Learning the Ropes 



skills, and it was certainly not the one that was star-featured in 

 Jan's training. For six weeks his working life was centred on a 

 long low room, rather badly lit and smelling strongly of dry dust 

 and oakum. The walls were ornamented with immense hooks 

 and wooden poles that sometimes reminded him of the parallel 

 bars in a gymnasium. Instead of childish athletes, however, it was 

 a skinny population of knotted string that hung limply, and us- 

 ually shapelessly, in all the postures of exhaustion. Long wooden 

 needles were littered aimlessly over the floor, needles that were 

 like flanges, that had only a mild convergence of their sides for a 

 point, that were cut open like a window frame and in the frame 

 there was always a narrower rod of wood. Jan learned how to 

 lace twine around this rod and wind it further, yard upon yard of 

 it, about the needle until it became a fully loaded spool of sisal. 



Then he was taught to lay a line of bights along a rope or a rod 

 by a series of clove-hitches. That part was simple enough. What 

 was difficult to believe, or even imagine, that a lame series of 

 stringy semicircles could possibly be the foundation of such a 

 massive and highly-differentiated instrument as the huge trawl net 

 that was suspended across the roof. The anatomy of this great 

 beast was explained to him, its wings and its belly pointed out, its 

 head-rope and ground-rope dissected, the functioning of the bag 

 becket and the quarter-ropes clarified. He understood, or thought 

 he understood what was being said to him. What he could not 

 understand was that he, with the help of two of his fellow 

 students, was going to make a similar monster, and that he was 

 going to make it out of these bits of slack string that were 

 dangling on the rope before him. And even the trawl on the roof 

 was only a scaled down model of the Otter Trawl as it was 

 commonly used on the ships that sailed from Aberdeen. And the 

 trawl that he was going to make would have the full commercial 

 dimensions. 



Tony Buchan, who taught net-making, was as sceptical as his 

 most modest pupils. He did not hold with this business of teach- 

 ing a lot of foreign farmers the secrets of his trade. Had he been 



17 



