Living Silver 



able to get out of his wheel-chair and walk a deck he would 

 gladly have left them all and their absurd ignorance. What could 

 he do with a man who couldn't tell a cod-end from a cod? These 

 chaps would never be fishermen. They didn't have it in them. 

 Why the hell were they wasting his time, and a couple of tons of 

 good twine into the bargain? 



Unlike the Goldfish, Buchan did not practice rhetoric. His 

 oratorical abilities would have gone down well in a Trappist 

 monastery. Jan found this taciturnity even more disconcerting 

 than the loquacity of his navigation master. The gnarled little 

 cripple would explain a particularly tricky technique for double 

 selvedging or norselling by saying: 'It goes like this.' A few 

 twists of his rheumatic fingers would follow and the job would 

 be done. If he were asked to repeat the illustration he took it as 

 an accusation that he had been malingering and he would go 

 through the motions again, but this time he would flick the spool 

 and the knots and the net at such a speed that no single motion 

 was visible to any of his onlookers. 



Jan survived this individual tuition. He learned to tie the 

 round knot and the flat knot, to mask the sisal thread into a lint 

 of even diamonds, to bate away the meshes and so to narrow the 

 lint, to crease it back up to its former breadth, to strengthen the 

 selvedges at the side, to staple the lint to one rope, to marl it hard 

 to another and even to practise such esoteric delights as regulating 

 the ground rope frequency of the bights of the bolsh on the wings 

 and those at the bunt of the bosom. He learned the whole voca- 

 bulary that fishing communities had evolved over their centuries 

 of life in the isolation of villages. Their strange words became 

 more familiar to him than the everyday language of the country of 

 his adoption. For most of them there was no Polish equivalent. 

 He could not translate them, even unconsciously, into his native 

 tongue. He heard them only on the lips of Buchan, and each of 

 them meant only a quick turn of the fingers, a flick at the needle, 

 a pull. There was no possible misunderstanding. It sometimes 

 seemed that only these words had meaning, and just because he 



i8 



