Market Whimsies 



tioneer had now moved on, leaving six row^s of labelled boxes be- 

 hind him. The lumpers converged, dragging them off to the 

 lorries, and the auctioneer jumped to the seventh row where he 

 stood again, still surrounded by buyers, whispering schizophreni- 

 cally to himself. Not until the following morning when the local 

 papers printed the figures did Jan discover what price any particu- 

 lar species was fetching. 



These prices too were strange. The ships in the upper part of 

 the market, the first catches to be sold, received the best money. 

 It was vaguely explained that this was because of time. If fish were 

 bought by five minutes past eight they could be put on an eight- 

 thirty train and dispatched to the south. They could be in Glasgow 

 by lunchtime and sold to the consumer before evening. There 

 was a quick return and the perishable commodity had no time to 

 'go off'. But this explanation never satisfied Jan, though he could 

 find no other - unless it was that the best skippers always made a 

 point of being at the head of the market. And that wasn't true 

 either. 



Then too, the relative values of fish fluctuated violently, de- 

 pending as much on the quantity as on the quality of the supply. 

 A large market usually meant low prices, except on a Monday 

 when the week-end fish famine increased the demand. And it 

 seemed grossly unfair that a crew who had laboured for weeks 

 among gales and ice should be penalised because they were un- 

 fortunate enough to land on the same day as a lot of other ships. 

 But it probably worked out all right in the end. Next trip they 

 would be lucky and find only half a dozen vessels in port. The 

 value of their shot would be doubled through no effort of their 

 own. Still, it was very haphazard. 



These reflections were obvious and would have occurred to any- 

 one who passed a week of mornings at the market but Jan found 

 that the inconsistencies of fish sales did not stop there. Both quan- 

 tity and quality had something to do with the catch but there were 

 innumerable other factors which bore about as much relation to 

 fishing as an aeroplane bears to ploughing. The first and most im- 



57 



