Living Silver 



'Yes,' said George wearily. 'The market will be a good one.* 



Everybody was too tired to ask him why he thought so, but he 

 was right. A few boats that had gone south returned with fairish 

 catches, up to a hundred cran, but the bulk of the East Anglian 

 fleet had been fishing within ten miles of the StanislawdLiidj of them, 

 Ian landed the best shot - forty crans, not much more than a tenth 

 of what Jan and Tadeusz took. When they thought it over it was 

 simple, bafiflingly simple. The herring swim had been on the far 

 side, the east side of the ten fathom ridge. Perhaps there had been 

 herring on the other side as well but, if so, they had kept to the 

 bottom. There was no way of telling. The gannets had been there 

 all right, and the whales too. One of the Peterhead drifters had 

 lost a couple of nets when a whale charged playfully into them. 

 That, too, was strange. With the nets so thick, the whale, or 

 whales should have torn dozens of them to ribbons. For the most 

 part there had been nothing in the nets, not even the jellyfish that 

 had given Adam blood poisoning in the summer fishing. 



With the landings so low and the quality of their take so high, 

 the Poles were able to sell most of their herring to the kippering 

 companies and the dealers in fresh fish. Only thirty crans went 

 for fish meal. But, although he cleared two hundred pounds on 

 the night's work, it was not the money that Jan remembered with 

 most gratitude when he looked back on East Anglia in later years. 

 It was the student, the one who had been vomiting blood. 



Naturally enough, everybody had been annoyed at the time. 

 The work on a drifter was highly organised and demanded a crew 

 of nine. If even one person was missing it meant interminable 

 delays. Now the Stanislaw had been working short-handed, with 

 a crew of eight. Jan and Tadeusz between them had taken most 

 of the extra work, especially Jan who was doubling up as cook 

 and mate, a hand-breaking, brain- tearing job. When the student 

 deckie had been forced to desert his post, Tadeusz had tried to 

 combine his duties as skipper with those of a deckie, bouncing 

 about from wheelhouse to deck, as split a personality as a clown 

 with two masks. The student had realised the trouble he was 



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