R.M. Murray - Bleak: The Mundane Comedy

Island exports: The Loch Seaforth with herring barrels, 1960s. From the T B Macaulay Collection, by kind permission of Mrs Kirsty Maciver.

After the war, my father worked as the Collector of Dues for the Stornoway Pier and Harbour Commission. He met my mother in the ticket office at the ferry terminal for MacBrayne shipping company. Soon after, in 1955, they got married. I was born in 1956. Two years later, my brother Iain arrived, then Donald in 1960 and Kenneth Malcolm in 1964. Its how things were done.

At the time, the mainland connection with Stornoway was the railhead at Mallaig with a stop-over at Kyle of Lochalsh. The mail steamer that plied that route from 1947 to 1972 was the Loch Seaforth. And in all that time it only ever missed one sailing as a result of bad weather: the 31st of January, 1953, when the 7,000- tonne cargo liner Clan MacQuarrie ran aground at Borve on the west coast of Lewis, resulting in the largest breeches buoy rescue in history.

Much was made of the barely imaginable ferocity of that storm. But it was the fact that even the Loch Seaforth had not sailed that night that emphatically put it into perspective.

As an adult, you are the sum total and resolution of all your mistakes. In time you might stand at the same vantage point your parents once did, recognise the place and experience a kind of retroactive empathy. As I have. Even so, I still find it baffling as to why they thought it a good idea to take four young children on a near twenty-four-hour round trip to Mallaig on the Loch Seaforth. They told us we were going on a cruise.

My youngest brother was still a baby, so I could only have been eight years old. The outward leg was overnight and, just before midnight, long past our bedtime, we got a lift into Stornoway and drew up outside the art deco ferry terminal on Number 1 Pier, boarding via the dimly lit, steep gangplank. The weather was not remarkable enough to recall.

With her graphic black, white and red livery, embellished with gold, the Loch Seaforth was the flagship of MacBrayne fleet. An impressive, imposing vessel, she embodied the stout values of pride, order and competence in the established tradition of British merchant shipping. Her handsome nautical trim an ensemble of wooden railings and decking, lifebelts and lifeboats, coiled ropes and fluttering flags.

On board, my parents talked and smoked with acquaintances in the haze of the saloon while we ran around and explored. There was an air of general conviviality and anticipation. A chatter and hum. Soon after casting off, we were taken down to our quarters towards the bow on the starboard side.

It was not spacious. Or comfortable. The mattresses were unyielding and covered in a bristly, stippled material while the ground tone was the thundering thrum and smell of the engines, counterpointed by the pervasive aftertaste of the galley. None of which mattered in the broader context of this huge adventure.

As we cleared the harbour and arced our way out to sea, the initially benign motion of the ship gradually matured into a slow, metronomic swing. The ominous development reaching its optimum when the porthole above our berths began to submerge under a green and white froth and then yaw up to the night sky as a recurrent black hole.