MORNING SERIAL
STRANGEST of all, hanging from a hook on the underside of the top shelf was a stocking-shaped net packed with a selection of identical pebbles beautifully painted as herrings down to the finest details of fins and scales. I counted them. There were seven. With a shaking hand I withdrew the envelope, relocked the cabinet and returned to the kitchen.
I sat there a long time staring at the envelope and thinking about the contents of the locker.
The piece of net with the painted pebbles representing herrings, the same as the six full boxes of unpainted pebbles in the shed and the almost full one by the wall outside. I looked at the box full of driftwood by the fire. Painted on the side was the word CRAN. Seven cran of herrings. Why? I reached across and picked up the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. I withdrew the contents. A few typed pages and a photograph of a young boy in tatty shorts like I used to wear, with plimsolls on his feet and a cap with a blue letter W behind the peak. I turned it over and read the name, WINSTON. It triggered a recent memory. The chart in Grandfather’s log and the message H7F for W HT. I’d been wrong, the W that I’d thought was for Grandfather’s name was for this boy.
Herrings for WINSTON. He had to be Grandfather’s greatgrandson, named after him. Father’s son. I started to read the faded type. It was Father’s story.
Grandfather had always told us, Winston and I, the story of the Silver Tube that in all his years of fishing in Carmarthen Bay he had never managed to catch.
He said that he knew it was possible and he knew the location but that he’d never been there at that one time when the secret herrings were massing to spawn, on that one particular night probably late in November when the shoals of herring gathered to reproduce. He always kept cran boxes in his boat believing that a silver tube would fill seven of them, his lucky number. He never managed it.
I was always fascinated by this and it became my sole ambition to fulfil this for Grandfather. It was to be my undoing.
The Herring Man by Cyril James Morris is published by Parthian at £7.99
www.parthianbooks.com