Utter Bloody Madness

Or so said those of our friends who knew anything about Business. And they were right, for we were scarily ignorant.

And yet it seemed a good idea. On the one hand, here were we, looking for a way to make a living, and one of us with huge expertise in the world of racing dinghies; and over there were numerous dinghy sailors who could find no place locally to buy the necessary fittings, rope and paint. If we could find a place to operate from and induce suppliers to give us stock on credit, we could make a start and see if it would work.

Hence the birth of the Boat Shop, in a mews in a posh bit of the New Town. In no time at all the Jack Holt dinghy fittings, the International paint and the Marlow rope were flying off the shelves, and any empty space was filling up with bits of paper, some of it printed, called Invoice and (presently) Statement, some of it handwritten notes saying, e.g., “Fred: 2 yellow 1 black”, some of it banknotes escaping from the Shoebox of Takings, which doubled as the Shoebox of Lunch Money.

It took only a few days to realise that the paperwork had to be conquered, that we were the army that must conquer it, since who else was there? And yet how? We did not even know what an invoice was, nor had we much idea how to keep track of what our customers had taken and how to extract an appropriate amount of money from them. The task looked impossible.

If you had a problem in the extremely olden days you might use the technique of the sortes Vergilianae: you shut your eyes, let your Aeneid fall open, stabbed the page with a finger and read the wisdom of the stabbed line. So, for example, if your finger stabbed v.143:

convulsum remis rostrisque tridentibus aequor

“Aha!” you would cry, “the sea convulsed with oars and three-pronged beaks  - this surely means put in an order for oars and … eh, toasting-forks? Can that be right?” Such was the Wisdom of the Ancients.

However, what we chanced to have handy was not the Aeneid but a booklet full of quotes from Napoleon, and we reckoned that this would serve the same purpose. After all, had he not been a great strategist? His ideas could well be helpful.

So we let the booklet fall open and stabbed it.

     impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools

Fine, OK. But something more positive, please, M. Bonaparte?

     never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake

Hm, good thinking, but surely for a world more savage than the world of bits of boats. Give him a last try.

     an army marches on its stomach

Yes! At last, the message: go and have lunch.

Napoleon being short of advice for the war against paper, we applied for help to the spouse’s mother who, it turned out, knew how to do this stuff, and set us up with a simple, easy system and an explanation of what and when and how and why.

Other pieces of advice came our way. A wealthy customer, as he loaded a mass of rope and paint into his car, advised us: “If anyone doesn’t pay after you’ve sent your final demand, take him to court, or he won’t respect you.” He was the only customer who never paid us.

the ice yacht at Newhaven

Soon we needed more space, and we moved into a shop down in Newhaven, opposite the Chain Pier Bar. (This was where the ice yacht described in Ready About took shape.) Furnished with used egg-crates, it allowed a better display, and it had a basement where we could cook lunch and do the paperwork.

By this time I was pregnant and beginning to find the future bleak, for we were still living with the in-laws and although the shop was going well we couldn’t see any possibility of buying a place to live. The shop basement was certainly liveable for adults who needed only a sleeping-bag, but it would hardly do for a baby. Or so I thought, but actually I had no idea what a baby might need.

regatta at Loch Earn: spouse, OK dinghy, van

Meantime we still went to regattas, with the van full of things for sale, so that it was not easy to live in. I now found the OK too much to handle in strong winds, and capsizes hard to recover from, so I began to stay put and leave the regattas to the spouse. Things were closing in, the years of playing about on the hill or the water were finished, it was growing-up time and felt desolate.

Maybe  as a result of a particularly brisk wind at Helensburgh regatta and a lot of capsizing (which convinced me that I needed to stop sailing), or maybe because it’s quite a common thing to happen, I had a miscarriage and spent a number of days in bed at the in-laws’ house miscarrying into a Heinz Beans tin and emptying it periodically into the far-off loo.

At the next weekend, the spouse went to South Queensferry regatta to sail with his ex-girlfriend Samantha, whom he’d not married (he told me) because she had too many accidents and was thus unfit to rear children. It was a curious coincidence that after she’d taken up with a different boyfriend she stopped having accidents. How interesting.

Anyway, there I was, on a sunny Saturday, feeling weak as a kitten, minding the shop down at Newhaven and beginning to think that I wanted no part of Growing Up, and perhaps the time had come to admit that this was a way of life that I wasn’t fitted for, and I’d better get out while I still could.

When who should appear but Tommy, last seen in the bar of the Kingshouse in Glencoe telling me I couldn't marry Joe McCash; “You’re looking a bit miserable,” he said. So I told him the story and he said “I’m away to Glencoe with my sister and her husband and the girlfriend, do you want to come?” Shakily I packed the old rucksack, closed the shop, and went off with my old friend to stay in my old tent at the foot of that old playground, the Buachaille. The girlfriend wore spectacularly bright horizontally striped knee-socks and seemed disgruntled – she’d probably been expecting a weekend alone with Tommy.

Sleepless with happiness I lay and listened to the sounds of the river flowing past and presently the rain pattering on the tent, and intermittent squeaks of “Get OFF!” from nearby. Not, I thought, from the sister’s tent.

Next day, we went west into Ardnamurchan and lost the rain, and Tommy hurled off his clothes and dived into the sea, as happy as could be, while the striped kneesocks lay on its back refusing to watch him, and sulked. Which didn’t bother him at all.

And so, with that brief sating of nostalgic craving, the crisis passed.

Pitt Street, Kay in pram

Presently we moved into a shop at the foot of Pitt (now Dundas) Street, with not only a basement but also a sub-basement, way down where the big rats lived and where we thought we too could live, relieving the in-laws of our presence, for by now we had our first child, Kay, who slept in the double-sleeping-bag with us for protection from the rats. To get to the loo in the night one had to negotiate the eerie rooms of the sub-basement by torchlight which reflected the baleful red eyes of the indigenous inhabitants. Aarggh.

I suggested to the spouse that we might block the obvious big hole in the skirting of the room where we slept (it was hardly a bedroom) but he said it was better to leave it open, because that way we knew where the rats would come out; if we blocked it they would just make another hole, and we wouldn’t know where that was. I could see the logic of this, especially when he said that his father had wide knowledge of the ways of the rat, that the rats travelled freely through all the sub-basements of Edinburgh and could never be blocked.

The next night there was a tremendous amount of squealing from the hole.

-               - What’s that?

-               -  Mr Rat, of course

-               -  But why is he squealing like that?

-               - That’s the young rat. The old rat nips his tail to make him go through the hole first, in case someone’s waiting to kill him

-               -  Mm. Clever Mr Rat

Through the window, down there in the fiefdom of Mr Rat, could be seen the feet of passing pedestrians, and a tiny bit of sky, way high up. It was scarcely the best ambience for a tiny child.

Just round the corner, a top floor flat came up for sale for £1,200 (£300,000 – £400,000 now, I guess) and before long we were living at an altitude that for Mr Rat was probably the Death Zone – at any rate we seemed to have shaken him off. The flat had rooms so huge that my sister said the whole of her house floor plan would have fitted into our dining-room. Only the pram did not share our satisfaction: he was big and heavy and didn’t want to go up and down three flights of stairs. I used to take Kay up first, tie her to the railings, go down, lug the pram up, unlock the door, bring Kay and the pram indoors – and reverse the process for going down. Nowadays, Health and Safety would probably raise their eyebrows.

But to return to the rise and fall of the Boat Shop. Helping in the shop had become difficult, especially when the second child, Cee, arrived; and when the spouse decided that he needed to expand I could hardly argue, although by now he was employing a secretary and a book-keeper, their pay took precedence over our own, and I couldn’t see where the finance for expansion was to come from.

Economics and money are beyond my comprehension. Why must growth and expansion go on after a certain point? Surely to think one must go on growing is the thinking of a cancer? And, because a cancer ultimately kills the organism it is lodged in, it’s a thing whose unwitting purpose is its own extinction.

Long ago I’d been gripped by a photo of a lad on a station platform waiting for the train to Snowdonia; on his back was everything he needed, and though tilted forward slightly to counterbalance the weight, he carried it easily and looked happy. This, I realised, was what I wanted: to travel light, accumulate the bare minimum and resist any unnecessary extra.

A business that had to keep on growing seemed to me to be set on self-destruction, but I didn’t know enough, and wasn’t contributing enough, to make any serious objection, and on we went, expanding in various directions that seemed only to be ridding ourselves of profit without making any return.

There came a time when suppliers had to be paid, and where was the money to come from? By selling the flat, of course, for house prices were rising. Where to live? We bought a caravan, towed it to a hillside not far from the airport, stashed all our furniture on the paving down by the double basement of the shop, and hoped it wouldn’t rain. The secretary looked at it and said the best thing to do with all that bruck would be to douse it with petrol and set fire to it.

The crisis passed and we managed to find another house, down in Trinity, looking out over the Forth. But before very long the suppliers ran out of patience and the Boat Shop folded. Not long afterwards I produced our third and last child, Em.

Our meals became monotonous: roast potato with mashed potato, boiled potato with turnip. My teeth began to fall out. When the day came that I spent our last few pence on a big turnip which turned out to be riddled with worms, I decided that since my qualifications would probably get me a job, I must become a teacher again. A temporary post at a posh school was offered; I took it, and went on looking for something permanent.

Stromness, Orkney, was advertised. I went up there for an interview and got the job. We had a week to sell the house; the spouse’s father was decorating the walls with the thinnest conceivable layer of magnolia emulsion even while the people were looking around.

Our belongings, including the caravan, went on board the St Rognvald at Leith, followed by ourselves. We were fed an enormous meal of salt beef and beetroot, Em being particularly taken with the beetroot, and then went to our cabin where, since there were only four berths, I lay on my back, clasping Em tightly on top of me. It was too much trouble to remove my white polo-neck pullover and trousers.

In the middle of the night it became stormy as we crossed the Pentland Firth in a gale, and Em tipped her partially-digested beetroot over my white polo-neck pullover, where it festered for the three days it took for our luggage to be brought from Kirkwall to Stromness.

Thus began a new and exceptionally interesting life, copying the lad in the iconic photo by carrying only what I stood up in, but covered in bright purple vomit.