Hellfire and Herring Read online

  The coffin was then kept in storage for Mad Maria, whose suicidal urges came on her every winter. On freezing cold days she would walk gingerly down the slipway, wade into the middle of the quarter-tide until she was up to her knees, and start to wail like a stuck siren. Then she’d slither back to shore, legs and feet caked in mud, shaking her head and complaining that the water was much too cold today for drowning herself and she’d have to wait for warmer weather. But when summer tides cooled the hot green stones of the slipway, poor Maria never felt the winter in her blood which turned her old feet to the water’s edge at the turn of every year. One year Maria caught a chill and Kate’s old coffin finally saw service.

  Another Kate was Candy Kate, who pushed a barrow round the streets, from which she sold crystallized candy. She also carried on her back an open pack of it, from which boys would be detailed to pilfer. When she swung round to box their ears she’d be sure to spill some of her wares and we’d run to harvest them, while she went among us delivering kicks and curses. Sometimes the sugar candy was eaten between blooded lips and sweetened a singing skull.

  Or we shadowed Jean Jeff. She was French and stone deaf and her real name was Genevieve, which was impossible for us to pronounce. So we settled for Jean Jeff, trooping right behind her and bellowing at the tops of our voices, ‘Jean Jeff’s stone deaf!’ while she carried on walking, oblivious to the trail of howlers in her wake, muttering quietly to herself, sometimes arguing fiercely with whatever phantoms peopled her shuttered mind. Sometimes we laughed at these women, and teased them if we were bored, but mostly we simply accepted them, weird old widows who walked among us like a caste of priestesses, elevated or at least set aside from normality by some special law.

  Then there were the old men, men who had been fishermen, many of them. But now with nothing left to keep them active on the tide, they pottered about its edge, and about the edges of their own existence, killing time and frightening small boys.

  There was the awful McCreevie who drowned unwanted kittens. He just dropped them in a pail of water, sat on it and laughed. Once I watched, horrified, as the pink blind mouths mewed to the blue sky. There was no mercy in McCreevie’s square, grinning head. He sat down on the pail again, tittering softly to himself. Then he sloshed them out on to the grass where they lay among the daisies like little grey gloves that had lain in the rain for a day. Yet they’d only been in the water for a minute or two. How could such things be and not be in such a short space of time? Their wet inertness was terrifying. Surely if they were just laid out in the sun for a while they would live again? But they stayed like that on the grass, sodden little fingerlengths of fur.

  McCreevie saw me watching from over the wall, picked up the litter in one spawny fist and opened up his mouth like a well, making as if to eat them. He shook with laughter at my horror, leering at me through that black imbecilic hole in his face.

  ‘You next,’ he grinned. ‘Only I’ll cut your head off first.’

  I ran screaming for my granny.

  Sometimes McCreevie could be seen making for the harbour, carrying a sack which moved and mewed. Children followed him at a distance.

  ‘What’s in the bag, McCreevie?’

  ‘Young ones – just like you. Coming to keep them company?’

  But nobody wanted to watch McCreevie as he went over the harbour wall and out to the breakwater blocks, to hurl his bag into the dark cold water, where Miller’s watch had long stopped. I didn’t have to follow him. I knew what it was like out there, in the deep sea.

  I preferred to join the bands of boys who tortured the Blind Man. He was so bad-tempered that he cursed and cuffed anyone who got in his way, lashing out with his rubber-stopped walking stick. We catcalled after him, ran rings round him, tugged at the stick, turned his cap the wrong way round on his head, often at our peril, as he detected distances and obstacles with lethal accuracy. Out for his constitutional he paced along the piers with perfect precision, bringing himself to a halt with not a step left between him and a sudden drop to a dark drowning. Summer visitors would shout out in alarm as they saw him tapping his way closer to the water, only to be cursed for their concern and told to mind their own bloody business. Sometimes we tried to confuse him in his counting by shouting out our classroom sums, but he refused to be put off, plodding on doggedly and swinging the stick as he went, occasionally striking wide if he sensed somebody within his range. Cracked heads and shins were occasionally sustained.

  Once, on an afternoon of freezing fog, I saw him approaching me on the pier. In trying to give him a wide berth I stumbled into a fishbox and he immediately interpreted this as a possible attack. He half bent, the blind head shot forward for better scent and hearing, swaying from side to side like a cobra preparing to strike, and he scythed the air with his stick. I had no option but to retreat, tripping over coils of rope and getting caught in bundles of nets, obstacles that never seemed to trouble the man with no eyes. Backing away from him, I came at last to the windy pierend, where the waves cracked like black whips. And still he came on.

  ‘I’ve got you now, you bad little brat! I can hear you and I can smell you and you’ve nowhere to go! I’ll break open your head and feed your brains to the fish!’

  My heart whacking, I slipped softly over the edge of the pier and crept down the rusted iron rungs that allowed access to boats. But there was no handy little boat moored there that I might have slid into and under a tarpaulin, snug and safe from the weather. I climbed all the way down until the black water was slapping the soles of my shoes. And waited. The Blind Man’s face appeared above me out of the fog and he struck the topmost rung with his stick.

  ‘I know you’re down there, fishbait! I’ve got all day!’

  And he stood there in a grim silence throughout two terrible hours, at the end of which my feet were quivering, my fingers were blue claws, and my jaw was jabbering at my knees. When he finally left his post I made my way home jack-knifed with cold and cramp, an object of derision to hooting children.

  Most of the weird old men pursued their own quiet trades, scarcely dimpling the surface of village life.

  The Snailer combed the braes for the humble specimens which had given him his name. He brought them back to his garden in biscuit boxes for breeding. He had no success but he sold those he did find at a half-penny a dozen as his own cure for salt-water boils. And so he earned his tobacco and his weekly half pint. Not many of the fishermen bought them, but I knew that they worked. I suffered badly from boils and had one on my leg once that made the limb blow up to nearly twice its size. Limping along the braes to avoid one of Leebie’s kaolin poultices, I was hailed by the Snailer, who refused to let me go until he’d rubbed one of his catches into the sore for almost an hour. Next morning the leg had gone down like a punctured balloon. After the treatment the snail was tossed aside into the grass.

  I couldn’t pay him but offered what I thought was the helpful suggestion that he might manage to sell some of his wares to Jean Jeff, as I’d heard they ate them in France. The Snailer turned purple.

  ‘Bloody French!’ he spat. ‘Bloody Philistines! Eating me out of house and home if they could! Waste of good snails!’

  Next day, as a pacifier, I brought him one of grandfather’s screw-top beers, which I’d purloined from the pantry. He was profuse in his thanks and told me to come back any time for free treatment and to say goodbye to the kaolin poultice.

  They were not all loners, but the dafter they were, the more solitary their lives. The Tanker could be seen most days occupying one of the larger rocks west of Newark. As you approached he’d grip his imaginary machine gun with both hands and let you have it – vocally and from juddering fists, following you all along the sands.

  ‘Bastarding tanks! bastarding tanks! bastarding tanks!’

  It was his only line.

  Then he’d sing us a song of slaughter, high up on his turret, bow-legged and grinning, pointing at us in time to the music as if he were conducting:
/>   If you want to see the old battalion

  We know where they are –

  They’re hanging on the old barbed wire!

  ‘You’re a useless shot, Tanker!’ boys would shout back. ‘You can’t aim for peanuts! I should have been dead five minutes ago! Look – I’m still alive!’

  And they’d pick up small boulders from the beach and lob their grenades at the machine-gun nest, inspiring the gunner to greater fire-power. We saw a loony on a rock, that was all. But from his pinnacle the Tanker saw much more – squadrons of war advancing all across the plains, their long gun barrels trained on him and flashing fire. Only a madman would think it was just a group of small boys.

  The Jockey – on his imaginary stallion – was a more peaceful figure, though more liable to knock you flat coming round a corner. He’d rein in if he saw you coming, though, and pass the time of day. Sometimes an apple or a lump of sugar would be proffered and he took these on behalf of the horse.

  ‘Did you ever win a race?’ we’d ask him.

  No, he’d never had any success as a jockey, he’d admit ruefully, which was why he’d left Ireland. And what was the trouble, we inquired? The answer was always the same: ‘Slow horses and fast women.’

  Women, fast or slow, were the speciality of Pussy Starr, though he preferred them slow, Billy said, because then he could catch them. His nickname, however, was a mystery to me.

  ‘Does he like cats?’ I once asked. And the whole family laughed, even my father.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Jenny said, ‘he likes cats, all right. But they don’t like him, and they have to keep their claws out when Pussy’s on the go!’

  The Postie advertised his weakness for women in time-honoured fashion, unless he opted instead for the letter-box approach, hence his name. There was a fat mad lady called Nancy who lived up a lane, her front door looking down to the harbour. She had a habit of wandering out of the usually open door, wearing only her knickers – though these were mizzen-mast affairs, grandfather said, visible even from out at sea. A bench for the old men stood against the harbour wall, offering them a view of the lane all the way up to Nancy’s door. Members of the Women’s Guild kept moving this seat ‘a few respectable steps to the west’ but each morning the old men would move it back again, claiming it was closer to the harbour office, where they needed to ‘keep in touch’. As soon as you heard the titterings and saw the pipes jabbing and the old men come to life, you knew Nancy was on parade. Usually we were chased away, but to us Nancy’s ballooning breasts soon became just another part of the scenery, banal as the weather. Sometimes we’d wander up Petticoat Lane (as the old men called it), walk straight into her house and help ourselves to digestive biscuits and oatcakes which she kept in her sideboard drawers, while Nancy sat around chattering to no one in particular. Occasionally she’d ask us to run errands for her. Once she sent me to the chemist for six sticks of liquorice – ‘so as I can have a really good clean-out,’ she said. Mr Bett as usual looked at me with some suspicion. Even liquorice was lethal in his permanently worried and inflamed head.

  ‘Who are they for?’ he asked. ‘Your granny?’

  ‘No, Nancy sent me.’

  He withdrew the sticks of liquorice and thought for a moment.

  ‘Have you only just come from Nancy’s?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And what was she wearing?’

  ‘Only her knickers.’

  Mr Bett smiled. I’d never seen the chemist smile before.

  ‘I’ll take them round myself,’ he said.

  He saw my face fall.

  ‘What’s wrong, lad?’

  ‘She was going to give me a penny for going.’

  Mr Bett looked worried again, but he went to the till and took out a penny.

  ‘Mind the shop while I’m away. If anybody comes, tell them I’ll be back in two minutes.’

  As an afterthought he went to the liquorice jar and pulled out an extra stick.

  ‘That’s for you,’ he said. ‘One’s enough. And for God’s sake don’t touch anything while I’m gone.’

  When I reported this incident in the braehead house it split the family into two camps. The women all took the view that Mr Bett wanted to spare me another sight of Nancy’s paps (as they called her breasts). The men saw it differently and grinned and stroked their chins, just like Mr Bett.

  ‘Good for old Jockie – and him an elder of the kirk to boot.’

  I didn’t see what his boot had to do with it. But that was Nancy.

  Of all her admirers the Postie was the most serious, but she took a dislike to him, unusual for her, so ingenuous and so mild to all, and would shut her door when she saw him coming up the lane. So the Postie earned his nickname in a flash. And caused hilarity in all but the Women’s Guild. Even we children knew the story, though not its full significance, not in my ignorant case, at least.

  The girls did the tutoring.

  ‘He sticks his willy through her letter box!’

  ‘Why should he do that?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. And do you know what happens next?’

  ‘No, tell me.’

  ‘She runs to the fireside for the tongs – and snap, crackle and pop! She’s branded him and she holds on tight and he’s howling his head off on the other side of the door!’

  And the girls ran screaming down the street. If they met the Postie they’d shout to him: ‘Got any post for us today? Has it got a stamp on it?’

  The Postie enjoyed their attention.

  ‘I’ll show you in a minute – I’ve got more than one in here. And they’ve all got stamps!’

  And they ran screaming off again, their laughter silvering the sky.

  Peter Cleek had a hook for his left hand. He pushed a big barrow through the streets, holding one of the shafts inside the hook and the other with his good hand. Usually he brought round herring, but in March, when the cod had huge roes in them, he’d shout along the street: ‘Good cod roes! Good cod roes!’ Then we’d shout back at him: ‘Isn’t there any herring in the firth today, Peter?’ And he’d answer, ‘Good God knows! Good God knows!’

  George Young went after all the horses in the town, waiting patiently with sack and shovel for them to drop their cargoes of hot compost straight on to the street. The baker’s big horse, the milk horse, the fruiterer’s and the fisherman’s, he followed on their rounds, and all the little horses that carted the gear to and from the boats and hauled the unloaded herring up to the station. Occasionally a bit of apple would be offered, or just a few words by way of encouragement. Not even waiting sometimes for the horses to move off, he reached between their hind legs with his spade and raked away the steaming loads, shovelling them into his sack, which he then swung on to his shoulder, marching off in search of more takings.

  If the horse was wearing a nose-bag we’d shout, ‘Hey, George, the bag’s in the wrong place. Why don’t you tie it to its backside?’

  He’d do anything to fertilize his strawberry patch, where the berries grew like the food of the gods, and he sold the produce for high prices to those who could afford them – unless we’d got to his garden first.

  ‘Geordie Young, the King of Dung!’ we shouted after his back through our tightly held noses, marching after him and furiously fanning the air in his wake. He appeared to revel in the title, his red face lighting up like one of his own strawberries, his eyes crinkling as he silently nodded and laughed, winking and wagging his head.

  Sometimes there were public spectacles. Mad Mansie was a ton of a man who, when drunk, became like Mad Maria. But unlike Maria he had no suicidal qualms. He took off all his clothes, folded them neatly on the pier, and threw himself into the harbour in a decorous sitting splash. It was only when hit by the cold sea that he experienced an instantaneous change of mind. Wallowing and wheezing whitely in the oily water, and unable to swim, he gasped and spluttered for help before disappearing. Once my uncle Alec dived in and saved him. Mansie was so fat, Alec said afterwards, that the wet oily
naked flesh kept slipping through his fingers like blubber.

  ‘It was like trying to life-save a bloody whale!’ he said. ‘I’ve told him next time to keep his clothes on – otherwise he’ll bloody drown!’

  Other characters were less dramatic but equally memorable. Philip the Philosopher had only one question.

  ‘I’ll prove to you that you’re not really here,’ he used to say to us, stopping us in the street.

  ‘Go on then, Phil.’

  ‘Right, then. Are you in Edinburgh?’

  ‘No, Phil.’

  ‘Are you in Glasgow?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you in Aberdeen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right then. If you’re not in any of these places you must be somewhere else, then?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Right! If you’re somewhere else, then how can you be here?’

  The Philosopher’s bent logic straightened us out for one mind-boggling minute while he went on his way triumphant.

  And there was the old cold gold-earringed sailor called Gowans, who drew me conspiratorially into the folds of his sea waistcoat, pointed his white buccaneering beard at me, and whispered the one which, of all the strange sentences of childhood, stands out sharpest.

  ‘I’ve seen monsoons and typhoons and baboons – and teaspoons!’

  Often they congregated in front of the harbour, these old men, maybe twelve of them at a time, bunched together like a dozen herring on a string, walking up and down a small stretch of Shore Street, no longer than the span of an average fishing boat from stem to stern. Twenty steps then turn, twenty steps then turn again, they made their old men’s half-strides, walking backwards and forwards to keep out the cold, or taking the measure of the imaginary deck their feet had left long ago. Or they strolled to the end of the pier, blew their noses with their fingers into the wind, and sauntered back again, perambulating penguins with a communal instinct, with nothing left to do on a cold day but blow their beaks and spit.