The Eel Man of Grimsby

By John Coffey

Dan Noakes inherits a license granting sole rights to fish for eels in Grimsby Docks. The license was gifted to his family in King John's time, but is it a blessing or a curse?

Gritty portrayal of contemporary Grimsby and its fishing industry from fisherman John Coffey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SDS Publishing
• Release date: Oct 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311176752

John Coffey

Author Bio: John F. Coffey is London born and educated.. He lives in Radnor, Pennsylvania, with his wife,Gillian; He is the author of: ‘Tim and Nothing - A Nature Myth’ by John Coffey; and of, ‘Sylvia Myer MD - Sometime Somewhere' by John Coffey.

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THE EEL MAN OF GRIMSBY

Copyright John Coffey 2014.

The Eel Man of Grimsby

By John Coffey

Published by SDS Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 John Coffey

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE – THE EEL MAN

ONE – EARLY CHILDHOOD

TWO – TEENAGE YEARS

THREE – TAKING THE LICENSE

FOUR – MY FATHER’S DEMISE

FIVE – THE CLERK

SIX – GARDENING LEAVE

SEVEN – THE RED LION

EIGHT – APPLE HARVEST

NINE – THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

TEN – THE WHELK BOAT

ELEVEN – MY MOTHER’S DEMISE

TWELVE – FIRST BUDS OF SPRING

THIRTEEN – THE BEGINNING OF THE END

FOURTEEN – THE BOMBSHELL

FIFTEEN – THE WIDOW

SIXTEEN - THE MOLES

EPILOGUE - THE WATCHER

PROLOGUE – THE EEL MAN

1955. I was with my brother Ronnie, and we were walking along the pontoon in Grimsby Fish Docks. My brother was third hand on one of the deep-sea trawlers, and had taken me down to the docks, me tagging along on the heels of my hero. He often took me to get his pay, or if he went to sign on with a boat. In those days, he was a man in demand, as the saying goes; one of the toughest of the tough. It was an honour to be with him, following in his footsteps, looking up to his shoulders, and seeing the way he walked. It was raining, and it was freezing cold, even though it was supposed to be summer. We saw a man standing up in a rowing boat, sculling with a single oar in the rowlock on the transom. He wore a battered Sou'wester, and a long oilskin coat that shone with the wet. The rain was running like a leaking tap off the sharp point of the back of the Sou'wester, down onto the back of the coat. His face looked as if it was made of polished stone, and he could have been someone famous. His hands were red raw, making my hands feel cold, even though mine were deep in my pockets, and my shoulders were hunched. I was wearing a corduroy cap with a sewn-down peak. The cap was getting heavier by the minute. But Ronnie and I were not complaining of the weather. We just walked, oblivious to it. It was what we were used to. It was what it was. The oilskin man’s boat was battered and so old. It was not built for speed. It was built to last. With each pull of the oar, it positively creaked and groaned like some overloaded donkey, or some other such beast of burden. Time meant nothing to him; that I could tell. He paused from time to time, and I remember the blade of the oar had a long crack in it that had been bandaged with copper wire, finished on a flat-headed copper nail. The murky dock water dribbled off the blade, disappearing below the surface with the fleeting little darts of rain. His occupation seemed so peaceful, compared to the hive of activity all around as fish was unloaded from vessels; the clattering of winches, the swaying of booms when their wires were not straight up and down, the clatter of metal containers, falling lumps of dirty ice, human voices speaking, no, shouting in the ‘fuck and fucking’ language, with some other English words thrown in. The oilskin man’s boat lunged up against one of the piles like a dog, cocking its leg to piss. He exchanged his oar for a boat hook, whose tip was blunt and rusted, then speared the hook into the water as if his quarry was a whale. I couldn’t see the game he was playing because his back was turned. I said to Ronnie, What's he doing?

Ronnie answered, the walking encyclopaedia that he was. He's fishing for eels. He has the rights to fish for eels in these docks, handed down from the time of King John, and that is long before these docks were ever built. They send the catches down live to London on the train, so the Cockneys can have their jellied eels. I don't fancy 'em myself! Ronnie, like so many people on the docks, knew something about everything and everybody, and what he didn't know was made up on the spot.

-o00o-

People pass one another like ships in the night. I have no idea what you are thinking, nor do you know the same for me. I might get a vague idea if you look happy or sad, have a meek disposition or look dangerous. When I find myself in a crowd, I often ask myself questions. ‘What are all these people thinking about? Do they think like me? Are they thinking about money or things, the wanting of things, work, the politics of their personal lives, or sex?’ I know they have different characters living in their heads to mine, but in life there are set themes, common to us all. Those themes are played over and over in the plays we cast and script in our heads to pass the time. I can guarantee I would not properly notice you, because I lived then, as now, in a little world of my own. You would have to call out, more than once, ‘Dan’ or ‘Eely Dan’; ‘Dan’ if you knew me, or ‘Eely Dan’ if you knew of me. People calling me ‘Eely Dan’ are slightly amused by it, as if I were a figure of fun, like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. And all because of what I now do for a living. Blame it on the eels; the slimy wriggly creatures that have to be jellied or smoked, almost as if to camouflage what they are. For me, however, they are like the mark of Cain. I still am a martyr to my job. That is still the truth. A martyr to a cracked, folded piece of what they say is vellum. Yes, it does have writing in faded ink; ink so faded it looks like invisible ink taking its secrets with it. It has been folded and refolded so many times, that in many places, the vellum is gone, especially at the corners of the folds. If you open it fully and gently pick it up, the light shines through, and it looks like a doily from someone's sideboard. It is supposed to be the original license dating back to the time of Runnymede. It is supposed to be, according to my father, what plenty of other people think is a privilege we have come by, by fair means or foul. Some think they would like to own it; the sole rights to fish for eels in these damned docks. It’s a living; a safe if unglamorous living. It’s a ticket or a passport, enabling our family to navigate its way through history. All those sepia and black-and-white photographs in local history books on the mantelpieces, sideboards, and in the musty drawers of Grimsby; gaunt, toothless people hardly surviving. Well, our family has slipped almost unnoticed through all of that, thanks to that folded, tattered piece of vellum. Our ancestors never got quite as gaunt, or quite as sickly-looking as the worst of the photo people. I was taught we must never forget that, and the price is that the eldest son of each generation shall be offered up as the custodian of the wriggling, slime-ridden, smelly eel way of life. ‘Use it, or lose it’. What is the Latin for that? It’s our family motto.

But what if, as is highly likely, the vellum is a hoax? Who perpetrated it? Was it my grandfather? Or his grandfather, or a dozen grandfathers before him? It does not matter now; it’s all enshrined in the folklore. Each year we have to take the vellum to the dock offices. These days, the dopey-looking clerk in the Payments Section does not even bother to take it out of its grubby brown envelope, but just writes out a receipt for the ridiculously small amount. It may have been a serious amount of money back in the Middle Ages, but not in 1955, and especially not today. My father thought he was taking advantage of him, having a laugh, screwing him over, and the docks company too; they never had the brains to mention the words ‘inflation’ or ‘cost of living indices’. Me, I am not so sure. They might be having the last laugh, I tell you. I always planned that as soon as my father died, the license would die with him, but he lived long enough to leave me in no man's land. I was stuck. By the time he died, I was good for nothing else, except the way of life I knew. It was not like quicksand that sucks you in and quickly drowns you beneath the water, but the kind of mud that will just not let go. I was left to wave and shout, but nobody heard, because the waving and shouting was going on in my head. The tide was coming in, and I wasn’t sure if it was a spring or neap tide. It was like a bad dream, except it was the worst of dreams, where nothing changes, nothing is resolved.

CHAPTER ONE – EARLY CHILDHOOD

I was born the elder of two boys in a dilapidated terraced house in Grimsby, on the southern side of the River Humber estuary on the east coast of England. You will see the town on the map, where the river leaves a gaping wound above the hip of the country. Grimsby is said to be so named by a Danish invader called Grim, the 'by' part meaning 'town’. The locals call it ‘Little Siberia’, because in wintertime, and the weather does not always wait until wintertime, the wind blows so cold and strong. If it rattles the windows, if it whistles from the top scales of the instrument, if it loosens the fillings in teeth, or blows vaguely from the East, the locals believe it has already toured Siberia. Perversely, they love throwing the words about; their way of crowing from the rooftops that they are heroes for living there. Masochists. The gales do have a style of their own, and regular as clockwork, the children stretch out their coats like wings, and lean into the howling wind to at least 45 degrees, shrieking with delight at their gravity-defying feats. The wind steals their cries, the game played as mime.

I was born in the front room on a bed, which was carried down the creaking stairs for my mother's ‘lying in’. No doubt the labour would have been long, and her cries would have been audible in the street to neighbours scuttling past, shaking their heads in understanding, while muttering silent prayers. Nature will have its way. I have walked the same streets, and heard the same noises. Of course, my father would have been nowhere to be seen, as was the way of doing things in those times. Upon being allowed into the front room when all was calm, he would have been told I was a boy, and would have been over the moon that, praise the Lord, the tattered piece of vellum was safe. If the good Lord would see me safely through measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, polio, and any other childhood diseases, the license to fish for eels would continue its service. It would stay with the family, and the rest of the world could go and get stuffed. Princes of the realm got their duchies, industrial barons and the sons of the landed gentry got their estates, their coal mines, their factories and their shipping, and I got that grubby piece of vellum, with all it implied. That is the way of the world.

Of course, back then, I did not feel ingratitude, protected as I was by the innocence of youth. The very first thing I can remember is being taken down steep carpeted stairs by my father to see your new little baby brother. I know by simple arithmetic that I would have been three years old, and the bounce I was given in my father's arms meant I was supposed to have been excited. The excitement soon wore off. I remember feeling nervous, but did not know why. Everything was not right. The bed had never been in the front room before. There was a bossy woman there I had never met, who was obviously, in retrospect, the midwife. I wanted to go to my mother, but she could not take me, because she had a baby in her arms. As much as I remember every little detail in the room that day, blank spaces of memory follow. I cannot remember exactly when the ingratitude, the disease of ingratitude, set in. Like jealousy, it is one of those human defects that infiltrates your very bones. I could not see it, but an invisible hand was guiding me towards it, and through me, guiding my brother too. They call such things destiny; nothing at all to do with people, instead coming from some other place. Some invisible Godlike figure is supposed to lead you by the hand when you come to life's little crossroads, whispering in your ear, ‘Go this way! Don't go that way!’ The same God, who in cases of shipwrecks and mine disasters, is apparently responsible for those who are saved, but not those who perish. At least in my case, it was that cracked piece of vellum, and the people I was related to, that were steering the boat. God had nothing to do with it.

My brother Robert. Robbie, oh Robbie; symbol of, but not cause of, most things wrong in my life. The haves and the have-nots all under one roof. Yes, it was not his fault. I used to revisit the situation, like I was passing the metaphorical beads of the rosary through my index finger and thumb, muttering under my breath, It is not his fault, it is not his fault. I could do it every day. It was not propaganda to the self, because I truly believed it. Every time I said it, it was as if I was kneeling and praying before a graven image, a seated calf in solid gold, simultaneously a picture of innocence and envy, one of the seven deadly sins. I made it my mission in life never to show bad feeling towards Robbie, to never speak of it directly to him, or to other people about him. I vowed never to shake him, or to strike him in frustration; that he was born free, and I was born into servitude. The situation was supremely ironic. The license was destined to be given to me, but the true prize was not to be given it. A blind man would always be able to tell us apart; ‘This one smells fishy, and that one does not.’ Through all the childhood fights, the wrestling, the fisticuffs that sometimes ended with drops and smears of blood, I never once accused Robbie of being the lucky one. God knows, when we did fight, the exertions were so extreme, that in struggling for breath itself, I could have been forgiven if the words had slipped out, but they never did. We all need to keep the evidence of our trials to measure ourselves, and this was my measure. Sadly, I was the only witness to my titanic efforts, and will take what I know to my grave. I got quiet satisfaction watching Robbie blundering through life, oblivious. Only a childish person would shove it in his face.

The three-year difference in our ages was not ideal. It would have been better if the gap was one year or several, but what can you do? Those were the cards we had been dealt. If it had been one year, I could have suffered his stupid games. If it had been several, my parents would never have dreamt of foisting him upon me. As it was, I was expected to be his entertainment director on the cruise ship called life. Not only was I expected to amuse him, but was expected to prevent him from getting into trouble at all times. Instinctively, he seemed to know I did not have full authority, and when he would not behave, it was I who got the blame. This was especially so with my father, who was forever tired or intoxicated, and would whack me round the head with the speed of a venomous snake. ‘You're older than him! You ought to know better.’ It is a miracle that as an adult, I did not flinch every time my father passed by, his words still ringing in my ears.

Playing games I did not want to play, or games Robbie was not capable of playing, and being imprisoned in such a climate, it is no wonder I was full of introspection. My favourite hobby was pressing my nose up against steamed-up windows,