Seining 



At first Jan had thought that the divergence between stark as- 

 ceticism and the most ribald of sensuaHty was due to a dichotomy 

 between seafaring men and farmers. His stay in the Orkneys had 

 given him that impression, for the men there were of the douce 

 dour type always associated with the Scottish church. They were 

 also men of the land, farmers who occasionally weni to sea. But 

 the neighbouring Shetlands were another manner. Its inhabitants 

 were the North Sea Chinamen of legend and reality, the men who 

 were always ready to heap themselves aboard a ship and sail, if 

 need be, to Japan or the Antarctic, to Chile or Australia, heedless 

 of the months or the years of their absence, men who were almost 

 physiologically aquatic, bom sailors. And their gay and brutal 

 irresponsibility was a product of the sea as the canny patience of 

 the Orcadian was related to the slower rhythms of the land. And 

 Jan had thought these differences analogous to those he found be- 

 tween trawlermen and farmers. But in Peterhead he was forced 

 to realise how wrong he had been. The co-existence of both types 

 of men within the same family, an inbred family of seafarers, 

 showed him that these two opposite temperaments were both 

 legitimate expressions of the schizophrenic soul of Scotland. They 

 had no direct connection with the sea. As for city folk, Jan never 

 thought of them as having any character or temperament at all. 



Yet the sea did put a strain on a man that the land could not. 

 It was a matter of decisions, of continually making new decisions, 

 not one, two, three, four per year, but dozens of decisions in the 

 one day : and each decision was as vital, and sometimes more fatal, 

 than the decision of a farmer about when he would sow his seed 

 com. Jan remembered well how he had noticed a frayed area in 

 the second rope as it went over the side of the April Morning one 

 day in the third month of their seining. He had made his decision, 

 silently. The ground was light sand, the catches were small, there 

 was little danger of snags. It would hold another drag. But it 

 hadn't. 



Jerzy had been standing by the stern between the ropes as they 

 began to creep out of the tumble of the water. He was weighing 



^7S 



