I arrive late but there is just enough light to take in the barren hills bounding the loch. Sombre green waters are patched with wood and wire. Mark lives in a house within fifty yards of the loch. Ravaged by the elements, it is fast advancing towards dilapidation. Over a fish supper, Simon explains that I have an invitation from his boss to join in tomorrow’s cull. There’s a knock at the door. ‘That’ll be Jake,’ says Mark. Jake lives with his sister in a white cottage nearby.
After a cold night it’s good to be up and moving. There is time only for the briefest of introductions to Alex who says he’ll check out the books after work. I have left them in the boot of the Princess, which has defied expectations in getting me here, a journey of some 700 miles from London.
We walk to the water’s edge. Jake fights to light a cigarette. The lines of age curve chaotically all over his narrow reddened face. Swathed in dirty yellow oilskins, he crouches to get down low in the boat. By resting his good arm against the gunwale, Jake smokes, free of the wind’s interference. He is shocked out of his reverie when the boat rocks with the sudden presence of Alex. Mark and I hurry to board the boat as its engine is jolted to life. I keep my eyes fixed to the metal gangway. Slip, and the sea will numb every nerve in the body. Death is unlikely — providing you’re fished out within five minutes.
His fingers glow red with defiance. Paralysed with arthritis and yellowed with nicotine, Jake’s hand is little more than a cigarette holder. The good arm attains an equilibrium of sorts, but his body still shakes, needs more than a dram to control its mutinous movements.
‘You all right lads?’ he asks with vigour.
‘Not too bad,’ I lie. Jake had called round with a bottle of malt, which didn’t see out the night.
‘You’ll not be inquiring after my welfare lads?’ says Jake, who I now know has the capacity to drink a loch full of Glenfiddich.
‘How are you feeling?’ we say in chorus to which Jake replies ‘Fucking awful. Spring time in Scotland. Hah!’ he adds, looking around. Clouds scud across the sky, darkening the day. The sun can only shed a cold light upon the perennially soggy Highlands.
Salmon swim sluggishly. Jake sees too many salmon in his life; his clear blue eyes stare into the nets, rigidly secured and weighted down. In total there are twelve nets, aligned in two rows either side of an aluminium gangway wrapped in meshing. At one end, looking as if it had been tapped on as an afterthought, floats a shed where refuge is sought when storms stir.
In the boat we laboriously scoop and scatter foul smelling yellow pellets, using short handled shovels to extract them from big plastic bags. Adorning the bags is a picture of a salmon arched athletically above BP’s insignia.
We saturate the salmon congested waters with mackerel, processed at great expense, Alex has told me, and then compressed into tablet form. Each bag contains seventy pounds of mackerel. Wrist muscles throb. We diligently scatter the pellets in an even spread, whereas Jake isn’t above surreptitiously tipping out, in one cumulative plop, all the contents of the bag.
The waves are rising, but haven’t yet reached a menacing height. The boat chugs contentedly enough towards a more sheltered part of the loch where the company holds the bigger salmon captive. Today there is to be a harvest. Lorries descend on the company’s station, two inlets down the jagged coastline.
Some landlocked lakes teem with tiny salmon, tricked into accepting the freshwater environment as the river stage of their life cycle. Simon says that hired helicopters haul these fish out to be conveyed rapidly to salt loch waters. Chemicals in the tablets will turn the farm reared salmon the pink colour that wild salmon acquire naturally.
‘How many?’ asks Jake.
‘A biggy. One thousand six hundred,’ Alex answers, probably thinking of his bonus. Mark sighs, appreciating the magnitude of the toil involved. The wind strengthens. Tethered to the platform, the boat begins to pitch and roll. We watch the approach of a barge carrying crates half filled with ice. The barge is being pulled along by a squat craft powered by a noisy engine. The crew is a youthful bunch of burly locals. They assemble two waist-high benches near the crates before untying the ropes. One net is heaved upwards, so as not to disturb an outer net, which is interwoven with wire to deprive the seals of an easy meal.
The salmon splash madly, as if sensing their fate. Self-torpedoing, the salmon are easily ensnared in landing nets. The fish are tipped out, wriggling and gasping, onto the first bench, soon slippery with the slime of blood, scales and water. Clasped by their tails, the fish are dealt blows by Alex’s club-wielding gang. Only the heads are battered, the odd eye is dislodged.
When they are flung onto the second bench, it is then our job to propel the dead and dying fish into the ice packed crates while keeping count. It is tiring work. Once begun, the cull always needs to be completed.
The barge is set loose on the sea, bound for the old barn that reeks of creosote. Beside the barn is a slipway, marking the culmination of a sharply undulating road that runs behind Jake’s cottage. It tests the nerve of the lorry drivers charged with transporting the fish to supermarket.
We sit in the floor of the shed, which inside is lined with posters that show the various stages of sea lice infestation. Mark makes the tea while Jake and Alex eat Mars Bars. Farming the seas burns calories. Alex is pleased with the haul.
‘How much do you want for the books?’ His question takes me by surprise. I hope he’ll appreciate the effort I’m putting in. I try my luck.
‘Three hundred pounds?’
Okay. Deal done. Simon thinks Alex wants the books more for show, to give a sheen of intellect to a job that is essentially labour intensive.
I find it difficult to envisage Jake trudging back out for the afternoon feed.
But he does. The rain stings our faces as we go our separate ways, dragging bags to our assigned nets. On we work. Black smoke is coiling into the sky. The company is burning the discarded plastic bags.
A Book and a Memory, Chirk Castle Bookshop, 2004
Madeleines, dipped in tea, are famous for sparking involuntary memories in Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past in the first translation, more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time).
‘She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place… at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…’
Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way.
Books possess that madeleine-like power. The second book that I truly read of my own volition (the first being Shark Attack: Terrifying True Accounts of Shark Attacks) was Muhammad Ali’s 1975 autobiography, The Greatest. In it, Ali recounts his life, both in and out of the ring. The beauty of a great athlete whose family roots in Louisville fascinated me as much as his sporting endeavours. And Ali’s victory over Foreman was, for me, an early experience of pure vicarious exhilaration. The book reminds me instantly of that night in 1974. Still decades after its publication, a mere glimpse of it — the yellow background and The Greatest: My Own Story in bold black type — transports me back to when Ali is taking a pummelling. Convinced that Ali’s demise is imminent, my family and their friends have left the room. Round Eight. A punch is landed. They come rushing back into the room to sample the magic of the moment; the commotion in Zaïre able to emanate from a TV set in a Devon cottage. It’s contagious; causing a ten-year old with no real interest in boxing to jump around and chant ‘Ali! Ali! Ali!’