Living Silver 



whole sections of the lint had to be cut out and it became very 

 difficult to decide where to begin and where to end. Continually 

 he seemed to have creased an extra mesh to make up for a loser 

 in the last row, or one would be bated away by a take-up. These 

 mends were much more complicated than the straight making of 

 a stretch of lint. Yet he knew that his work at sea would be 

 concerned with mending rather than making and that it was 

 therefore necessary for him to have a thorough understanding of 

 the complication of techniques employed. And two weeks of 

 strenuous mending satisfied Buchan that he knew about nets. He 

 even began to be able to connect some of the fishermen's terms 

 with ordinary language. To crease meant to increase. To bate 

 meant to abate. And so on. Things were becoming simpler and 

 his very mastery led to a new kind of dissatisfaction. He wanted 

 to learn more. He wanted the excitement of trying to answer 

 questions that stumped him. And net mending no longer supplied 

 them. 



Buchan, of course, sensed his dissatisfaction, and he soon had 

 Jan installed in the rigging room, the first pupil of the school to 

 graduate to this final stage in net-making. The real interrelation 

 of all his previous patches of work now began to take shape and 

 the trawl net itself to acquire a personality totally different from 

 its constituent sheets of lint, the frail wide-meshed square, the 

 rough double-stranded fine-meshed cod-end. As the years of his 

 life passed this personality was to develop but even from the 

 beginning Jan thought of the trawl as though it were some 

 enormous dunce's cap. 



The dunce himself was fast asleep with the huge conical cap 

 resting on the bottom of the sea and being dragged along it by the 

 local bully. Poor dunce, he was a miserably skinny parody of a 

 man, his arms akimbo and his long long legs rubbing uncomfort- 

 ably at the ankles where they broke the surface of the water. He 

 was lying face downward so that his nose and forehead were 

 going to be scratched to a jelly by the chafing of sand or gravel. 

 His hands, that were boards of wood and chain and steel, dug 



20 



