North Star (2 page)

‘Ah asked when.’

‘Spring of 1969 – the
Lady Betty
.’

‘Old Harcourt. Shipped as a deckie, did you?’

I nodded.

‘And your mate’s ticket four years later.’ He lit his pipe, solid and immovable as the ship fell off a wavetop, sending the rule and dividers skidding across the chart. ‘Ah doan’t understand you, and that’s the truth. A bloke with your education –’ He shook his head, frowning. ‘Still got your union card an’all?’

‘Yes.’

‘But not the Hooll Trawlers’ Officers – shipyard, isn’t it?’

I didn’t say anything and he grunted. ‘What made you switch to trawling?’

‘My own business,’ I said.

‘Aye.’ He took the pipe out of his mouth, his eyes staring. ‘But just tell me. Ah’d laike t’knaw.’

I laughed. What could I tell him? ‘The sea,’ I said. ‘It’s in my blood, I suppose.’

‘You were at the Marston Yard on Clydebank, a member of the strike committee in 1968. And before that you were in prison, result of a demo that tangled with the police.’

‘That’s a long time ago.’

‘You’re still the same bloke, aren’t you?’

‘Come to the point,’ I said.

‘Orl raight, Ah will. Pierson & Watt now, if they’ve coom oot … Sounds laike it, an’ they’re non-union, all of them. Young Watt won’t employ union men. So where do we go for a refit?’

‘Not my problem,’ I said.

‘No. Not your problem. But you’re doing, I reck’n.’

‘Then you’re wrong.’

He shook his head, an obstinate look on his face. ‘You’re a good mate. I grant you that. But you’re a trouble-maker. I wouldn’t have shipped you if –’ He stuffed his pipe firmly back into his mouth.

‘If what?’ I asked.

‘I was doing you a favour.’

‘You were short of a mate.’

‘Aye. But it didn’t have to be you.’ And then he shrugged and said, ‘Orl raiglit, Ah’ll tell you – Jimmy Watt asked me to take you. Get the bugger off our backs, that’s how he put it.’ And then his big forefinger was jabbing me in the chest. ‘Do you deny you were on the Committee?’

‘Not on the Committee. I was called in to advise them.’

‘Advise them, eh?’ His voice was still quiet and under control, but the Hull accent was stronger now, something building up in him, an undercurrent of menace. ‘Advise them on what? Intimidation?’ He leaned his round head closer, the grey eyes cold and fishlike in the hard light. ‘Or did they call you in to get at Jimmy’s foreman, to get Bob Entwisle to –’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I was suddenly angry, remembering how I’d walked out of that crowded meeting, the little Congregational Hall thick with smoke and full of violence. ‘You know nothing about it.’

‘Doan’t I? Well I know this –’

‘You listen to me.’ I was shouting and I reached out and grabbed hold of his shoulder.

‘Doan’t you dare.’ He slammed his big fists down on my arms, wrenching himself free. ‘Keep your hands off.’

‘Just listen,’ I said. ‘It was the economics of the strike – the future of the yards, the financial state of shipbuilding in the North East. They were scared about their jobs.’

He glared at me. ‘They doan’t care about their jobs. They doan’t care about anything – just so long as they can smash us all to hell.’

‘You may be right.’ What was the point of arguing with
him? I suddenly felt tired. ‘My watch,’ I said. ‘You’d better get some sleep yourself now.’

‘Why would they ask you about the financial state of the shipbuilding industry?’

‘I was trained as an economist. London School of Economics. You know so much about me you should know that.’ I turned to the chart. ‘What do you intend to do? You can’t make another trip without a refit. There’s a leak for’ard where we hit that growler –’

‘Ah doan’t need you to tell me that.’ He relit his pipe, staring down at the chart. ‘There’s no roosh. Ah’ll have a word with Jimmy in the morning. Aye.’ He nodded to himself. ‘We’ve a little time yet.’ And he turned abruptly, without another word, and left me alone to my watch.

It was a long four hours; nothing to relieve the monotony but the slowly changing position of an oil rig seen only as a blip on the radar screen. The wind was gusting 50 knots, the ship standing on her head and no visibility in the blinding murk of sleet and spray. Plenty of time to think, and my brain too tired, too numbed by the battering to work out what I was going to tell the police when we docked. There had been two of them, two shadowy figures, and then the crash of glass, the sudden blaze, their faces lit as they turned and ran.

I switched on the Decca Navigator, concentrating on the clicking dials to get a fix, doing it automatically, knowing I could identify them both and worrying about Bucknall Claxby I didn’t care about; he was an older man, a hardline militant brought in to cause trouble. If it had been just Claxby, there on his own, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But young Harry Bucknall was the son of a good honest shipyard worker who had marched to London with the Jarrow boys in the thirties. A post-graduate university student, intelligent and an anarchist. At least he had done it out of conviction, believing that violence was the path to revolution. And I had no doubt who had been the ringleader.

I entered up the fix and went back to stand by the wheel,
staring out into the black night. All I had to do was tell the police. Tell them the truth. But it was the charge that worried me. If I hadn’t been there, if the little girl had died in that fire, it would have been murder. The charge could still be attempted murder and myself in the witness box, the full glare of publicity, and everybody knowing I had been interrogated by the police. It would be my evidence, my evidence alone, that convicted them. I would be cast in the role of a Judas. And they hadn’t meant to harm the little girl. They hadn’t known she was there.

All this time I was pacing up and down, the bridge tumbling under my feet, the noise of the storm beating at my ears, the elements in tune with my mood – everything in chaos, the world, my life, everything. Was this a sort of crossroads in the long journey from womb to grave? If only there were somebody I could turn to, somebody to lean on, to give me strength, to tell me what the hell to do.

I was thinking of Fiona then, wishing to God that just something in my life had turned out right. And then a rogue wave came out of the night, hitting us on the quarter, water roaring along the port side, and as the ship fell off the top of it with a slam that hurled me against the man at the wheel I heard him cursing under his breath. Our eyes met and his big mouth opened in a grin: ‘Them lads ashore … all toocked oop in bed with their womenfolk. Makes me laff on a night like this.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cos they doan’t know when they’re well off, always itching for something. Me, I joost want what they’ve got – raight now I’d settle for the missis, all warm and cosy laike, a naice soft bed that didn’t move unless I made it.’ He grinned, winking an eye, the longing of weeks at sea on his face.

My watch ended and I went to my bunk, lying in the dark, thinking wearily. I was an idealist, and idealists get cut down to size when ideals are transposed into politics. Maybe I wasn’t tough enough. When it came to the crunch … Was I a coward then, my ideals shattered by a petrol bomb? But
the doubts had started long before that. When was it? At that Clydeside meeting when a small group of militants screamed ‘Fascist!’ at me because I had tried to spell out for them what would happen? I had dried up and handed the mike over to a man, who talked their language, not the logic of falling orders and redundancies. Was that when the doubts had started? I couldn’t be sure. It was such an accumulation of things.

It was just on ten when I went back on to the bridge, daylight now, a grey world, cloud and sea all one in colour and the whitecaps rolling in from dead astern. I glanced at the gyro and then at the skipper. ‘You’ve altered course.’

‘Aye.’

‘Aberdeen?’

He nodded, his eyes on a small freighter headed for Norway and making heavy weather of it as she butted the tail end of the storm.

‘Did you talk to Watt?’

He didn’t answer me and after a moment I ducked out of the bridge to the door of the radio room. The fug in that little cubbyhole was overpowering, the air thick with smoke. Sparks was thumbing the key, tapping out a message in his shirt sleeves, a cigarette burning beside him in a rusty tobacco tin full of stubs. I waited, sweating there, until he had finished. ‘Any news for me?’ I asked.

He picked up his cigarette, turning in his chair and looking at me, his dark eyes large behind the steel-rimmed glasses. ‘You know we’re headed for Aberdeen?’ Morse crackled from the loudspeaker and he reached out tobacco-stained fingers for his message pad, listening with his pencil poised. Then he relaxed. ‘That rig again. So much traffic for
Redco 2
I’ve hardly been able to send at all, and the old man desperate to jump the queue and get us slipped.’

‘He hasn’t notified the Aberdeen police?’

‘Not his job to do that. The office knows, of course, so maybe they have.’ He leaned back, his eyes fixed on me, but
half his mind on the Morse. ‘They’re waiting to haul anchors so I suppose they got no joy on the Bressay Bank. Les is fit again, by the way.’ And he added, ‘Sorry about that. The old man’ll be sorry, too, in a way. Les isn’t the best mate in the fleet. What’ll you do when we get in?’

I hesitated, wondering whether the police would be waiting for me at Aberdeen. ‘Go on the club again, I suppose.’ One trip in six months. I was hating myself for being so dependent on trawler owners for employment, conscious of a deep-seated urge to start something on my own.

‘Why don’t you switch to oil – supply ships, something like that? That’s where the future is. Trawling …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Doesn’t matter to me. I go where Marconi send me. But a man like you, with a master’s certificate, you want to go where the future is.’ He jerked his head at the sound of the Morse. ‘He’s talking to the tug owners now, a big German job steaming north from Heligoland. The forecast’s good, so they’ll be under tow tomorrow night. Every trip it’s the same; down past Brent and Auk, all this area of the North Sea, nothing but rig talk –
Bluewater
,
Staflo, North Star
,
Glomar.
Take my advice – I listen and I know. There’ll be more rig supply ships than trawlers soon.’

‘Maybe.’ I stood there for a moment listening to the crackle of the Morse. Clydebank, Newcastle, Hull, all the political involvement of my life … My mind switched to Shetland, to the islands now far down below the horizon. Was it the island blood in my veins that had made me abandon capitalist America as a kid? Was that why I had started on my wanderings, seeking the values I could not find in the rich world my mother had embraced? Or was it the legendary figure of my father? Had I built him up as a hero in my mind simply because she had tried to bury him? I didn’t know. My mind was confused. All I knew for certain was that everything I had done, everything I had believed in, had suddenly turned sour.

And then Sparks murmured, ‘The offshore capital of the
world.’ He coughed over his cigarette. ‘Aberdeen – you know it?’

I shook my head. ‘Never been there.’

He smiled. ‘Well, that’s what they call it.’ The Morse ceased and he glanced at the clock, his fingers reaching for the dials, tuning to the emergency waveband. ‘Take a walk round the harbour when you get there. Have a look at the pipe storage depots, the diving outfits, all the clutter of stuff the oil rigs need. You’ll get the message then all right. Aberdeen’s no longer a fish port. It’s an oil rig supply base, and if I were in your shoes …’ He stopped then, his body suddenly tense as a ghostly voice, calling in clear, began repeating the single word – ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday …’ The voice was urgent, giving details now … It was a trawler with its engines out of order being swept on to a rock-bound coast in heavy seas.

‘Shetland.’ Sparks was scribbling it down on his pad, and as the voice began to repeat the vessel’s position, he glanced up at a large-scale map. ‘Looks like he’ll drive ashore on Whalsay Island.’ He ripped the sheet off his pad and got to his feet. ‘Nothing we can do about it, but the old man better know.’ And he hurried past me through into the bridge.

The name of the trawler was the
Duchess of Norfolk
. We looked her up out of curiosity. She was just under 200 tons, built at Lowestoft in 1939 and owned now by G. Petersen of Hamnavoe, Shetland. New engines 1968, Paxman diesels, so what had gone wrong? All the Chief said was, ‘Bloody Shetlanders, they wouldn’t know a crankshaft from a camshaft.’ He didn’t like the Shetlanders, having been stuck there once with gales and a leaking ship.

The
Duchess of Norfolk
was in fact south of Whalsay and, with the wind backed into the north-east, she drove towards South Nesting. We caught snatches of radio talk, very faint, as the trawler
Ranger
steamed to her assistance. It gave me something to occupy my mind, following her progress on the Shetland Isles chart No. 3059. She cleared Muckle Fladdicap, a bare three cables to the eastward, drifted inside Muckla
Billan and Litla Billan, missed the rock islet of Climnie by a shift of the tide and hit Fiska Skerry at 13.46. By then the trawler
Ranger
was almost up with her and inside of half an hour had a line aboard. That was the last I heard of her, for we were already in sight of Aberdeen’s North Pier, with the city showing grey through the murk above the pale line of the Links, and I was busy getting ready to dock.

The skipper took us in, heading straight for Albert Basin, where the trawlers lay. As we approached Point Law, a survey vessel sweeping past us and a tug manoeuvring across our bows, the harbour area began to open up. Sparks appeared at my elbow. ‘See what I mean?’ He nodded towards a cluster of tanks to starboard with supply ships moored alongside. ‘Mud silos,’ he said. The area beyond was being developed, the sound of reconstruction work coming to us across the water. ‘That’s the future you’re looking at.’

It was an extraordinary sight, the whole harbour area crowded with ships, drilling ships, survey vessels, seismic ships, tugs and ancillary craft all jam-packed among the fishing vessels. And, up-river from Torry Harbour, a litter of pipes and buoys, equipment of all sorts, lay piled on the quay, more mud silos and a new berth nearly completed. As we moved slowly into Albert Basin we passed very close to Point Law and the supply ship bunkering there. It was the first time I had been really close to one of these flat-bottomed, tug-like vessels that keep the rigs drilling.