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lasting nature. The sudden arousal of his young anger had provided the motivation for the stepping of the mast and hoisting of the sails. It had also usurped the leadership of Able Seaman Bird who, without obvious rancour, relapsed into a grumbling contemplation of their fate. He constantly drew their attention to the fact that theirpay ceased the day the ship had sunk, excepting Mackinnon, of course, whose father’s premium paid for his training, and must be gradually reimbursed to the son in lieu of proper pay. Bird made no particular play of this difference, but beat ceaselessly upon the drum of the injustice he exposed. It was almost, the young Mackinnon thought, as though Bird regretted his survival, for it put him in the position of subjecting himself to this awful inequity and he would rather have died than suffer this final humiliation at the hands of capitalism.
    At the time, this revelation of the perversity of human nature seemed incomprehensible; afterwards it seemed that the ordeal in the boat was marked not by days, nor the issue of victuals by the Chief Steward, but by the thump-thump of Bird’s relentless, irrefutable polemic.
    With the wind on their starboard quarter they sailed south-east amid the rain and mist of autumn low pressure. The coast, when they sighted it, loomed suddenly, terrifyingly close. Unfamiliar, its appearance was hostile, grey cliffs set about with the white pounding of breaking seas. They stood inshore and drew closer, seeing a rolling countryside and re-entrant bays, the white oblong of a farmhouse, the huddle of a village and the sharp yellow strand at the head of an inviting bay.
    They drove recklessly inshore as the sun set unseen behind the grey veil of the persisting overcast. The lifeboat’s keel struck the sand with a grating, the boat broached and lurched amid a welter of breaking seas that rolled up to the high-water mark and spent their energy in a sibilant roar.
    Staggering over the gunwale while the waves thumped on the bottom of the heeling boat and broke over it in deluges of bitterly cold spray, they found their legs incapable of bearing their weight and fell full-length in the shallows. After a while Mackinnon floundered ingloriously up the beach and lay gasping beyond the reach of the waves. Eventually he heaved himself shakily to his feet and found apath. Calling his intention of getting help he followed it inland.
    He seemed to walk miles before, in the last of the twilight, he stumbled into a muddy farmyard and found a solitary figure scattering kitchen scraps to a bevy of hens. The girl looked up and gave a little shriek. She retreated, calling her alarm at Mackinnon’s approach. A door flew open and a lozenge of orange lamplight spilled out across the yard. It was instantly disfigured by the shadow of a large man with a shotgun.
    â€˜And who the divil are you?’ the man challenged, the click of the gun lock sounding clear in the evening air.
    â€˜Seamen,’ Mackinnon gasped, ‘British seamen . . . we’ve been torpedoed.’
    He remembered clearly standing there while the big Irishman came up to him and, finger on the trigger of the shotgun, cautiously scrutinised him. The man walked round him before asking, ‘How many of you?’
    Mackinnon told him and led him back to the beach while the man sent his daughter to inform the police.
    â€˜Where are we?’ Mackinnon asked as he stumbled down on to the sand where his shipmates had huddled and the lifeboat looked like a beached whale in the darkness.
    â€˜County Antrim,’ the man said gruffly and they returned to the house until the police arrived. The girl came back with the police, peering at the survivors with shy curiosity, a girl of his own age with large dark eyes and hair that looked brown until the lamplight caught it and it flared into a rich, dark gold.
    Mackinnon heard the man called her ‘Shelagh’. He did not then know that she was