Living Silver 



ments would operate in the sea slums that sailed from Aberdeen. 

 Compared to this atmosphere even the danger of drowning was 

 revealed as an envigo rating experience. 



Anyhow, there the ships would lie, twenty, thirty, forty of 

 them, forming a line so close that the propellor of one vessel must 

 have been scraping against the rust on the stem of the one behind. 

 Yet, when the huge baskets of fish had been hoisted to the con- 

 crete quay and the lumpers had arranged them in regular lines of 

 hundredweight boxes, there would be a couple of ear-splitting 

 hoots, ropes would slacken and be hauled aboard and then a ship 

 would reverse out of the order, turn itself free in the pool and 

 nose its way out towards the dock gates, hooting occasionally to 

 frighten the herring gulls that clustered around it, but otherwise 

 as sedately and as leisurely as an old lorry might move in an open 

 stretch of road. 



They looked much safer, less likely to collide and be injured 

 than the men they left on the slippery concrete behind them. For 

 the men looked murderous. Their boots were of thick and inflex- 

 ible leather, sometimes spiked with wood, so that it was almost 

 impossible for them to walk without giving the impression that 

 they were trying to kick one another. Then, too, they were mov- 

 ing very quickly, scurrying, almost running. A gigantic game of 

 football with oblong balls, each weighing more than eight stones. 

 No sides at all. Everybody against everybody else. And yet not 

 football, for the long iron hooks in their hands made it look more 

 like hockey; and then there were the high and restless trolleys, 

 sliding and colliding without any pattern or apparent purpose from 

 one end of the market to the other, so that at times it looked like 

 polo played from man-drawn chariots. And the weighing mach- 

 ines, too, that were trundled more slowly from one line of fish to 

 another, elderly men emptying the contents of any boxes that were 

 not quite full into these ambulatory scales. And individual fish. 

 They had to weigh all the fish that were too big to be put in boxes. 

 And label them, scribbled unreadable labels, 3 i, si > or 9 for that 

 big halibut, with its milk-white belly upturned, slightly yellow, 



