A Book of Death and Fish (49 page)

It’s explosive. There might not be a lot of mass. Velocity neither. But it’s enough. So when a ceramic object falls four feet or so from a kitchen worktop and hits the stone floor, it will shatter. There might be large bits, might be small. Usually it’s a mixture so you have to get the hoover out, whether the floor is ready for the annual dusting or no. But just for a minute you’re looking at a bit of your life, distributed all around the floor.

This morning it was the teapot. This also left a small, damp heap of soaked lapsang-souchong leaves. No smoky smell because you’ve already imbibed that. As my housemate’s mate said, Laphroaig tea. It’s the residue. The damp dross. My spliced three-strand rope handle is, of course, intact. That was a repair made about twenty-odd years ago. The lid, a darker and less matt clay than the rest, because the original lid took a dive some time back – that’s whole except for a chip. So it could be worth putting aside. But the terracotta unglazed clay pot has been in every address since the student days. It was in the cold Torrey flat and the room above the Brig o’ Cowie.

It was in constant service because I didn’t drink alcohol in them thar days, Jim lad. I was intoxicated by rhetoric. But there was the possibility of calm in the spaces between words.

The Edi Thompson bowl was very good for drinking tea. It was a comfortable shape in the hand. It had an unglazed ribbed line and then the smooth area went from something between Harris agate to Ross of Mull granite, maroons to pinks. It’s possible I might have sipped a dram from it too because it seemed I no longer needed to look for the rest of any bottle that was open. It took a good few sips to acquire a taste for malt whisky. I’d
been reared on black rum, the sea angler’s preference, as the spirit of choice before I stopped drinking at the age of seventeen. In those days the choice of rums outnumbered the whiskies on the gantry in the Criterion Bar.

After the Parkinson’s set in, Edi was not going to be making more pots. So it became precious. I stopped drinking out of it and that’s when my bowl took the plunge as my sleeve caught it on its shelf. Edi was a librarian at a music college. He was deaf and a very good pianist. He was a keen climber and settled in Harris because of the hills that go straight up from sea-level. The ones that have no intrinsic landscape value, as quoted by the landscape consultant employed by the multinational company which wanted to develop the superquarry by wiping out a mountain. Would that have been a death? If the constituent rock had been shifted in ships to be laid as the foundation for new highways? Or simply a transfiguration.

Edi was gay and once wrote a brave letter to the
Stornoway Gazette
. As my own sister did but his was more of a direct statement, arguing against intolerance. He’s under the ground on the west side of Harris now. You can’t bury anyone on the east side. Not deep enough. Not without blasting equipment. They call the east side road the Golden Road because it cost so much to explode its snaking route from the gneiss. The ‘golden grave’ has a ring to it. Instead, they have the funeral path, east to west Harris. Each cairn is a dram-stop. There’s quite a lot of them.

It might have been after that breakage, I housed Mairi Bhan’s two raku pots in respective deep alcoves. They might be out of reach of glancing scuffs from elbows. Neither of them has a function. They both have a shape but you couldn’t say what it is. I mean, not the way you could say a buoy is cylindrical or its top-mark is a can or a cone. I put some gnarled twigs in one for a while but I took them out again. The pots are what they are. They are their own stories. I love them. I don’t mean I like them.

The daughter won a fine bit of stoneware made by the Island pottery with the longest standing. It used to be Stornoway Pottery though it was out in Benside, Laxdale, from 1974. Now it’s Borve pottery and it is made in Borgh (same name). The West Side Borve, on the road to Ness, not the Harris one. It was a sailing prize and she won it with her pal in the plastic
dinghy. I should be able to tell you the type. But I can’t. Anyway, that piece of artisan’s porcelain took a dive too. I wasn’t responsible. I only visit the Leverhulme Drive abode by prior arrangement. But I saw it was in bits, set aside for a repair job that would never happen.

Now the amazing thing is that I won a very similar stoneware plate by Borve Pottery in a sea-angling competition. It was an accident and I’m a bit ashamed of it. I gave up competition fishing about the time the old king died. But there was not a scale to be seen on the east side so the cheapest way of getting out to feed a portion of Kenneth Street was to renew the membership for the Danglers. I didn’t know it was a competition. I was thinking of dabs for the neighbours, a ling for the
cailleach
along the road, a haddock for the ex, a
cnòdan
for myself. I just knew it as the word for the fish. I didn’t know it was Gaelic. I didn’t know if it had any accents or not. I had to look it up. I already knew that
bodach ruadh
were red codling so I knew
cnòdan ruadh
was the red gurnard. Anyway, you get points for catching different species of fish, these days. I scored, big time.

Anna broke her collarbone. Outdoor pursuits. I went to visit her and took the plate in the packaging it came in. A replacement for her shattered trophy. I didn’t have space for it anyway. Very bonny packaging. Aye but not plastic, not rainproof. Nothing’s Lewis rainproof anyway. I didn’t realise the bag was getting soaked. The bag with the plate and, of course, dark chocolates on top, grapes and all. It parted and that mass and velocity thing happened. I picked up the sodden base and wrapped it up with the rest of the debris. I couldn’t just leave the sharp bits on the pavement. And I didn’t find a bin and some sisters could be strict about visiting times, at least they were in the olden days and that probably hadn’t changed, so I kept on going and found myself explaining to Anna why I was carrying in a sodden bag of shards.

I said sorry I’d forgotten the Araldite because it was a kit, a puzzle really, to keep her occupied for an hour or two. That seemed to hit Anna’s fairly individual sense of humour. The daughter said it was exceflickinglenté but that maybe needs a note which is coming now:

(NB SY grammatical structure: the breaking of the conventional word with expletive insertion in its polite form, followed by a pan-European
echo of French or Hispanic connotation – a nod to our neighbours down the searoad – as long as you work the tides – if you don’t you’re not going to get there, Bilbao or Vigo. Unless you’ve got a Kubota under your deck.)

So that’s really it then, the deaths of pots. I never did own a Bernard Leach one. He was a Bahá’í. I know a lot of kind and wide-looking people who are or were. He learned about the Faith through an artist called Mark Tobey. An abstract expressionist, who made white-line paintings, a bit like calligraphy in Arabic but out of conscious control. Leach wrote a modest book called
Drawings, Verse and Belief
. I returned to it often. He worked with Shoji Hamada. The Japanese master did the raku with a proper fire. But the blowlamp and oildrum method is quite in keeping with Island historical traditions of using what’s left lying around. I might have told you, that’s how Mairi made them, in a workshop at the school.

I’ve got the house to myself again. There’s a lot of space for one guy but not when it fills with files and books.

We’re all conversant with the device of a flashback by now. You’ve been to the movies even if you haven’t been daft enough to trip out on LSD. So let’s go back to Keitel’s memoirs, written at speed when he knew his days were numbered. I found myself returning again and again to that period – the closing stages of World War Two. A lot of the killing happened near the end. I thought of two friends, Ruaraidh and Aonghas, Roddy and Angus. I did go to visit Angus once, in the sheltered housing. But he’d been moved to that place on the outskirts, just back from Broad Bay. A suburb that used to be one cattle-grid out. I was warned he wouldn’t recognise anyone. He needed total care. Instead of going there to read to myself and to be able to say I’d done it, I kept going round to the library or downloading pdfs.

Hitler’s Field Marshal mentions the plague. Not by name and not in detail but he refers to a conference when the
Führer
was looking closely at a research programme into biological warfare. Keitel seemed to have found this way of prefixing his orders with a protective introductory phrase, when he was troubled by the suspicion of a moral scruple. ‘With extreme reluctance, the
Führer
has felt it necessary to…’ sort of thing. As a former civil servant of Her Majesty I recognise a technique which was known as ‘covering your arse’ in the trade.

Flash-forward again and the evidence is overwhelming. Saddam Hussein was using chemical warfare against the troublesome Kurdish minority. That would be his administration’s version of ‘special treatment’. The dates tell us that this was weel kent many years before he became an official tyrant. When an alliance between the USA and UK
administrations gelled to the point of mutual support (and indeed admiration), this history seemed to gain a sudden topical relevance. The question of the presentation of evidence that weapons of mass destruction, held in Iraq, amounted to a significant threat to the rest of the world, is outwith the remit of this personal diary. For now.

Strange thing though, that Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary, could see clearly enough to tender his resignation. Unlike Field Marshal Keitel, who felt that such an act would be dishonourable, at a time of national crisis. Instead, he remained in command and made his weak protestations.

Of course Anthrax Island will be in your own ken. Britain’s wartime experiments in germ warfare were filmed in that early technicolour that’s got its retro atmosphere. A special flock of sheep was taken to Gruinard and observed, as the anthrax bombs were delivered. You can see the beasts fall and the carcasses being burned. So it was a successful experiment.

You can also see an attempt to tidy up. I think researchers were surprised that the spores in the soil were so persistent. Warning signs were kept in place until near the end of the twentieth century. There was a prohibition on landing on the island. It’s remote enough anyway, of course. Yes, from London. It’s under one mile from the nearest point on the west coast of Scotland.

Protesters placed containers with soil from Gruinard in prominent places, in the 1980s. Ministry of Defence personnel were sent to the island with protective clothing and enough formaldehyde to preserve shoals and shoals of sharks.

After further tests, the island was provisionally announced as safe. The Coastguard was informed that restrictions would be lifted. Next time a lobster-boat had machinery failure and it looked like the crew would drift on to Gruinard, I had no official reason, as a Coastguard Officer, to inform the MOD. But I thought I would anyway. This had been the procedure all my years in the Service. There was a bit of a flurry. ‘I thought you guys said it was safe,’ I said on the phone.

‘Yes, safe for sheep,’ a voice said.

But tests for safety to humans were incomplete. Unfortunately, these guys got their engine going again, otherwise the MOD might have got
their test results, free of charge. Which is exactly what happened in a more recent British experiment in chemical warfare.

Now I’m taking it you’re with me so far. No challenges on the story of Gruinard Island? But we’re going to leave World War Two history behind and move straight into the Cold War – well I should say we’ll move back in there because we’ve had an encounter or two already. From Melbost to Rügen.

It’s 1952. The pertinent department wishes to conduct an experiment into the feasibility of spreading bubonic plague to an unspecified enemy. But this is clearly going to be a sensitive issue so a remote location is required. As Gruinard was still a prohibited area, due to continuing contamination, it was almost certainly considered. But from a scientific point of view, you clearly need to limit the factors under scrutiny to one at a time. The continuance of anthrax spores could complicate results. It could also pose some nuisance to personnel involved in the new experiment.

So caged monkeys and guinea pigs were set afloat on rafts in Broad Bay. (You may choose which is nearest to the human species, but please choose carefully and be willing to reconsider when you hear the full story.) Yes, that’s the same Bay, to the north of the Eye Peninsula and touching on Stornoway Airport. It was a very productive haddock fishery at the time. Smoke floats were used as a means of letting loose the airborne plague so it would contaminate the rafts.

However, a Fleetwood-registered trawler ignored the warnings that special operations were being conducted in the area and steamed through the whole experiment. In one sense this was disappointing but in another way it was a blessing. Clandestine means were used to keep the vessel and its crew under surveillance. Her radio traffic was closely monitored. Luckily the crew went ashore, home in England, and mixed in general human society before they knew they were at risk of carrying the plague. This was the ideal situation to monitor the effectiveness of the airborne method of disseminating this form of organic warfare.

The crew fared very differently to the flock of sheep on Gruinard. There was no report of ill effects beyond the normal hangovers you might expect from the first night ashore, to wind-down, after a long voyage to
the Hebrides. You’ll have to make up your own mind about how far to trust your unreliable narrator, a figure common to the disciplines of both literature and history. Would I tell you any lies?

Anyway, it’s not as simple as that. There’s the matter of presentation. Let’s move forward from the Cold War. Let’s look at Iraq 2. Not the Kuwait reason for attacking a tyrant who was himself attacking that model of democracy. But the time when a logical case had to be made out for ‘finishing the job’ in response to terrible events in the city of New York. But the UK’s involvement could not simply be seen as the inevitable result of a strategic alliance (cf causes of the First World War).

I don’t know why HM Government could not have simply raised the issue of the treatment of the Kurdish minority. Maybe they were a bit too distant. Apart from the contrast in habitat, maybe they were in fact perceived to be a little too close to the Inuit savages dismissed by Charles Dickens as that bit less than equal.

Enormous pressure was brought to bear on certain individuals who had the duty to collate and present objective information on the likelihood of the Iraqi regime’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The information was not sufficient unto the needs of certain politicians. They required a proportion of bloody presentation with their pound of flesh. Leverage is applied by different methods. Different individuals have different capacities for resistance. Dr Kelly was the scientific adviser and therefore the key player. He was also a member of a religion which I happen to know holds human life sacred, in a similar way to Roman Catholics. But a member of the Bahá’í Faith appears to have taken his own life, under the enormous forces of conflicting duties, when instructed to put a bit more effort into the dramatic presentation of limited facts.