Painted Brightly 



astic or as generous as Tadeusz ; for it needed a minimum of four 

 men to run a seine-net vessel and that was what they were all after. 

 Money was not nearly so important as a good fisherman. It was 

 the Government, in any case, that was going to provide the bulk 

 of the finance. The Government would pay for their ship. Tadeusz 

 had gone into that. Provided they were British citizens they would 

 qualify for the Grants and Loans Aid to Fishermen, a scheme that 

 had just been inaugurated. 



It was designed to favour those who, like Jan and Tadeusz and 

 Adam and Jerzy, intended to run their own boats but it was also 

 extended to cover the larger companies which employed seamen. 

 The scheme had been made necessary by the general decline in the 

 numbers of the fishing fleet and the continual ageing of the ships 

 that remained in service. Government advisers had decided to try 

 to stop the rot before it had too great an effect on fish supplies and 

 prices, and their method was to help finance the building of new 

 ships by a complicated system of low interest loans and outright 

 grants. Tadeusz had gone into the scheme in some detail. His ex- 

 perience of official generosity in Poland had not made him very 

 hopeful but he soon discovered to his surprise that the authorities 

 would be willing to give him a third of the price of the ship and 

 lend him the rest. In the meantime, while this new boat was 

 building, his father-in-law was willing to rent him a smaller ship 

 that was past her best and that he was finding difficulty in selling. 

 It was this vessel, the April Morning, that he showed to Jan. 



A little wooden boat, not more than forty-two feet in length, 

 it badly needed a repainting and, probably, more fundamental 

 repairs. There was certainly nothing strikingly generous in the 

 father-in-law's vnllingness to let them have the use of it since they 

 would have to make it into a much more saleable article before it 

 became sea- worthy. Gear, too, would have to be bought, an echo- 

 sounder rented and Jan would have to learn something about the 

 rudiments of seining. Obviously they couldn't start fishing im- 

 mediately, but they could start planning. And they did. 



Four thousand pounds began to seem like a very small sum of 



i6i 



