MORNING SERIAL
IT took me a long time to read the poem as it had more than a hundred verses and within those verses were many words that I never understood.
I found an old dictionary in the cottage and each time I came across an unknown word I looked up its meaning.
Like I said earlier, Father told me that Grandfather sailed to Alaska and on the way encountered a pod of whales feeding on vast shoals of Pacific herring.
Their mouths like Fingal’s Cave, he said, swallowing hundreds, nay thousands of fish with each gape. He enlightened me about Fingal’s Cave sometime later, but I sensed the vastness of it at the time.
Grandfather told him that God had packed the sea with herrings to feed all creatures including man. The whalers came as he was watching and bloodied the blue ocean with their endeavours. Grandfather couldn’t bear to watch and sailed on northwards to the Aleutian Islands.
I read on and, for my own education, found paper in an old cupboard and started to use the typewriter. I typed every word that I didn’t know together with its meaning.
The words on each page in the dictionary were to me an understanding of the importance of language, and the whole book of words was like the ocean filled to overflowing with fish.
My shallow typing of words gradually became sentences and the sentences paragraphs of words complementing one another like shoals of swimming fish.
It captured my imagination and I turned my attention to Grandfather’s log thinking all the time of Father’s last words on the paper: tell them the stories.
CHAPTER 10
I found myself in somewhat of a dilemma, too many important tasks and I was unsure which one to tackle first.
Father’s ashes seemed to be the most pressing but to achieve that I had to get the boat into the water, and I had never rowed a boat before in my life. I would need to practise. However, I was comfortable for the time being knowing that Father was still there in the cottage with me.
The Herring Man by Cyril James Morris is published by Parthian at £7.99
www.parthianbooks.com