To Celebrate!

(a thousand views registered here on my blog... so I am posting this a day earlier than I intended... by way of celebration... another Port Brokeferry piece of writing. 

And what is Port Brokeferry? 

It is a place. On the coast of Scotland. Once a fishing town, when fishing could sustain a community. Now it is a quieter place. A little known haven for tourists looking for ‘small’ and ‘still’. The young mostly leave when they can. If they’ve any sense they do. But they come back sometimes, when they have lived. Just to see, if it’s still there.

I have chosen to write about a week in Port Brokeferry. Seven Days. At that point in the year when the quiet of winter tips into the start of the summer season and the visitors, such as there are, begin to arrive. It is a week of change in Brokeferry, and a time of interruption.)

EDWIN AND THE LEARNING FROM FINN

The sea is calm. Not glassy or still, for it is never that. But not chopped or rough and so the boat moves easy through the water and does not judder underfoot. Edwin steers it in to port. Can do it blind if he has to. Knows every turn of the wheel he must make. Has done it so often. First as a fisherman, though he was a boy at the start. Took his learning from an old man who was steadier on the water than he was on the land. More patient than Job, that man. Name of Finn, like in the stories of the great adventurer. And he had stories to tell too. 

Old man Finn once worked as a whaler in places where the ice screamed and howled and the sea ran red with the blood of those harvested whales. On good days it did. Finn saw men lose their fingers and toes to the weather. Turned black as meat when it is rotten, then snapped as easy as a dry dead twig; saw boats crushed by the flexing and stiffening of the water; saw the sea rise up as high as a green hill and almost crush them when it fell. Then Finn came home again. Back to Port Brokeferry, with his pockets weighed down with silver enough to buy himself a small fishing boat: ‘The Silver Herring’. Kept him in beer and meat and tobacco for the rest of his days. And at the end Finn passed everything on to Edwin, just as he had passed on all that he knew.

Edwin keeps the memory of Finn alive in the stories he tells his passengers. Two families from the hotel today. And a lady from the cottages for rent. And a handful of day-trippers. Kerry came as well. To see the seals out at The Snag. She has names for them all. They look up when she calls them. Like they could be pets.

‘And Finn came home sometimes, when other boats were empty, and ‘The Silver Herring’ weighed so far down in the water with the fish he’d caught, that it took three days to unload the catch. ‘The sea owes me,’ Finn said in explanation.’

Edwin’s voice alive with the telling and the remembering. His eyes always a little wet at the end of a trip. Even when trips these days took him only as far as The Snag and back. No basking sharks today or whales. Just the seals coming to the edge of the boat to see what was what. And for the fish that Edwin dropped and that they knew he would. It’s good for the visitors seeing the seals up close. Makes them feel like it was worth something, the trip out.

Edwin brings the boat in easy. Blows the whistle just for show. Martin runs up and down the jetty, waiting for the new lad on the water, Bran, to throw the ropes ashore. Martin laughing like it is a game and he is a child again and he calls Edwin, Finn, like he’s living in another time.