The Mando. Scilly Isles 3. Written by Richard Alan Gardham, transcribed by Angela Gardham.

This passage was written in the early 1960s when Richard was living in the Scilly Isles working as a seasonal worker in an hotel.

It was a beautiful summer day and they were working on the Mando which had sunk about ten years ago. When it went down, one of its lifeboats was found floating on the surface. Johnny got it and he deserved it. It seemed strange, that little blue boat, doing all that work to try to recover the bronze propeller of its mother ship. You could see the boat working just a little away from the cliffs. It looked very frail in its turbulent surroundings.

But Mr Johnny was no ordinary boatman, “You have to wait ten minutes at ten feet down then surface, an’ with the bloody swell the boat goes up and down, an’ you grab the ladder, it lifts you up with the swell right up into the air, and with those conditions the tanks on your back weigh a ton.” The wreck was just a mass of big steel plates. “You get two men on one sheet and it’s amazing how it can move under water like a piece of cardboard, yet if it was on dry land you would be hardly able to move it. You’d never believe it’s been down there only about ten years. Its smashed to bits. It’s going to take weeks before we can clear the propeller to blow it into liftable pieces.”

“They were doing a blasting job on it an’ the detonator had gone an’ they only had so much time to get away an’ the bloody engine stalled! All our hearts stopped an’ beads of sweat ran down our foreheads.” Johnny never has been known to move as fast but he wound that starter handle so fast that the action was just a blur. She started up slowly, just in time, then they noticed Mac was stood up holding the box of explosives above his head -cool as cucumber is Mac, thinks of everything even vibration.

They worked on her for months, snag after snag would come up, then winter was approaching. They had to pack it in for that year. The Custom’s man kept all they had raised. There was a decent sized piece on the quay. Johnny said, “Try to lift that Dick.” I tried but it was heavy and I couldn’t even move it an inch. They had bought the rights to the wreck so they could come back another year and finish the job.

They were living in an old barn through the season. We went for a visit. They had just come back from the wreck. Johnny’s hands were full of shining silver herrings. His hands looked as though they had never had a wash in their existence upon this planet. His sleeves were wide and cut out at the elbows, his clothes dirty and ragged. He was like a man from somewhere else. He cut open the fish an’ cleaned them with his fingers and then dropped them into the pan on the primus stove. They smelled great as they were frying. We all had one. That was the most beautiful fish I had ever eaten. Johnny said “They came up with the blast but the bloody gulls got most of them.”