The Last Wanderer by Meg Henderson

Author:Meg Henderson [Henderson, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857901934
Publisher: Birlinn

16

When Sorley Og first mentioned selling Ocean Wanderer, Rose knew that it wasn’t a whim. He had had something on his mind for months, and she knew him well enough to know that he’d come out with it when he had thought it through and come to his decision. Normally the boat was away for anything up to four weeks at a time, back home for two days, then off again, but it was March and with the end of the mackerel and herring seasons the crew would be at home for the next three months. In June they would be off again in search of sand eels for pet food, but the lull gave them time to attend to all those minor repairs that Sorley Mor insisted be logged, when the boat was repainted and checked for damage that could not be seen by the naked eye. She knew Sorley Og had been mulling something over, but when he voiced his thoughts it was still a momentous, if low-key announcement. Not only was the boat going, but it wouldn’t be replaced; the MacEwans were getting out of the fishing.

A decade before the very thought would have caused fatal seizures in and around Acarsaid. To those who had lived and worked beside them for generations the MacEwans were the fishing, but these days everyone knew there was no longer a living to be made. It had been bad enough in the mid-1960s, when herring fishing had been banned to allow stocks of ‘the silver darlings’ to recover from years of over-fishing, driving skippers out of business, crews – and curers, too – out of jobs. It had been the end of Aeneas Hamilton’s livelihood; with no herring being landed at the once thriving port, he was forced to buy what fish he could from other ports to keep the smokery in work. It wasn’t economical, but he hoped it would be a short-term measure – only it wasn’t, of course. When stocks had recovered and the ban had been lifted, years had passed and the public had lost the fish-eating habit; a whole generation of consumers had discovered the delights of beef-burgers, pizzas, chicken nuggets and other convenience foods. It had coincided, too, with a wider change in society, with more women going out to work and spending less time cooking, so convenience had become their priority, preferably anything that would heat up in the microwave in minutes without preparation.

Traditionally fish had always been cheap, but now it was regarded as too expensive, when the true cost, as with coal, was in the lives of the men who harvested it. Aeneas had stuck with his business to the very end, unable to comprehend that it was over, that now the fish had returned he no longer had a market to supply, or to face the fact that the situation was permanent, so that he was left with a smokery that no one wanted to buy because they had no use for it.

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