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The Longshoreman
A Life at the Water's Edge
By Richard Shelton Grove Atlantic Ltd
Copyright © 2004 Richard Shelton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84354-162-2
CHAPTER 1
FISHY BUSINESS
The Chess is a chalk stream, one of several in south-east England that help to sweeten the waters of the lower Thames. It rises in the Chilterns in about half a dozen little brooks and winter bournes, fed by springs that bubble out of the ground like liquid crystal. The largest of these brooks flowed close to a sawmill, no doubt long since closed, below which the infant Chess opened out into a long pool shallow enough for small boys to fish in without drowning.
My brother Peter and I are standing by the pool as our mother maintains a watchful eye. Below the surface hang the grey-brown forms of the 'banny-stickles' or three-spined sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus L., jerking forward when they see us and then hanging again, maintaining position with their quivering pectoral fins. Here and there we see the gaudy magnificence of a 'cock fiery' or mature male three-spined stickleback. He is turquoise above and brightest scarlet below, and he is fanning his nest in which several females have been chivvied into depositing their eggs.
Peter and I are carrying home-made nets and we make many clumsy attempts to catch the tiddlers from the bank. How easy it looks, the fish almost stationary before the plunging net. Back the net comes and we search its folds, finding nothing but a little sand and a couple of toe-biters, the freshwater amphipods often, wrongly, called freshwater shrimps. Eventually, my brother is rewarded by the flapping silver of a tiny fish and pops it proudly into the jam jar to which my mother has tied a carrying handle of string. I do not have an immediate tantrum but instead step into the water in the hope of achieving success of my own by confronting the quarry in its element.
There's a sudden chill as water which has not long sprung from its cool fastness in the chalk enters my left wellington. I say nothing for fear of bringing the expedition to a premature end and stand stock-still as a trickle into my right boot gathers strength. Slightly raising my eyes to look towards the deeper water in front, I see a seemingly transparent grey ghost gliding into view. It pauses briefly but, before I have time to get over my wonder, it spots me and, magically, it is no longer there.
For some reason, known only to the mercurial mind of a little boy, I tell no one. In fact, I have seen my first trout, Salmo trutta L., and in due course I will learn the secret of its transparency. Like those of most mid-water and surface-living fishes, the scales of trout are faced with silvery crystals of guanine, and it was the biophysicist Eric Denton who first demonstrated that the crystals are arranged in rows which, when parallel with the sun's rays, act as mirrors. By reflecting their surroundings, they give an illusion of transparency and thereby hide the fish.
It proves impossible, however, to hide the fact that I have filled both boots with the icy water. I am still fishless and, to avoid a scene from her spoilt elder son, my mother, revealing a skill which astonishes me, deftly catches some tiddlers and pops them into my jar. Boots are emptied and the jars, along with their precious contents, are taken home and put on the sill of the kitchen window. The little fish are admired until it is time for bed. Sadly, though, there is only so much oxygen in the jars and by morning all the fish are dead. But they have already exerted a powerful fascination on both Peter and me. More must be found, and quickly.
ONE SUNDAY MORNING
It is a highland Sabbath and a hesitant sun dapples the gravel around the porch of the tiny kirk. A few cars have already arrived and, along the road, little groups sharpen their pace as time for morning service approaches. For many, youth is a distant memory but children's voices can still be heard under the oaks. Here in the Perthshire hills, the pop culture of the towns has yet to dull the minds of the young folk and the embers of older values still glow brightly in the hearts of the young mothers from 'up the glen'. The minister arrives, a slim, white-haired figure, elegant in black, dark eyes shining out of a face that still has the power to enchant. A reassuring glance here, a kindly word there – she is among her people and any that 'swithered' about turning out today are thankful that their better selves have prevailed.
The wee kirk started life as a mission hall. The simplicity remains – rows of pews, a pulpit, a lectern and a communion table raised up on a low stage, are all that distinguish it from a garage or a 'tatty' (potato) shed. It's different today, though, because over the communion table is draped a full-size blue ensign, in the top left the brilliant complexity of the Union flag, and in the centre of the blue 'fly', the bright oak leaves and crown of the Scottish Fishery Protection and Research Flotilla.
It is Sea Sunday, a time when congregations across Great Britain and Northern Ireland remember that, however far from the sea we may live, we are an island people. The Articles of War, first articulated in the seventeenth century, begin with the words: 'It is upon the Navy, under the good providence of God, that the welfare and safety of this kingdom do chiefly depend'. In her Call to Prayer, the Reverend enchantress commends all seafarers to the care and protection of Almighty God.
Long extempore prayers are part of the Presbyterian tradition. At their longest and most discursive, they test the concentration, if not of the Deity, then certainly that of the most earnest of His worshippers. But this morning no one grudges the seamen of the Royal Navy, the Merchant Service, the Fishing Fleet and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution their separate mentions. The first hymn, 'Will your anchor hold', a favourite of the fishing communities of the Costa Granite (the Moray coast in north-east Scotland) and the 'regimental march' of the Boys' Brigade, thunders out, an involuntary descant supplied by the loud, sharp and quavering voice of an elderly lady to my right, ample of bosom but stout of corset. As we sit down, a voice whispers in my ear, 'Are you nervous?' With an uncertain shake of the head, I make my way to the lectern. As the only working seafarer in the parish, I have been asked to read the Old and New Testament lessons. Despite my rare appearance in the pew, the enchantress has indulged my request to read both of them in the incomparable English of the King James Version. Making my way up to the lectern, I look for reassurance at the blue ensign now draped on the communion table and 'won' many years before with the connivance of a sympathetic Marine Superintendent who looked the other way at just the right time.
'They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters. These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep': the familiar words of Psalm 107 bounce back off wall and window-pane alike, and in my nervousness the reflected tone sounds to me like that of a stern and aged headmaster. Back to the pew, more hymns and prayers, a sufficient break to recover in time to struggle through the Gospel account of the stilling of the storm. A thoughtful sermon from the enchantress follows, delivered in the soft cadences of her Aberdeenshire calf country (old Scots for where she was brought up). The final hymn, 'Eternal Father, strong to save', favourite of ships' companies throughout the English speaking world, nearly breaks me, so often have I heard it sung by my fishermen shipmates, but I reach the end without recourse to my handkerchief.
How had I, born far to the south in Aylesbury, the county town of Buckinghamshire and as far from the sea as any town in England, found myself representing the seafaring community in a village kirk in rural Perthshire? It is a long story, and it is not only about the sea.
LUCKY BONES
I was born in the mid-summer of 1942. Tobruk had fallen and Alamein was still in the future. My father had joined the Local Defence Volunteers (later to become the Home Guard) immediately they were formed but, as an older married man, had yet to be called up. He was shortly to join the Royal Air Force. As a professional photographer in civilian life, he served as a photographic specialist with Coastal Command. For a time he was based at RAF North Coates in Lincolnshire and, with my mother and me, was billeted at a farm near the aerodrome. First memories are as much a product of brain development as of external events. Thus, I have no recollection of the enormous explosion which accompanied the collision of two fully bombed-up Lancasters near the farm. It must have been some bang because the blast brought the ceiling down in the bedroom containing my cot, from which my mother had removed me moments before. I do, however, remember a yellow tanker lorry which used to visit the farm and a steamroller which worked on the local roads and no doubt also on runway repairs.
Shortly afterwards, my father was posted to the Middle East and my mother and I went to stay with her parents in Aylesbury. Here my early interest in steam propulsion was reinforced by the fact that my grandparents' house overlooked the Aylesbury to Cheddington line, the world's oldest branch line and whose documents of Royal Assent carry the cipher of HM King William IV. Light passenger traffic and some goods were handled during the war by archaic and feeble-looking four-coupled tank engines with very tall chimneys. I dare say they were more capable than they looked to a little boy. The apple of my eye was a magnificent eight-coupled goods locomotive, built originally for the London and North Western Railway, and often to be seen sizzling quietly from my grandparents' newly decorated front room. 'One two THREE, four, one two THREE, four' barked fiercely from its chimney as it took hold of its squealing trucks in the curiously named Dropshort siding opposite the house. I had been given some wax crayons by an honorary aunt and it was not long before a large representation of the engine adorned one cream-distempered wall, a result I had achieved by standing on the sofa. My maternal grandmother was a saint and I was never aware of her disapproval.
Not long afterwards, my uncle, who was serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, caught meningitis. He had joined the Territorial Army before the war and was called up at once. He was attached to a Territorial battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, a collection of East End reprobates whose fearsome reputation for fighting with one another and with the men of other units had earned them the informal title of the Hackney Gurkhas. Thanks to a new drug developed by May & Baker, my uncle's life was saved but he was declared no longer fit for overseas service. As a result, he was able to come home often enough to play a big part in my early upbringing. My interest, and that of my cousin Stuart, in steam locomotives found a new expression in the lovely wooden toy engines he built for us. Further reinforcement came from a superb double-page illustration of express engines in a volume of the Children's Encyclopaedia which had originally been bought for my mother and her younger sister. The engines were resplendent in the gleaming liveries of the independent railway companies that pre-dated the amalgamations following the First World War. My particular favourite was a North Eastern Railway Pacific in the light green of that fine old company.
Thinking back, I often wonder if my interest in natural history had its first flowering in this early obsession, one I have never entirely lost, with a form of propulsion which creates such a convincing expression of a living and breathing organism. As it was, my real biological observations were concentrated on the enormous bumblebees and brightly coloured butterflies that often visited my grandparents' back garden to enjoy the golden-yellow flowers of the monkey musk and the tall blue lupins.
VE-Day came and my cousin and I were given tall paper hats with Union flag motifs together with small Union Jacks with which, despite the outbreak of peace elsewhere in Europe, we duelled whenever our respective pushchairs drew in range of one another. My father's service with the RAF extended into 1946, by which time his travels had taken him to Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon and Kenya. One day when he arrived home, enormous in his blue greatcoat, I was playing with a small fishing rod, attempting to hook a metal fish out of an enamel bowl. 'I'm fishing' were my words of greeting and his face beamed.
As my younger brother Peter and I gained in understanding, so we pestered our father more and more for stories of his time abroad. He had brought many souvenirs back from Africa: soapstone carvings of fish and elephants from the Nile, an ivory paper-knife in the form of a crocodile, vultures of horn and Kenyan tribesmen and ducks made of wood. Pride of place in the collection was held by the 'lucky bones' of a lion and a leopard. I have them in front of me as I write and they appear to be collar-bones which, in the cat family, float free in the muscle tissue of the upper shoulder. Their reputation as lucky is probably a throw-back to the days when warrior tribesmen proved their manhood by killing lions while armed only with spears and were regarded by enlightened white hunters as 'the bravest of the brave'.
With the souvenirs at hand and my father's skills as a raconteur, we soon became familiar with a world in which hyenas whooped outside the tents and lions roared menacingly in the night. Curiously, none of these stories caused us to lose sleep – none, that is, bar one: the story of how once, one night in the Egyptian desert, he had seen a mountain fox peeping above a sand dune. Exactly why it was that the thought of seeing a small and timid animal with large ears should have engendered such terror was not clear then and still is not nearly sixty years later. The dark was a time when foxes were abroad and we even feared their imaginary indoor presence in my father's photographic darkroom. What nonsense it was, but how vividly the memory remains.
During his service overseas, my father's car, a 1937 Austin Seven Ruby Saloon with running boards but no bumpers (they were an optional extra for which my careful father was unprepared to pay), rested on blocks in the coach-house of his mother's property in what was then the small village of Stoke Mandeville. It lay some twelve miles away from our town flat in Chesham. To reach it involved a journey through the Chiltern Hills and on to the southern edge of the Vale of Aylesbury, a wild paradise visited by golden plover in the winter and made famous as Londoner's Leicestershire by the Whaddon Chase hunt. Petrol was still in short supply and some of my first journeys to my paternal grandmother's house were by bicycle. My father had two bicycles, giants with twenty-eight-inch wheels and large frames in proportion. To the crossbar of one he attached a wooden seat which he had made himself. Here I sat as we bowled along, the three-speed gears and the strength of my father's legs – honed by many a run along the perimeter track to service the cameras of Bristol Beaufighters and De Havilland Mosquitoes at dispersal – overcoming all gradients. One day in early autumn, we passed a stack-yard with a threshing machine in action, power provided by a traction engine which was not in the elaborate ex-works livery of the modern traction engine rally but workmanlike in faded black as all of them were at that time.
Before the war, the garden at my grandmother's house had been something of a showpiece. Herbaceous borders surrounded the house, and there were a large orchard and kitchen garden, lawns and a tennis court. By the time my brother Peter and I knew it, nature had had rather a free rein. The herbaceous borders were still in fair order and the kitchen garden had not completely lost the battle against field horsetail, ground elder and rabbits; the lawns were still kept up, but the tennis court had become a meadow. The apples had not been pruned for over twenty years and had become full-size forest trees below which cow-parsley and wild horseradish grew strongly. A better place for small boys to introduce themselves to the natural world could not have been imagined.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Longshoreman by Richard Shelton. Copyright © 2004 Richard Shelton. Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
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