Hellfire and Herring Read online

  The working fishermen, their hands hauling on sodden nets, were too pressed to develop deep aberrations. All the same several of them quirkily proclaimed their individualities against the rough routine of a life of toil.

  One of these was Star Jeems – a man of enormous size and strength, who scorned the use of hoist or barrow or horse when shifting his nets from boat to pier and from harbour to house. Jeems, like most of the fishermen, was called after the name of his boat, the Morning Star. On a Saturday morning crowds of boys would gather on the middle pier to watch it come into harbour. After all the fish were landed the great moment would arrive when Jeems would heave his share of the nets on to the pier wall using a single hand, straighten himself for a second among his massed admirers, then walk a quarter of a mile to his house, trailing a long tail of children and bearing a weight that would have bowed the legs of a rhinoceros. For good measure he would then walk up the steps of his own house all the way up to the garret. This was sheer bravado, for he then flung the nets back down into the yard for their Saturday washing. But he liked it to be seen that he had no need of the hoist and tackle that topped the garret window.

  These so-called eccentrics, whom so-called progress has swept away, were victims of hard work, poverty, social isolation and much inbreeding. They were also victims of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to – as somebody once famously said. But mostly they were victims of their place and time. Yet we children were never harmed, never molested, had no fear of abduction, murder or rape, or were even warned about them. We got through our childhood without a single casualty, though it was a place of open doors and lunatics on the loose.

  4

  The Dragons of Eden

  Miss Shoes was the first. Hughes, as a matter of fact, but the regional pronunciation produced the word which had me immediately looking down at her feet, as if that was where her essence resided. Miss Boots would have been closer to the mark, I remember thinking at the time – dainty little dark brown things, with high heels, buttoned up the side and trimmed at the top with rabbit fur. The reason I recall them in this detail is that we sat cross-legged on the floor on our first day at school, Miss Hughes perched on a high chair in front of us. With her spinster’s passion for method she had arranged us according to our height the moment we walked through the door, and because I was a small boy I was put in the first row, right in the centre. So my school life begins with Miss Hughes’s boots, buttoned up the ankles, all the way to where her legs began. These were equally fascinating, encased as they were in thick brown woollen stockings with wavy patterns wiggling upwards to her knees, like the lines left by the tide on the beach, where Honeybunch loved to walk. Ah, but Honeybunch was poetry in motion. Miss Hughes was a stiff affair. Her stockings ended – or disappeared – beneath a dark green skirt that looked as if it might have been cut from Epp’s velvet armchair, and the same buttons went up to her neck. She wore a loose smock over this, but it was unbuttoned, allowing us to view Miss Hughes in all her glory. And topping all was a fluffy white cloud of hair surrounding a patch of wrinkles and a pair of spectacles. Miss Hughes grew in front of us like a dandelion clock.

  And faded as fast – blown by time before she had time to get to know us, or we her. ‘Shoes is dead! Shoes is dead!’ That was the playground cry that greeted me one morning to tell me that I’d never again see, except in memory, Miss Hughes’s little buttoned-up feet pointing at me as I snipped and pasted bits of coloured paper on to strips of newspaper, intensely aware of the smell of glue, but with no idea as to why I was doing this or what in the world I was doing here in the first place. I recall no parental warning, no cushioning hints about going to school and saying goodbye to freedom. Probably there were none. People were less self-conscious in those days. Things simply happened.

  School was one of them. I just woke up one morning and found myself there, surrounded by children. I’d never been so surrounded by children. They were all faces I’d known individually in passing, and in random groups, but never together and in such a small space. A crowd of shapes and scents and sounds that made no sense to me.

  What are the pieces that remain, still standing out in relief, their definition undimmed by the passing years?

  The smells.

  Varnish is one of them. Our desks had been varnished for the start of the new term, but nothing could conceal their dismal oldness. Old oak they had been made from, older than Epp’s coffin by far, perhaps as old as Epp herself, who may have sat at one of them when she was a little girl. Certainly our mothers and fathers (my father excepted) had occupied them, and even our grandmothers and grandfathers, and there were dragons who took delight in telling us, ‘Your father and his father before him sat in that very desk where you’re sitting now, and that’s why you’re there – it’s a desk for dunderheads!’

  Dunderheads or clever dicks, it made no difference. These solid slabs of oakwood were what held us, brutally banged together to form mantraps for boys and girls, to keep us sitting in rows, two by two, like the animals in the ark, sealed in from the great flood of ignorance that raged about our lives. So we sat there, heads upright, faces to the front, calves and torsos perpendicular, parallel to the walls, thighs aligned to the plane of the ceiling, shoes flat on the floor, feet together. We were told to sit like that, and that is how we sat, like crooked alphabets, for the next seven years. We sat and sat – and grew into the angles of our desks. And the wooden desks, dead coffinwood, grew into our souls.

  The mind strikes match after match – ignited even then by the smell of varnish, though I never stopped long enough, in those dark little rooms in my head, to analyse the images as they exploded into light. Not at five years old. But Epp’s box came floating back again into the haven of childhood, and the men wriggled like maggots in the ribs of their skeleton craft, high up in the boatshed. And old Hodgie Dickson worked and worked at his daily death. And Epp’s mouth was closed by Liza Leslie, who bandaged the sneering jaw, placing a knot at the top of the white dead head, like the bow on the head of the beribboned girl in front of me. They came crazily at me, all of them, out of the grain of the wood, where they lurked in camouflage. Kate the Kist lay down on my desk and demanded to have her measurements taken.

  One, two, three, four …

  Twelve inches one foot, three feet one yard.

  Six feet, how many inches?

  Six feet long, six feet deep.

  The days of our years are three score and ten.

  ‘Waken up there, boy! You’re dreaming again! Write this down on your slate – with your chalk, boy, with your chalk!’

  Chalk. The smell of it. Chalk dust trapped in the slanted sunbeams, clouds of it settling on the teachers’ clothes and hair, powdering their smocks with its ghostly moss till they looked like faded old dusters.

  ‘Stop chewing that chalk, boy, it’s for your brain, not your belly!’

  Down on to our slates went the first words, the first chalky cells of literacy that would combine and multiply and make scholars of us. Fish, star, starfish. Gull, sea, seagull. Verse and universe, satyr and Satan – Satan flying over the rooftops, over the shaky slates of the school on sooty pinions, the crumbs of sinners falling in flakes from his jaws, gouged gobbets of eyes falling like fish-heads into the waves. God is Love.

  ‘Write it down, boy!’

  God is love.

  ‘Wrong again! Love with a capital, you turnip! Let that remind you!’

  The first blow. And a fire burning on the side of my face where Miss McNeil’s fist had found my ear, for love spelt with a small letter. Her hand rubbed out the offending character and replaced it with a rigid, right-angled Pythagorean capital. Her fingers were caked with chalk dust, like the white unringed fingers of old Epp as she gripped the poker in her rage. Flour like a dusting of chalk on Mrs Guthrie’s wedding ring as Liza Leslie removed it before preparing Mrs Guthrie for the ground. Flour into chalk, bread into stones, a classroom killing, t
he end of infant life, the death of imagination.

  And the strange smells of other bodies. Through the veils of chalk and varnish, the odours of antiseptic sinks, bottles of ink, strips of plasticine and pots of glue, there filtered the rich reek of the farm boys, creatures of dung, not of our tar-and-tangle element and therefore inferior to us. They came clumping in from the fields wearing muddy boots and question marks for faces. They slammed themselves into their desks and stared dazedly into space. None of them was ever able to answer any questions.

  I sat near the bottom of the class myself, marked out by my inability, inhabiting the same desk as a farm boy called Bert Mackay.

  ‘What do you call a young horse, Mackay?’

  The silence started up at once, cruel as a knife. The teacher repeated the question. The silence persisted. I could feel Bert’s head close to mine begin to blow up big and red with the effort to discover within itself a piece of information that simply wasn’t there. The question-mark face contorted to almost comical proportions. But nobody laughed.

  ‘Answer the question, boy! What do you call a young horse?’

  I made to help him.

  ‘Be quiet there! How dare you whisper! Do you imagine that if you were struggling with the plough he’d lift a finger to help you? How do you spell “plough”, Mackay?’

  Silence.

  ‘How do you spell “foal”, Mackay?’

  Nothing.

  ‘What is a foal, Mackay?’

  Bert breathed like a horse, straining in the mud of his mind. The rich ripe earth smells steamed out of his carcass with the sheer fury of his thinking. He whimpered and groaned. But no answer came out of him.

  ‘He’s fit for carting dung, that’s all!’

  Geordie Young, the King of Dung.

  ‘All right, then, we’ll give him an easy one. What’s a young cat called?’

  ‘A kitten, miss.’

  Blind pink mouths mewing for mercy to the blind blue sky and McCreevie’s thick grinning head breaking open with laughter.

  I’ll break open your head and feed your brains to the fish!

  ‘What did he say? Pay attention, boy!’

  ‘McCreevie, miss.’

  ‘What? Your drivelling dreams again? Supposed to be helping him too! The blind leading the blind! This’ll waken you up! I’ll make you see, all right!’

  The heavy hand of Miss McNeil, beating away the dreams of Eden, keeping them at bay, day by day.

  The school day started with the unbridled anarchy of the playground, where we wheeled and dived like gannets in the gladiatorial amphitheatre of the sea.

  On my first day I was prey rather than predator, before I learned to attack. The trouble was that I never really wanted to attack anybody. A pacific soul, I suppose, in my dark green velvet shorts with the straps over the shoulders. I let go my mother’s hand and walked sullenly through the iron gates, into the maelstrom. At once they zoomed in on me. Arms spread stiffly like wings, they swooped and soared, goggle-eyes stabbing as they advanced, clattering tongues machine-gunning me dead with fear before they closed. Even the Tanker couldn’t have held them back. Dogfaced dog-fighters, they struck, tore, bit, clung, punched and kicked. They swung from the twin ends of the long scarf that Leebie had knitted for me, till my face turned blue. They knocked me breathless to the ground, faces jostling in the sky like bunches of bruised fruits, busy hands rifling my pockets for anything that could be eaten. Then they were off and I was dazed but initiated. After that it was merely a case of spreading your arms and contending for the honour of being a Spitfire rather than a Messerschmitt. Messerschmitts were always brought down. Our re-enactments of the Battle of Britain were instinctively patriotic and I was seldom a Spitfire. I came to have a sneaking sympathy for the Germans.

  Boys like Bert Mackay who sat through most of their schooling like bemused beetroots were the ones who ruled and gloried in this element where mental life ceased to exist. Hacked and hounded by the teachers, they made up for their daily humiliation by hitting anything they could. If you were lucky it was a football. Heavy-booted feet that shuffled in misery beneath the desks now sent balls crashing like cannon shot into the school wall, occasionally missing the windows. Heads bent in toil and bowed in disgrace for most of the day tossed and butted like bulls. And ink-stained fat fingers that could scarcely hold a pen let alone form a letter, bunched themselves into fists, delivering punches with all the zest of beings goaded beyond their natural forbearance.

  The girls, who simpered through the lessons in a smarter, soapier silence, carried on their demurer games in their own playground, separated from us by a high brick wall. Breaking school rules, we would scale the wall and watch them playing with their skipping-ropes, rhymes and roundelays.

  Salt, pepper, vinegar, mustard,

  Miss McNeil’s got a face like custard.

  Or at the risk of a thrashing, we dropped down on their side and were among them like commandos on a raid. Our mission – the Garter.

  Heaven help me, I’m a martyr,

  Kiss me quick or I’ll grab your garter.

  The kiss or the garter. Capitulation was unknown in that death-before-dishonour society. The snotty swotty girls considered it beneath them to give a boy a kiss and the coarser fishergirls preferred a fight. They were lithe creatures with loose salty tongues and rough tumbling hair. Fists and feet flew as we closed in on them and grabbed at their legs. Long white thighs kicked against their deflowering. Navy-blue knickers flashed above rumpled stockings and flowered dresses, and shrill silvery screams rippled like summer lightning. The Battle of the Garter was fought and won. Willing hands hoisted us to safety over the wall, eager to touch our glory. We pulled the garters like headbands over our tousled brows and, whooping like braves who’d taken their first scalps, war-danced round and round the playground to the hysterical hootings of the jubilant male tribe and the outrage over the wall.

  Was there anything faintly sexual in it, I wonder? Not one whiff, at least none that I remember.

  The bell rang then, hammering us into submission.

  ‘Line up!’

  A hundred unruly tongues were stilled and the chaos of bodies came miraculously together in two long lines, the animals entering the ark. The girls were lining up at the other end. We could see them through the open double doors. It was a one-corridored building, seven rooms for seven years. You entered at one end aged five, knowing nothing, and emerged at the other aged twelve, knowing the geography of Britain and the capital of France, but not knowing that some of the girls now had periods – and penetralia in which we would soon be interested. Not knowing either that we could have even greater fun with our own genitals than simply seeing who could pee highest up the outside wall. All that lay ahead of us, seven years away, at the end of that corridor, where the girls waited.

  The headmaster blew his whistle like the guard at the station, a sign to the teacher at the other end of the school to let in the girls. Simultaneously he barked an order and in we went, like mice beneath the hawkish nose and eye, the sharp jaw, the bristling ginger moustache. Heads down, we stared in passing at his plus-fours, the shit-catchers, which all the fishermen said they wouldn’t be seen dead in, and the term we gleefully applied to him. In the singular, it became his nickname.

  We filed into our classrooms.

  ‘Good morning, boys and girls.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss McNeil.’

  ‘All stand! Our Father …’

  Which art in heffen

  Halloo pee thigh name

  Thigh kinktom come

  Thigh will pee ton

  On earth as it ish in heffen

  Kiff us this tay our taily prett …

  ‘And forgive us our tits!’

  So the coarser girls would mimic her out of the classroom, winking and stabbing their chests with inward pointing fingers. And we’d double up, hysterical at the thought of Miss McNeil’s earnest plea and supplication to God on high, every morning in life without fail. And
the prayer would be trumpeted around the playground.

  ‘Miss McNeil’s dead!’ screeched Golly Gowans as he bombed his way past me at battle speed across the playground, loosing off bullets at the Red Baron intruding from another world war, who went into a nose-dive and revealed himself as Peem Peattie fighting in flames at my feet.

  Another one? Surely not. ‘What do you mean?’ I shouted after him.

  Golly tilted his wings, banked dangerously, and came bombing back up the playground to make sure the Red Baron was dead.

  ‘Miss McNeil’s dead!’ he screamed again.

  He whizzed by on the second run, his hands juddering on his guns.

  ‘Died in her sleep last night.’

  Dead. I said the word over to myself in the sudden silence Golly had left in his wake. The Red Baron bundled his spilt books back into his schoolbag and wandered off. How could those thick hairy tweeds be dead? Someone had been inside them all the time. A human being. Miss McNeil was gone now to Liza Leslie to be washed, gone with Epp and Hodgie and Miss Hughes into the back of beyond. This was becoming an alarming habit. The dragons were so ancient they were keeling over in front of us. I had not yet worked out from observation that this is simply what people do. Die. But children expect their teachers, like their parents, to be eternal.

  Prayers were in order when we came to Miss Hughie, whom we called Shuggie.

  Shuggie was a religious maniac, a fundamentalist who had weighed the Old Testament in one hand and the New in the other and found the latter wanting, so she threw it away and gave us Jehovah instead in all his glory.

  A stuffed stork stood on one tireless leg in a long glass case in the corner of her classroom. She directed our attention at once to this bird, which she intended to use as a visual aid to her own brand of sex education.

  ‘Now children, there is a stupid superstition that babies are brought to your parents’ homes by the stork. That, of course, is just an old wife’s tale, nothing more. You can all of you see this stork in the corner, can’t you?’