Happenstance and over-hearing
In the Talent is Timeless online community, we have a monthly songwriting challenge. Last’s month’s winner — the wonderful Trudi Brunskill (here’s a link to her winning song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDNRUgyMeeA) — set this month’s challenge: to write a song on the theme of ‘missing the boat’.
So far in these posts, I’ve told you the stories of the songs before you (might) click on the link and listen. This time, I suggest we try it the other way around… So click on this link and listen first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwYGigbbdHw
To be honest, I hadn’t been intending to pick up on this Trudi’s suggested theme, partly because life has been so busy lately, and partly because the theme didn’t initially grab me. But, happenstance forced to slow down on Monday, and carried me to a boat-filled place; and, there, a snippet of over-heard conversation sparked something in my imagination, from which a song emerged. Let me explain…
My 89-year old dad had set off the week before on his first camper-van adventure for a long time; and his first such adventure alone in a very long time. By Friday he was on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. To cut a long story short, the trip went well, but after a mishap that involved a minor head injury and a precautionary night in the Uist and Barra Hospital, my work-plans for Monday were scuppered (note the nautical metaphor!) and I hopped on a train to Oban to meet him off the ferry and drive him (and his beloved van) home to convalesce.
I’d never taken that train before. Since I get a little travel sick if I try to read on trains, I passed the 3 hours very happily watching the scenery unfold and change, and listening to music. When I arrived in Oban, I had an hour or so to kill before his boat was due in, so I wandered around the town for a bit, ate some fresh scallops on the pier and settled down to watch the boats come and go.
My dad was coming on a boat called the Lord of the Isles from Lochboisdale (on South Uist), via Castlebay (on Barra, about which I’ve written here before: https://www.fergusmcneill.com/blog/songs-and-memories). That’s a 7-hour crossing. (For all the ferry/shipping enthusiasts out there, I know that the Lord of the Isles isn’t usually on this route, so there is a bit of poetic license in the lyrics below, but it is my dad’s favourite boat, it is the most reliable in the fleet he tells me, and he was very excited that it was being piloted by a McNeil namesake [even if he has always been very fussy about the two Ls in our surname!]).
I overheard a tiny fragment of conversation between a couple of men on the pier, clearly men who work on the ferries; one was saying to the other they should have a dram together when the retire. Why wait, you might say (!), but it set me thinking about what it must be like to end a career spent sailing between the mainland and islands. After decades living with the routines, rhythms and rituals of these crossings, can you ever adjust to a life on land? How long does it take to find your ‘land-legs’? How strange does it feel to have solid ground under your feet after years of the swell and sway of the seas?
So, it seemed that happenstance and over-hearing had dropped a ‘missing the boat’ song in my lap, as it were; and, as often seems to be the case when song ideas sort of fall upon you, the music also seemed to suggest itself.
If you haven’t already, why not raise a dram to those ferry men and women, and think of them as you listen to this. It’s only my imagining of what it might be like to leave the boats behind, and it may be a long way from the realities of their working (and post-working) lives, but I intend it as a tribute, and a thank-you for bringing my dad back to me not just safe and well, but delighted with his adventures and misadventures on land and sea.
Lyrics
The rain falls straight, not like the ocean spray
The wind still bites, but saltless blows away
The sun still shines, but only from the sky
It casts no rainbows here through sea-mist to my eyes
The gulls don’t chase; no selkies come my way
I’m run aground, from sea to shore displaced
They made me leave my love, they made her sail away
Our time was done, they said, so lost on land I wait
It feels so strange to stand on solid ground without the swell and sway
Like a babe torn from the cradle, I just cannot rest this way
I miss the ocean’s ebb and flow, how she carried me away
I’m so weary of this harbour, I miss my love each day.
I worked the line, Oban to Castlebay
‘Lord of the Isles’; she never missed a day
Star of the fleet, pride of the Hebrides
I need that boat the way she needs the sea
It feels so strange to stand on solid ground…
The tears falls straight, not like the ocean spray
The wind still bites but salt gets blown away.
(c) Fergus McNeill 2021, all rights reserved.