A Book of Death and Fish (38 page)

We’re in the shed at Griomsiadair. It’s a lean-to. It’s a temporary structure that will last longer than the house. It’s corrugated iron on a timber frame. Same as that dance hall Prince Albert had built at Balmoral. And that’s still hanging together. Available for study by PhD students, assessing the longevity of materials. Older sheets, they say, last longer. New steel sheets are thin and come with sacrificial coatings of zinc or protective ones of plastic.

The shed was fixed against the stone gable of the home-built house. There were some fine wooden-handled tools still hanging from resilient nails. The wind came through the chinks but maybe that airflow helped to preserve it. And the tools. That’s where Ruaraidh and Angus devised their projects. I was a bit preoccupied with blueprints for that elusive New World Order when they were unfolding the plans for the pram.

Plans are only a potential. But drawings can be beautiful in their own right and of course more perfect than the finished product could ever be. It’s not so long since I’ve looked closely at a steel yacht, designed in the Netherlands. She had a very tidy Perkins diesel, recent electronics and decent sails. Self-steering gear. She was going for a song at a time when I’d been getting a fair bit of work. I had this daft idea: Anna and me could do a proper cruise. Ireland, Galicia, Azores, places like that.

I’ve seen the plans from Van De Stadt, and the lists of specifications. I’ve seen the paperwork for importation of cut steel plate, coated and delivered to an address in England. But I’ve also looked closely along the waterline and seen the buckling between the frames. That syndrome is known in the trade as the hungry-horse look. I’m informed it’s usually only cosmetic and due to distortion from the heat of the welding.

And even if the ship has been professionally built under the supervision of a naval architect, repetitive pounding through seas will cause some buckling of plates. Think of it as the ship’s memories of her experiences.

Anna was gentle with me but pretty clear when I sounded her out. It’s not that she didn’t fancy it. But what she really wanted now was a pair of river kayaks on the roof of a VW van. The faster the water, the greater the rush. She knew it was a sort of addiction.

Good job I phoned her before doing anything daft. End of the year, I was skint again. Unscheduled repairs to roofs and wheels. The ideal gets dented. When it comes to shaping the ways of the world I think, so far, history shows that the idealists are dangerous. It might be OK on a scale of villages or towns – New Lanark or Leverhulme’s Port Sunlight. Maybe it’s even possible for whole islands to tick over without too much bother. Once you start invading other places to spread the religious or political word it’s ratshit dot flicking com,
a ghràidh
.

Take Napoleon. He was well into the whole picture – legal code and all. Couldn’t megalomaniacs be more like boatbuilders – the ones who build by eye – smoke a lot of roll-ups and do a lot of standing back and looking at the lay of the planks? That would maybe reduce some of the damage they cause. But then they couldn’t really be megalomaniacs.

I’m going to propose that there is a significant difference between those who seek to impose their order by weapons and those who are motivated to do it by eloquence and charisma.

Can we agree first on the similarity – both roughly-drawn types believe like crazy in what they’re doing? And of course some leaders of men and women are capable of alternating between both strategies. Not my own cup of rhetorical tea but, never mind the words, look at the presentation. I’d go to Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator
for the definitive analysis of Adolf Hitler’s body language. Passionate and persuasive, if a little OTT for my personal taste.

But it’s the tone of voice that gives you warning of the horrors to come. Think of the hate bursting through Adolf’s tight-arse rhetoric. But that’s the end of this digression. I was going to number them for the sake of order, the digressions I mean. But then they wouldn’t really be digressions.
Let’s go back to the idea of blueprints, for vessels, rather than societies.

A proven design has to be achieved in suitable materials. These will be selected according to function, budget, taste and availability. There’s also the crucial factor of time – you can’t use a material that hasn’t been invented yet. Some materials have been around longer than others. Wooden boats can still be competitive, in everything but cost. There are now also many ways that timber can be adapted for use in boatbuilding.

Some years ago, two friends were plotting construction in a material that was new to them both. Plywood has been around for a while. Layers of pressed timber are glued together to form a composite which has very good structural properties. Durability can be an issue but it depends on three main factors. The quality and species of the timber to start with; the number of laminations, with a large number of thin being stronger than a small number of thick; and the quality of the glue which joins them. Marine grade plywood uses particular glues and more durable species of timber are usually favoured over others.

A sheet of plywood comes in a standard length which is 2.4 metres (call it eight feet in old money) so there are some issues when it comes to joining sections. Angus was always researching and inquiring and came up with the plans for a simple vessel which had come out of tests very well. It was based on a proven shape – a Norwegian pram-dinghy. There will now follow a short description. Should you wish to proceed to the less technical parts of this story, please omit the following two paragraphs.

Thank you for continuing. A pram-dinghy is by no means unique to Norway but is very common in the sheltered waters of the fjords. The form is also prevalent in other parts of Scandinavia, particularly Sweden. Several Norwegian boats were imported into the Hebrides on the backs of fishing or whaling vessels. They were used as tenders. Rather than take them home, these would be sold off to local crofter-fishermen, as inshore rowing boats. Replacements could be obtained very cheaply or just built, on return home. Timber was cheap or free because in Norway, certain varieties of timber are easily available because the stuff does indeed grow on trees.

The design is based on efficiency and ease of construction. Planks, solid timber, or in this case, cut from sheets of plywood, run the whole length of the boat. They end in a blunt piece in the bow (front) and a blunt piece which becomes the stern (back). So there is very little twist in the shape. In Norway these are usually made from quite wide boards so there are only a few planks on each side. Because they overlap, this adds strength so only a small number of additional frames are required as stiffening and strengthening.

The plans which caught Angus’s eye merely adapted that principle to plywood construction. Frames were set up first and the joints between plywood planks were designed to fall where there was supporting timber framing behind them. Fastenings would be dipped in protective gunge. So the boat was planned to outlive the creators.

I was away on travels while these gentlemen plotted and drew and assembled materials. So the summons only came when I was home from Uni, at Easter. ‘Never mind the peats,’ Ruaraidh said. ‘There’s painting to be done.’

So that was my share but I didn’t get to choose the colours. The hull was black and the wooden trims at the gunwales and bow and stern were signal-red. The oars were black with red bands. She was a fine, simple shape.

All went well until the launch. She was light by the heavy standards of the time. Light enough, just, to be carried or dragged down the croft and put into the sheltered water of the inner loch, the Tob. The boys (translated as ‘old guys’) had a bit of difficulty carrying her down but there were plenty of cousins so they could stroll behind, carrying a rope and a bailer. They wouldn’t need the bailer though, because she wouldn’t leak. She didn’t. When you launch a clinker boat for the first time, or if she’s been out of the water for the winter, you expect water to gush between the boards until they expand. The pram was tight because the joints were bedded in suitable material.

The problem occurred when the boys sat in their new vessel. That’s when they realised they were getting old. Each of them also knew then that he didn’t want to die for a bit longer.

‘Shit, she’d roll on wet grass,’ Angus said.

Ruaraidh spoke in Gaelic.

‘Oh well,’ the watchers said.

I tried to intervene as gently as possible and say that some things you had to get used to. She’d never be like a beamy Lewis boat but this was a different style of rowing. She might seem tippy at first but maybe she’d stiffen when she leaned a bit.

The boys weren’t ready for such advice.

‘Pity she’s too big to put on the mantelpiece,’ someone said.

One of the boys used her that summer, to go out and back from the net. Someone else used her another year to get out to his swinging mooring about fifty metres out. That was about it. The boys had planned to take her over to Loch Orasay where you could still sometimes net a vermillion charfish. But they lost heart.

Not quite twenty years after the launch day, I bumped into old Angus in the Poy-oy. The postoffice. That’s one word. That’s how you say it. This would be about a year after Ruaraidh shed the mortal. I was a bit shocked at how frail Angus looked, leaning on the stick, but I hoped I didn’t show it. Things moved fast.

‘Make me a silly offer,’ he said. ‘I’ll give the money to Kenny’s young cousins for the painting they’ve done over the years. They’ve kept it up. But she’s not been out.’

That’s Lewis cousins he was talking about. Could be termed third or fourth cousins, on the mainland.

So we have to ask ourselves, how come I never had time to bring Anna over, to visit folk, out of town, while we were working away on our own extensions or on the olaid’s house? But I did have time to take her to see this craft. The paint had protected the ply. There was some rot in the stem and stern. Some rusty screws because they’d built her before stainless steel fastenings were widely available. She belonged in a museum to document the shift of technologies. Construction of small vessels in the transition from Scandinavian lapstrake construction to epoxy-based glue systems.

We took our time on the repairs. I didn’t have access to a big shed
then so the jobs were weather-dependent. Angus wasn’t interested in my reports of the oak replacing cedar at the top of the transom. He wanted to know what the colour scheme was now. ‘Pale blue with a maroon trim,’ I answered. He gave that the OK.

We gave him the photo. The pram moored calm among the rushes. We hit on this plan to row round Loch Orasay. That’s the deep loch. Deep enough in places to hide a stock of surviving Arctic char. Well, I don’t think the fish live for ever but the species continues here as it does in a very few other localised environments in Scotland. And in Lake Windermere. In Iceland they grow big. In Lewis they average half a pound and they’re usually netted. I served one up to Gabriele the night she came off the ferry to stay. I’d been given it by Ruaraidh. I’d been a bit anxious about the local reaction to my German blone, even if she was going to go down well at the first footing – tall, dark and handsome.

The fish looked better than it tasted. It had been in the freeze a wee while. It wasn’t at all bad but we didn’t get far into the second course. Prawns, of course, since you ask.

The remains of the Lewis char and the prawns made good breakfast material.

Don’t think we ever told Angus about our first adventure in the pram, after Anna and me had made a few repairs and painted her up. We went out to lay a running mooring in the loch. I’d heard it was deep so I brought along plenty of rope to go to the chain, shackled to a big single-point mooring – a dense piece of scrap steel that would bury itself in the silt and mud. What age was Anna then? She could swim better than me. But I delivered the lecture. One loop of rope and it’s death. Once that weight is going down there’s no stopping it. The line has to pay out smooth from the bucket. We’re at the other end of the boat. No feet, no gear, no nothing near it.

‘Just like dropping anchor, Da?’

‘No, I can haul the anchor back.’

‘Have you checked the depth?’

‘Well, no, but we’ve plenty of length in the rope. Plenty to spare. We’ll tie it off to size after.’

It went over. No hurry. We balanced the pram and watched the line pay out smooth as you like and go on for ever till the float went over as well and disappeared into the still loch. Anna was curious. She looked over for herself before saying, ‘What happens next, Da?’

I said not to worry but I was going for a wee swim. Just in case the float was a few feet under the surface. I can swim to about fifteen feet. Well, I could then. There was no sign of the luminous white plastic. Anna refrained from laughing till I was in the boat again and we hadn’t tipped.

‘It’s a wee bit deeper than I thought,’ I said.

‘So we’ve achieved exactly nothing,’ she stated when I got my breath back. She was reading a lot, these days.

‘That’s not quite true, young woman. We’ve done our bit to tidy up the more industrial streets of our metropolis.’

‘And chucked it all in the country instead.’

‘Can you see that hunk of scrap?’

‘No, but I know where it is.’

‘OK, but neither of us are seeing it again.’

‘Probably not, Da.’

So we went for a row and trolled some flies round the loch. Never saw a fin, char or trout. Forgot to tell you what the char look like. More red than brown. Spots are more gold than black. In fact the red on the one I saw and cooked for Gabriele wasn’t that different from the red that used to be the trim on the pram-dinghy.

When we were in a shallow bay, we put all our weight to one side, to test her out. The pram leaned right to the water and then became stiff. We could balance her like that, leaning right over. That’s why Ruaraidh thought it was a good design for Lewis. It was. Once you got used to that quirky leaning thing that happened before the shape became a wedge on the water and stopped her rolling further. The old boys just lost their confidence too soon.