Learning the Ropes 



couldn't say what their meaning was he had to act it. He would 

 find himself suddenly immersed in meaning as he watched a square 

 of taut lint grow almost automatically out of the strands of twine 

 that were whorled round the needle in his right hand. 'Bate one 

 on every third till you get it down to nine meshes. That's right 

 leave a fly-mesh.' And he looked back at the loose mesh now 

 fluttering free on the selvedge. 



One day quite early in the course, he finished the square of his 

 trawl. It was immense, two hundred meshes by three hundred. 

 They were arranged in even lines, each with a bar of two and a 

 half inches. He was very proud. He went to Buchan and told him 

 of the feat. The old man looked distinctly incredulous but he 

 came over to have a glance at the twelve hundred square feet of 

 lint that Jan had managed to spread on the floor. 'Aye, Aye. It's 

 no bad.' And he wheeled his chair over it. Then he stooped 

 down and tugged at a couple of the knots. 'No bad at all.' This 

 was not the first time that the manual dexterity of the cripple had 

 outwitted Jan, but never before had it enraged him. Before he 

 had even noticed the knife he saw that his beautiful square had 

 been ripped clean across the middle ; about a dozen of the sisal 

 bars sliced. 'Many's the bonny net has been ripped. You'd better 

 learn to mend it.' It was in this way that Jan first found that it is 

 perhaps more difficult to mend a torn net than to make a new one. 

 Yet nets had to be mended since they were continually being torn 

 at sea and since it would hardly have been practicable to renew 

 the trawl on every occasion that a few meshes snapped. 



Buchan waxed almost eloquent in his description of how to cut 

 the net in order to save as much of it as possible. The pattern had 

 to be saved, the even diamonds restored. It was therefore neces- 

 sary to cut away the raw ends of the bars, all except one at the 

 head of the slash and one at the foot. These half bars, or halvers, 

 were the beginning and end of the mending operation. Jan 

 knitted back the trawl pattern from a tie at one of them to a tie 

 at the other, and the lint was complete again. And again Buchan 

 ripped it. The gashes became more and more complicated so that 



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