Complete New Tales of Para Handy (10 page)

By now they had entered the wider, sheltered upper loch and the vessel was headed towards the pier at Bonawe. She was scheduled the following morning to load a cargo of granite setts from the nearby quarry for Glasgow Corporation roads department. By five o'clock the puffer was snug at the pier and the crew, with the exception of the Engineer (who refused to be persuaded to join them under any circumstances), set out to walk the mile or so inland to the inn at Taynuilt.

They had scarcely settled themselves at a corner table with glasses of beer and the landlord's best set of dominos when the outer door burst open and a worried-looking man in a yachting cap came in almost at a run. He banged the bell on the bar loudly and urgently and when the landlord appeared had a brisk and anxious exchange with him, the two of them hunched across the counter so that their heads were almost touching.

Finally the landlord straightened up, shaking his head.

“I'm sorry, Captain Forbes, but there's no' an ingineer this side o' Oban. Go you there on the next train,” and here he consulted his watch, “You'll be in the toon by eight o'clock and if you're lucky in finding a man you'll be back before 10.”

“Ten!” cried Forbes. “I can't leave a touring party stranded on the ship till then! They're due back at the Hotel for their dinners at eight!”

Para Handy cleared his throat. “Where's the shup, chentlemen,” he asked, “and what seems to be the trouble? We have a sort of an enchineer wi' us — he's no' here but he's no' far away — and I am sure he would not see you stuck.”

Half-an-hour later Captain Forbes, Para Handy and Macphail (the last still in the same ill-humoured temper) were clattering through the Pass of Brander in a pony and trap.

Forbes was indeed in a predicament.

The small Loch Awe pleasure steamer, of which he was captain and part owner, was aground at the mouth of the pass, where it opened out into the broad waters of the loch itself. “We should never have come so close in shore,” he admitted ruefully “but I've done so often enough before without any trouble.”

The trouble stemmed from the fact that the engine had died just as he was about to turn the little vessel back to deeper water and, drifting with the momentum of her passage, she ran gently aground 200 yards offshore. The problem was seriously compounded when all efforts to get her engine re-started failed.

“We took a new engineer on for this season,” said Forbes, “and I don't think he has the experience he said he had.”

The three rowed out to the little ship — imaginatively named the
Lochawe
— in the dinghy in which Forbes himself had come ashore in search of another engineer. As they clambered aboard the Captain was surrounded by a crowd of passengers, some of them curious, some anxious and some just plain angry.

“Why don't you chust tak' them below to the salong,” suggested Para Handy, “and trate them to the wan wee refreshment. A man aalways feels mich better when he hass a gless o' somethin' in hiss hands! Macphail and me will have a look at your problem.

“He may not look much,” he confided as his Engineer disappeared in the direction of the engine-room at the stern, “but though I would neffer tell him to hiss face, in case it would make him swoll-headed, he iss wan o' the very finest enchineers in the coastal tred!”

So it seemed.

Twenty minutes later came the gratifying sound of the shaft turning and, by dint of moving the passengers to the stern of the little boat (which was in deeper water) and calling for maximum power astern, Forbes was able to pull the grounded bows off the shoal onto which they had strayed, and the vessel was soon under way and headed for the pier at Loch Awe village, just beside the Hotel at which her passengers were staying.

“You and Mr Macphail can get the train from the village station back to Taynuilt, Captain Macfarlane,” said Forbes with some warmth. “And I am sure I do not know how to thank you enough. You have saved my reputation! And probably my ship as well!”

“It wis nae problem,” said Macphail, grudgingly. “Jist a broken linkage, and that on an injin gey like mah ain. Ah've telt your man whit went wrang so if it happens again, he should be able tae fix it. Else ye'd best look oot fur a new ingineer.”

“Well, does that not make you feel better, Dan?” asked Para Handy as they sat in the Glasgow to Oban train for their short trip back to Taynuilt. “I am not referring to this ... ” he waved the crisp, white Bank of England £5 note pressed on them by the grateful Forbes “ ... but to the cheneral proof of your agility and your value. You have been in a foul mood for the last few days and we are aal most anxious to see you snep out of it!”

“If onything it mak's me feel worse,” said Macphail miserably.

“Dan, Dan, what ails you?” asked the perplexed Captain. “We've been long enough at sea, Captain and Enchineer, that we should have no secrets.”

Macphail sighed, long and deep.

“It wis yon spae-wife,” he said at last. “she wisnae wan o' the usual rubbish ye get. She wis wan o' the real Gipsy Rose Lees! She telt me the names o' my wife and weans, she telt me the name o' the shup, she telt me we wis comin' tae Loch Etive for the setts.

“Worst, she telt me she saw me on a puffer wi' a broke-doon injin and an injineer no' able tae fix it, and the shup herself goin' on the rocks! Jist like whit happened tae that man this efternoon — but no' on a passenger boat like yon, on a puffer she said. That has tae be the
Vital Spark
.

“Peter, get anither injineer, at least till ye're all safe back tae Gleska, for sure as daith if ye keep me on we'll be agroond at the Connel tide-rip, or even a worse boneyerd, an' the shup'll be lost!”

“You're a haver, Dan,” said the Captain, but taken aback by the Engineer's unfeigned, vehement despair. “Spaewifes! They're aal rubbish!”

“No' all,” said Macphail, “No' all of them.” And he turned with a heavy sigh to stare miserably across the passing countryside into the dying evening light.

Para Handy came back to the corner table from the bar counter at the Taynuilt Inn, with four drams perched tantalisingly and precariously on a battered tin tray featuring the advertising slogan of a long-forgotten brand of chewing tobacco: a silver mountain of change from Captain Forbes' five pound note: and a broad and quite triumphant grin.

“Dan,” he said, “I have the best news you've had for days and if you don't believe me you can ask himself over there himself and he'll tell you it iss aal true”: and he gestured towards the landlord, who nodded and smiled back.

“Even if your spae-wife wass the chenuine Gipsy Rose, Dan, and even if effery single thing she told you wass true, you have nothing at aal to worry aboot! It hass aal happened already!

“The
Lochawe
wass wance a puffer herself, that's what she wass built ass! They turned her into a passenger shup years ago but orichinally she wass a puffer chust like the
Vital Spark
, which is why the enchines wass so like what you were used wi'. What happened today iss what your spae-wife told you aal about — but she neffer said it wud happen to you on
your
shup, chust that it wud happen to a puffer and that you'd be there when it did. And it has happened — but tae the
Lochawe
and her enchineer!

“That means it's not going to happen to you — nor to the
Vital Spark
!

“So cheer up, Dan, and let's have no more of your nonsense. And don't you effer, effer again let me cetch you goin' onywhere near a spae-wife while you're the enchineer on my shup!”

F
ACTNOTE

The railway bridge at Connel was completed in 1903. For more than half-a-century it doubled as a toll-paying crossing for motor traffic for which exorbitant tariffs could be (and were) charged in view of the near-monopoly situation which its owners enjoyed. The only alternative route for vehicles from Oban to Benderloch or Appin or Lochaber (or vice versa) was a tortuous road journey of nearly 100 miles. Eventually, in 1966 — after the closure of the railway line to Ballachulish — it became a normal, toll-free part of the road network.

The tide-race at this point, known as the ‘Falls of Lora', is most noticeable at the spring tides, when it presents a quite daunting spectacle for any small boats contemplating the passage into Loch Etive.

The first major industrial venture attempted at the Etive village of Taynuilt, in the 18th century, was an iron foundry but this had a relatively short lease of life.

For decades thereafter, however, a large granite quarry on the shores of Loch Etive opposite Bonawe was the source for many of the cobblestones or ‘setts' which paved the streets of Glasgow for many generations. A few now by-passed city backstreets and cul-de-sacs survive with these original surfaces: hardwearing, impervious to almost any abuse but quite notorious hazards for two-wheeled traffic (pedalled or powered) in the wet, when they turn swiftly into treacherous, ridged skid-pans.

The Pass of Brander runs westwards from the northern shores of Loch Awe just beyond the remarkable Cruachan Hydro-Electric Power Station, built inside the mountain and completed in 1965.

The small passenger steamer
Lochawe
served on the loch for half a century, finally going to the breaker's yard in 1925. Mystery surrounds her origins. She is registered as having been
built
in 1876, but there is evidence that she was in fact
converted
in that year for passenger duties, having been originally designed and constructed some years earlier as a steam lighter of 100ft overall.

Her lines and general appearance were certainly suggestive of a cargo rather than a passenger carrying ancestry. She had a very substantial freeboard, and a cavernous saloon and dining room which gave every indication of having been created in the original hold. Like every puffer ever built — and unlike almost every purpose-designed passenger vessel of the time — she had her engines aft. The Pointhouse yard of A & J Inglis was responsible for her conversion (or construction) in 1876, and she was then dismantled and transported in sections to Loch Awe for assembly on a lochside slip.

9

The Kist o' Whustles

I
t was several weeks since the paths of my own peregrinations had crossed with the passages of the
Vital Spark
, and I was out of touch with the latest news of the doings of her Captain and crew when I came across them loading a cargo at the factory pier of the fireclay works on the river Cart.

“It's drainage pipes for Cowal,” acknowledged Para Handy with a deprecatory shrug, meeting me as I strolled up the quayside just outside Paisley, “and given the amount of rain they've been havin' on the peninsula this last week or two, it iss mebbe not before time.”

Using a contraption consisting of a complex rectangle of netting made from webbing-straps the puffer was loading a cargo of ochre-coloured pipes of quite startlingly large diameter.