Painted Brightly 



credits had allowed him to start up on his own as a line fisherman 

 on the west coast. A small boat, a few lines and a large number of 

 hooks, and he had begun selling the better class of haddock, cod 

 and ling in Oban. There he had met a Peterhead girl who was on 

 holiday and, his English being as bad as it still was, the inevitable 

 had happened. So he had married her. 



At the moment he was himself on holiday with his wife's people. 

 The weather on the west coast was too wild for a boat of twenty 

 feet and it was discouraging the tourists who helped to employ 

 him in his alternative profession of photographer. He told Jan 

 long stories about the strange characters who were his wife's kin. 

 Fishermen all, they seemed to have organised matters so that 

 every father was the precise opposite of his son and every daughter 

 of her mother. The paternal grandfather was still alive, an ancient 

 called Sandy who had spent his youth on Antarctic whaling ex- 

 peditions and who retained, even at seventy-five, a strong prefer- 

 ence for whisky over tea and for song rather than speech. He was 

 full of yarns too, especially of Christmas day on the Antarctic, how 

 his own ship had met a Norwegian one and the rival crews had 

 played at football on a gigantic iceberg until they were all too 

 thoroughly refreshed to be able to stand. Then they had sung and, 

 when they couldn't decide what tune should come next, they had 

 begun an amicable battle of which Sandy still bore the scars. 



Had his exuberance allowed it the old man would have been 

 relegated to a cupboard and regarded as a skeleton. But he was all 

 too fleshly for that role and his family had to suffer him as a real 

 living disgrace. Nevertheless, the long absences of his youth had 

 permitted his wife to safeguard the morality of her children, four 

 boys and two girls, all of whom were members of a very severe 

 religious sect. The Plymouth Brethren, that had begun among 

 fishermen in Devon, was a mild affair when compared with the 

 zealotry of the Peterhead Exclusive Brethren. It boasted about 

 two thousand members, all in the North of Scotland, and its indi- 

 vidual theology postulated that these two thousand and only these 

 two thousand would enter at Peter's Gate. Its members were 



^5S 



