The Flatties 



oured, a kind of deep brown black, a suflfocating colour. But the 

 lemon was gay, like the fruit of its name, patterned in rich browns 

 and stark whites, patterned in a thousand shapes and shades that 

 were inextricably complicated, each fish so individually patterned 

 that it might have been wearing a national costume and itself been 

 the only member of that particular nation. For the lemons lived 

 on the rocks, and the colours of rocks varied more extensively 

 than the colours of mud. As in most of the flatfish, colour was 

 dictated by the necessity for camouflage. One of the few resem- 

 blances between the Dover and the lemon was that they were both 

 well camouflaged, but for different backgrounds. There were 

 never any Dovers landed in Aberdeen, and that was a constant 

 complaint among the port's seamen : for the Dover was caught on 

 mud, and mud was an easy medium. It did not tear the trawl. But 

 boulders did. And the cold-water lemon lived on boulders. That 

 was why it was coloured so variously, as variously as the sponges, 

 the anemones, the sea-squirts, the barnacles, that lived beside it 

 among the jungles of serpulid tentacles. 



It was only when he was landing his first herring catch at Lowe- 

 stoft that Jan saw Dover soles. And until then he had thought 

 them easy to catch. But he found that they tended to live in holes, 

 and he knew that it was difficult to fish through holes. Great holes 

 in the ground at the bottom of the sea ; it should have been obvious . 

 That was where the mud would naturally accumulate, and the 

 Dovers lived with the mud. It could never be easy to draw a trawl 

 along the scoop of a deep sharp hole. How would one know when 

 to let warp out, when to draw warp in ? How would one even find 

 the hole, small as it was, in the first place ? And, then too, wrecks 

 also accumulated on holes, and the thickness of the cascading mud 

 tended to blur an echo-sounder's warning. It was very easy to 

 draw a net down into a deep hole and so knife it with the dead 

 prow of a sunken ship. But Jan himself never fished for them and 

 he never found out how difficult it was to catch a thousand pound's 

 worth of Dovers . 



But he did learn about lemons. He had to. They were, for 



III 



