The Concrete Deck 



like rich cream. And so that everything would be still more hectic 

 than it could be made by the sirens of the ships, the screaming of 

 birds, the undirected clatter of two hundred running and stum- 

 bling men, or even the howl of a south east wind biting deep into 

 the iron pillars, there was still the ice. Old yellowing ice that had 

 made the journey from the grounds and was now three quarters 

 melted, thick with fish slime, and the clear new cold ice sent to 

 preserve the fish ashore. It sharpened the edge of the wind and 

 robbed the hurrying lumpers of all control of their feet. 



Yet, down the middle of all this confusion, there walked the 

 macintoshed and mittened business men, as intent on observing 

 quality, as insouciant, as uninterruptible, as a lady deliberating 

 between two shades of lipstick. It was while the fish were being 

 laid out that they made up their minds about what they wanted to 

 buy. One run through the market, then back to their offices, and 

 a long series of telephone calls to their customers throughout the 

 country. 'No, there aren't many lemons today, but there's a nice 

 catch of chicken halibut. ' * Yes, I can get you a couple of boxes of 

 first-rate small haddock. Good. And you want a few big ones as 

 well.' And so on. To London, and Birmingham, and Glasgow, 

 and Manchester. Their telephone accounts were often the largest 

 item on their lists of expenditure, larger even than the wage bill. 



These customers in the south bought blind. They couldn't 

 themselves come up to inspect the goods that the wholesaler at 

 the market was selling them. It was therefore essential that they 

 find a wholesaler whom they could trust, whose judgement of 

 quality and whose understanding of their requirements were un- 

 impeachable. The personal skill and probity of the wholesaler 

 was, thus, his greatest asset. Or, at least, that was the idea. 



It so happened, however, that the financial tangle of the fishing 

 industry was even more chaotic than the obvious physical hulla- 

 balloo of a fish-market in action. There was that kind of in-breed- 

 ing between close relations which, at the biological level, usually 

 leads to idiocy, haemophilia or cretinism. And the body econ- 

 omic did not differ from individual organisms in this respect. The 



^3 



