A Twelvemonth and a Day Read online

  The next persuasion that I was far from ague-proof came to me in my pram. The road down to the harbour was a winding brae with our house on one side. Down we came in winter—my first memory of being taken out at night. Was I one, perhaps, or even two? I was sitting up in my carriage, with my mother’s pale face hanging in heaven, and her smile was a warm lamp lighting up the darkness. But there were other lights scattered about her head, like the slow spray of the winter firth frozen across the sky. And the words were coming out of my mother’s mouth.

  I can hear them now.

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are.

  She blew on the rhyme with her hot frosty breath. Sparks floated across the darkness to me and I reached out for them. The sounds were living cinders lighted on my lips as she blew me her kiss. I reached out again for the embers of the tune and my hand came into contact with the sharp prickles of the cold stone wall. Millions of frost-diamonds glittered and winked in that wall. They scored my flesh beautifully, a perfect cut. A soft crimson glove ran over my hand like velvet, ruby rings enriched my fingers, and the deep red wine stained my lips as I tasted and saw—that I was king of the salt sea that ran in my veins. It was then that I saw the moon in the sky for the first time—a wild bride who had flung aside a veil of stars—and a terrible beauty was born. Inside the house a moment later I looked round an adult circle of concern, a ring of goggling lips and eyes, questioning my divinity. When I saw their faces I bawled. But here at least was intimation that the world had grandeur in it, that pain was golden. Even as I write about it now, several decades on, I wish I could recapture that first blood which made the writing so inevitable.

  Another pram memory recreates for me a January journey—a journey for snowdrops. Balcaskie Wood was a gothic cathedral, vaulted over by the interlocking boughs of ashes, elms and oaks. Birches and beeches too laid their leaves in drifting generations along the gusty green aisles, the dim transepts of the trees. The nave of this great wood was a spacious footpath, soft with its own prayermat of moss, deep-piled a mile or more from the gate. So many dead had trodden out their printless footsteps here that silence hung over it like a hallowed arch. It was known locally as The Bishop’s Walk.

  Balcaskie was a mile inland, and when my pram set out the wintered sun was low in the west, an angry orange flare, raging the last inches of its dreary descent, so far and near from spring. For as the day lengthens the cold strengthens, a voice whispered to my baby brain, a voice from beneath the horizon. Through the white gate of the year we went, and into the wood, where the sun never shone except in broken shafts, and only the glossy dark flames of the evergreens rose in their own incense to the sky: the burnished ivy bushes, the sharp crackle of the Christmas trees, the porcupine spruce, the long needle-slender billowing of the pine. And on a single ash-grey trunk glowed Balcaskie’s only sun—a vast splash of lichen. A golden fire, smouldering and pulsating with the year, but never setting in all the years I could remember.

  Then it was dark and a chilly lamp was lighting up a gathering of voices like deep bells all about me. I was lifted from my pram and placed on my brand new feet at the perilous edge of a frozen sea, a green bank topped with foaming white droplets.

  Snowdrops. I sucked up their scent and my head was flooded with fragrant foam. Through the ecstasy of my drowning there came a girl wearing a green cloak. She bent down, holding out for me a bunch of flowers—little green knights with the holy white helmets. I reached out, accepting them from her, my spirit sealed in a slumber that there were still no words to break; for the locks of language had not yet been placed on my lips and the prison-house of speaking was still to close. That green-caped young girl is now a white-haired lady, and even as I begin to rage against the fading of my light, her glad young smile lights up my remembering. I was aglow only with the knowledge of snowdrops, a knowledge into which no cancerous worm had yet bitten the bitter recognition that I should surely die.

  Perhaps that knowledge came to me in the dimmest possible way with the passing of Epp.

  Epp was our landlady at East Shore Street, for the house was not our own. She was Queen Victoria at number sixteen, well into her eighties when I knew her and dead before I was three. Thrones will perish, kingdoms rise and wane, and queens may never redden from their dust. But I shall never forget old Epp.

  It was Epp who began my literary education. Throned on her massive moss-green velvet armchair, all curves and buttons, she sat there in a black waterfall of lace, her skirts spilling across the floor, and thundered at me: ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. I stood no higher than her dark silken knee, a tiny little man. Stormed at by the shot and steady shell of her wrathful cannonades, I would watch with horror the trembling of her dreadful dewlaps when her frail white fists descended on the sides of her chair, beating out the rhythms of the verse. She held the windowed sky in her spectacles and her head was lost in the clouds of her snowy white hair.

  She was always erect.

  ‘Be a brave wee man,’ she said to me when I cut my thumb and cried, ‘or you’ll never be a sailor like your father, or a soldier like my bonny sons.’

  I roared at her in mortal anguish.

  ‘I don’t want to be a soldier or a sailor! I want to be a fisherman!’

  ‘A fisherman!’ she scoffed. ‘You might as well be a tinker!’

  ‘And you’ll never get a wife either if you greet like that,’ she admonished me. ‘None but the brave deserves the fair!’

  None but the Brave,

  None but the Brave,

  None but the Brave deserves the Fair.

  I wept all the louder.

  When I was bad and uncontrollable, and all the men in the house at sea, I was taken to Epp.

  ‘Oh you scoundrel!’ she scolded. ‘You bad wild boy!’

  Then she would tell me that the horned and hoofed devil had flown over the rooftops on black, scaly pinions of soot, that he was sitting on our chimney right this minute, listening to me, and would be down the lum at my next word. His mouth was full of sinners and that was why I couldn’t hear him mumbling, but at the next swallow there would be room in his jaws for one more gobbet of begrimed humanity, and that would be me. Didn’t I hear the soot falling? Open-mouthed, I looked from her to the lurid red glow within the black grate of her fireside. Sinister scrabblings came from the awful tall blackness of the chimney, which led up to the universe, the unknown corners of God’s coal-cellar. Quaking, I turned my eyes back to my torturer, her pale old face laved in flames. She spitted me on her tongue.

  ‘You will go to hell,’ she leered. ‘You will be crying for a single drop of water to cool your parched mouth. Your throat will be like the desert. But Satan will just laugh at you before he crunches you up. And not one drop of water will you get! Oh yes, my bonny man, you’ll get something to cry for in hell!’

  When I ran to her, screaming, she never softened.

  ‘Go away, you bad lad! You’re like every other boy that was born, picked up from the Bass Rock you were, that’s where your father got you, didn’t you know? Why didn’t he go to the May Island, the silly kipper that he was, and bring us all back a nice wee lass instead of you, you nasty brat!’

  Epp assured me that boys came from the Bass and girls from the May. Where had my father’s ship gone wrong? What hand at the helm had blundered? Ah well, it had been wartime, and many errors had been made. I was one of them.

  ‘Ours not to reason why,’ she proclaimed.

  And then she was off again at her poetry and her preaching. When she came out of it she told me that since I was a boy I had better make the best of it and behave as well as I could. But like all boys I was born to be bad. There’s your bairn, God had said, make a kirk or a mill of him for all I care. And like Pontius Pilate he went and washed his hands.

  Poor Epp.

  Her two sons had run away from home and had died in scarlet in the war against the Zulus, leaving her naked in her age. If she
never stopped blaming them through these tireless tirades of hers against the whole masculine world, perhaps it was that she kept up a kind of praise and lamentation in her wild volleys of heroic poetry, dedicated to their reproach and their renown. At any rate she was a stern Eve. She had known a sharper sting than the serpent’s tooth. And the apple of life had turned to ashes in her mouth. So she bit back with venom.

  But she unbent for the ceremony of the pan drop.

  I was summoned to the hearth.

  Taking a pan drop from a glass jar, the holy grail of her dresser, she would place it on the fender and pulverise it with the poker. She turned the fire-iron the wrong way in her hand. Its head was a burnished bronze mushroom. With this she would execute the frivolous indulgence that was the sweet, and I always feared for the precious pieces. It was placed on the whorled corner of that fender and broken between bronze and brass, smashed like a criminal on the wheel—rendered innocuous for the tender tongue of the anxiously waiting youngling. Epp waited there to the end, watching me haughtily as I sucked away the last white crumbs. She stood straight as the poker, still gripped in her white hairless knuckles, and with which she looked as ready to crack my skull as please my palate. My eyes turned again to the glass container. Still it hovers before me, shining like some mystic churchyard urn through the mists, never quite touching the surface of that dark dim piece of furniture which endless recollections have left but half defined.

  ‘Away you go now, you young rascal, that’s all there is.’

  She lifted the poker and shook her free fist at me. I ran from the room. I was horrified of her in those moods.

  But she was my first queen and I her quaking subject. Her sceptre was the gleaming poker, her court the flickering hearth with its high-backed buttoned throne. The pan drops were the favours she dispensed. And how could she or I know then, in that dark backward and abyss of years, that I should pay tribute to her in the only coins I have ever had to spend—memory’s mintage of hard-won words? Why is it, Epp, that the old lady and the little boy have to meet again after all these years, and go on meeting until the last day’s tribute has been paid?

  Is it because of what happened one winter’s night that still grips me like guilt, like some dreadful disease? For I can remember such a night when the grownups faced one another across a bare table, all of them as dumb as stones for sheer poverty, the fishing that year having proved a failure. I was up whining for food, but there was none to be had, nor a toy in the house between ceilings and floor. I roamed about the distempered walls following my gaunt hungry shadow beneath the gasmantles, glancing narrowly at the grown ones as they sat there in that grim-faced gathering that both angered and upset me. So it was I who heard the small silver chiming at the dark brown door—so small a sound I saw that the others had not even taken their faces out of their fists. Blotting myself against the wall I moved silently to the door. I stared down in wonderment at two shining circles on the floor, two bright winter moons that lit up the linoleum.

  Two half crowns.

  Down to the edge of our door, where the gray daggers of the winter winds struck her between the ribs, my great queen had knelt in the lonely darkness of her empty hall. She had laid her old bones down there unseen and had pushed back our rent money that we could not afford to pay. Through the door it had come again, from the probing tips of her white ringless fingers. Epp who never said a word, though everyone knew of that tender mercy which became her in the end better than her reign of terror.

  But she breathed her last, old Epp, before she could receive the thanks of her meanest vassal. Such is the breath of old queens—brief in the bitter mornings of little boys.

  When there had been no pan drop for a day or two, I pestered my mother to know where Epp had gone to. She tried to soothe me with an old rhyme, which I can still remember because it was repeated to me with such sadness.

  God saw that she was weary,

  And the hill was hard to climb,

  So He closed her weary eyelids,

  And whispered, ‘Rest be thine’.

  But the words drew mysterious veils over something which I gathered to be awful and ultimate. I pursued my quest relentlessly for the vanished Epp, drawing whispered riddles and quiet murmurings out of the mouths of everyone in the house. Old George, my great-grandfather, said that she was now a pilgrim before God, my grandmother told me that she had gone to a better land, and grandfather that she was being made ready for the kirkyard. Many were the sacred seals and stoppers that they used rather than show me a mystery. Asleep in Jesus, gone to glory, singing hymns at heaven’s gate—Epp haunted me from a thousand hiding places.

  At last somebody said that she was dead.

  Dead. I repeated the word over and over to myself. It had a heavy sound, that word. Why did they say it so quietly, and why was everyone still so unable to explain how it was that I would never see Epp again, to reveal the curious circumstances of her departure? Dead, dead, dead. What does being dead mean? I expect my upturned face and earnest questionings must have preyed on their nerves.

  So they took me into death’s physical presence.

  I can vividly recall the total blackness of the room where she was laid out. It was the dead vast and middle of the night.

  We entered the room of death.

  The enveloping silence hung like a tapestry. I stumbled into its heavy invisible folds. The tightly hushed whispers still deafen me, years later, like a black beating sea. A match was struck. There was no electricity in that house of gasmantles where at that moment there was no shilling to feed the meter. A flaring yellow nova burst the silence of the universe in which I cringed, frightened now. Criss-cross patterning of the trestle on which lay a big dark shape. Arms lifting me up. Darkness again and another match struck. Then there she was, old Epp, my queen, clothed in whiteness to the wrists, the first time I had ever seen her out of black, or her stern eyes so softly closed. And finally, in the plunging confusion of more darkness and exploding matches, a heavy lid closing with a thud, the dark inscrutable workmanship of shining oak, the brass mirror of the polished name-plate—Elspeth Marr, her name, her years. Where’s Epp? That’s where she is now—in there.

  The rest was silence.

  *

  With Epp gone I ran wild for a few days before I forgot her, if I can ever forget that old queen of the night. From then on some other threat of punishment had to be found to hold over my wicked head and restrain me from mischief.

  That ultimate threat turned out to be the Marship.

  The Marship was a floating borstal, a gray hulk to which bad boys were sent instead of going to jail. I never saw the Marship but I was told whenever it happened to be in the harbour, which was whenever I happened to be bad, and the night was dark, and the curtains were drawn. It was then that I hovered anxiously between the devil on the chimney and the Marship on the deep blue sea.

  On the Marship boys were made to scrub the decks all day long. That was all they ever did—scrubbed until their kneecaps wore whitely through the red rags of their skins, like the elbows of the old women, and their hands were sodden lumps of carbolic soap, scarlet from the constant immersions from dawn to dusk. They had to use freezing water, and if there was a single speck of dirt left on deck by any boy, that boy was tied to the mast and flogged. Buckets stood ready to catch the blood as it leaped from the cat-o’-nine-tails which they used for the flogging. The Marship boys lived on hard tack, with maggots for meat. They slept with rats in their bunks, but when they had been especially bad they were put in the bilge and the wobble-eyed crabs came and linked claws round their necks, fringed their raw wrists and picked off their toes one by one if they dared to move a muscle.

  It was the thought of those living necklaces and bracelets that convinced me. And I knew just what it would be like to have no toes. An old man called Tom Tarvit used to hobble up to the house to see my great-grandfather. He was an ex-whaler and had lost all ten toes in the Antarctic. He came in on two sticks, bent
in half, his red eyes leering out of the rat’s hair that grew on his face.

  ‘You’ll be like Tom Tarvit,’ they used to say to me. ‘Not a toe to your foot and not a tooth to your head.’

  Once only I was picked up, slung over a shoulder, and told I was being taken to the Marship. My response was instantaneous. I went rigid and stopped breathing. The frightened adult put me down and shouted for help. The whole family beat me in turn until I was as black as I was blue, but they could get no more breath out of me than out of an iron bar. They stuck their fingers down my throat, they tore my hair, they held me upside down and rained blows on my back. Somebody even shouted at me that I’d be taken to the Marship if I didn’t come out of it! It was an ingenious but futile suggestion. My face must have been like a bursting purple plum when old Leebie drove her largest darning needle into my behind. This blood-letting let air into me at once and I lived to recall something of the horror of that moment. The puncture in my rear had to be repaired, but at last I managed to sit at peace.

  From then on I committed only minor crimes.

  I dry-shaved myself with grandfather’s open razor and wore the red results for months afterwards. I gulped down a bottle of Indian ink and thought it not at all unpleasant. I put back a large quantity of my uncle Alec’s home-brewed beer, considering it passable ale at the time and afterwards revolting. I swigged off the rum which my father had left in a brown bottle in the medicine-chest in the bathroom, just before he went back into the navy. I thought myself a proper sailor as I reeled downstairs, half clutching half demolishing the banisters. My two young aunts shrieked at the tops of their voices, the air silvery with their laughter; my grandmother raised her eyes to the skies, proclaiming the Apocalypse; uncle Billy began singing a song about fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. I never thought of it as a sea-chest. I saw fifteen rum-raddled sailors, each with a foot set in triumph on a dead old pirate, his chest cracking like a crab’s shell as they caroused fiercely over his corpse. I felt as drunk as all fifteen men put together, and ready to take on the whole family, all nine of them.