THE OLD JETTY

We went to IKEA - to buy coffee and batteries - two things that IKEA doesn’t do in flatpack but which come at a flatpack price. The quality of both is excellent. I’m an IKEA fan.

They also do pictures. Meandering through the store I stopped at a picture of an old jetty by a lake, similar to the one above.* This jetty appears to be somewhere warm and sunny; the IKEA photograph looked to be of northern Sweden.

Both pictures are evocative - who used the jetty last and why? Where did they go? Why is the jetty now ruined?

Next day I began a story, imagining what might have happened and working into the tale my own experiences of setting off in the gathering dusk from a jetty in Shetland - with the wind and swell getting up on the open sea.

Now I’ve never done much fishing - I’m unlucky. I’ve had the humiliating experience of being in a boat fishing for mackerel and catching nothing while a friend beside me pulled up three or four fish at every cast. When we changed tackle and places; I still caught nothing. I wasn’t born to fish, I concluded.

But at the time of the jetty incident I hadn’t learned this lesson. My sister in Shetland had invited me to stay. She knew a local fisherman and suggested he took me out for monkfish. This involved descending to where the voe was no longer a sheltered inlet but the Atlantic ocean proper. And it involved going at night. It all sounded rather exciting.

The fisherman was stocky with a dark, untidy beard. He was an experienced boatman and so I had no qualms as we set off from the wooden jetty, into the gathering gloom in his small wooden boat, powered by an outboard motor.

Towards the mouth of the voe, the wind picked up and the water sloshed unpredictably over the side and over us. He didn’t speak; his face was fixed on some point on the horizon. Eventually we stopped about 500 yards out. The boat bobbed like a cork. The lights of the houses seemed a very long way away.

He anchored, cast the bait, and we waited in the darkness. Nothing of course happened. I was already wondering why I had embarked on this absurd enterprise. I had at least taken the precaution of donning a waterproof anorak, but my jeans were soaked. I was shivering.

He was dressed in fisherman’s trousers of some oily cotton and an old sweater, yet seemed impervious to the wet or the cold. I started to bail some of the water; he stopped me, saying the scrape of the bailer would disturb the fish. What fish? I began to feel sick.

He started the engine and my heart leapt at the warm safe prospect of home. But to my disappointment we headed two hundred yards further out. The sea seemed even choppier. “I have my marks,” he said, squinting at the black outlines of the cliffs against the sky. “I know just where we are. This is another good spot.”

In this vast, angry, tossing swell, cold and featureless, it was hard to believe there was anything below at all.

Again we drew blank. Superstitious, like all fishermen, I knew he felt me a bad omen. He yanked viciously at the cord to start the engine again. The three pulls it took seemed like thirty.

It was now totally dark. He ran the engine very low; fearing losing traction, he said. With the water slopping mightily over the sides we only inched back towards the land.

Then the engine coughed and stopped. He pulled the cord, but it wouldn’t fire. He opened the cap on the little petrol tank on top and peered in. “Got a match,” he shouted to me over the wind.

I was fumbling in my pockets; in those days I still smoked. “Here you are,” I said.

He rounded on me. “Didn’t I know you shouldn’t look at a petrol tank with a lighted match? Did they teach me nothing at university?”

The words stung. I’m suppose he meant it as a joke. But perhaps this was my punishment for ruining his luck. Yet with a stalled engine and the wind blowing us out to sea this was no time to be second guessing his instructions. I counted he knew what he was doing.

Standing in the boat he stuck a finger in the tank. Smelt it. “We’re out of fuel,” he grunted.

I began to panic. But he was already reaching for a red can below his seat. I heard the comforting sound of petrol sloshing. He screwed the lids back and pulled the cord. Reluctantly the damp engine burst into life and we raced home again across the sea.

Never was I so happy to set foot on dry land.

*The picture is by vestraphotography.com publishers and framers of fine prints