Complete New Tales of Para Handy Page 13

  17

  The Missing Link

  Para Handy looked up from his perusal of the Glasgow Herald with considerable surprise. “My Chove,” he said, “did you read this piece in the paper aboot the Piltdown Man, Dougie?”

  Captain and Mate were alone in the fo’c’sle: Macphail was carrying out some running repairs with, to judge from the baffled curses which could occasionally be heard even from the forefoot of the vessel, scant success. Sunny Jim had been sent ashore with a long shopping list, for this brief stop-over at Partick would be their last chance to stock up the provisions cupboard for some days.

  The puffer was on her way from Rutherglen, where she had loaded a farm flitting, and would shortly be sailing for the remote clachan of Bellochantuy on the western shores of the Kintyre peninsula. It would be some days before they were within hailing distance of a shop again.

  “Piltdoon Man?” asked the mate: “and who might he be when he iss at hame?”

  “He iss not at hame any longer,” said the Captain, “for he hass been dead now this many thoosands o’ years: but he used to live in the sooth of England and some professor or somethin’ hass been and dug him up again, and says he iss the ‘Missing Link’, whateffer that might be.

  “Chust look you at this picture, Dougie,” he commanded, handing over the paper, opened at the page carrying the story of the Piltdown discovery under a banner headline, and bearing beneath that an artist’s impression of what the ‘Link’ was thought to have looked like.

  “It is quite uncanny!” continued the Captain with considerable conviction. “Did you effer in your naitural, if you were chust to shut the wan eye and look at it sidey-ways, see onythin’ that pit ye mair in mind o’ Macphail on wan o’ his aff days?”

  The Mate peered quizzically at the sketch.

  “He certainly disna look too healthy,” he said at last: “but iss he not raither mair like thon English chentleman that wass up for the shootings at St Catherine’s last year, and shot himsel’ in the foot, and we had to gi’e him a hurl across the loch in the punt, ower to the doctor’s at Inveraray?

  “I think it iss a wee bit unkind o’ ye to be comparing him wi’ poor Macphail, Peter. Even after 30 years shuvveling coal Dan’s airms iss no’ quite ass long ass that.”

  “Whateffer you think yoursel’, Dougie,” said the Captain: and carefully folded the paper before placing it on top of the mess table: “but I will be interested to have Jum’s opeenion when he gets back wi’ the proveesions.”

  At that very moment Sunny Jim was coming to the end of a longish grocery list in a branch of the Glasgow Co-operative on Dumbarton Road.

  “And six pounds o’ best pork sausage,” he concluded.

  “Links or Lorne?” asked the grocer.

  Jim thought for a moment. “Mak’ it links,” he said at length “and a couple of black puddin’s, and twa mealie wans too, jist for a wee divershun tae go alang wi’ the sausages.”

  The grocer weighed out the goods, wrapped them in grease-proof paper and perched them on the top of the large cardboard box into which a full week’s supplies for the crew of the Vital Spark had now been consigned.

  “Onything mair?”

  “Seein’ I’m here, Wullie,” said Jim, “you could jist open me a screw-tap o’ Worthington and I’ll get ootside that while you’re doin’ the sums.”

  And he leant sociably on the brass-edged counter pulling at his beer while the Co-op man, licking the point of his pencil at intervals with a sigh of fierce concentration, totted up a long column of figures once, then twice to check it, and finally a third time — apparently for luck.

  “That’ll be five pund fifteen and saxpence,” he said at length, straightening up and handing the document to Jim: “and anither saxpence for the ale.”

  “Mercy! Near on six pound! I’m sure I didna think I wis buyin’ the premises when I cam’ in.” said Jim. “And a tanner for the beer! Are you no’ throwin’ that in for the good wull o’ the hoose?”

  “Ah canna dae that,” said the grocer. “For it’s nae ma hoose and the chentlemen in Morrison Street wud soon be throwin’ me oot of it if they foond Ah’d sterted tae gi’e the goods awa’ on a whum.

  “Whit Ah can dae for ye is send wan o’ the delivery lads doon wi’ the box on a bike tae the boat. That’ll save ye a pech. And I’ll gi’e ye a nip o’ my ain whusky.”

  And on that offer the bargain was struck. Sunny Jim paid with six crumpled pound notes, pocketed his change, swallowed a generous dram poured from the bottle gifted to the grocer by one of his suppliers, and saw the box safely loaded onto the metal cradle at the front of the delivery bike.

  “See and no’ cowp it,” he admonished the youngster who was to pedal it, “for there’s eggs in there, and as we dinna like them scrambled you’d best get them tae the shup in wan piece. Put the meats in the wire safe on the foredeck, and the rest o’ the stuff in the fo’c’sle. And tell the Captain I’m on my way.”

  The puffer slipped down-river in the gloaming with Dougie at the wheel: Para Handy passed the article about the Piltdown Man to Sunny Jim as the two of them sat on the stern gunwale.

  “Dan to the life,” he said in a deliberately loud voice: “but when I showed it to the man himsel’ an hoor ago, he wass not at aal amused. You wud think he wud be prood tae be taken for onythin’ ass important ass a ‘Missing Link’, but no. He chust ran awa’ from the suggestion: he iss like the Gabardine Swine in the Scruptures, that had the pearls o’ wusdom thrown tae them, but chust went dashin’ awa’ into the wilderness!”

  A furious clang of metal from the engine-room at their feet indicated that the unfortunate engineer was reduced to taking out his feelings on a pile of coals.

  “We wull put in to Bowling for the night,” Para Handy added pointedly, “and mebbe Dan wull obleege the company by givin’ us aal a Piltdoon performance at the Inns!” But, despite their cajoling, Macphail huffily refused to join the rest of the crew when they went ashore after a herring supper to quench the thirst it had given them.

  When they returned on board, though, he was in his bunk and fast asleep — with a somehow satisfied-looking grin on his face which made Para Handy bristle with suspicion. “He’s been up to something: wait you and we wull see!”

  The Vital Spark continued down the Firth after an early start the following morning and mid-day found her just off the south end of Bute.

  Sunny Jim went below to make a start on preparing dinner for the crew. With the potatos peeled and set on the stove to boil in a pan of sea water, he went up on deck, opened the door of the meat safe and reached for the link sausages.

  They were not there.

  Cursing the delivery boy for his perfidy, Jim made the best of a meal he could from the black and mealie puddings.

  “Ah’m sorry, boys,” he said: “but yon wee duvvle has pinched the sausages on us, and there’s nae mair I can do by way o’ a meat dinner.”

  Para Handy and the Mate accepted the situation, grudgingly, but Macphail refused to eat any of the fare on offer and retired in high dudgeon to his stokehold.

  “To bleezes!” said the Captain: “The man’s still in an upset over the ribbin’ we gave him yestreen: well, aal I can say iss that he’ll be hungry afore we are,” and he tucked into a forkful of mealie pudding with apparent relish.

  In fact, Macphail refused to join them for any meal over the next two days, surfacing only to butter a few slices of bread and make himself a cup of tea at regular intervals, as they rounded the Mull, beached just off the farm to which the flitting was consigned, and unloaded the strangely mixed cargo into the new tenant’s waiting horse and dray.

  Then, on the morning they were due to sail for home, Sunny Jim squeezed his way into Macphail’s domain, anxious to make peace with the engineer for the air of gloom and doom which hung over the little ship went quite contrary to Jim’s nature.

  And he found Macphail frying a pound or thereby of finest pork sausages on the back of a shovel held over th
e glowing ashes in his fire-pan!

  His yell of outrage brought Para Handy and the Mate dashing to the engine-room.

  “You’re a duvvle, Dan!” Para Handy protested. “Can you no’ tak’ a bit o’ a joke wi’oot complainin’, or at least wi’oot losing the heid and stealin’ from your shupmates!”

  “Ah’m no’ complainin’ noo,” said the engineer: “that’s been the best grub Ah’ve ever had on this decrepit auld hooker. Two solid days o’ meat meals and I’ll say wan thing fur ye, Jum, ye ken a good sausage when you see it.

  “Ah’m fair vexed that’s the last o’ them — or Ah’d offer you all a taste.

  “Mebbe that’ll teach you a lesson. Never mind aboot the Missin’ Link: it’s the missin’ links that you should all be a lot mair concerned aboot!”

  And with a satisfied laugh to himself, he swallowed the last morsel of sausage with evident, if exaggerated, relish.

  A few minutes later, the farmer appeared with his cheque-book to pay for the flitting and as he perched on the seat of his cart to sign it, he had his first sight of Macphail (who had been seated unseen in the engine-room throughout the unloading process of the previous hours) as that worthy came on deck to get a breath of air.

  The farmer stared at him, transfixed, and was so put off his stride that he smudged the signature badly and had to start all over again and write a fresh cheque.

  “My heavens, Captain,” he confided to Para Handy in an awed whisper, “it’s none o’ my business, but that’s some man you have as your engineer! You ken, he’s the very double o’ that ‘Missing Link’ that had his likeness in the Gleska Herald a day or two back.

  “I hope I’m no’ offending you saying that…”

  FACTNOTE

  The discovery of Piltdown Man was one of the great news stories of 1912, and one of the supreme academic hoaxes in history. For sheer audacity and confident theatricality it ranks with such classics of the genre as America’s Cardiff Giant or the Berners Street prank in London, Scotland’s 18th-century ‘Ossian’ literary imposture: or the hoax that went so infamously wrong when what had been intended as a slightly scarey leg-pull turned to near-tragedy when Orson Welles’ radio play, based on the H. G. Wells novel War of the Worlds, was believed by many of the listening American audience to be an accurate news broadcast, with whole families panicking and fleeing their homes.

  Charles Dawson was an amateur antiquarian and archaeologist who announced to a startled academic world in 1912 the discovery of the ‘Missing Link’, the hominid which spanned the physical and intellectual gap between ape and man. For about two generations thereafter the skull and jawbone which he had ‘excavated’ to prove that theory held an honoured place in the pantheon of the British Museum and the site of his ‘discovery’ — a chalk pit in the Sussex Downs — became a place of pilgrimage for earnest and enthusiastic antiquarians both professional and amateur in the quest of further, momentous ‘finds’.

  All of which doesn’t just help prove the truth of the old adage that ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’. It also demonstrates quite gratifyingly — at least to the layman — that as often as not the ‘sucker’ is a loudly self-proclaimed ‘expert’.

  Only in 1953 was the hoax finally exposed as what it was though even then (and, who knows, perhaps still today) there were voices raised in defence and protest against the destruction of a myth so dearly-held. The skull of the ‘Missing Link’ was proved, by dating techniques, to be that of a 20th-century man and the jawbone that of a 20th-century orang-outang, both cunningly stained to simulate great age.

  I think the only individual involved in the whole scam who came out of it with honour intact was the orang-outang!

  Scottish pork butchers, on the other hand, inherit a long and honourable tradition. Glasgow firms like McKeans, established in the 1870s, built up a worldwide reputation, winning awards and medals at food exhibitions (of which the Victorians were so fond) as far afield as Canada, and still trade today, changed beyond recognition by the demands of an evolving market.

  Lorne sausage, for the uninitiated, is a coarse-chopped, sliced sausage-meat in block form. The origin of the name is unknown (the first maker perhaps?) but, when it is well made and spiced to perfection, it is tastily addictive.

  18

  The Cadger

  Macphail and Sunny Jim watched the Mate come disconsolately towards them along the quayside at Lamlash, his head down, and his hands deep in his pockets.

  “Ah doot it’s no’ good news,” said the Engineer. “We’ll be here a week at the least afore the man’s weel enough mended tae come back. A week in Lamlash! It shouldnae happen tae a dug!”

  The accident had happened the previous afternoon, as they were unloading fencing-stobs for the Duke of Hamilton’s estates. As a bundle of the posts was being swung upwards and outwards from the hold the knot on the rope binding them together had slipped and the stobs had come tumbling onto the deck. One caught Para Handy a hefty blow across the head, sending him flying across the hatch-coaming and into the depths of the hold.

  The doctor, when he eventually arrived in a pony-and-trap from Brodick, was less concerned with the broken wrist which the Captain sustained in the fall than with the large area of contusion on the side of his head.

  “I can strap the wrist no problem,” he pronounced, “but I can give no guarantees about your the effects of that blow to your head, Captain MacFarlane. I’m not happy about it at all.”

  Macphail restrained himself with considerable difficulty from offering his own opinion on that matter, but the upshot was that Para Handy was removed within the hour by horse-drawn ambulance and taken the three miles over the hill to the Cottage Hospital at Brodick ‘for observation’. Dougie went with him, partly to keep him company and see him safely installed, partly in order to telegraph the owner in Glasgow to advise him of developments.

  “Whit’s the news then?” asked Macphail as the Mate scrambled aboard. “Is he deleerious?”

  “No, nor hileerious: but he’s ass carnaptious ass a wagon-load o’ pensioners for they’re sayin’ they want to keep him in for a week, and there’s a nurse yonder built like a dreadnought wha’s in cherge o’ the ward and he’s feart for her already, chust feart. No’ that I blame him: if they’d had her at the Crimea it wud have been in the front line trenches and no’ Florence’s hospital they’d have pit her.”

  “So we’re tae lie here for a week!” exploded Macphail. “A week in Lamlash in October! Nae wonder ye’re lookin’ as miserable as an innkeeper at a Rechabites meeting. We’ll be oot o’ wir minds wi’ boredom, and here’s me wi’ naethin’ Ah hivnae read, an’ nae mair chance o’ buyin’ onything mair here than I hae o’ gettin’ a transfer tae the Columba.”

  “No,” said Dougie, “it’s worse nor that. I telegraphed Gleska and they said there iss a cargo o’ scrap iron waitin’ for us at Ardrishaig that’s urchently needed up at Pointhoose so the shup hass to go and load it. Peter iss to choin us at Pointhoose ass soon ass they let him oot.”

  “Thank the Lord,” said Macphail emphatically. “At least we get oot o’ here. So whit are ye lookin’ so miserable aboot then Dougie? I thocht ye always wanted a chance tae skipper the boat yersel’?”

  “Indeed I did, Dan,” replied the disconsolate Mate: “but the Gleska office will not let me do it! They say that for the insurance we have to have an experienced Captain and they’re sending wan down to Brodick on board the King Edward tomorrow morning.”

  “Well, Ah’m vexed for ye,” said the Engineer generously, “but at least we’ll no hae to drum wir heels in Lamlash for a week. So why are ye lookin’ like a wet December funeral?”

  “For the same reason ass you will be in a meenit,” responded the Mate dolefully. “Wance I tell you who the relief skipper iss goin’ to be. They’re sendin’ doon Cadger Campbell.”

  Macphail blenched visibly. “Ye’re jokin’ Ah hope!”

  “I wish I wass,” said the Mate. “But I would not joke aboot ass se
rious a matter ass Cadger Campbell.”

  “Ah should hope not indeed,” said the Engineer. “It wud be jist temptin’ providunce if ye did!”

  “For sure,” agreed Dougie miserably.

  Sunny Jim had been growing increasingly restive during this (to him) totally incomprehensible and infuriatingly repetitive exchange.

  “And just exactly who,” he managed to get in at last, “is this Cadger Campbell?”

  “Dinna tell me that ye’ve never ever even heard o’ the Cadger…” began Macphail.

  “Look,” said Jim in total exasperation, “if I had heard o’ the man I wudna need tae be askin’ who he wis, wud I? Noo are ye gaun’ tae tell me, or no’?”

  “He’s wan o’ the most notorious skippers that ever had command on the river,” said Dougie. “He’s lost wan chob after anither through drink an’ fightin’ an’ he’s been in the courts three times on a cherge o’ wreckin’ boats for the insurance only they could neffer prove it. What they did prove more nor wance though wass that he’s a fist on him like a menagerie gorilla an’ he’s quite prepared to use it. The man’s done fower spells at least in Barlinnie for assault. He’s got a tongue on him as acid as a soor-plum and aal he can come by in the way o’ work nooadays iss an occasional berth when the regular skipper’s no’ weel and there’s an urchent chob to be done. Like noo, wi’ us.”

  “By comparison wi’ the Cadger,” added Macphail, “Hurricane Jack is a teetotal pacifist wha kens every Moodey and Sankey hymn by hert an’ sings them tae himsel’ a’ the day lang. Need I say ony mair?”

  The Cadger came aboard at half-past-eleven the following morning, bearing about him like a miasma an aroma reminiscent of a distillery and a brewery rolled into one, and carrying a grubby canvas holdall which clanked noisily, as of bottles, when he placed it down on deck in the wheelhouse.

  He was more than six feet in height, a hugely-built man in his early forties with more hair in his ears and nose than most men have on their beards, and a lived-in face the colour of a side of raw bacon and the texture of a pebble-dash wall.