In Irvine Welsh's piece of writing for a Message From The Skies, he describes the influence of the sea, growing up in Leith
The sea indirectly facilitated my transition from boy to man. More accurately, it stopped me from becoming the grown up I probably would have been. But strictly speaking my fate was decided not so much by the oceans themselves, but by another man from the port of Leith who had allowed the tides to define him. Like him, I was born very close to the water, but unlike him, I very rarely saw it. From our vantage, first from Leith tenement then Muirhouse flat, ‘the sea’ was visible only as the oily, dark, Firth of Forth, a river long gone tidal since its weaving adolescence in the Trossachs, as it bled slowly into the frozen North Sea.
I had always craved the endless possibilities of travel. I wanted to access lives I only had a vague idea ever existed. I was curious.
It was one particular man of the sea who helped provide that pass. Let’s call him JL. He was a stick-thin Samuel Beckett clone, a mate of my dad and uncle. A bunch of those ‘old boys’ as we called those men in their forties then, all from the docks, shipyards and maritime fleet, drank in the Marksman Bar in Duke Street. Unlike the dockers, who talked of thieving, and the tooled up shipyard workers at Robb Caledon, who talked violence, JL spun tales of the merchant seaman’s life, spiced with the intoxicating promise of sex and travel. It struck me fondly back then that young men need an uncle figure to tell them about carnal affairs. Your own dads are too embarrassed: ‘find a nice lassie, treat her right, and dinnae bring shame on this hoose” are admirable sentiments to live by, but also a little limiting.
JL had a different approach. His life was the sea, as it offered him freedom from not just confinement, but from attachment. He would move close in and advise us in his Grouse whisky breath, one eye shut, the other outrageously open, “get up the toon and fire intae they posh festival birds. Dinnae waste your time wi some wee hing oot fae The Spiral, you’ll never leave the scheme that wey.” I sensed that JL was particularly directing those sentiments towards me. In my complete engagement, he read a fellow wandering soul. But like him, I didn’t so much want to leave the scheme as take it with me all around the world.
We would later learn that JL had two families, one back in Granton and the other in Montevideo, or ‘Monty’ as he called the Uruguayan capital. And yes, it transpired that there was also a lover who was Portuguese, whom he’d worked with on several ships. This man came to Leith to find JL, probably to confront him about his treachery but strangely, or perhaps not so, ended up lodging for several years with JL’s long-suffering wife, EL. Of course, JL himself was gone. “Probably got another boat…” his mates in the Marksman would mumble. But yes, it was inevitable that the old craggy-couponed dog would be back at sea, or perhaps in ‘Monty’, with his second family. Or maybe there was a third set of kin somewhere, and I can see his progeny in Shanghai or Marseilles, briefly looking up from the mischief they were indulging in, perhaps wistfully gazing out to the sea. Wondering about its possibilities, and if they will ever allow it to make them.
It certainly helped to make me, for better and for worse, if only by the proxy of JL. I was on a train to London at sixteen and then a plane to New York at nineteen. I’ve never stopped moving since and it’s all down to JL and those strange lessons he gleaned from the sea.
Message from the Skies 2020, Shorelines runs from January 1-25
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