Hellfire and Herring Page 3

  The harbour crooked its arm around me. It was a safe haven but I left it, left the harbour and drifted east. Nobody stopped me as I made my way past the swaying forest of masts, the fish-curing sheds, the high sylvan din of the boat-builder’s yard, where the scents and sounds of sea and forest met in a strange mingling and the men laboured minutely inside the giant curving rib-hulls of the boats, like Jonahs in the bellies of great wooden whales.

  Leaving behind me the last black-painted house, I walked the last of the piers, the east pier, climbed the iron steps in the wall, came down on the seaward side and made my way out on to the zigzagging breakwater that took the batterings from the south-east seas and stood between the town and Poseidon. At the end of this Roman mole I found myself staring into the infinite depths of the sea, a calm cold world of wonder and weeds. It was a magic glass, so green and clear – if I just leaned over a little bit more and looked into it, I might see to the other side of the world …

  Did I fall or did I simply let myself go? Better to be with Epp, perhaps, whose rage was all in her head, not in her hand, whose anger was all words. I could hear all the oceans of the world roaring in my ears. The dark tangles parted to let me go by, waved to me in passing, stroking my face, and Epp sure enough came floating up from the bottom of the world to meet me, her eyes still blind and jaw still bandaged but her arms extended. They wrapped themselves round me for the first time – she had never touched me once in all my short life – and I was surprised by her youthful strength and suppleness as she kicked us both up to heaven. My head broke back into the blue world of sunlight and air and suddenly there was water everywhere, changing its texture, a stinging blizzard of brightness and salt. Epp had changed too. I could see now that she had metamorphosed into a man – a fully dressed man, who became a boat and sailed us both back to land, where I vomited torrents of water. I was hurried to the nearest house and wrapped up by strangers, smothered in a grey army blanket whose crude red stitching I can still see out of the corner of my eye. A circle of faces, many voices, a large spoon with something in warm water – Give him some more … put more brandy in … No, that’ll do, I hear he’s had enough already – and then my mother arrived, trundling my old pram, in which I was wheeled home and put to bed.

  From there I could hear the voices.

  ‘I’ll give him a bloody good thrashing when he wakes up!’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing! You’ve hit the boy too hard already and look what happened.’

  ‘But Miller’s lost his gold watch – do you know how much a thing like that costs?’

  ‘It didn’t cost a life, anyway, it was the other way about. Your son’s alive, man. A thrashing’s not going to bring the watch back. And Miller can stand it.’

  My grandfather was home from the sea. I was safe. And I slipped into a warm sleep, unaware of the enormous debt owed to James Miller, boat-builder of St Monans, who’d been dressed for a funeral that day, fob watch and all. A debt my father sullenly reminded me of long afterwards. The calculation was easy, even for him. A son’s life, a gold watch. And I had escaped a thrashing, though the next time he administered one and I thought it was over, he breathed for a moment before starting again, standing over me gloating and snarling, And that’s for the bleeding watch! No justice in the world, then, but God’s blind hammer and an implacable little bully. But James Miller lost a time-piece – and gave me a lifetime in return.

  With my mother often putting in night shifts at the local telephone exchange in Anstruther and my father working by day and drinking by night, or vice versa, I was put in the care of old Leebie who, like the sibyl, had time on her hands. Nobody had ever worked out who exactly Leebie was – which was far from strange in a village of a thousand souls where inbreeding must have amounted to unconscious incest every now and then. Even Leebie herself didn’t know, or pretended not to. ‘Oh, I’m there or thereabouts on the family tree,’ was the most she came up with when questioned. Ironically it was Leebie who followed the branches better than anyone. She could quote you the dates and places and even times of the hatches, matches and dispatches, as she called them, the names of the forebears, the progeny who’d come and gone, the lines of descent, the cross-fertilization and cross-relationships.

  The task Leebie set herself was to bring me up proper, so she said, by putting me in perspective. ‘It’s high time you knew who you are,’ she told me, convinced that if I knew who I was, it would somehow confer on me the consciousness of how I should behave, and so save me from future thrashings. This genealogical tutelage she carried out either at the sewing-machine, her polished black shoes flying on the treadles, or more usually while knitting one of her long black Sunday scarves, the family line and the woollen comforter growing longer together, knit one purl one, as she sat there, patient and persistent as Penelope, hour by hour, waiting for no man, but determined to make a man out of a little boy.

  On my mother’s mother’s side she took me back six generations to seventeen ninety something, to a multitude of Marrs and Gays who had never moved more than a mile from St Monans and who had spawned shoals of local offspring, all bearing the same bewildering names as their forebears: William, Philip, David, Andrew, John; Helen, Christina, Elspeth, Margaret, Georgina, Jenny, Jean. And on my mother’s father’s side she reached back again into the black bag of the past, into a time unthinkable, and came out with a clutch of Alexander Scotts, one in every generation, who’d given my grandfather his name. The frightening thing was that she’d known them all, all the way back to that seventeen ninety something, before which was Adam, and all the way down to the last Alexander, my uncle Alec, born in 1928 and not yet out of his teens. William was the youngest, my uncle at seven, and the one who’d sworn at my baptism. My mother, Christina, was the eldest of the children of Margaret Marr Gay and Alexander Scott, and her sisters were Jenny and Georgina. Jenny had black hair, Georgina was fair and my mother was red. Alec was black and hairy and Billy was blond. Grandfather himself was still very dark. His spouse, as Leebie called my granny, was very grey. And then there was me, with my stupid English name that God didn’t recognize because it wasn’t in the bible. I was the son of Christina Scott and Christopher Rush – and of his line Leebie knew nothing at all and didn’t want to. ‘He doesn’t belong here,’ was all she said. ‘But all these other lines now, they come out of the sea, and that’s where you belong, my lad, just you remember that.’

  Then she would tell me the story of Mary Buek on the side of my grandfather – whose mother, Bridget Burk, had hailed from Dundee. Mary Buek was a nurse in Dundee, back again in the 1790s, and Leebie had never known her because she had died in 1854, but she’d known her daughter, Margaret Watson, who’d lived till 1892 – and that, for Leebie, was only yesterday.

  Always she started the story by asking for one of the pair of black-leaded cannonballs that sat on either side of the fireplace, so symmetrically placed that they looked like part of the decorative fittings of the grate, though I often initiated the narrative myself by bringing one over to her, carried with pride and difficulty to the chair where she sat smoking. Her long silky white hair was usually in a bun, but for some reason she let it down, combing it out for the story, and it came out yellow with nicotine, a weird contrast with the unblinking china-blue eyes and the chipped black teeth. She looked down at the ball, cast off the scarf she was knitting and took out the old bone comb.

  ‘A fair-sized small shot,’ she said, refilling her tiny white pipe. ‘A present from the Spaniards, though not the biggest shot that hit the Victory that day. But it was just a wee musket ball that did the worst damage.’

  Leebie struck another match and puffed. A coil of blue tobacco smoke hung round her head. Some of it drifted up to the blackened beams. The other wisps were sucked up the chimney by the draught from the fire. But her words stayed in the air like a fragrance, and the folk she told me about seemed to enter the room as she introduced them, one by one. Up the lum went the smoke, to fade into the stars – and dow
n came Mary Buek, like a wraith risen from her grave.

  Buek at least was the name on the gravestone in Kilrenny kirkyard, not much more than three miles away, but that was just the ignorance of one old local chiseller, according to Leebie. It should have read Burk and he’d put in an ‘e’ for an ‘r’, robbing her of the true sound of her immortality in an age when people still hung over the tombs and studied their stone pages. Well, you can’t always believe what you read, but Buek she became, reborn in stone, and stone is stronger than paper, so Buek she stays – at least until people stop remembering, and when will that be, eh?

  So Leebie’s talk drifted on.

  Mary Buek came down from Dundee and married a Cellardyke fisherman called Watson, Thomas Watson. He was press-ganged in 1797 and the jolly jack tars took Mary along too, mainly on account of her being a nurse. What could be better aboard a man-o’-war? So the pair of them became guests of His Majesty aboard HMS Triumphant, which took them to Leith. After that it was the high seas and the French wars. The century turned like a tide and lifted Thomas Watson to the position of bosun gunner on HMS Ardent, a line-of-battle ship with sixty-four guns. And it was below the decks of that ship, to the thunder of the guns, that their baby daughter Margaret was born, right in the thick of the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. Some birth that was, in the middle of that death-ridden bedlam, down in the cockpit, the bloody womb of the ship, delivered among the dead and dying. Margaret Watson’s cradle was a rolling man-o’-war that shivered and shook in the North Sea. Her lullaby was the iron song of cannonballs, the rending of timbers, the shrieks of mutilated men. Stranger still for all those suffering and doomed sailors, whose cries were filling the ship, to hear the wail of a new-born baby rising thinly into the world of terrors that they were just on the point of leaving.

  So then they were three. And the battle was a victory for Nelson. Their employers would have let them go after that but Thomas and Mary stayed in service for another five years until six months after Trafalgar, and the little girl stayed with them, knowing nothing much of the wide world except ships and sailors during all that time. Her lasting memory was of Trafalgar itself.

  Strange today to think that I was taught my first history lesson by one old lady who’d known another who’d been at the Battle of Trafalgar. It’s now the year 2005 and that battle was exactly two centuries ago. Impossible? No. I’m sixty as I write this. Leebie was born in the 1860s and the Trafalgar baby lived to the age of 91. Leebie was in her late twenties when Margaret Watson died – the dove-tailing of eras was far from tight – and she’d heard her talk about Trafalgar often enough.

  Margaret remembered the roaring and the rolling, the flashes of fire and clouds of smoke and the song of the guns among the shrieking beams. She remembered her mother standing with arms red to the elbows, helping the man with the shining blades who did such terrible things to the sailors. And she recalled their shouts, which Leebie repeated with stabbing actions of her pipe, the smoke curling out of her blackened mouth as she replicated the scene and gave the orders. Close up, there! Two points abaft the beam! Point-blank, now, point-blank! Fire, damn you, fire! And she remembered the man with the stars on his coat being brought down to the cockpit and laid out on some spare sails, where Captain Hardy kissed him. He asked for lemonade and wine and water, but he never finished it. The tide had gone out of his body and no sun or moon could bring it in again. Soon afterwards the ship burst out into a round of sweet cheers for the victory that matched its name. But the cheers withered almost as soon as they began. Everybody was thinking about the great sailor, stretched out on his bed of sails.

  What more fitting a bed to die on, for a seaman who’d stood beneath their billowing clouds through so many famous campaigns?

  It was Mary Buek who dressed the corpse and embalmed it for burial back in England. Nelson had asked not to be given to the waves. And so to the famous barrel of rum and the tapping of the Admiral, the sailors sucking the life-force out of their leader, imbibing his seamanship all the way home. As for the Watsons, they’d had enough action and adventure for a lifetime. They returned to Cellardyke where, with their prize-money, they opened up an ale-and-pie shop at the harbour head. Margaret Watson married a cooper and became Mrs Camble. She had a large family but she outlived every single one of them and lived on to tell her story a thousand times.

  ‘They’re all lying up there now in Kilrenny kirkyard,’ said Leebie. ‘I’ll take you one day and show you their headstones.’

  She never did, but I found them out myself long after Leebie was dead, and there they still stand.

  ERECTED

  BY MARGARET WATSON

  IN MEMORY OF HER HUSBAND

  JOHN CAMBLE 1801-1859

  ALSO

  MARGARET CAMBLE 1801-1892

  THREE OF THEIR CHILDREN LIE EAST OF THIS STONE

  That was the memorial I discovered first, and I knew that beneath the simple stone lay the baby of the sea-battle, now a bundle of old bones. Later, as a student, I inspected Scotland’s Census of 1856, and there, listed among all the familiar street names of Cellardyke houses – George Street, James Street, Dove Street – there she was: Margaret Watson, born HMS Ardent, 64-gun ship at sea, during Battle of Copenhagen, 2nd April 1801. And though I’d known it all already, it still came as a shock to see it so simply, so starkly, so officially recorded. And there I was, a child again, blowing away Leebie’s pipe-smoke and feeling the weight of the small shot that had found its way from a Spanish battleship to No. 16 Shore Road.

  The older stone always struck me with even more force by its matter-of-factness and understatement.

  ERECTED

  BY MARY BUEK

  IN MEMORY OF HER HUSBAND

  THOMAS WATSON MARINER

  CELLARDYKE

  DIED 17th DEC 1831 AGED 66

  ALSO OF HIS WIFE

  MARY BUEK WHO

  DIED 28th FEB 1854 AGED 77

  On the reverse side of the stone there was a simple epitaph:

  What though we wade in wealth or soar in fame,

  Earth’s highest station ends in ‘Here he lies.’

  When I first saw that stone I was a secondary school pupil at Waid Academy, Anstruther, and I was about to sit a final history exam as part of my Higher Leaving Certificate, so I had with me a copy of Keith Feiling’s A History of England. I lay down on the summer grass and leaned back against the epitaph, thumbing through the tome. One of Feiling’s sentences leaped out at me. ‘Few places are better known in England than the cockpit of the Victory.’

  How many in England knew about this simple Scottish headstone? Few places could be more obscure. The stone didn’t even carry a record, however brief, of the things the Watsons had done. Bosun gunner? Trafalgar? Nelson’s nurse? Not a mention, not the merest reference. Mariner, Cellardyke – that was it, a simple seaman, nothing more. That’s when I first realized that history in the long run is made up of people, and by people – not the Napoleons and the Nelsons but little people like the Watsons who’d been too busy living and dying to think about making history. That was for their leaders to worry about. The French marvelled at the superiority of the British naval gunnery when their own ships and guns were technically better. Some would say it took men like Nelson to work the witchcraft. Old Leebie took a different line, that gunners like Thomas Watson and women like Mary Buek were what made the difference. What did it matter for them now? People would pass by their stones and never know the greatness they had touched, and their own touch of greatness too. But Leebie made sure I knew it and that I’d not be blinded by the icon of English naval history. ‘Your father’s an English sailor,’ she grimaced at me, sucking the last of the pipe, ‘just another able-bodied tarry-breeks. But that’s not where you’re sprung from. You go back through your mother to a time when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron.’

  ‘What were the women made of?’ I asked.

  ‘The women were made of sterner stuff, and that’s all you need to know. And
now you know just who you are.’

  So then I knew who I was: the scion of a female forerunner who’d sunk the world’s greatest sailor in a butt of grog, to be reborn in every drop, in every mouth, all the way to England.

  How much effect Leebie’s family slant on history had on my behaviour is hard to calculate. But there was no doubting the efficacy of her other method of bringing me into line. She threatened me with the Mars. The Mars was a floating borstal, a grey hulk to which bad boys were sent instead of going to jail. I never saw the Mars but Leebie let me know whenever it happened to be anchored just off the harbour, which was whenever I was threatening to misbehave, and the night was dark and the curtains drawn. It was then that I hovered anxiously between the devil on the chimney and the Mars on the deep blue sea.

  On the Mars 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 skin, like the elbows of old women, and their hands were sodden lumps of carbolic soap, soggy and scarlet from the dawn-to-dusk immersions. They were made 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 that they used for the flogging. The Mars 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 in chains, and the wobble-eyed crabs came and linked claws round their necks, fringed their raw wrists and tore off their toes one by one.

  By this time Leebie had left juvenile correction methods so far behind as to convince me. I could picture those living necklaces and bracelets, and I knew exactly what it would be like to have no toes. An old man called Tom Tarvit used to hobble up the hill 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, dripping from the nose and drooling from the mouth.