Complete New Tales of Para Handy (53 page)

Para Handy turned irritably to remonstrate with his persistent deckhand and as he did so the little engine, racing back from Hurricane Jack's end of the hatch, hurtled off it as it reached the momentarily unattended after-end, bounced once on the deck and, in a gleam of green and gold, soared over the low bulwarks of the puffer and sank, with one briefly echoing plop, into the salty depths of Loch Fyne.

“Jum!” yelled Para Handy accusingly. “Wull you chust look and see whit ye've been and gone and done noo…”

“An expensive high-jink, Captain” I said as we parted company on the corner of Argyll Street and Union Street. “But so long as you deliver the new set safely, and so long as neither giver nor receiver ever find out that you had to buy it, or why…”

“Chust so”, said the Captain somewhat shamefacedly, and he and Hurricane Jack went off in search of a cab while I made my way back to the newspaper office.

It was several weeks before the
Vital Spark
was in Inveraray again but one February morning she lay at the outer end of the pier loading a cargo of pit-props.

Just after mid-day the owner of the George Hotel came down the quayside and called to Para Handy, who was supervising the work of the derrick from the deck. Dan Macphail was at the winch and Hurricane Jack and Sunny Jim were up on the pierhead roping bundles of the timber together.

“I just wanted to thank you for delivering that Christmas gift in Glasgow for me, Peter,” the hotelier shouted. “Very much appreciated, and the laddie just loved his train.

“Funny thing, though : I must be losing my memory I think, for he wrote me such a nice letter about the train set and its fine
red
engine when I would have sworn blind that I had bought him a
green
one.”

“Aye,” Sunny Jim began : “But the toy shop wis sold richt oot o' the greeeeeaaaAAAAAH…!”

“Sorry, Jim” said Hurricane Jack loudly and pointedly, lifting the metal-shod heel of his heavy boot from where it had crashed down onto the toe and instep of the deck-hand's left foot. “Ah didna see you there…”

F
ACTNOTE

The Clyde Model Dockyard in the Argyll Arcade, the L-shaped indoor shopping mall which links Buchanan Street and Argyll Street, was so much part of the myth and folklore of West of Scotland schoolboys of my own and previous generations that it almost comes as a surprise to find that it
doesn't
have an entry in the Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland.

The Clyde Model Dockyard in the Argyll Arcade, the L-shaped indoor shopping mall which links Buchanan Street and Argyll Street, was so much part of the myth and folklore of West of Scotland schoolboys of my own and previous generations that it almost comes as a surprise to find that it
doesn't
have an entry in the Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland.

Argyll Arcade today is inhabited by nothing but wall-towall jewellers, but go back a generation and it housed a wide range of shops of which the Model Dockyard was the undisputed mecca.

Its window displays were legendary, the stuff of magic, dreams of the unattainable. Before plastic came to destroy the quality and character of toys the magic names of Hornby, Meccano, Trix, Mammod, Dinky, Basset-Lowke, Marklin, Frog and other legends of railways, roadways, airways and seaways in miniature dominated that plate-glass paradise and its groaning shelves.

At Christmas, even in the decades of continuing shortages which stretched well into the fifties, the Dockyard somehow managed to acquire stock which eluded lesser contenders, and scrums of anxious youths fought for places at the windows to see what was available before rushing home to pen anxious lists for their own personal present providers — before the limited, but quite priceless, stocks ran out.

I was living many miles from Glasgow when the Dockyard finally closed: victim presumably of the mass-produced, mass-marketed toys which for all their greater availability in shopping malls everywhere — and their relatively greater affordability — seem inconsequential and insubstantial trivia in comparison to those earlier delights.

Those who remember the solid chunkiness of a post-war Dinky Toy taxi-cab (any colour you wanted so long as it was black and green or black and wine) with its uniformed driver seated in his cab, open to the elements: or the challenge of getting the best from Meccano sets with which everyone else seemed to be so much more adept than you were: struggling with balsa-wood ship or aeroplane kits: the acrid smell of modelling paint and varnish: the surprisingly versatile rubber Minibrix, precursor of Lego and a valuable adjunct to Hornby Gauge 0 train layouts.

Those who remember such delights will never forget them, and will only regret that the toys which thrill their own children seem at once made so slipshod and slapdash (though technically out-of-sight), and so ephemeral (though imperative possessions for their one brief hour of fashionable fame) by comparison.

45

The Black Sheep

T
he disdain with which the Deck Officers of many of the crack paddle-steamers, and the officials at the more fashionable Clyde resorts, treat the puffers which cross their paths and frequent their harbours is as nothing compared with the calculated and insulting pretensions to superiority which are often directed at the little boats and those who work on them by the private yachts which they encounter — and the larger the yacht, then usually the larger the degree of derision with which they are treated.

Such opprobrium, however, comes not from the
owners
of the yachts but from their
crews
. This is particularly cruel, for as often as not these crewmen are of the same stock and background as the crews of the puffers, and the gabbarts and steam-lighters, which are the butt of their jibes and sneers.

I suppose it is merely symptomatic of the inadequacies of human nature that many who succeed in ‘bettering' themselves, whether financially or socially, should then desire to kick away from beneath them the ladder by which they climbed to such new and giddy heights — and to pretend that they never had anything in common with those less fortunate occupants of the lower rungs of that same ladder (namely their former colleagues and equals) at the same time.

And no individual can be more cutting in these circumstances than one who only
pretends
that he has improved himself, but knows full well that, despite superficial outward appearances, he has in fact signally failed so to do.

Para Handy, fortunately, was a man of a kindly and forgiving nature, and though he could be hurt by the unfeeling comments of former acquaintances who had moved on from the rigours and frustration of the coastal cargo trade, he was not prone to harbour grudges and was more likely to forgive and forget than to remember and plot revenge.

There are, however, exceptions to almost every rule and in this instance Para Handy's exception was Donald Anderson.

Anderson was a small, dark-haired and dark-featured individual with twitchy movements and a shifty look. He rarely if ever smiled and when he did (usually at the discomfiture or distress of another) it was, to trot out the old cliche, with his mouth only and not with his eyes.

Yet it had not always been so. Para Handy's very first posting afloat, as deckboy on a sailing gabbart trading out of Bowling, had been shared with Donald Anderson and the two lads, who were both of the same age, had struck up an immediate friendship.

In part they were drawn together by the unfamiliarity of their new surroundings, the uncertainty as to what the future held for them, and the sometimes unreasonable treatment meted out by the senior members of the gabbart's crew. In part, though, they had much in common despite the startling difference in their backgrounds — Para Handy brought up in a remote corner of Argyllshire, Anderson the unmistakable product of inner-city Glasgow. For the two years they spent on the gabbart, the two were inseparable.

Their paths diverged when they reached the age of 18.

Para Handy, determined to chart a career in the mercantile arm of shipping, signed on as deckhand on a larger gabbart carrying a wider range of cargos over longer distances.

Donald Anderson, when he learned of this, gave the very first indications of the sort of man he would one day become.

“Ye dinna catch me dirtyin' ma haun's ever again if I can help it,” he said cuttingly. “Ah'm fairly dumbfoonered at ye, Peter Macfarlane. Ye can keep yer gabbarts frae noo on for me, for Ah've got took on by MacBrayne as a steward in the third-class saloon on the
Grenadier
, regular hoors, a fancy uniform jaicket and three meals a day, and that's only a start. So you can be thinkin' o' me, and the dufference between wis, each time you is shuvveling coals or road-stone or some other filthy cairgo in some god-forsaken Hielan' hell-hole on a cauld January day.

“Ah actually thocht ye'd some sense, but ye're naethin' but a Hielan' stot efter a', and that's whit ye'll stay.”

“I dinna care much aboot clothes and ootward show, but you may as weel may get yoursel' into a uniform jecket if that is what you want, but it's for sure that you will neffer get your own command as a kutchen-porter if you live to be a centurion,” was all that the young Para Handy replied, and Anderson gave him a foul look and they went their separate ways.

Over the years, Para Handy heard snippets of gossip about his former friend, and they occasionally encountered each other in some corner of the west.

Anderson did not keep his job with MacBrayne for long, for once into his steward's uniform his attitude to the patrons of the third-class accommodation to whose needs he was supposed to attend became quite insufferably patronising — only ministering to the whims of the gentry in the first class lounges and saloons could merit
his
attentions and match
his
pretensions — and after just three months he was looking for another post.

He then spent twenty years going foreign — on the Greenock to Nova Scotia service of the Allan Line as a senior steward, by his own account. The truth was more mundane. Once again found wanting in his care of the paying passengers, he was demoted to acting as mess ‘boy' for the ship's engineers. He passed many fruitless and frustrated years trying to ‘improve' his position by obtaining a cabin post with one of the other transatlantic shipping companies but his record, resentment and reputation always preceded him, however, and he stayed where he was.

“At least his uniform fits him, even if his estimation of his own importance doesna,” remarked Para Handy to the Mate one day after they had encountered him in a dockside public house in Govan. “I am chust sorry for the Allan enchineers, it must be like bein' danced attendance on by a yahoo wi' a superiority complex. How they keep their hands off him I chust cannot think.”

By the time Para Handy had his own command, Anderson was back on the Clyde, having tried the patience of the Allan Line and its engineers just once too often. He drifted from one unhappy job to another — a washroom attendant at the St Enoch Hotel, a doorman at the Mitchell Library, a porter at Central Station, a boating-pond steward at Hogganfield Loch, a park-keeper at the Botanic Gardens. Anderson would take
anything —
as long as it gave him a clean-hands and non-labouring occupation, a uniform, and the opportunity to fawn ingratiatingly upon his superiors and treat contemptuously those he saw as his inferiors.