Complete New Tales of Para Handy (58 page)

Para Handy nodded sympathetically. “It iss chust what I have been trying to tell you, Mery: let us be happy with what we have and with where we were meant to be.”

“But it got worse,” said his wife, “the waitress that came to serve at our table was a Campbeltown woman I had been at school with and she recognised me, I could see that: but she pretended she did not, and ignored us as much as she could, and spilled the tea on the tablecloth when she put the pot down, and never brought us fresh hot water, or offered us extra cakes, the way she did at all the other tables.

“And when the bill came, I did not have enough money to pay it it was so huge, and had to ask Lisa and Annie to help out.

“I have never been so ashamed and angry all at the same time.”

“And I am sure you neffer looked bonnier either,” said Para Handy with some fervour, and comforted her, “for when the colour comes to your cheeks when you are upset or cross, there is not a prettier gyurl in aal Scotland. And besides, you were never out of place in there, you are a finer lady than aal the toffs o' Gleska pit together, and I am proud to be your man.”

At which Mrs Macfarlane blushed most becomingly, and clapped her husband gently on the shoulder.

“Keep your teas wi' the other wives by aal means, Mery, for it iss good that you are all frien's. But neffer try to change the way the world is, and certainly leave well alane wi' the way we are, and Dougie iss, and Dan.

“We're aal Jock Tamson's bairns on the shup, and on shore, and that's the way we want it to be — and nobody is goin' to alter that — not even our wives!”

F
ACTNOTE

Of the ladies of the three senior members of the crew only Para Handy's wife Mary makes more than a fleeting appearance. There is just one brief veiled reference to Dan Macphail's domestic circumstances, though Dougie's wife makes her mark (in
The Mate's Wife
, one of the earliest of the original stories) when she turns up at Innellan pier on pay-day to collect the Mate's wages, ‘with her door-key in her hand, the same ass if it wass a pistol to put at his heid'.

Para Handy tells us that she is down on the first steamer from Glasgow any Saturday that the puffer is inside Ardlamont (the outer margin of the Kyles of Bute) so she is not a lady to be taken lightly and certainly not one to whom one would willingly take home an opened pay-packet.

To introduce the three ladies to each other was a temptation impossible to resist.

Glasgow had certain catering institutions, including among their number the venue chosen by Mrs Macfarlane for the ladies' afternoon tea, which were unique to the city, or so at least it seemed, and which though they had their origins at the turn of the century, lived on into the second half.

For serious eating, whether of lunches or high teas, a Scottish speciality rarely encountered nowadays, there were the three restaurant businesses founded and operated by three redoubtable ladies, whose names were almost always given in full when their establishments were being referred to. These were the respected restaurants run by Miss Cranston, Miss Buick and Miss Rombach and though targeted at the middle to upper class family market they were also very popular lunchtime venues for Glaswegian businessmen.

A second, distinctive, Glasgow institution was the basement coffee-house, very much the preserve of the male, and the haunt of the lawyers, accountants and merchants who made up so much of the middle-class commercial backbone of the city centre. The chain of tobacco-shops owned by Mr George Murray Frame had in their depths a dark, wood-panelled, dimly-lit subterranean room redolent of coffee and tobacco smoke and crammed full in mid-morning (and most other times of the day) of men in dark suits, whose dark topcoats and bowler hats festooned the wooden hallstands at the foot of the stairs which led down from the shop above.

The formidable Miss Cranston was one of the early patrons of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and her (and his) Willow Tea Room, in which every detail of interior design bears his stamp and seal, is a major attraction still in Sauchiehall Street.

For Richer, for Poorer — No two photographs from the MacGrory Archive better illustrate the yawning gap between Edwardian rich and Edwardian poor than these dramatically contrasting depictions of the crofter or smallholder in his donkey-cart and landowner with shiny top-hat in his pony and trap. The Trabant and Ferrari of 90 years ago!

49

The Sound of Silence

P
ara Handy studied the telegram which had just arrived from the owner of the
Vital Spark
with details of her next assignment. “Lighthooses!” he exclaimed petulantly. “More of him and his dam' lighthooses: I dinna care if I never see wan again ass long ass I live.”

The puffer was lying at Rothesay where I was changing steamers for a long-promised visit to old friends in Lamlash, and the Captain had seen me on the quayside when I disembarked from the
Lord of the Isles
and invited me on board for a mug of tea. Our exchange of the gossip of the river as we sat side-by-side in friendly and relaxed familiarity on the vessel's main-hatch had been passing the time very pleasantly until we were interrupted by the arrival of a Telegraph Boy complete with scarlet bicycle and low, black, chin-strapped pillbox hat.

“So what's the call of duty this time, Captain?” I enquired, as that mariner angrily tore the flimsy telegram into shreds and consigned the fragments to the winds.

“Well,” he said: “at least it's no' coals this time, for that is the worst cairgo of them aal, ass I have told you before now. But this wull run it close for we're to tak' in the oil in barrels for the generators at the lights on the Ailsa Craig and roond the Mull o' Kintyre, and I sometimes think, from the way the crew behave and the sheer tumidity of them aal, that we iss an explosion waiting for somewhere convenient to happen when that is oor cairgo.

“We daurna smoke on deck by Dan's way of it — and him wi' a fire going in the stokehold that wouldna have disgraced Emperor Nero: and Dougie iss that nervous that he iss not at aal happy if Jum hass the galley stove goin' in the fo'c'sle to boil a kettle for oor teas or potatos for oor denner so we feenish up livin' on mulk and rabbit-food.

“I neffer, effer eat ass much in the way o' lettuces and raw carrots and that sort of rubbish in a whole twelve-month ass I do on a single week's fuellin' run to the lighthooses — and aal chust because my crew are feart o' havin' an open flame on the shup. They are chust feart for their lifes! If Dougie wass here he would tell you himself.

“I aalways tell them that a load of whusky, though it might be a much more welcome cairgo for aal sorts of reasons, iss chust ass likely to blow them to Kingdom Come ass a load of kerosene or paraffin — but wull they lusten? Wull they bleezes. You are talking to a brick wall wi' them.”

It was therefore with some anxiety that I first came across the accounts, a week later, of an accident which had befallen a steam-lighter in the course of her duties in servicing the lighthouse which guides mariners safely past Davaar Island at the mouth of Campbeltown Loch and into the welcoming shelter of that capacious harbour.

It appeared that the vessel involved — un-named in those first reports of the mishap carried in the earliest editions of the
Glasgow Herald
— was carrying kerosene to the light-station. She was struck by an errant starting-flare fired from the trim motor-launch acting as floating club-house and starter's office for the Campbeltown Yacht Club's annual regatta, which was in process of setting the yawl class off on a triangular course from the island to Peninver on the Kintyre peninsula, across to Blackwaterfoot on Arran, and back to the finishing-line at Davaar.

The rocket had landed on, and set fire to, a small heap of waste rags on the puffer's foredeck. Onlookers reported that within seconds a middle-aged man, thought to be the Mate of the vessel concerned, had dived overboard followed immediately by a young deck-hand and, just a fraction later, by an older man who had been seen scrambling out of the engine-room hatchway at the stern of the boat.

This left on board just one man, presumed to be the skipper of the vessel, who had been alone in the wheelhouse when the flare struck.

By the time this man — described by at least one paper as the ‘hero of the day' had run to the foredeck to extinguish the flames with a bucket of water hauled from the sea, dashed below to the engine-room to set the machinery to the off position, and returned on deck and made for the wheel-house, it was too late. The puffer ran firmly aground on the sandy tidal-flats below the lighthouse, and stayed there till the next high-tide floated her off that same evening.

“I wass bleck burning ashamed for them aal,” said Para Handy bitterly the next time I met him, and questioned him about the incident — for of course, as later editions of the paper had confirmed, the steam-lighter involved in the incident was indeed, as I had suspected from the first, the unfortunate
Vital Spark.

“Not wan scrap of courage or initiative between the three of them,” he continued, “but they did weel enough for themselves right enough! Aal three of them was picked up by the Yat Club's safety-launch and taken into Campbeltoon and treated like royalty, ass if they had been real shupwrecked sailors and no' chust three faint-hearts that had shamelessly neglected their duties to save their necks! And there wass I marooned on the shup, nothing could get alongside her till the tide turned, and there wassna so mich as a drop of wholesome Brutish spurits aboard, nor the makin's of a hot meal neither.

“Meanwhile that crew of mine wass safe ashore bein' wrapped up in warm blankets at the Mussion to Seaman's Hostel, and coaxed to tak' chust the wan more wee hot whusky drink, and spoon-fed wi' soup and chicken, and generally made heroes of.”

I agreed with the Captain that it must really have been an infuriating experience.

“Aye, and outfuriating ass weel,” he protested, “for when they wass interviewed by the chentlemen of the press when we got back to Gleska two days later (and no disrespect intended to yourself, Mr Munro, you'll understand) here and did the reporters no' sort of agree wi' them that the only reason I had stayed on board wass that I couldna sweem and that the three o' them had had to dive off to get a boat to rescue me, because our own skiff had a hole in her from where
I
had hit her onto a rock skerry aff the mooth of the Sliddery Water when
I
wass oot poaching in Arran the previous night.

“Dam' leears — we wass
aal
oot poaching in Arran the previous night!

“Onyway, I have made it clear to the owner: I am not cairrying kerosene effer again wi' that lot and I am gled to say that in aal the circumstances, he has agreed to that.”

“Well, that should reduce the visits you have to make to the lighthouses, Captain,” I said: “and given that you don't like them, that should suit you fine.”

“Aye,” said Para Handy, scratching his ear. “They chust do not agree wi' the Macfarlanes and I am not surprised. Look at my brither Keep Dark, noo — he wass six months in wan o' they rock lights aff the Pacific coast of America. Keep Dark went foreign for mony years, and wan time in the nineties he hit rock-bottom in San Francisco, poor duvvle, he wass ashore from wan o' they nitrate cluppers, they wass on passage from Valparaiso wi' a load of guano. That iss the most desperate cairgo you could effer imagine! Loadin' it iss unspeakable and the smell of it is in effery cranny o' the shup, you cannot escape it at aal.