Living Silver 



was such a change from the proletarian drabness of the Aberdeen 

 quays. Jan felt instantly at home. It was the way men painted 

 their houses in Poland, the way his mother had polished her furni- 

 ture . Even their shape suggested middle-aged middle-brow middle- 

 class solidity, broad on the beam, narrowing suddenly at the stem 

 but wide-stemed, they might have been sea-going dumplings, 

 each one covered in Christmas tinsel. BFS^^, Bright Venture^ PD 

 306 Spes Meliora^ FR 228 Jane MacGuire^ PD194 Calm Waters, the 

 casual names were so different from the earnest systematisation of 

 a trawler fleet. Among these wooden vessels that could seine in 

 winter and drift for herring in summer, he was at home. He was 

 listening to Tadeusz. He must be careful. Maybe it was just the 

 sound of his own language that was having this effect upon him. 

 He must take time to think. 



Jan escaped, but not before Tadeusz had made him promise to 

 come round in the evening if his ship had not sailed. It hadn't. By 

 the time they met again Jan had decided. He had long knowTi that 

 he did not want to marry while working on a trawler. The weeks 

 at sea were too long. The crudities of his shipmates sickened him 

 so that he felt debauched although he was, in fact, exhausted by 

 his resistance to debauchery. And there was the money. If half of 

 what Tadeusz had said were true he was certain to increase his 

 income from £10 to £ i ^ per week and he stood a good chance of 

 making the occasional round sum of £100 or more. It was only a 

 matter of going into details. 



But the details took a lot of going into. There were inexhaust- 

 ible mines of them. Months passed before the barest plans were 

 laid. Tadeusz knew two other Poles who were working among 

 fish. One of them was an engineer ; the other sailed from Grimsby 

 on one of those English seine-netters that were owned by a large 

 company. By a diversity of accidents they each had £1 ,000 avail- 

 able and Tadeusz too had the same sum. Jan had been saving 

 pretty solidly and, though he did not have quite so much as the 

 others, he had enough for Tadeusz, at least, to be willing to over- 

 look the difference. Jerzy and Adam turned out to be as enthusi- 



160 



