Seining 



could relax for a moment. He was stretched out tight to receive 

 whatever stimulus might give sign of a hurt to the vessel or the 

 gear and, with this useful information, he was forced to receive 

 the signals of his own subjective coldness, his bleeding fingers, the 

 wind like a blade in his back. 



Thus, in every way, he found seining a more unpleasant experi- 

 ence than trawling. It was more difficult, it hurt more, and it 

 took up more of his life. Yet he preferred it. He vastly preferred 

 it. For the first time since he had come to Britain, he remembered 

 what it was to have a sense of identity. To be somebody, he began 

 to understand, meant no more than to be spontaneously respons- 

 ible to somebody, not legally responsible, except in the sense of a 

 Divine Law, but equally and ordinarily responsible ; as he had been 

 responsible to his comrades during the war, when many of these 

 comrades had died in the most horrible conditions of torture be- 

 cause they had been thus simply responsible to him. He had not 

 demanded it of them. He would never have asked any such sacri- 

 fice from any man. Yet, looking back now, he realised that he had 

 expected it. Not overtly, of course. He had never told himself 

 that he would prefer them to die than to give him away, but he 

 had expected it of them in exactly the same way as he had ex- 

 pected it of himself. In their case he had been infallibly right. He 

 did not know what would have happened if he had been the one 

 who was caught. But he did know what he would have expected 

 of himself. And somehow this ferocious sense of responsibility 

 got mixed up with his feelings about his companions aboard the 

 April Morning. 



He was probably being very silly. Certainly the middle-aged 

 Scotsmen who sailed in their portly way through the stone wings 

 of Peterhead's prison-grey breakwater could not have this agonis- 

 ing sense of responsibility. He recalled old drunks like Jim Cowie 

 the skipper of the Weather True, who returned quite regularly to 

 his boat, at low tide and high, in such a state of intoxication that 

 he invariably stepped aboard her. If the Weather True happened to 

 be lying fifteen feet under the quay it made no difference. Old 



173 



