scottish system of family-owned boats and in favour of the English system of company-owned boats. And it was difficult logically to counter it, because, clearly, boats run by a shore syndicate, with capitalist resources to tide over difficult times, are bound in the long run to oust individual or family ownership, living from hand to mouth or at least from season to season.
We were seeing taking place before us the death of an ancient way of life that had many very fine qualities. For the skipper of the typical Scottish fishing boat has always been not only owner of his vessel but one of the crew, who called him naturally by his Christian name. He is one of themselves, one of a small company working for their common good, with powers of leadership and decision vested in him, and receiving an ‘extra share’ for the boat. Because of their common religious beliefs, for example, it would not occur to him to go to sea on Sunday—nor would any outside power compel him to go, whatever the material loss involved. To the dangerous business of the sea they brought the human factors that give to man his integrity and dignity, a matter conceivably of some significance for the world at the moment. For the universal problem appears to be: how to manage efficiently the economic machine and at the same time retain the maximum amount of individual freedom. The old Scottish system of family-owned boats represented perhaps the only great industry left in the world where some attempt at solving the problem continued to be made.
But it is a subject which I have dealt with elsewhere and I mention it now because of the depressing effect it had upon us on that quiet evening in Oban, with its gay visitors, and clean streets, and handsome hotels.
‘What does Oban live on?’ I asked the salesman.
‘House-letting mostly. Though the shops do a good trade with the country round about.’
Two trawlers were unloading and a third manoeuvring for a berth. I asked him how it was we could not catch fish in the bays. I could not help smiling at his dry expression as he looked at the trawlers. I remembered the lonely fisherman of Ardmore.
‘How much fish have they landed to-day?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know to-day’s figures, but on Monday last they landed two thousand six hundred boxes. Some days it’s less.’
For one small quay it seemed an astonishing quantity of white fish.
That these vessels poached the inshore banks there could be little doubt. That the official effort to detect them was ludicrously inadequate there could likewise be no doubt. On our travels, we had once seen the Fishery cruiser. Giving her the West to look after was like giving all Argyllshire to one gamekeeper.
To blame the trawlers is to ask too much of human nature. In their position I should certainly do my utmost to poach. Indeed, as I looked at these iron vessels, their rust whitened by salt water and gulls, I knew I was looking at the most daring vessels afloat, manned by the finest and most intrepid seamen to be found on any of the oceans of the world. They have the air of buccaneers. No slacking or grousing against the Government here. They take their living out of the teeth of danger, in the worst seas fought by man, and a slowly meandering Fishery cruiser or the wailing of a pack of half-crofters is not going to trouble them much.
‘Well, at least the trawlers bring a lot of business to Oban?’
But the salesman shook his head. ‘They have the fish all ready in iced boxes and load them direct on to the train for the south. That’s all.’
We watched this neat dispatch of business. The train shunted on the quay.
‘Are there no local fishing boats from Oban?’
‘There is supposed to be one.’
And there we were back at a sore point, back at the reputed laziness and lack of initiative of the West Coast man, at those tales of doles and faked employment, of constant demands for Government assistance, of a lost capacity to help himself.
‘I want to buy some fresh fish,’ said the Crew to the Mate.
Like a lamb he followed her into a fish shop. She chose a modest quantity for a single meal and the price manifestly staggered him.
‘Are you sure they’re quite fresh?’ she asked pleasantly.
‘Oh yes, madam. They’ve just come from Aberdeen.’