Complete New Tales of Para Handy (65 page)

“Aye, it takes a strong hand and a sherp eye to trans-ship near on fufty tons o' gunpooder just as calmly as if it had been barrels of herring — or butter, come to that.”

On board the puffer Para Handy, ashen-faced, appeared at the door of the wheelhouse with a copy of Brown's Manual of Signals in his hand.

“Dougie, pit oot thon pipe this meenit. Dan, away you and dowse the fire in the enchine-room and the stove in the fo'c'sle and if either of you have matches aboot your persons then throw them over the side o' the shup.

“We are standing on a floating bomb! A red burgee flies ower a ship that's cairryin' explosives. Butter firkins my eye — we've chust loaded up wi' kegs o' gunpooder. We canna unload them again and I wull not abandon shup: neffer let it be said that a Macfarlane flunched at the hoor o' danger. But there iss only wan way this shup iss going up-river — and that iss under wind-power. Break oot the mainsail for there will be no fires aboard the vessel from noo on. I do not care how long it takes.”

It took three days — for puffers, while notoriously slow under power, are positively plodding under sail.

The passage of the
Vital Spark
up river started out in convoy fashion as Sunny Jim, refusing point-blank to set foot aboard the vessel till her lethal cargo was safely unloaded, followed her in the punt, maintaining station a hundred yards astern. He finally bargained with his shipmates for a tow-line in exchange for the two canisters of Colintraive ale, and slept through most of the subsequent voyage upstream.

News of the puffer's condition and cargo spread like wildfire before her and, sporting her red burgee (a warning as potent as the hand-bell of a medieval leper) she was given a wide berth by all the traffic on the river. But she was cheered to the echo by the curious crowds on the bank — crowds which became denser as she neared the centre of the city, lured to this most unusual spectacle of a floating bomb by the reports carried in the
Glasgow Evening News
.

Her owner, uncertain whether to be outraged or flattered by the attention focussed on his wayward craft, met Para Handy on his eventual arrival at Finnieston with cautious cheerfulness.

This was only slighty diminished when it was made clear to him that the promised bonus, now that the entire crew of the puffer were privy to his deceptions should — far from being split four ways — now be multiplied four times. He cheered himself up with the thought that the original Gunpowder plotters had paid a far higher price for
their
deception.

F
ACTNOTE

The Cowal peninsula and the shores of Upper Loch Fyne seem to have been singled out as highly convenient dumping grounds for undesirable military activity for more than a century.

The US Navy has only recently withdrawn its Polaris Submarine Base from the Holy Loch just a couple of miles from Dunoon — a presence which made not just the adjacent, innocent villages of Kilmun or Sandbank but the entire Central Belt of Scotland one of the most obvious potential targets for a primary pre-emptive strike by the former Soviet Union throughout the uneasy decades of the cold war.

Our immediate forebears maybe did not have the misfortune to live with that particular threat hanging over their heads, but they were certainly no strangers to an unwanted military or armament facility deployed into their midst without so much as a ‘by your leave'.

Thus at otherwise idyllic locations such as Furnace on Loch Fyne, Clachaig in Glen Lean west of Dunoon, and Millhouse, just inland from Kames on the Kyles, gunpowder and other explosives were manufactured over a period of close on a hundred years.

Operations at Furnace (where the established presence of a huge granite quarry had produced generations of locals inured to the thump and the threat of daily detonations) closed in the 1880s after a horrendous explosion left more than 20 dead.

The black powder manufactory at Clachaig lasted a decade or two longer and some of the original worker's cottages, renovated and restored, are happy homes today.

The Millhouse works were shut down only in the 1920s, despite a series of catastrophic accidents over the previous century which resulted in heavy loss of life and (if the contemporary newspaper reports are to be believed) were sometimes to be heard — and even felt — as far away as Rothesay and Inveraray.

The finished products from Millhouse ware indeed shipped out on schooners from a private jetty at Kames, to which the kegs were transported on horse-drawn carts — their wheel rims at first cushioned by leather and, later, by rubber.

Anyone who has seen that classic edge-of-the-seat 1950s French film
Les Salaires de Peur
(The Wages of Fear) about truckers offered premium payment to drive potentially lethal loads of nitro-glycerine several hundred miles across unsurfaced roads in mountainous terrain will have some idea of how the drivers of those carts may have felt as they went about their duties!

55

Nor any Drop to Drink

I
n the balmy, early evening of midsummer's day, the
Vital Spark
lay against the inner face of Inveraray pier. In the afternoon the thermometer had touched 80 degrees fahrenheit, without so much as a whisper of wind, and even now, at six o'clock, there was not the slightest promise of any freshness in the air and the heat remained overwhelming.

The puffer's crew were spreadeagled on the main-hatch: Para Handy, vainly seeking some shade in the wheelhouse, leaned his elbows on the sill of its opened fore-window and surveyed the crowds thronging the pier and its approaches with a somewhat jaundiced eye.

Preparing to board the steamer
Ivanhoe
were the several hundred members of a special charter party. Special in more ways than one, for this was a strangely silent crowd. Though it included scores of children of an age-group which would normally be expected to be of a boisterous and undisciplined disposition, these particular youngsters were marshalled into subdued groups under the watchful eye of straight-backed ladies of an angular build, a frosty mien and a certain age — and all apparently sharing a taste for unseasonably drab and voluminous garments.

The balance of the company was comprised of perhaps one hundred couples, presumably the parents and grandparents of the silent children, conversing in small groups in a whisper, their heads down: occasionally, just occasionally, a few of the menfolk glanced wistfully towards the frontage of the town, dominated by the prominent white facade of the Argyll Arms Hotel. The last components of the party were about one hundred younger men and women who were also gathered in supervised clusters, all men in this one or that, all girls in these others.

Gliding through the crowd with beady eyes which seemed to peer everywhere and take in everything were a dozen or more stiffly erect figures in black frock coats, high-buttoned waistcoats, and tall, shiny-black stovepipe hats, and carrying tight-rolled umbrellas, the glint of white dog-collars (largely hidden behind full sets of Dundreary whiskers) the only departure from unrelieved black in their whole attire.

“A Good Templar's summer ooting,” said Para Handy with a degree of acerbity, to nobody in particular: and he shivered in spite of the heat. “Now there iss a sight to mak' the blood run cold! There is chust aboot as much spurit of happiness, good-wull and harmony in that gaitherin' ass would fill an empty vestas box!

“They'll have been at the Cherry Park for a tent-meeting and a picnic, and then a march back doon the toon to the pier. Cheery days! Look you at aal they bible-thumpers wi' the chuldren, and aal they spunster wummen chaperonin' the lasses, crampin' their style and makin' sure they keep them awa' from the lads and dinna let ony couples go wanderin' off into the woods or up wan o' the closes. Then there's a wheen o' bleck-coated meenisters to stop the men-folk from sluppin' off to the bar of the Argyll Arms or the George Hotel for chust the wan wee Chrustian dram and a necessary refreshment on a thirsty day like this!

“I am thinking they would be better to hire in a whole pack of collie dugs and drive the puir duvvles through the town ass if they wass a flock of sheeps, for if you ask me that iss what they aal are, and that iss surely how they are treated by their weemen and their meenisters: if Dougie wass here he would tell you that himself.”

Indeed the thronged pier dispersed an aura of gloom totally at odds with the brightness of the day, and in dismal contrast to the cheery joie-de-vivre and bonhommie which were dispensed in large measure to all and sundry by the typical excursion party.

Certainly the crew of the
Vital Spark
, and perhaps the whole of Inveraray as well, breathed a sigh of quiet relief when, at half past six and with the boarding process completed, there was a toot (even
that
a subdued one) on the
Ivanhoe
's whistle and the paddler moved out into open water and headed off back towards Ardrossan.

“In a sense,” observed Para Handy half-an-hour later, as the crew settled onto a bench in front of the Argyll Arms Hotel and contemplated the play of light on the trees of Duniquaich over the top of a pint pot, “in a sense they only have themselves to blame, puir craiturs, but at the same time there iss many of the menfolk chust bludgeoned into the Templars, or maybe the Rechabites forbye, by their wummenfolk, wi' no chance at aal to mak' an escape. I mean, would
you
want to argue the rights and wrongs wi' maist o' the wummen we saw on that pier today? They certainly pit the fear o' the Lord in me. I am thinkin' that maist men would simply do what they wass told ass long ass the wummen wass around, and do what they wanted to do themselves ass soon ass they were on their own.

“And when you get them on their own, the maist o' the Templars men are chust ordinary mortals like the rest o' us.”

“I'm sure an they didna bring mich business to the Inveraray Inns today, though,” observed Macphail. “The Licensees' herts must sink to their boots when they see the
Ivanhoe
offshore. If she had been the
Lord of the Isles
wi' a works' ootin' frae Fairfield's yerd that wud hae been different, Ah'm thinkin'.”

“You would be surprised, Dan,” said Para Handy, “at chust how profitable a temperance excursion can be for the licensed trade if aal the arrangements are in the right hands.”

Sunny Jim sensed a story.

“Go on, Captain,” he prompted. “What d'ye mean?”

“It wass many years back,” said Para Handy. “Hurricane Jeck and me wass crewin' a sailin' gabbart that turned a penny for a man in Saltcoats.

“We were to load a cargo o' bales o' wool from Lochranza, and we arrived there late one Friday evenin' and went ashore for a gless of something at Peter Murdo Cameron's Inn, chust along the road from the head of the pier.

“Cameron was in a bleck mood, that wass plain to see, and Jeck asked him what wass the matter.

“ ‘Chust my luck,' says Cameron, ‘you can imachine how very few excursion perties we get comin' to Lochranza, the maist o' the steamer passengers we see iss those aboard the
Kintyre
goin' to or from Campbeltown. Precious few effer comes ashore
here
for a dram. If it wassna for the likes of you, Jeck, and the herring boats in season, and the workers on the big estate, there would be little point openin' a bar in Lochranza and little chance o' makin' a livin' from it.

“ ‘So when we heard yestreen that there wass an excursion comin' to Lochranza tomorrow — aal adults, too — on a special charter on the
Glen Sannox
, you can imachine that I got quite excited and ordered in extra supplies from the distillery up the road, and brought in more beer on the dray from Brodick this mornin'. It wass going to be like Chrustmas and Hogmanay rolled into one, I told myself. Then this afternoon we foond out what this excursion perty consists of. Chust Rechabites from Fairlie.
Rechabites!
And me with effery penny I could raise invested in drink for them. It'll be months before I clear the stock I've bought in, and the most of the beer will have turned sour, wait you and you will see.