North Star Read Online Free Page B

pointed to the littleport, which was at the north end of the island of West Burra, a little below Lerwick, but on the west coast.
    He ran a car hire business, but when I said I couldn’t afford to rent a car, that didn’t seem to worry him. ‘Hamnavoe.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t know anyone going to Hamnavoe. You’ll have to go to Lerwick first. There’s a bus in the morning, or maybe I can fix you a lift. Either way it means staying the night.’ And he added, ‘My wife can fix you bed and breakfast if that’s any help.’
    His name was Wishart and I stayed the night with them, in a small house above Sumburgh village with breeze-block outbuildings in which he kept his cars. He had been a mechanic servicing local farm vehicles until the oil companies started drilling off Shetland. ‘Now I’ve got a real good business, not just tourists, you see – it’s all the year round, oil executives, contractors, technicians, commercial travellers. We’ve never known it so good.’ His face was beaming.
    ‘Yes, but how long is it going to last?’ his wife said quietly, and behind her words was the experience of hard times.
    ‘Ah!’ His eyes glanced quickly round the neat little parlour with its gleaming new furniture and bright chintz curtains. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’ We had finished the meal and were sitting drinking whisky out of a gin bottle. The whisky had a strong peaty flavour. ‘You being from Aberdeen, maybe you know the answer to that.’
    I shook my head. ‘I’m a trawlerman.’
    ‘Trawlers, eh? You looking for a job up at Hamnavoe?’
    ‘Maybe,’ I replied cautiously.
    ‘It’s a lot smaller than Lerwick, you know. You’d do better in Lerwick.’ He poured himself another finger of the pale liquor, topping my glass up at the same time. ‘Only this morning I rented a car to a man wanting to get hold of a trawler cheap – something to do with one of the rigs. But there aren’t any big boats up here, only peerie ones, and there’s none of them going cheap. Anyway, the fishermen here, they hate the oil companies. They’re scared of what could happen. The Torrey Canyon was bad enough, but suppose one of these production rigs blows? Particularly if they strike oil to the west; then all of the Shetland fisheries could be destroyed, millions of tons of oil polluting the seas for miles around. That’s what scares them.’ He looked at me, his eyes very bright. ‘Dangerous bloody game, anyway. Trawling, I mean. There’s just been one of them wrecked, went ashore yesterday in a north-easterly gale. Skipper dead and two of the crew injured.’
    ‘The Duchess of Norfolk ?’
    He nodded. ‘That’s right. Drifted into South Nesting Bay … Hear they beached her in the East Voe of Skellister. That’s all right until another north-easter piles the seas in. You mentioning Hamnavoe reminded me of it. The skipper came from Hamnavoe. Now what the hell was his name? Not a Shetlander. Norwegian, I think. You ever been up to Graven?’ And when I told him I had never been to Shetland before, he nodded, staring into his glass. ‘An old wartime base, like Sumburgh here. But bigger. They had seaplanes – Catalinas – and a big airfield. And Scalloway, that’s where the Norwegian boats were based after they moved from Lunna, landing men and arms in Norway, bringing refugees out. I was only a peerie boy at the time, but my Dad was up there. A blacksmith, fixing armaments, all sorts of odd jobs.’ And he went on to talk of his father, the stories he had told, until it was almost midnight and his wife chased him off to bed.
    It rained all night. I could hear it drumming on the slates. But in the morning the sun was shining, a magnificent view of sea and rocks and greensward, all sparkling in the freshness of that early northern light. I left with the post van that had brought the mail down from Lerwick, the washed brightness of land and sea calling to something deep within me. We passed under