Hellfire and Herring Read online

  But the sound that ran through my brain most of all, the sound that I could easily disentangle from the whole natural and social symphony, was that of water: the sound of the living firth. This was my first language and my first university, my alma mater, my alpha and omega, my eternal mother, the sea, the sea.

  And my actual mother, she who bore me – that was Christina: Christina Scott, telephonist, eldest daughter of Margaret Marr Gay and Alexander Scott, born 21 December 1921, a child of the winter solstice, now married to Christopher Rush, able-bodied seaman, born 9 May 1919, now engaged in war service. So I’m told sixty years later by certificates of birth and marriage, on whose ageing parchment their love in black ink still shines bright. As I stare now into the laughing teenage eyes of my mother, looking out at me from a 1930s photograph (clad in the garb of her straitened time and place, a coarse heavy coat, and shoes without stockings), I can feel again that warm wave of love she gave out all her life, and with which she must have enveloped even my father. Five years after that photograph was taken, outside my granny’s house, the iron gate she leant against was gone, as were they all, gone to foundries every one, turned to guns, and turning young Huns to corpses – and young Christina was wheeling a pram.

  Our house, as I’ve said, was on a hill, a steep winding street with the harbour glinting at the foot. Down we came in winter, in the dark, my mother pushing the pram and me in it, looking up at the bright freezing lights in the sky, among which her young face shone like a lamp. Twinkle, twinkle little star. The words of the song drifted from her lips in hot frosty clouds and hung between us. I reached out for them as the skidding pram ran past the sharp harled wall of the house. That was first blood – a red glove with which I could have touched the stars, but no sensation of pain, just a song in the air, still hanging there, and my mother’s changing face, the sweet love in her mouth turned to an O, and those stars tingling at my fingertips.

  Then came the snowdrops. It must have been February 1945 at the latest, and I’d have been all of three months. I was wheeled the mile inland to Balcaskie woods, a gloomy cathedral of evergreens, vaulted over by the interlocking boughs of ash and elm and oak, and wheeled another mile along the nave of this gothic affair, a moss-soft path, deeppiled with needles and the sea-drift of leaves, generations of birch and beech casting their carpets over the marvellous avenue along which the endless altered people came to buy snowdrops from the estate.

  First a girl in a green-caped hood, bending over me and crushing the flowers into my face. Why? Who was she? Many years later I saw a white-haired lady at a local gathering and knew in myself that it was she, raped by age. The flood went over me, the memory of how they’d then loaded the pram with snowdrops, a froth of sea under which I was wheeled home, sucking in the green white scent. How valid this is as a piece of recollection I have no idea, but stuck in a pram in the winter of ’45, a wordless little world, I know only that I was aglow with the knowledge of snowdrops, into which no cancerous worm had yet bitten the bitter recognition that I should surely die.

  It was Epp who passed on that knowledge to me, both by instruction and by example. Epp was a great-aunt of my mother’s and our landlady at Shore Road, for the house was not our own. She was Queen Victoria at No. 16, well into her eighties when I knew her and dead before I was three, but it wasn’t necessary to possess a memory like mine to remember Epp. A hibernating spider, stuck in a corner, would have remembered her. She was unforgettable.

  It was Epp who began my literary, religious and sex education, all rolled into one. And in all three respects as in every other, she was an anachronism. Throned on her massive moss-green velvet armchair, all curves and buttons, she presided over me in a black waterfall of lace and silk, her skirts spilling across the floor and rustling over my feet. Her fists were knotted over the head of an African cane, up which a brace of wicked-looking snakes wriggled and writhed, standing out like the veins on the backs of her hands. From this position she thundered at me every morning about how well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old, and other heroic stand-offs:

  Half a league, half a league, half a league onward …

  At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay …

  On Linden when the sun was low

  All bloodless lay the untrodden snow …

  Years later, coming across many of these lines at school, I realized with a shock that I was not learning them but remembering them. And suddenly I was back in front of the armchair, standing to attention, no higher than old Epp’s knee, stormed at by the shot and steady shell of her wrathful cannonades, and watching once again the trembling of her dreadful dewlaps as her frail white fists descended on the arms of the chair, beating out the rhythms of the verse. She held the windowed sky in her spectacles and her head was lost in clouds of snowy white hair. She was God’s mother, for sure.

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

  ‘I don’t want to be a soldier! I want to be a fisherman!’ I howled back at her.

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

  She never failed to pour scorn on my role models, my grandfather and his sons, who went out like matadors to face the bucking white bull of the sea.

  ‘And you’ll never get a wife either if you bubble like that! 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 were at sea, I was taken to Epp.

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

  Then she would tell me that the horned and hoofed devil had flown over the rooftops on scaly black pinions of soot, that he was sitting on our roof right this minute, listening to me, and would be down the chimney 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 turned my head to the lurid red glow of her grate. Sinister scrabblings seemed to be coming out of 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 by flames.

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

  When I ran to her, screaming, she never softened. My hands clutched at her knees, my face buried in her black lap, wetting the velvet. She smelled of moth-balls.

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

  Avoiding the biology of stinking drops, Epp assured me that boys came from the Bass and girls from the May. My father’s ship had gone off course. Someone had blundered, some hand at the helm. I had not been intended, that was all. Ah well, it had been wartime and many errors had been made, many wrongs committed. 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 h
im for all I care. And like Pontius Pilate he went and washed his hands.

  Poor Epp. Her two brothers had run away from home, following their father, and had died in scarlet in the Zulu wars, leaving their mother naked in her age. They’d left Epp to grow into an unmarried battleaxe, grinding out her grudge against the entire male race in those tireless tirades of hers. But if she blamed them with one breath, she glorified them with the next, and every breath in her body was dedicated to their reproach and their renown, the latter articulated unconsciously perhaps in the wild volleys of heroic poetry. These were her only concession to their selfish and stupid bravado in throwing their lives away. 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 one of the large white mints from a glass jar, the holy grail of her sideboard, she would place it on the whorled bronze corner of the fender and pulverize it with the head of the poker. And always I feared for the precious pieces, scattered amongst cinders and ash. Epp waited there to the end, watching me haughtily as I picked them out and sucked away the last white shards.

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

  She lifted the poker and waved me away, shaking her free fist at me. I ran from the room. I was terrified of her in those moods.

  But Epp was my first queen and I her adoring 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 have known then that I would one day pay tribute to her in the only coins I have ever had to spare – 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 will go on meeting until the last day’s tribute has been settled.

  Is it because of what happened one winter’s night, that still grips me like some dreadful disease? I remember that night when the grown-ups faced one another across a bare table, all of them as dumb as stones for sheer poverty. The fishing had failed that season and there was nothing to eat. I was up whining for food and there were no toys either, nothing to distract me between ceiling and floor. I roamed the distempered walls, following my gaunt shadow beneath the gas mantles, glancing narrowly at the grown ones as they sat there in that grim-faced gathering that angered me to the bone. Why didn’t they do something? I sensed it instinctively -- that this was what adults were for. Not my father, of course, who wasn’t around that night, out drinking himself drunk again, as somebody said, pissing what little money we had up against the wall, not part of their real world of sea-stress and struggle to survive. But that was their function and burden, to shoulder the heavens that were falling on us, and instead they were sitting there like statues, while I scoured those bare unpapered walls, passing the mouse-hole over and over, out of which no mouse ever came. It had slung its tiny hook and buggered off, my uncle Billy said. And so I was the one who heard the little silver chiming at the door – so small a sound that the others did not even lift their faces out of their fists. Blotting myself against the wall, I glided to the door and stared down at two shining circles on the floor, two bright winter moons that lit up the linoleum. Two half crowns.

  Down on her knees, where the grey draughts struck like daggers between the ribs, my great queen had knelt in her empty hall, on the other side of the door. She had laid her old bones down there in the dark, 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, from Epp, who never said a word, though everybody blessed her for 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.

  One morning I was not summoned for the usual audience. When there was still no summons on the second morning I balanced pandemonium against pan-drop and decided the sweet was worth the death of the six hundred, or even my own in the sulphurous pit. Where’s Epp? I pestered my mother repeatedly and she tried to calm me with a quatrain.

  God saw that she was weary,

  And the hill was hard to climb,

  So He closed her weary eyelids

  And whispered, ‘Rest be thine.’

  A sentimental snippet from a church magazine? An epitaph picked off a gravestone? It chiselled itself into my brain, all right, revealing itself decades later when pen on paper acted like the key in a lock. But at the time the words merely drew mysterious veils over something which I knew to be ultimate and awful, and I pursued my quest relentlessly for the vanished Epp, keeper of the pan-drops, drawing whispered riddles out of the mouths of everybody in the house. Old George, my great-grandfather, said she was now a pilgrim before God, my grandmother told me she had gone to a better land, and grandfather said she was being made ready for the kirkyard. No. 16 Shore Road was a sprawl of family, and artless infants don’t need a who’s who. It was years before it even occurred to me to unravel the relationships, the aunts and uncles who put the sacred seals and stoppers on Epp’s passing, 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 my father, tired of my questions, told me.

  ‘She’s dead.’

  Dead. What’s dead? What does it mean, being dead? I’d asked the big one, the one that most human beings spend their lives ignoring, preferring not to think about it. What could they answer, after all? Extinction? Putrefaction? Translation? Resurrection? Judgement? Eternal bliss? Eternal torment? The lake of fire? A state when totally irreversible chemical changes have taken place in the body? That last’s for sure. But none of that was on offer and I expect my upturned face and persistent questioning must have preyed on their nerves.

  Yes, but what is it? What is dead?

  So they took me to meet death.

  My father snatched me up roughly under his arm and my protesting mother followed us, through the hallway, past the parlour, and into Epp’s presence. It has never left me – the total blackness of the room in which she was laid out.

  The silence was electric – though there was no electricity in that house of gas mantles where at that moment there was no shilling to feed the meter. A match was struck – and failed. The tight little whispers of my parents still deafen me today. Another match, breaking open the blackness and the silence. Criss-cross patterning of the trestle on which lay a big dark shape. Blackness again and another match. And then there she was, in the flaming dark, old Epp, my queen, clothed in whiteness to the wrists, the first time I had ever seen her out of black, her chosen mourning, or her stern eyes so softly closed. Now she was the bride she had never allowed herself to be. And finally, in the plunging confusion of more darkness and exploding matches, a heavy lid thudding shut, the 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, in the box. And that’s where she stays. Till the last trumpet. The rest was silence.

  With Epp gone I ran wild for a few days before I forgot her, if I ever did forget that old queen of the night. My crimes were legion, apparently, though I remember only a few. I dry-shaved myself with my grandfather’s old-fashioned open razor and wore the red results for weeks afterwards. I gulped down a bottle of Indian ink and thought it not too bad, stuck buttons up my nose beyond the reach of the local practitioner, put back a large quantity of my uncle Alec’s home-brewed beer and was as sick as a pig. I also found the rum that my father had brought back from the navy and which had been put into a little brown bottle, left in the medicine-chest in the bathroom and forgotten – till I emerged reeling downstairs, clutching the bottle
and the banisters. Jenny and Georgina shrieked at the tops of their voices, the house silvery with aunties’ 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 saw fifteen rum-raddled sailors, each with a booted foot set in triumph on a dead pirate, his chest cracking like a crab’s carapace as they caroused on his corpse. And I felt as drunk as all fifteen put together, and ready to take on the whole family, all nine of them.

  Not the tenth, though. My father was never part of the family. He was the intruder from the open ocean whose ship had gone wrong, or so Epp had said. He should never have come here, someone had blundered. I wasn’t the error, he was, though he never admitted it and always shifted the blame on to me. ‘You’re the nigger in the woodpile,’ he’d say to me privately when something went wrong, ‘you’re the fucking fly in the ointment!’ One adult day came the realization that he’d been swearing at me, verbally abusing me. But he’d always added, ‘And you repeat that if you dare!’ So I was forbidden to tell the secrets of my prison-house, on pain of the usual punishment, sonny boy! And that’s what he called me as he gave me the instruction I heard a thousand times after that, heard it with fear and loathing. Bend over that chair! And I bent over the chair. I can see it, feel it, describe its green design, smell it, follow its damp threadbare awfulness, its every loose thread. Off came the belt. And that’s the first thrashing I remember. I wasn’t even three, my bottom not even the size of his able-bodied hand.

  The day of the thrashing, my first experience of inflicted pain, I escaped from the house and made my way down Shore Road, heading straight for the water, wiping away the tears, ignoring the cat-calls from the other kids. Cry baby cry, put your finger in your eye, tell your mother it wasn’t I. I arrived on the wave-swept rocky shore, the sunken sea-dreams of my folk locked hard in my head.