Free Bruach Blend by Lillian Beckwith Page A

we tried cutting one open it had the stomach an’ entrails of an animal. We didn’t know what to make of them.’
    â€˜Indeed I never heard of such things,’ exclaimed Janet. ‘Surely the sea is full of wonders.’
    Padruig Glic (Padruig the wise) asked thoughtfully, ‘Did you say they were red?’
    â€˜Kind of red,’ agreed Willy.
    Padruig nodded. ‘They would be what the English call a “sea squirt”,’ he elucidated, and added with an oblique smile, ‘The name we have for them in the Gaelic means “a long-drawn-out fart”.’ Amid wheezes and chokes of laughter everyone looked at me.
    â€˜That’s just what they do, then,’ said Willy with a grin. ‘Surely there’s no language like the Gaelic for puttin’ a right name to a thing.’ He aimed his cigarette butt at the fire and rooted in his pocket for the packet. ‘If it’s strange things we’re speakin’ of there was somethin’ we got only a few weeks back in the net. It was that big an’ heavy we couldn’t haul the net at all though we tried every which way. The skipper thought he was goin’ to have to cut the nets free an’ lose them but then all of a sudden up they came as easy as you like.’
    â€˜An’ what was in it?’ asked Johnny eagerly.
    â€˜Nothin’,’ said Willy.
    â€˜Nothin’?’ repeated Johnny incredulously. ‘What do you reckon was keepin’ it then, a rock?’
    â€˜It was no rock,’ returned Willy. ‘The way we was haulin’ a rock would have torn our net to shreds. When we got the net in we thought it would be damaged but there wasn’t a hole in it.’ He looked around at the varying expressions which ranged from wide-eyed wonder to carefully concealed scepticism. ‘I’m thinkin’ it must have been a monster of some kind,’ he went on defiantly. ‘A monster that was able to swim out of the net when it wanted.’
    â€˜Ach, monsters!’ broke in Tearlaich with a yawn. ‘If you believe everythin’ you hear there’s a monster in every loch in Scotland. Half the time I’m thinkin’ folks are lookin’ at a conger eel through a magnifying glass.’
    â€˜I don’t know about lochs but it’s true there’s plenty of monsters in the sea,’ Willy maintained.
    â€˜Damty sure that’s true,’ supported Erchy.
    Tearlaich, who probably had less experience of the sea than any other man present, shrugged contemptuously.
    â€˜Mind you,’ conceded Willy with a cheerful smile, ‘maybe it’s not just humans who see monsters. We had a fellow aboard once that wore these thick glasses like the bottoms of glass bottles; we called him “Square Eyes”, an’ one day when he was helpin’ to haul they fell off into the sea. The crew had a great laugh tellin’ him they’d landed on the head of a big cod, so there’s a panic-stricken cod swimmin’ around the Minch thinkin’ every sprat is a monster chasin’ him.’
    â€˜An’ what would the poor man do on a fishin’ boat without his glasses,’ asked Morag, her mind flying immediately to the serious side of the anecdote.
    â€˜Ach, he was no use at all,’ Willy told her. ‘But he wasn’t much loss seem’ he was goin’ off anyway. The skipper paid him off that week.’
    â€˜Goin’ off?’ asked Mairi. ‘Where?’
    â€˜Off his head,’ Willy said. ‘He’d got religion pretty bad when he came aboard but when he started sayin’ he was Jesus Christ he properly upset the skipper. “If you’re Jesus Christ you make sure our nets come up full of fish,” he told him, “because if they’re not you can start walkin’ back to that bloody harbour.”’

5. A ‘Right Ceilidh’
    I felt it was time to leave the ceilidh, but as