Free North Star by Hammond Innes

inherited a solid streak of peasant greed from his mother, would be like explaining Marxism to a Hull trawler owner. I pulled the door open. ‘I need another beer,’ I said.
    He stood for a moment uncertainly. But he knew it was no good. ‘I thought you were clever.’ His voice reflected hisdisappointment. ‘You’re just a bloody fool,’ he said angrily. And then, as he was going out, he turned and asked me why, after all these years, I had come to Shetland making enquiries about my father? ‘You never knew him. You never cared what happened to him. Why now?’
    ‘That’s my business,’ I said and I pushed him out into the gangway, ordering Henrik to take him ashore in the work boat we now had alongside. Gertrude Petersen arrived shortly afterwards with a meal she had prepared at home, and when I told her what had happened, she said, ‘I don’t like that man. I don’t like the people he employs. Last December, when we are stormbound in Burra Firth for two days, we are in the hotel and there is this Irish behind the bar – he make trouble for Johan.’ She didn’t say what trouble, but there was a slight flush on her face as she added, ‘It is the last time we drink in his hotel.’
    I forgot about Sandford after that. We lived by the tide, our heads aching after every shift, falling into our bunks as soon as we had fed and sleeping until the alarm woke us. And when, in the early hours of the Friday morning, it was done and we began pumping, I just stood there on the deck staring at the dark shadow of the hills, feeling utterly exhausted. I was like a surgeon who has performed a difficult operation. All I wanted now was for the patient to live, and so identified had I become with the ship that I felt it was a part of me.
    We breakfasted late to the racket of the pump, and afterwards Gertrude drove me to Halcrow’s yard. They were behind schedule, and with the drilling contractors screaming for their supply ship, the trials were set for Sunday afternoon. That gave us two clear days. We got the anchor out on the port beam, with the chain linked by a big block and tackle to the trawl winch hawser, then at low water on the Saturday morning, with the Land-Rover hitched to the tail end of the purchase guy, and all of us pulling, some of the locals as well, we managed to roll her about 12 degrees. This list to port was just sufficient to bring the whole patch clear of the water at thebottom of the tide. But it still took two tides to cut the plate edges of the hull, beat out the dents and weld the last six inches of the patch. Even when that was done the pump could only just hold its own.
    ‘We’ll have to slip and patch her properly from the outside,’ I told Gertrude as we stood that evening in the engine-room, the sound of the pump drumming at the deck overhead and the water gurgling in the bilges. She didn’t argue. On the port side the floor gratings ran down into water. Even when we had released the purchase tackle and the trawler was floating upright on the top of the tide, water sloshed and gurgled over the gratings as the ship moved in the wind, dancing to a slight swell coming in round the end of the spit. She knew the hull had to be absolutely watertight if we were to keep the sea in all weathers for three weary months.
    All this time the wind had been westerly and the water in the voe quiet under the lee of mainland. Now the forecast was for changeable weather, the last of the depressions moving away towards Iceland and a High coming in behind it, with a Low over France. That slight swell was a warning of northeasterly winds. Duncan appeared at my side and stood sniffing the air as though he, too, sensed the change. He was a dour man with a long nose and a sandy moustache. The hospital had discharged him the previous afternoon and he had been down in the engine-room ever since cleaning the place up with the help of his assistant, Per, and the youngest member of the crew, a big bull of a boy known as