Читать книгу Coloured Spectacles - Frederick Niven - Страница 8

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Alexander Smith, recollection of whose pattern-designing had made me accept apprenticeship to the manufacturing with filial acquiescence, wrote a poem on the Tweed in which he told how it flowed through his imagination "as through Egypt flows the Nile."

The river that most haunts my imagination or flows through my memory I might say, to adapt Smith's phrase, is Clyde. I have been, since those days—and more than once—on that haunting river the Yukon, one of the great water-courses of this planet, that flows north while Mississippi flows south, Amazon east and Congo west; and have seen the pilots (Islesmen some of these, with the Gaelic lilt in their voices) negotiate shoal and rapid, and counted the migrating caribou swimming across the stream till I reached a thousand, all in an hour or two, and then lost count; but, even so, Clyde—a little streak of a river in comparison—flows often through my mind. Though I have an early memory of it in its higher reaches, rippling west under the cone of Tinto—and of Tweed too, winding east, with a stationary heron standing on one long leg among the rushes of a bend—Clyde begins for me, recalling old Glasgow days, at the foot of South Portland Street.

Very much for me it is Glasgow River. I am tagging along with my father again, crossing Clyde by the Suspension Bridge, and he is telling me that when he was a boy a great ploy of youngsters was to tread close behind their elders on it, leaping and dancing to set it atrembling, what to elders was a grand new feat of engineering being as a grand new toy to them. That was the bridge of his early memories. Mine, I find, are of the lower bridge—the Jamaica Bridge, the old Glasgow Bridge. I delay again those who have me in tow to see a Clutha approach beneath, and watch for the lowering of its hinged smoke-stack. That was a great event.

Later the old bridge gave other happiness. The Campbeltown boats berthed on the south side of the Clyde close to Glasgow Bridge—the Davaar, the Kinloch, the Kintyre—but never all together, of course. The absence of one or two jogged the mind. If Davaar was there then fancy would go in search of Kinloch and Kintyre. I would picture the Kinloch tied up at Campbeltown and jerseyed men on the landing alongside below swerving gulls, and the Kintyre, trailing a fallen column of smoke, thrashing across Kilbrennan Sound.

The Campbeltown boats touched at Lochranza and Pirnmill, and going on upon my way I would be only seemingly in Jamaica Street, or cutting along Howard Street (past a fish-shop in the window of which there was often some curious marine monster on view as attraction) and on up St. Enoch Square past Francis Spite's, only seemingly there but truly—or spiritually, if you prefer it—in Arran. Swinging open the door of the old ware'us in Ingram Street a waft of the odours of wincey and flannelette and shirtings would bring me back from a day-dream of chuckling burns among heather and the desultory bleating of sheep.

In the earlier schooldays many a Saturday forenoon I spent on the wharves. My people loved ships—despite some of their experiences of what the sea could do with them. They had gone to South America on a sailing-vessel, a barque, the Aberfoyle, on her maiden voyage. It was of nine months, from the Tail of the Bank to Iquique. She was posted overdue at Lloyds as she lay becalmed in the doldrums or drifted backwards. For weeks she fought storms off Cape Horn. I have heard my folks tell of how, hour after hour, they would feel her settle under tons of water, drop, drop, as all held breath, and then spring up as with desperate effort. The first mate had a way of leaping into the state-room (it was entered not from amidships on the main deck but from the poop by a companionway) for a cup of coffee, with a shout of, "Prepare to meet thy Goad, Mrs. Neevin. The ship's goin' doon!" He would gaily quaff half a cup of coffee, the other half flung out in one of those sudden springs of the barque, and get up again to the fight. Out of green food, scurvy attacked all on board. Arrived at Iquique they found they had been posted as missing. All the crew save the captain and first officer left her there.

The captain came to say farewell to my folks before setting sail for the homeward voyage, a last farewell. She was badly built, he said; he had watched her behaviour during those nine months: she did not rise well to the waves when they pursued her. And the currents, he explained, west to east round Cape Horn would be worse than any from east to west. It had been hard to navigate her westward; to wheedle her round eastward was, he declared bluntly, hopeless.

"I'm taking her out," said he, "to go down with her."

They asked him why, with that opinion, he did not cable the owners and refuse to go. It was, they pointed out, her maiden voyage and he was an experienced mariner.

No, he replied, and repeating again his belief that she would inevitably be pooped, that the seas astern would simply climb over her because of her lack of buoyancy and shove her down—"as a man slips under a blanket,"—he shook hands and departed. She was sighted south of Valparaiso and never again.

The Aberfoyle was a wooden ship. The captain of the Santona, Captain Mellor, on which we came home, hearing the story of that voyage shook his head. A wooden ship, he remarked, might wallow, derelict, about the seas a long time but an iron ship, such as his, would go down promptly with no prolongation of agony. He was a very cheerful man.

Sails aplenty were still twinkling round the wet curves of the world then and in the docks lay barques and ships, brigs and schooners as well as the tramp steamers from the seven seas. When I Was a schoolboy I had often accompanied my father on his Saturday afternoon rambles among the sheds and by the docksides. Later, when he was away on business or upon other pleasures, I went alone among these scenes to which he had introduced me.

Once in Kingston Docks I saw a barque, an iron barque with grey-blue hull and black-painted ports. Where had she come from? From Iquique. Nitrate was her load, so the captain told me—pausing on his way aboard in the manner of genial Jack Ashore to talk to a hobbledehoy admiring his ship. And when I disclosed to him that I was born in Chili and had come round the Horn in a vessel much like her, an all-iron barque also, with the same painted ports, down I had to go with him to tread her from stem to stern. Her last resting-place had been Valparaiso Bay. There she had lain with sails ready to carry her at a moment's notice out to sea should a sudden Norther swoop into the bay, while from the mole to the ships great barges came and went with dark-skinned men hauling on the sweeps, loading and unloading.

"You'll remember that, being born in Valparaiso. Ah, well, there are two ports a sailor is chary of—and the one is Valparaiso with that unprotected bay open to all the Pacific west, and the other is Mozambique open to all the Indian Ocean east. You've always to be ready to cut and run out to sea and safety from these two ports. Steward, steward! Bring this laddie some biscuits. He's been round the Horn on a wind-jammer the split double of this old tub—aye, and with painted ports, he's been telling me."

Valparaiso, Mozambique: there's the romance of Glasgow docks and Clydeside.

Enchanting places, these docks and sheds. Dockside police and shed-watchmen, remembering their own boyhood no doubt, were not too Dogberryish with us. They knew the difference between youth in quest of romance and youth, with pilfering intent, in quest of nuts and oranges. All we had to do was to keep out of the way of the stevedores charging up and down the iron gangways with their trucks. Donkey engines, beside the hatches, coughing their loads up and down, added to the din; but every here and there was an oasis, some shed in which there was a lull in the uproar. Shafts of old gold sunlight leant from smoky glass roofs to dusty floors. Pigeons pottered there, picking up scattered grain, and up in the rafters the cooing of others sounded, and the scents in the air were of China, of Malaysia, Valparaiso, Mozambique. Oh, to be a boy again for two hours on a Saturday forenoon or afternoon in late Victorian or early Edwardian days, the war and post-war years casting no shadow before them this chaotic age undreamt, dodging through Kingston Docks!

Clyde may seem sinister on foggy evenings when the reflections of dock-lights struggle wanly in it and steamer sirens are lamenting. But that is only one aspect of it. Few cities own a river of such magic. All in a day it can transport a citizen to communion with quiet, to haunts more of the weather and the seasons than of men, and back again. The spirit of rural quiescence under the eaves and in the kitchen corners of some old farm in a secluded glen, strong-built against the winter sleets, is still in his mind when he finds himself, home once more, among the calls of the newsvendors and the city's clamour in the ochre twilight.