THE BLUE CABIN

Living by the tides on Islandmore

STILL ON THE SOUND

A seasonal look at island life

Island life & Strangford Lough

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MICHAEL FAULKNER

Books on island life and Strangford Lough

“...Kevin was still sorting boxes and equipment on deck, and the wheelhouse door was still open, but I had no intention of waiting around for him and I continued to inch the dinghy closer to his stern. Relative to one another, Harvest Home and the dinghy were rising and falling a good three or four feet with every wave, and Kevin would have to choose his moment carefully. In what seemed to me like extreme slow motion, as I held the dinghy as close as possible without risking a collision, Kevin slammed the wheelhouse door on his hand, mouthed a few words which were probably not ‘Thanks for coming’, and vaulted neatly over the gunwale and onto the dinghy’s tiny triangular foredeck, where he sat facing me with an expression of pure agony, his left hand clasped under his right armpit and the blood draining slowly from his face.

At this point, as if they weren’t bad enough already, things nearly took a turn for the worse. Having picked up my cargo, I had two choices. Either I could go back the way I had come, that’s to say round the outside of the pontoons; or I could follow the herring gull’s example and take a shortcut under the swinging bridge, which at that state of the tide offered a clearance of perhaps four or five feet. With an extra twelve stones of ballast to keep the bow down, I decided on the latter – it would be easier, quicker and drier than going the long way round. So I allowed the bow to come round with the wind, and headed for the bridge.

I should have thought of this, but of course Kevin had his back to the bridge, was not able read my mind and had more important things on his. Despite his weight, it was as if we were at two ends of a seesaw: as the stern slipped into the troughs, so the bow rose above the peaks, and Kevin with it. He would have to lie flat in order to be sure that ‘head’ wasn’t added to ‘hand’ when the duty doctor later made a list of his injuries at the A&E Department in Downpatrick. This was obvious to me, and of course to Wesley and the others standing on the bridge; but when I made up and down gestures with my arm to try to get him to duck , Kevin too made up and down gestures with his injured hand, as if to say, ‘You’re too bloody right it’s sore!’ and there came a point where I couldn’t have gone astern, into the wind, even if I’d wanted to, and we were committed to the bridge for better or worse. My gesticulations became increasingly desperate and I put my free hand on top of my head and ducked down low, then pointed behind Kevin at the bridge; and whether by divine intervention or merciful instinct, he glanced over his shoulder at the last possible moment, shot me a wild-eyed look and prostrated himself on the floor of the boat.

As we passed safely underneath, Wesley was grinning widely (with relief, I would assume) and Kevin was laughing (hysterically, I imagine); and when we got into quiet water on the other side, I tied the bow rope to a cleat on the nearest pontoon, and thought of the words of Lord Atkin in his judgement in the House of Lords in Donoghue v. Stevenson (1932), which were to form the basis of the legal definition of negligence as it relates to tort (delict in Scots Law). It has always been my favourite judgement, and incidentally reconciles perfectly, in a single paragraph, the layman’s view that legal prose is impenetrable, with the lawyer’s that it is merely precise:

‘You must take reasonable care to avoid such acts or omissions as you can reasonably foresee would be likely to cause injury to your neighbour. Who then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be - persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected, when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.’

Perfect. On that very elegant definition, if Kevin’s head had indeed made contact with the bridge, I would surely have been responsible. Good intentions have nothing to do with it: a stupid thing to do is a stupid thing to do. Clearly, it wasn’t appropriate to raise Donoghue v. Stevenson at the time, but I felt sufficiently guilty to call Kevin later and ask about his hand. He said it was fine, that nothing was broken and that when the pain in his thumb had become too much he had used a penknife to whittle a hole through his thumbnail to relieve the swelling.

Obviously, A& E is for sissies.”