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  He picked on Sunny Jim at once.

  “And who the bleezes are you?” he asked, pulling the cork from a half-flask of whisky retrieved from the holdall. “Ah ken your shupmates fine — yon lanky streak o’ a mate wi’ the reputation o’ bein’ the most tumid man that ever set fit on a boat, an’ the ither yin hidin’ doon there pretendin’ tae be a proper ingineer when he cudna even wind up a waggity-wa’ nock wi’oot breakin’ the spring.

  “But you, Ah’ve never clapped eyes on you.”

  Sunny Jim explained himself as best and as briefly as he could.

  The Cadger’s eyes lit up. “The Cluthas, eh! Weel, there’s hope for ye yet: at least they wis boats wi’ a turn of speed and a bit o’ class aboot them. A bit o’ a come-doon for ye tae finish up on this rust-bucket, though.”

  Gesturing to Jim to cast off the mooring ropes fore and aft, he pushed the unhappy Dougie unceremoniously out of the wheelhouse and, without granting him the dignity of employing the whistle and speaking-tube for the purpose, he bellowed his instructions to Macphail, grabbed the wheel, steered the puffer out from the pier and set a course which would clear the northern promontory of the sheltering Holy Isle, and move towards the open waters of the Firth.

  Four hours later the Vital Spark was well into Loch Fyne with the entrance to East Loch Tarbert just off the port bow, and their destination — Ardrishaig — only 12 miles ahead.

  The atmosphere aboard was thick enough to cut with a knife. The Cadger, tipsy when he arrived off the King Edward, had been steadily demolishing firstly the half-flask of whisky, and then when it was finished the three quart bottles of stout which appeared to be the sole contents of the holdall. Dan Macphail, hidden among his engines, had missed the worst of the relief skipper’s verbal assaults and Jim, on the excuse of preparing the crew’s dinner, had retired to the fo’c’sle — safely out of earshot, and out of sight as well: in fact though, so sudden and so unexpected had been the Cadger’s departure from Lamlash that he had had no chance to replenish the ship’s stores and the crew would go hungry till he could go ashore and stock up once they reached Ardrishaig.

  The unfortunate Dougie, unable to make his escape, had suffered the brunt of the Cadger’s unrelieved torrent of abuse, directed first at the boat, then at her ship’s company one-by-one. Even the mild-mannered Mate was at breaking-point when the Cadger suddenly swung the wheel violently to port and headed into Tarbert harbour.

  “It’s no’ Tarbert oor cargo iss at,” Dougie protested, “but at Ardrishaig. We’ve near two hours to go.”

  “We’re gaun nowhere wi’ a dry shup,” growled the Cadger with some menace, pitching his empty bottles overboard. “Unless you want tae go the same way as ma deid men, get intae the bows and get ready tae pit a line ashore when we come alangside.”

  Sunny Jim was summoned from the fo’c’sle, given a crumpled pound note taken from the Cadger’s back pocket, and sent up to the village Inn to buy two bottles of whisky.

  “What the blazes kept ye,” roared the Cadger when Jim returned 10 minutes later carrying not just the whisky, but two plain loaves, a bag of potatos and a couple of pounds of sausages as well, “and whit the hell d’ye mean by wastin’ ma time and your money buyin’ a’ that breid and stuff?

  “Never in a’ ma life hiv I seen sich a bunch o’ useless shilpit nyaffs as the three o’ you. Macfarlane must be saft in the heid richt enough tae pit up wi’ it: nae wonder the fence-posts did him sich a mischief at Lamlash!”

  Para Handy came down the road to the jetty beside the Inglis brothers’ Pointhouse Shipyard in the late afternoon of the following Wednesday, a bandage round his head and his left arm in a sling.

  The crew welcomed him, like a long lost brother, with literally open arms.

  “Now, now,” he cried, retreating in some embarrassment, “I am chust fine, chust sublime, stop this fuss this instant and tell me how you got on with Mr Campbell, for I’m sure he’s the only reason you are so pleased to see me back again! Iss he still here?”

  “He never actually got here,” said Sunny Jim. “Dougie brought her home frae Ardrishaig an’ a right good job he made of it an’ a’.” Whereat the mate blushed like a young girl. “Naw, Campbell the Cadger is probably still somewhere on Fyneside, and lookin’ for a cargo o’ scrap — and his crew.

  “By the time we got tae Ardrishaig he wis jist destroyed wi’ a’ the whusky he’d been drinkin’ an’ he went oot like a light.

  “We were to lift the cargo o’ scrap that the auld Hay’s puffer Aztec wis bringin’ hame frae Furnace when her biler blew aff Lochgair. They’ve decided she’s no’ worth the repairs an’ she’s tae be scrapped hersel’ wance they can fix a tow tae Faslane.

  “So wance we’d shifted the cargo, we jist cairried the Cadger over tae the Aztec ’n’ dumped him on a bunk in her fo’c’sle and changed the lifebelt wi’ her name on for the wan wi’ oors. Then Dougie brocht the shup tae Gleska.

  “When Campbell finally woke he wud believe he wis still on the Vital Spark: he’s probably huntin’ through Ardrishaig for his crew richt noo!”

  FACTNOTE

  The Island of Arran, 165 square miles in area, and about 20 miles in length and 10 in width, has often been referred to and (in tourist terms) promoted as ‘Scotland in miniature’.

  There is a logic to the claim. The island contains dramatic mountain scenery, fertile rolling farm country — both grazing uplands and arable lowlands — and a dramatic coastline from beetling cliffs to gentle beaches.

  For generations Arran was a popular retreat for Glaswegians rich and poor and though the great days of doon-the-watter sailing have gone, and though more and more we desert our own land for sunnier shores when it comes to holidays, the island retains an immensely loyal following and maintains a mystique all its own.

  The village of Lamlash was the first port-of-call for the steamers after the island capital, Brodick, and was a particularly popular haunt for break-takers during Glasgow’s ‘September Weekend’ — always the last weekend of that month and the (unofficial) end of the holiday season.

  Holy Isle, which shelters the bay of Lamlash, takes its name from the monastery founded there in the early middle ages. That tradition of sanctity is maintained today by the Tibetan Samye Ling Buddhist community who purchased the island in 1992, have renovated the farmhouse and lighthouse, and plan to build two new centres as refuges for interdenominational retreats at those sites.

  The ‘Pointhouse’ to which the puffer’s cargo of scrap-iron was consigned was the famous yard of A & J Inglis, builders of many generations of the most renowned of the Clyde steamers as well as whole families of ships great and small created for other owners, other waters and other purposes. The yard (sadly, like virtually every other Clyde shipbuilder, long gone) stood on the north bank of the river Kelvin at the point where it joined the Clyde opposite Govan.

  The character of Cadger Campbell is of course purely fictitious but it has to be said that there were always some notorious individuals on and around the river Clyde, as there were in any industrial environment anywhere! When researching background material for my factual study of Para Handy and his world (In the Wake of the Vital Spark, Johnston & Bacon, 1994) I was given much information which, even a generation or more after the event, I felt it unwise to specify. One snippet concerned a puffer captain reputed to have ingeniously ‘lost’ at sea not just three (as in Cadger’s case) but four puffers in pursuit of fraudulent insurance scams!

  19

  The Blizzard and the Bear

  The frost had scarcely lifted all the February day and now at three in the afternoon, with only a couple of hours of daylight left, the first flurries of snow began to tumble from a steely grey sky which seemed suspended only a few feet above the tip of the puffer’s mast. From the engine-room came the clang of the furnace-door being thrust open and the rattle of Macphail’s shovel in the bunker as he prepared to spread another layer of coal onto the glowing fire.

  The three other memb
ers of the crew were squeezed into the wheelhouse in a vain effort to keep warm by dint of numbers but the only effect of their combined presence in that confined space was that their breath, condensing on the windows, had almost completed misted the glass.

  The Captain wiped the pane in front of him with an oily rag and peered vainly into the gloom of the dying day. The curtain of falling snow now made it virtually impossible to see anything beyond the bows, which were rising and falling smoothly on an oily swell. Fully laden with a cargo of slate from the quarries at Ballachulish and en route to Port Ellen in Islay, the Vital Spark was in the unfamiliar territory of Loch Linnhe and Para Handy had intended to put into Oban for the night.

  “Dougie,” he now said: “I am thinking we would maybe be better chust to put her in somewhere close at hand and wait for this snow to blow over rather than risk the shup.”

  “Whatever you think yoursel’, Peter.” said the mate, who had been increasingly uneasy about the prospect of picking a blind course through the boneyard of the Lynn of Lorn when the only navigational aid on board for these strange waters was a school atlas Para Handy had bought secondhand from a Glasgow book barrow prior to their departure from the Broomielaw three days earlier.

  And so, with the lights on the northern end of Lismore faintly visible as a guide on the starboard bow, and Sunny Jim perched reluctantly in the bows as a shivering lookout, they picked their way into the tiny harbour at Port Appin and tied up at the stone pier. There was not a breath of wind and a silence as of the grave lay on a landscape rendered all but invisible by the snow, which fell more thickly than ever. The crew prepared to make the best of a bad job by creating as much comfort as possible in the cramped fo’c’sle. Macphail carefully carried a shovelful of red-hot coals from the engine-room furnace to get the stove going: Dougie carefully trimmed and lit the two oil lamps hanging from the deck-beams: Sunny Jim filled a basin with water and began to peel potatos for their evening meal.

  “I have neffer seen weather like it!” said the Captain, “The snow we get on the Clyde is chust a handful of confetti compared wi’ this.”

  “You call this snaw!” derisively snorted Macphail, who had ‘gone foreign’ before returning to Glasgow and his berth on the puffer several years previously. “You should see the winter in the Baltic. The Rooshians get that much snaw the hooses get totally buried in it: it’s only the lums sticking oot and smokin’ that let folk ken whaur their hooses is at.”

  “That’s a bit of a whopper, surely, Dan” said Sunny Jim. “Whit wye could they get in and oot o’ them?”

  “The hooses is all built wi’ special doors in the roofs beside the lums, of course,” said Macphail. “And I know for a fact for I’ve seen it that they can build railway lines ower some of the lakes in winter, the ice gets froze that deep. So if Para Handy wants tae conseeder some real winter weather then he shouldna be greetin’ aboot a puckle snow in Appin, but raither remember whit things can be like for the Tsar and his weans and a’ the ither folk at St Petersburg: it isnae all snowmen and sledges there, that’s for sure.’’

  “Is that so,” said the skipper with heavy sarcasm. “Weel, that sounds like a spring mornin’ compared wi’ the conditions that Hurricane Jeck had to put up wi’ wan year when he wass on the cluppers.

  “He wass first mate on the City of Lisbon, wan o’ they nitrate shups, and they wass on a voyage home to Liverpool from Chile wi’ a cargo o’ phosphates. Efferything wass smooth enough till they came to Cape Horn and here they wass hit by the most terrible storms for you should know, Jum, that this iss a place most weel-thocht-of for wund and waves the like of which you’ll no’ see anywhere else in aal the seven seas. Dougie himself will tell you.”

  “Right enough, Peter, right enough,” affirmed the mate with alacrity, though he had never been further west than Barra nor further south than Belfast all his days at sea. “It iss a most terrible place, to be sure.”

  “For six days and nights they wass forced to run under bare poles, they daurna’ show a scrap o’ canvas, and the men on the wheel wass lashed to it for fear they would be washed awa’ wi’ the seas that wass sweepin’ her from stem to stern. And aal the while they was bein’ blown sooth, way off their course and aye nearer and nearer to the Sooth Pole.

  “Then wan night the wund stopped chust as sudden ass when it started, and there wass a deathly silence, and a night chust as black ass the Earl o’ Hell’s weskit. In the mornin’ when the daylight came they foond to their horror they wass becalmed in the mudst of a whole fleet of icebergs, effery wan of them as big ass a land o’ hooses.

  “It wass so cold you would not credit it. The riggin’ wass ass hard and ass brittle ass icicles, and if you made the mistake of knocking against ony pairt of it, it wud just snap in twa like a stick o’ seaside rock. The men off-watch below wass aal frozen solid into their hammocks and had to be chipped oot o’ them by the men on watch. If you would try to tak’ a billy of tea from the galley to the fo’c’sle it wass chust a lump of ice by the time you got it there and in the officers’ salong the rum froze in their glasses afore they could drink it, and they had to sook it chust ass if it wass a cinnamon ball.

  “Worst of all, the compass wass froze in the binnacle and they couldnae tell north from sooth so that even if the ice let up a bit, and a wind cam’ up and they had the chance to pit some sail on her, they would have had no wye of knowin’ which road to tak’.”

  “Ye’re a haver, Para Handy,” cried Macphail. “Whether the leear iss yourself, or whether it wass MacLachlan, I dinna ken: but wan o’ ye is talkin’ nonsense and it’s wrang tae pit sich daft notions in young Jum’s heid.”

  Para Handy paid no attention. “Jeck said,” he continued, “that the only thing that saved them wass a perty of Eskimos oot huntin’ polar bears who happened by in their kayaks, and wass able to point oot where north wass tae them, so that when…”

  “Eskimos!!!” shouted Macphail. “Eskimos at the Sooth Pole! And polar bears forbye! Ye done it noo, even Jum must know that you only get Eskimos and Polar Bears in the Arctic.”

  “Whit d’ye mean ‘Even Jum’?” cried Sunny Jim angrily. “Are you makin’ oot I’m some sort of eejit or somethin’? Of course I ken the whole story’s rubbish — but it’s gey entertaining rubbish and it wis whilin’ the time awa’ very nicely.

  “Why not get back tae wan o’ your novelles, Dan, and leave the rest of us tae enjoy a harmless baur if we want tae…” And the enraged Jim picked up the potato knife and took his feelings out on a half stone of Kerr’s Pinks.

  Once their supper was finished, the engineer retired to his bunk, while the rest of the crew played a goodnatured game of pontoon for matches.

  After about half-an-hour, with the harsh sound of Macphail’s stentorian snoring echoing through the dimly-lit fo’c’sle, Para Handy climbed up the ladder and opened the hatch to have a look at the weather.

  The frost was harder than ever, but the snow had stopped and a crescent yellow moon hung in an inky black sky peppered with stars. For the first time it was possible to see something of the tiny harbour in which they had taken refuge. The village, and the village Inn, lay less than a hundred yards away but were totally hidden by an intervening hillock. Indeed there was not a single house to be seen anywhere from the deck of the puffer.

  Even the shallow seawater in the harbour was covered with a layer of ice, such was the severity of the frost: and the further harbour wall was so blanketed and smothered in snow that it was unrecognisable as a man-made object but looked more like a floating mass of ice.

  At the edge of the jetty against which the puffer was moored there stood — coated with snow — a wooden tripod about six feet in height, surmounted by a round ball which, when aligned with the ball on a similar construction just visible halfway up the hill behind the harbour, would form a guide-mark for incoming vessels.

  The tripod had two wooden arms projecting to either side about five feet off the ground. From each there hung a lifebelt.


  Para Handy tiptoed back down the ladder into the fo’c’sle and beckoned to Dougie and Sunny Jim.

  “I’ll treat you both to a dram,” he said. “But come up quiet and dinna wake Macphail. Will you, Dougie, set the alarum clock to go off an hour from now: and Jum, bring yon shovel Dan used to bring the coals from the enchine-room. There iss a wee chob to do before we go up to the Inn…”

  Ten minutes later he stood back to admire their handiwork. The lifebelts had been removed from the arms of the tripod and snow had been built up round it in a rough cone shape as far as the ball which topped it.

  Snow had been carefully moulded onto the horizontal arms, and five short twigs of wood added claw-like at their tips. Around the ball at the top a muzzle-like shape had been created on the side facing the boat. Two large ear-like pieces projected from the top of it and three pieces of coal had been set into the head so created — one for a black snout at the front of the muzzle, two for eyes at its top.

  “Not bad,” said the Captain. “Not bad at aal. Enough to give Dan a bit of a fleg when that alarum goes off and he decides to come up on deck to find out why he’s alone on the shup. Wi’ an icebound landscape like this aal roond him I’ve no doot he’ll wonder for a moment chust where he iss…

  “He’ll see then that there’s polar bears in ither places than the North Pole — and maybe that’ll teach him no’ to be sich an auld misery next time, when aal we are havin’ is a harmless baur!”

  And with a spring in their step the three set off across the snow towards the companionship and warmth of the Appin Inn.

  FACTNOTE

  There are two villages carrying the name of Ballachulish, the North and the South, one at either side of the narrows where Loch Leven enters Loch Linnhe.

  South Ballachulish was, until the middle of this century, the unlikely venue for a major industry. It was largely to cater for that industry’s needs that the isolated branch-line railway from the main Oban to Glasgow route (involving the construction of a cantilever bridge across the fierce rapids at Connel just north of Oban) was laid through the difficult Appin terrain and first opened for business in 1903. Passenger services on the line offered a faster route to link with connections from North Ballachulish onwards to Fort William and Inverness.