Living Silver 



they were rather ugly fish, their tiny barbel fixed to a row of dew- 

 laps, white under the dark spade-shaped head. Though it seemed 

 so comfortable, the cod had a graceful shape, an easy movement : 

 it looked like an athlete. The haddock was comparatively clumsy, 

 its lines less streamlined and its head too heavy. The haddock 

 slouched, as it were, while the cod sauntered. And it kept even 

 more to the bottom of the sea, its white and wrinkled rows of 

 chins trickling sensitively forwards but close to the roughness of 

 the ground, almost as though it was going to start ploughing the 

 sands beneath it. Large and flattened, the head slanted back to a 

 bull-like neck of bone behind which the black thumb-print of St 

 Peter had been placed by a legend. 



Even more than the cod, then, the haddock gave the impression 

 of a respectable vegetarian, browsing quietly on underwater grass. 

 But the delicate rigging of its three dorsal fins was always there to 

 remind Jan that it was a gadoid and, therefore, a voracious carni- 

 vore. Yet the food it flicked in between its soft lips might well 

 have seemed vegetable to a man who knew nothing of the sea. It 

 did not move. It often branched up intricately out of the sea-bed. 

 Green, sometimes, or red, those little encrusting or burrowing 

 animals mimicked the leguminous pigments and often shed light on 

 the surrounding muddy darkness. They grew with the same static 

 finality as an oak tree and with the obstinacy of a daisy. They were 

 not to be shifted. The haddock would shovel away the topmost 

 layer of sand, uncover the tiny urchins that lived there in their 

 millions, moving so slowly that they hardly seemed to move, and 

 the haddock would soon be munching their delicate calcified skele- 

 tons or dissolving them whole in the acids of its stomach. Or 

 again, the fish would edge over an acre of marine boulders, snat- 

 ching systematically at the herbage of sedentary worms as they 

 flowered into a field of predatory tentacles. There too, it dug 

 brittle-stars out of their crevices and gobbled their splintering 

 bodies. Anemones would be uptorn from rocks and the spawning 

 grounds of the herring grazed down to nudity. 



The speed of the assembling haddock over grounds where her- 



78 



