A Twelvemonth and a Day
Christopher Rush
A Twelvemonth and a Day
Introduced by Alan Bold
The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
‘O who sits weeping on my grave
And will not let me sleep?’
Contents
Preface
Introduction
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
And a Day
Preface
In writing A Twelvemonth and a Day I have drawn freely on autobiography, family tradition and social documentary in order to produce an evocation of a place and an era (the East Neuk of Fife, particularly the St Monans of the 1920s and 1930s, the last great days of the Scottish herring fishing and the steam drifters), a lament for their passing, and, more positively, a celebration of their vanished values. Perhaps not entirely vanished—for the book is also about growing up; and all of us have been children, and there must be very few of us who have not felt the mystery and the magic of ships and the sea. Or who have not partaken of the formative influences of family and community, church and school, storytelling and games, sex and death.
My grateful thanks are due to my patient wife and children; to Peter Smith and Eugene D’Espremenil of Cellardyke, who gave me more than I can repay; to all the folk and family of St Monans who made me what I am; and to Harry Quinn, who first suggested to me that I should expand the Introduction to my first book, Peace Comes Dropping Slow, into a book in itself. That brief article was a splinter from the old mosaic: what follows is my attempt to rebuild the entire stained-glass window. Look into it, reader, and grant me absolution.
Christopher Rush
Edinburgh
January 1985
Introduction
Ostensibly the autobiography of a simple soul —an artless figure in a seascape—A Twelvemonth and a Day is actually nothing of the kind. It is an accomplished artistic performance and has as much to do with literary tradition as with literal truth. Looking back in adoration at the first twelve years of his life, our author always chooses his words carefully and they are always revealing: ‘And I saw my grandfather, a golden youth upon a golden shore, hallooing to the heavens as a flock of seabirds winged their way across the clouds.’ The author’s cash-conscious present—‘I … pay more in taxes each month than my grandfather ever earned in his whole life’—is a poor exchange for the golden age of a childhood well spent by the sea in a Fife fishing village.
The Scottish lament for a lost way of life is at least as old as the poem on the state of the nation after Alexander III died falling from a cliff in Fife in 1286. According to this poem, the golden age had gone and Scotland was in a sorrowful state:
The gold was changit all in leid,
The frute failyeit on everilk tree.
Christ succour Scotland and remeid
That stad is in perplexitie
In Scotland the lament became a way of life, and an enduring literary tradition, too. Dunbar lamented, some time before his death in the sixteenth century, that no state on earth stood securely; and MacDiarmid lamented, in 1930, ‘The state that Scotland’s in the day’. On the written evidence, Scotland can be judged as a land of lost souls longing for the past and digging into the good old days for gold.
In the case of Christopher Rush, the tradition of comparing a leaden present with the golden past can be traced directly to George Mackay Brown who was greatly influenced, in his turn, by traditionalist Edwin Muir. For Muir, his Orkney boyhood was a paradisal fable subsequently ruined by the infernal reality of life in Glasgow. For Brown, Orkney was ever Edenic in the good days of the past when, supposedly, folk were content with their folklore as they profitably spent their time spinning yarns.
Writes Brown in An Orkney Tapestry (1973):
There is a new religion, Progress, in which we all devoutly believe … The old stories have vanished with the horses and the tinkers; instead of the yarn at the pier-head or the pub, you are increasingly troubled with bores [regurgitating] some discussion they have heard on TV the night before …
Writes Rush in A Twelvemonth and a Day (1985):
The old fishing ways and the men who followed them are pale shadows of the past.
It has all been broken up—their community, their art of the story, their feeling for the sea. The faces in the firelight have faded into the garish light of the TV screen and of what is sometimes called progress.
By a creative coincidence, when A Twelvemonth and a Day was filmed as Venus Peter (1988) the movie was made in Brown’s native Stromness rather than Rush’s native St Monans. To some extent Rush recreated St Monans in the image, and imagery, of Brown’s Stromness (the setting for the best of Brown’s poems and stories) yet he approached his stylistic source with authentic emotion, and it shows.
A present-day tourist will find St Monans an unusually attractive fishing village in the East Neuk of Fife. Rush has no time for modern St Monans for ‘fishermen no longer gather at the pierhead as they used to do’. He prefers to locate St Monans in a glorious past of yarn-spinning fishermen and their folklore and their visionary voyages. With his faith in fishermen, he believes he was born in a miraculous place.
It could not have been anywhere else. It had to be St Monans. That was where I was landed in time. St Monans was my salt-splashed cradle with its fringe of gold. And even now it is that same cradle that rocks me nightly towards my grave.
A Twelvemonth and a Day is a lament, in lyrical prose, for the loss of the way of life Rush experienced as a boy in St Monans where he was born in 1944. Way back then, Rush felt he lived in a village of great communal vitality, as colourful local characters went to sea and came back to swap stories of the golden age of the herring industry (herring are ‘the silver darlings’ in the novel of that name by Neil Gunn, another influence on Brown and, through Brown, on Rush). Life then seemed to ebb and flow with the water. Folk seemed to respond to the rhythms of the seasons. The community seemed to care.
Alas, according to Rush, these times have gone and the East Neuk is in a sorrowful state. The folk have been destroyed and their days are a cherished memory: ‘They are all gone then—the days and the people, and their language and their ways, and the stories they told me … All finished now.’ The reader is entitled to ask if it was really so Edenic way back then and Rush is entitled to answer, as he does by the affirmative tone of his tale, that it seemed so to him and that is what matters. Art is an illusion and Rush is an artist whose observations are coloured above all by aesthetic responses and impressions.
In the fiction of the folklore he loves, Rush was a boy who knew more about hooks than books, who wished only for a life like his seafaring grandfather whose steam drifter ‘breasted the seasons in search of the herring’. In fact Rush was a lad o’ pairts who left St Monans to attend Aberdeen University and earn his living as a teacher in Edinburgh. In conversation he claims he dislikes the city and dreams of finding his way back to Fife but that, I suspect, is another illusion. The depressing spiritual and economic poverty of Fife now could never compete with the richly romantic vision of a book that imaginatively explores a ‘universe of golden grains’. Though he says he had a ‘bookless upbringing’ (another illusion?) his view of St Monans is a literary version of the real thing.
If Brown is the most obvious influence on Rush’s book there are also touches of Dylan Thomas—one of Brown’s favourite writers. In the process of colouring Scottish tradition with Welsh romanticism, Rush clearly
draws on Thomas when, for example, he describes Balcaskie Wood as a ‘gothic cathedral’ of trees just as Thomas looked up at ‘domes of leaves’ in ‘In country sleep’. And Rush’s celebration of the life of a long-dead community has thematic links with Thomas’s Under Milk Wood in which the dead and dozing inhabitants of a fishing village are shocked into life when soaked by waves of lyrical prose. Like Thomas, Rush begins impressively at the beginning and his first paragraph sweeps the reader into a powerful dream of another Eden.
Dreaming of the golden days, Rush rocks in and out of sleep and the villagers begin to turn contentedly in their graves. Knowing that all the adults he grew up with are dead, Rush resurrects them as they were in those golden days—Auntie Jenny, Leebie Marr, Lisa Leslie (midwife and dresser of the dead), Honey Bunch (‘who would never wash’), Bella Bonny Socks, Kate the Kist and The Blind Man who—like Thomas’s hunchback in the park—was tormented by children who knew no better so were merely guilty of innocence and ignorance.
As accepted by a child, the world is a gift presented to him (or her) alone and Rush succeeds admirably at conveying his solipsistic perception of the world of St Monans. He sees everything subjectively, delighting in such details as the sight of his grandmother at the hearth, shining the doors of the grate with Zebrite and polishing its knobs and rails with Brasso. Away from the hearth, the child enjoys the exercise of his own inexhaustible imagination. So when Rush is told, by Old George, of what whales can do he believes he is hearing a gospel truth and broods on the implications: ‘Imagine going through those curtain-like teeth, and them swishing shut behind you—into the awful theatre of your own death with all the lights out and your last act played out in darkness.’ Evidently, Rush was a child who enjoyed dwelling on death.
His happiest hunting ground was the graveyard of the Old Kirk and he haunted the gravestones ‘like a revenant’. He knew by heart all the inscriptions and found a pathway to the past of St Monans by following the signs on these gravestones. As the theme of his book is the death of a community it is appropriate that an obsession with death should be a main motif. He gravely indulges a death wish:
I wish I’d died in my mother’s belly and never sucked at her breasts. I’d rather be lying right now, a still born bairn in the old kirkyard, with kings and counsellors of the earth, dead in their tombs and their crumbled castles, dumb as the gold and silver they piled up for nothing, for other folk to spend.
He knows he is not immortal, and yet his statement of this fact will live as long as there are connoisseurs of fine writing and Scottish culture:
Yes, I knew that the time would come when I would be nothing more than white bones frozen beneath an impenetrable armour of ice that would be the cold coffin of the world; when even the folk who had forgotten those other folk who never knew me, would themselves be nothing more than a breath inhaled on a lonely shore. Not even that. And my gravestone would be fiery with rime—then rime itself.
No wonder he grew to love supernatural ballads and indeed he took the title of his book from ‘The Unquiet Grave’, a revenant ballad about excessive mourning for the dead.
It is the knowledge of death in particular that disturbs, albeit excitingly, the Edenic idyll of childhood. And it is knowledge in general, as imposed in school, that destroys the age of innocence in Rush’s book. Every Eden has to have a Satanic presence and in A Twelvemonth and a Day this is supplied by the schoolteachers with their stings in the tails of the tawse. Schoolteachers like Miss Sangster: ‘She had a nasty trick of flicking [the tawse] in such a way that it curled up around the wrist and arm, producing long snaky weals.’ Rush’s observations are almost always allusive, so Miss Sangster is recalled in the imagery of the Bible (the only book, says Rush, he knew as a boy though that’s a likely story) or Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘What are the roots that clutch out of the stony rubbish that she gave me, what fragments to shore against my ruins, torn down by time?’ A rhetorical question.
Rush’s rhetoric is informed by classic modernists like Eliot and classic romantics like Thomas but principally by a classic Scottish tradition, and rightly so since his is a distinctively Scottish experience and his writing, having absorbed its influences, is a brilliant reflection of, and also a meditation on that experience. This beautifully written book is full of life as interpreted by a self-consciously literary man with a great hunger for those elusive golden days and a fine taste for tradition. By inventively immersing himself in the past, Rush has triumphantly renewed a great Scottish tradition.
Alan Bold
CHAPTER ONE
January
To start with I was nothing more than a wafer-thin cry, a winter wailing that went up through the thick green panes of our skylight windows at number sixteen East Shore Street, where it mingled with the smoke from all the other village chimneys. My first noises drifted out over the clusters of red pan-tiled roofs, and was lost among seagulls and steeples and the huge fluffed-up clouds which the fishermen called Babylonians.
It was the time of the winter herring.
The sea was busy with boats, their white nets winnowing the waters of the Firth of Forth, searching for the shoals that silvered the linings of our pockets, keeping my family alive. Now here I was, with my gannet’s mouth ragged and raw, tearing another hole in those pockets.
But at first I knew nothing of all this. I was a white wordless little world, dumb as a snowflake, many of which were falling around me now; unable to speak a single syllable to the earth on which I had been so suddenly dropped, a silent crystal. Too easily forgotten about, I decided, among the harsh high hunger-claims sent out by the shuttling seabirds as they knitted the sky a white shawl for winter. But though I could not talk I could screech and skirl, and so I opened up again that bellowing red wound in my face, which the milk of human kindness closed at once. Satisfied, I returned to my sleeping, the strangest I had slept for months, and repeated this process of bawling and bullying my way to milky slumbers several scores of times before it occurred to me to bestow the least part of my attention upon the world that was now mine and mine alone.
I think water was the first thing I was ever conscious of—the sound of the living sea. This was to be my first and final language, my alpha and omega, my beginning and my end. Before my mother was the sea, my alma mater who taught me the irrelevance of talk, then as now—and yet spoke; and spoke; and spoke, to my unspeaking. Mother stood on the edge of the world and threw me my umbilical, my lifeline. She drew me painfully out of the twisting tangles of the water, with white shiftings of seabirds and snowflakes like cells in the sky. So I crawled along my lineage, out of the deep drowned memories of men, made fast to their bones. And I arrived on the wave-swept rocky shores of January: a mortal mooring, the frail end of a long line, the sunken sea-dreams of my folk locked hard in my head.
The harbour crooked its arm around me.
St Monans.
Mare vivimus, we live by the sea.
It could not have been anywhere else. It had to be St Monans. That was where I was landed in time. St Monans was my salt-splashed cradle with its fringe of gold. And even now it is that same cradle that rocks me nightly towards my grave.
I lay back then in the slow dawns and darknesses of my pillow, waiting for understanding to break, and I listened to the language of the sea as it roared past our windows like an angry express train my eye could never catch. The sun slipped into Aquarius, the water-bearer. The tides turned my ears to coral shells; spiralling through the whorls of my brain as it grew and knew, they made my sleeping rich and my waking strange. That was life—a breaker-beaten bank and shoal, beset by a running sea that sang the song of eternity.
At my baptism there was ice in the font. Alec Fergusson, the old beadle, had placed the water there the night before, so that when the Reverend Kinnear went to perform the sacrament he was prevented by a frozen silver shield which his fingers could not penetrate. But his arm was strong to smite, as all the Sunday schoolers knew, and his fist great as his fait
h. He brought his huge clenched knuckles down into the stone font with force enough, my mother said, to kill a whale. The shield splintered but yielded no water. There was none to be had in the church either at that time, and Mr Kinnear stood breaking the third commandment between his teeth and muttering his determination to break others. So the old beadle ran down the outer steps of the kirk, to where a bursting sea was spraying the tombstones of my ancestors. He brought back a glimmer of cold brine in a brass collection plate. That was how it happened that the waters of the firth, which had been wetting the bones of my forefathers for uncountable tides, were used that morning to baptize me—in the name of the Eternal Father (strong to save) and of his Son and of the Holy Ghost.
One day without warning the sea was breaking on my forehead like white thunder.
I was set down from the safety of my mother’s breast onto a shore that was full of sound and fury. The firth, which had first touched me out of a sedate circle of holy brass, was flinging itself at me now with wild wet flicking fingers that blinded and stung. Bright screams were tearing the sky apart. I felt the hard heaviness of the bouldery beach, heard the soggy scrape of shingle as the sea gargled. Too indignant to protest for the moment, I reached down and took up a handful of this alien dimension. I sat up again, opening up my pink starfish hand for inspection. A sudden universe of golden grains swirled before my amazed eyes and disappeared. Once more I grabbed at the world and let go—and watched several thousands of worlds tumbling through incredible inches of space from the hand of me, the sower. To my astonishment I realized that I was a god. I cast another cosmos to the wind and blinked grittily. My eyes told my fingers with blinding revelation that godhead would have its aches and agues too. I lifted up my head to the hills of my mother’s breast, from whence came my milk, and in bitter rage that I had been cast away upon a stage of fools, I wept until I was lifted.