Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [37]
“That,” said Ros defensively, “is what we’re going to have for supper. It’s pollock.”
“Pollocks!” spluttered Tord, his great beery red face aghast. “Pollocks? Nobody eat pollocks. I tell you not even cats don’t eat pollocks. Why you eat that fish?”
“Well, it doesn’t cost anything,” countered Ros. “There are plenty of pollocks in the fjords.”
Sobered a little by thoughts of our desperate diet, Tord sat down, took a big slug of whisky, and said: “I get you some proper think to eat. I work in der meat biznis.” Nothing more was ventured about the preponderance of the pollock in our diet, and after another hour or two of heavy, heavy drinking, interlaced with forays of meaningless twaddle in Norwegian—the sort of session you wish had never got started—he and his cronies finally crawled ashore, leaving us to slump crapulously into our berths.
The next morning, when we had a mind to continue sleeping, there came a stumble and a thump, some feverish shuffling and a whispered oath. It was Tord coming back, as he had promised. The skylight darkened (it gets light at about two in the morning in June this far north), and the familiar beery face peered in and guffawed. With a crash a heavy piece of unidentifiable meat hit the saloon table … then another … and another … and finally a fourth.
“Ho … vid dis stuff you don’t haf to eat no more pollocks. Open up de door; I need some more drinking …”
We weighed this option up. There was not a man among us who felt inclined to continue the drinking session with our benefactor … but then there lay in a heap on the table four enormous legs of smoked mutton. This was proper Viking fare—they had been big sheep and their legs would do us all the way across to Vinland without the need to troll for more pollock. To take a drink or two with Tord was clearly a moral obligation. Tom dug up the loose floorboard and fished forth another couple of bottles of whisky … and off we went again. It transpired, in the light of the illuminating conversation that ensued, that Tord had nicked the mutton from the meat works where he was employed. It didn’t matter much anyway, he said, because he had just been given the boot … oddly enough for drunkenness and pilfering.
The smoked mutton, shaved thin with a hasp knife, was the most delicious thing you could imagine … well, at any rate better than pollock. Tord had at a stroke raised the gastronomic level of our journey from desperate to something close to gourmand.
For some reason that escapes me now, the four legs of mutton were hung in the heads. The heads, as nautically minded readers will be aware, is the boat’s lavatory. Ours was a tiny curved compartment containing a small porcelain bowl decked with a baffling array of levers and plungers. On the wall, now unfortunately obscured by the mutton, were the instructions that told you the order in which these things had to be operated and how … and, to a certain extent, why. Curiously enough, the ceaseless thumping of those muttons on the wall of the heads remains to me one of the most enduring memories of our Vinland voyage.
IN NO TIME AT all it seemed that May had given way to June, and July was looming. It was surely time to cut loose from the tiny and hospitable harbor towns where we had moored and throw ourselves once again upon the mercy of the open sea. Yet, although we all claimed to be champing at the bit to be off, there was a discernible note of reluctance among us sailermen (as the locals called us) to wrench ourselves away from our newfound friends—whole families we had got to know in the waterside towns had welcomed us into their homes—and cast ourselves on the mercy of the North Atlantic. So we stalled for a few days by putting in at one of the outermost islands, ostensibly to make some small repair, but in reality storing up a last bit of comfort from the warm, dry land before committing ourselves to the horrible icy cold and danger that we all knew lay ahead. The island was too small to have cars. It had a toy-town port and a cluster of