There were three or four inches of snow on the ground this morning. But half a mile down the hill in Birkenhead most of it had gone apart from small piles of black slush at the side of the pavement. I was going to the market to pick up some fish from Wards.

Simon and Nigel were behind the counter offering tea made by Galen. He lurked in the background embarrassed to have his Dad there. I picked up a pound and a half of prime haddock for fishcakes on Monday. As we were talking an elderly man walked up and leaned against the counter next to me.

‘Good morning boys’ he said ‘Are you okay?’ His voice was clipped and far back, not from Birkenhead. The skin on his face was tight around the bones and he had bright lively eyes.

He was dressed in a curly black wig, a red pixie hat and what looked like an old Father Christmas outfit that had seen better days and was badly ripped so it hung round his legs like a skirt. He was wearing two bright green hoola hoops slung around his neck.

‘Now boys,’ he said ‘Now boys these hoola hoops are new. But they are not for me no they are not. These hoola hoops are for the good lady at home, Judith. Boys’ he leaned closer over the counter ‘Now boys I am not a transvestite. I have no objection to them of course and there are a few round here if you look closely enough. But I am not one of those. Let me explain.’

‘Did you see that thing on the telly were they looked at the prostrate. Thats all you need. It fits somewhere between the front of a man and the back part of a woman.’ He laughed and rubbed at his belly with a hand that was covered in a clear plastic glove. ‘I tell you boys they showed it all and if you want to change from being a man to a woman then let have a go at your prostrate, it will wiggle a bit, and after they were done there was no need for any surgery, pills or prosthetics. So that is why I’m not a transvestite.’

He started on a story involving a loose woman who could not be satisfied, a man who loses a watch and another man who loses a coach and two horses laughing all the way through until he got to the end. He then stood back from the counter and re-arranged the hoola hoops around his neck.

‘Boys I have to be off now I will see you again.’ He walked down the ailes.

‘Well he was the first of the day’ said Nigel. ‘Does Galen tell you about the people who come here?’

I asked about Ted, the man I had written about last summer who came for an oyster on a Saturday morning.

“He’s not been back’, said Nigel.

We normally make the journey down in late July or August when each side of the road, each hedgerow, is coloured and marked by a blaze of red or pink from fuchsia in its full summer bloom and the orange montbretia flowers pushing through to dominate through all the thick green leaves. The fuchsia has been chosen as the symbol for West Cork, but for the lack of an attractive shape montbretia would do just as well, the flowers spill out of every ditch and hedgerow, a surprise that there could be so much colour against all that green.

The road chases back to the land as the swallows cut up, over and through the hedges on either side and then up to and past Rossmore Point, its rambling farmhouse and ruined castle stuck in a plot of land away from the sea the road rises and then falls to cling back to the coast and the view is the full sweep of the bay opened up. Knocknamaddree squat over the Mizen on the left and on the right the mountains of the Sheep’s Head, Rosskerrig, Seefin and in the distance a misty glimpse of Ballyroon Mountain the last stop before the Atlantic and between the two peaks of the bay the straight line that separates sky from water dominating the distance.

If it is late afternoon in summer the sun will be falling behind Rosskerrig and the water is silver fast as the flash of a belly of mackerel. At each beach there is a rush of smooth stones to the water, cars parked and people are swimming or fishing looking for the boiling of water as sprats are chased to the shallows.

Then the bay opens up and fills with the water sliding down from the Atlantic as if it the world is not going to stop tipping and the waves will soon be lapping over the seawall.  On the left the mountains of the Mizen hovering over the back of Doneen Coos mostly shrouded in the mist of distance and the yawning gap of the mouth of the bay.

Now the sea is touching the sky not touching dissolving into a smooth milky blue the eye forever drawn and never quite seeing. The sea still and the bare glimmer of wind rippling the surface, looking out again, perfectly mirrored so water and air seem one. The horizon then disappears and there is space you could move through if only you could just carry on. The sea sits very still and the sky is perfect summer blue dwarfing the clouds through its enormity.

Now the tide is going out. Slipping its suck and leak from the shore. Soon the bay will feel emptied, drawn out and plug gone.

From the Cottage it is not possible to see the head of the bay but boating out of Kitchen Cove to the point off Owen Island it again opens up and the two penisulars – the Sheep’s Head and the Mizen race off to that milky point.

‘Feck. Did you know once, once there was a man who set himself the task of counting the stripes on a mackerel’s back.’

We both drank at our pints.

‘Jimmy Carroll he told me the story and showed me the paper this man wrote. His grandfather, James Carroll, was a fish merchant in Kinsale on Fisher Street and he had a shop on The Pier, and the man wrote to him letters asking questions about the fish that he sold. The man, Walter Garstang, if there is such a name was a professor and a fellow of some sort, a college, in Oxford.

‘Back then the men would catch mackerel by dropping rocks in the water. They’d take two boats out and one of those boats would have a net in and the other would be filled with pieces of stone and there would be six men in each boat . There’d have so much in the boat with the stones if they’d caught a bad wave they’d be over and down and the boat would only move slowly through the water. But they’d get it out there and they would sit there on the water and wait to see if the surface was moving and that would tell them if there were fish underneath.’

‘Patrick Daly he said that it was the colour of water that told you if there were fish there. He said that if the water was yellow and smelt of shit there would be plenty to catch. Michael Arundel said that if there was a smell in the air then that was because Patrick Daly was wearing the same old clothes he’d been wearing all month and that if he were to fall in the water and wash some of the shit off him there would be nothing to smell at all.’

‘The first boat once they saw some movement in the water they would throw out the net and let it sink near where they thought the fish should be. But if you let a net just hang there in the water it will catch feck all so once it was down and secure to the first boat then the men in the second boat would start throwing in their stones. You’d think that the fish would just swim away. Well maybe some of them did but there would be enough that would panic and they’d get caught in the net. Some of the men would shout at the water as well and on a quiet day you could hear them out there they would make such a noise.’

‘Once all the stones were gone the boats would pull up next to each other and then men would clamber out some so there was ten of them in the first boat and they would start to haul it in.’

‘A net like that is heavy enough when it is wet but you fill it with fish and you would need a good ten strong men to pull it in and as the fish came out they would let them fall about their feet in the bottom of the boat. They would have to climb from boat to boat as the fish came in so there were mackerel and men equal in each boat. If they had a good day the fish would be so deep they would be up to their waists here and they would have to sit on their benches as if they were in a bath of mackerel to row the boats back in.’

‘Back here their feet on the ground their boots and trousers would shine in the light the colour of the fish they were so covered in their white scales and red blood and they would have to wade back in the sea to wash it off. If they left their trousers all covered like that when they dried they’d be as hard as a piece of wood.’

‘The man, the professor he had heard that you could tell a male fish from a female by the number of their stripes. Feck I have never heard something so stupid. If you have the fish there in your hand they all look the same and if they are male and female is there any difference to the taste. How the feck do you tell if the fish you have there in your hand is a man or woman.’

He paused and as he allowed that thought to settle we both started to smile and the man made a noise his throat.

‘Feck. Can you imagine it we go out there to start sexing the feckin fish. Start counting their black lines and they’ll have us throwing them back if we get it wrong, if we miscount on the stripes on a mackerel.’

‘But this man, the professor, Garstang, he had these fish sent from all over not just from Kinsale. The fish there from Kinsale, almost 400 there were and they were fresh and they were wrapped up in newsparer, old copies of The Southern Star, but there were others that came from America and they were kept on blokes of ice and France as well. And they all went to him by boat. Now a mackerel’s no good after it has been out of the water a few hours so can you imagine them after there few days in a boat.  Think on the smell. Feck, all those fish together. He said in his paper he had almost 2,000 of them in all. Can you see it now 2,000 mackerel all out of the water and starting to smell and their insides going black. Feck you put him on one of those boats were they threw out the stones and the feckin’ fish would be jumping, jumping out of the water to be in the boat with him.’

‘Well he counted the mackerel’s stripes, he counted them and he measured the feckin things and do know what he found. He found that they all have the same feckin’ stripes  be they a man or a feckin’ woman. He would have been sick of mackerel after that. Do you think he ever ate one again.’

‘What was that question? How to kill a mackerel? I tell you, I tell you, you hit it on the back of the head with a feckin’ great stick. Hit it clean and that’ll do it. There’ll be blood and shit and their white scales on your hands and their tails will still thump at the boat but it’ll be dead and you can throw your line and your hooks back in to catch another.’

Outside it was coming to the end of the summer. It was getting dark and with the clear sky a chill was starting to form in the air. I could see Owen Island across the bay and there were two Great Black Backed Gulls sat on the lamps on the pier. The water was still in the early evening and under its surface the mackerel churned and turned. What sound did they make there in the water? Would they have heard the shouts of the men dropping in their stones?

I said goodnight to the man and he shook my hand. ‘You be good now’ he said.

It was a two minute walk back to The Cottage. Outside I could hear the noisy squabbling of the gulls crossing back and forth across the water. Before going back into The Cottage I turned right and walked up the pier. We’d be gone soon but the boats and and the gulls would remain and the mackerel would be back next summer and some of them would be caught up short by the hook at the end of my line. There were sprats in the water flitting just under the surface small flashes of light. Some of them appeared translucent and others carried hints of the pinks, blues and green that move over the belly of a mackerel just after it has been caught.

I turned and walked quietly back to The Cottage.

‘Now I will tell you something you don’t know.”

“Before she sold off The Cottage, Rachel Leigh-White she owned The Butter House as well and they were all one property and the orchard across the road that was more part of The Butter House and not The Cottage. The man Gould he managed to persuade her to sell him the the orachard as well and that gave him the garage and a woodshed and somewhere to park your cars.’

‘It was Rachel Leigh-White who planted the apple trees there. She had one of the gardeners come over from the big house in Bantry. They were started off there and he brought them over and the five trees were laid out in a neat row.’

‘But it was the man Gould and his wife who loved those trees. I don’t know maybe they didn’t have apples when he worked at his bank in India but he would make sure they were back here every year in September so they could have the best of them. Some of the apples they are good enough to eat as they are and others yoo can cook with them.’

‘Gould’s wife, she was a great baker and if you were working on the pier and she was in the kitchen the smell would be there coming out of that corner window. They would send their children up the road to where the church and the school is with bowls from the kitchen to pick blackberries. The children would come back with their faces and hands all black with the juice but they would have enough left over in the bowl for her to cook with.’

‘Mary can you rember her name. He was called Terry but I can’t remember her name.’

‘Now this is what I was going to tell you. You remember Curly O’Brian. Of course you do. He died a few years back but he used to work around the garden and mow the lawn. You gave him a lift home sometimes in the evening when it got too far for him to walk back into the hills from here.’

‘Before Gould sold the place he would say that one of the things he would miss most would be the eating the apples come autum. So for a few yeasrs after you bought it Curly O’Brien would be asked to pick some of those apples and wrap then in paper and send them to him back in England. Curly would get a letter and some notes to pay for the postage and his time. But then one year there was no letter and that was the end of the arrangement.’

Back in The Cottage I went to the shelves by the cupboard under the stairs and took down The Cottage Log that Terry Gould had left behind after we bought it. In it he had made a note of useful telephone numbers, guidance on the intricacies of the plumbing and the pump. On one of the pages he had made a note of the apple trees in the orchard.

 1st nearest road Bramly late Oct on. Hard cooker. Very good flavour- good keeper.                                                                                                                                                                                 

2^nd furthest from road Grenadier August. Soft golden yellow cooker. Almond flavour.

3^rd furthest from road Worcester Pearmain (?) heavey cropper September. Good eater especially eaten straight from the tree.

4^th furthest:  Elstan, younger tree. September/Oct very crisp eater.

5^th furthest: Cox’s Grange Pippin October – fine eater