Hellfire and Herring Read online

  Here my grandfather had bought a house further back from the harbour than Shore Road but with a high windiness which gave out on a gull’s-eye view of the village and the whole of the firth. A clutter of red rooftops jostled crazily down to the shore, their chimneys sparkling in the sun or puffing through the winter storms. The firth flashed its fire at us. Or we watched its grey glimmerings all the way from Earlsferry on the west side, up past Pittenweem and Anstruther on the east. But always it was on the move, a fluid kaleidoscope of sound and colour. Infiltrated in this way, even the graveyards seemed not to stand still. All along the coast the village steeples linked land and sea and sky, fish and fishermen and fishers-of-men. Like forefingers jutting from sturdy fists, they pointed at God, somewhere up there. And to the south and east the big blue folds of firth and firmament were pinned together by three blue brooches – the May Island, the Bass Rock, from which I’d been brought in error, and Berwick Law on the other side of the world.

  The house was actually two houses, which for some reason they called the old house and the new house, though both were ancient. The old was separated from the new by the transe, a narrow funnel two feet wide which led to the yard, and through which the north-east wind whistled like an arrow, hitting you like Harold at Hastings, Leebie said, giving you an instant cold in the eye and blurred vision for a week.

  On the east side of the transe was the new house, lived in by the whole family. The other house was mainly used for old lumber, torn nets and broken creels, except for one room which was occupied solely by my great-grandfather. It contained a stove, a bed, a table and chair, and a small desk in the sea-facing window, on which his huge pulpit-bible was always laid out. An old sea-chest stood in front of this desk, serving as a seat. This he called his ‘headquarters’.

  The door of the new house opened on to what we called ‘The Room’, first off the hallway. This was my grandmother’s holy-of-holies, cold and clean as a new gutting knife and joyless as an unbaited hook. Only at funerals was I allowed into this special room, which nobody but granny ever went into anyway, except sometimes Leebie, who sat there in the cold, revolving her memories, and Georgina, to play the old piano. The doctor was always taken in there first, whenever he came, and the minister and the undertaker; once a man in grey who my mother said was a lawyer – and they all carried death and depression in their terrible black bags, their soft white faces and hands. They sat there among the polished oak and cold brass, sipping tea and rehearsing for their coffins. Helping them along, staring at them from dresser and sideboard and mantelpiece, were my rusted brown ancestors in their heavy gilt frames, grimly assuring me that life was a deadly business. As I peered through the keyhole of the Room on these state occasions, the black-clothed visitors seemed to stiffen and grow tarnished and brown, merging with the gowned ghosts, the faded frock-coated phantoms in their frames, disappearing into the dimension of the dead, into Leebie’s unthinkable history.

  These were the Davids and Andrews and Alexanders, the Christinas and Elspeths and Jeans. Only one of them drew me like a moth to her pale flame – a young bride, sad and slender as a white willow, almost weeping, it seemed to me, on her wedding day. Her husband had such gigantic whiskers – how could they possibly kiss? He carried the commandments in his eye and a bible under his arm. His other hand grasped his young wife’s with an inflexible caress, and with her free fingers she held a single brown rose to her bosom – tenderly, but so unlike Mrs Guthrie, with her floury fingers and flashing glasses and the apples in her dress, apples resting on the counter.

  The young bride’s breasts were buttoned up to the neck. An invisible sea was breaking on her beautiful brow. I touched her with my nose, wiping the breath from the flower, the rose that had been red on her wedding night. If only she could have known the ecstasy I might have given her, had I sailed backwards through the frames of generations on my grandfather’s boat, saving her from life with that dreadful beard, that bible. But what would I do when I got there? What was the ecstasy that existed between man and woman, that made my mother sigh some sleepless nights? And what did the bible mean when it said that the sons of God went in unto the daughters of men?

  ‘Come out of that room this minute, you young rascal!’

  She was always there whenever I went back for her, always awaiting the rescue that could never be, for ever a bride and still to be plucked, her petals not yet fallen. And that stern sea beating on her brow. But I passed her by behind the closed door nearly every day, going straight through to the kitchen where everybody lived, eating and drinking, shouting and singing, telling stories and falling asleep and falling out, year by yesteryear.

  Except that it wasn’t a kitchen really, it was the heart of a ship, with its dark driftered beams brushing my grandfather’s head, its sun-slanting, small-paned windows that let in the light but beat off the rains, and its winter-thick walls in which we were cribbed and cabined off from all the winds that the firth threw at us. Long long since, my grandfather said, in the long agos before the Flood, some bewintered boat had been caught up by the biggest wave in the world and flung right up on to the braehead. The sails had been torn away, the masts toppled over, the hull splintered and stove in. But the mariners, unwilling to abandon the ship that had been their home, had built this house around its knotted heart of oak, and we had inherited it.

  The engine-room was the hearth, the heart of the ship that never stopped beating. The first sounds would be grandmother at the big black-leaded grate, worrying it into life, raking out yesterday’s white ash, blowing the cold embers back into being. A few sticks thrown on and soon it was crackling again without having to be relit. She would never let it go out, superstitiously equating its pulses with the family’s, and she told me proudly that it was the same fire as had burned in Epp’s house, and in the house before that, the house she and my grandfather were first married in. Each time they moved home, grandfather had scooped up the glowing embers of the very last fire and run with them in a bucket to the new house. She made the doors of the grate gleam with Zebrite and she polished its knobs and rails with Brasso. She kept the blackened kettle on the boil. It was my grandmother who first taught me to find faces in the fire, golden long-haired heroes and ashen-faced old men, flickering sprites and soldiers on the march. And when everyone was at home there was a circle of ten faces looking into those other faces and listening to the heart’s red beating against the white and black beatings of winter. I have no memory of my father sitting there – he was never part of that circle.

  Everything in the kitchen had its appointed place. Hanging from hooks in the low black beams, the various mugs and pitchers constellated my childhood, the pots and pans, the toasting-fork, the brass tankard, the potato-masher, small handlines of brown twine rolled round bits of kindling – and the odds and ends of clothing that were put on and off at the last minute by the adults in their comings and goings, my grandfather’s cap on a nail nearest the door.

  Between the kitchen and the Room a steep staircase wound its way dimly up to the bedrooms, where the big ones of the family, all beards and bosoms, slept out those few desperately short hours of their lives when they were not working or worrying or putting food into those busy mouths that murmured endlessly in front of the fire.

  The back of the house faced the sea. It had a paved yard with a coal-cellar, a barking boiler and a gear-loft built over the wash-house. And it was the wash-house that was the scene of the most furious activity in the life of the family. My mother lit the fire beneath the washing boiler, and when the water in the copper began to boil and bubble, the whites were thrown in – the flannel shirts and vests, the long johns for men on stilts, and nightgowns for spare sails; shifts and sea-boot stockings, sheets and slips and pillowslips; and here and there the scantier things worn by the young aunts, who snatched them up with squeals and blushes, throwing them in quickly to prevent their brothers running round the yard with them on their heads. And there we all stood, knee-deep in our own dirty washing
, drowning under the warm waves of bleach, winnowed by sunlight on the outside walls.

  At the end of the long herring seasons the huge washings of heavy woollens and beddings took place and every woman in the house seemed to be washing every day for a fortnight. Set upon set of working clothes piled up in an aromatic jumble – thick brown kersey trousers and oiled-wool jerseys, barked jumpers and reefer coats, all the boat’s bedclothes in which grandfather and his sons had slept hard in their bunks in the nights broken by sea and herring. They came into the yard and emptied their kit-bags upside down on the stones, drawing the tie-ropes through the brass eyelets, shaking the bags upside down until everything that had suffered the direst cruelty of the sea, from woollen hats to pepper-and-salt socks, came tumbling out in a sudden salt-stiffened bundle to be dumped straight into the dolly barrel.

  Leebie directed operations and she and my mother and my aunts stood round the tub in a striving circle, armed with their wooden dolly sticks. They were like giant potatomashers and Billy assured me that this is exactly what they were. Sometimes they sailed to South America, he said, and there the potatoes were bigger than your head. You needed a club this size to mash them up. Then you brought them back with you and they did for the washing. ‘We cut them from Norwegian pines,’ he added, ‘deep in the fiords.’ And as they thudded up and down in the barrel, beating the brine out of the blankets and three weeks’ body-sweat from the clothes, the women were women no longer, but the white Lapland witches of Leebie’s stories, singing and thumping in a circle of suds, scarlet-armed, their red faces like rising moons over a foaming sea.

  ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles,’ sang auntie Jenny, suds on her cheeks and in her hair, foam flying from her as she floated round the yard like a ballerina.

  I’m forever blowing bubbles,

  Pretty bubbles in the air,

  They fly so high, nearly reach the sky,

  Then like a dream they fade and die.

  My grandmother stood watching out of the grey prison of her asthma as her three daughters heaved and sweated in the glory of their youth, their dresses drenched and clinging to their bosoms, hair flying in the bright wind, blowing bubbles like mermaids, just as Jenny sang. My mother wielded the scrubbing brush on the big aluminium board, larding the dirtier linen with monster yellow bars of Lifebuoy soap. And Leebie worked the mangle, rinsing and wringing with arms made of anchor-rope – she was tough and long and slippery as an old conger-eel, was old Leebie.

  ‘All hands on deck!’ she would shout on wash days, and the yard at once became warm and wet and wild with female life. Soon the pinned-up sheets would be walloping in the big-bellied wind, carrying us like sails over the roofs of all the other houses, into the far-flung foam of the clouds.

  But it was the garret that was my favourite part of the ship. I stowed away up there, hidden among the piles of nets that belonged to grandfather’s boat. There were over seventy of them. He used to say that if he shot his whole fleet of nets together he’d have fifty million meshes in the water, waiting for the fish to swim into them and drown.

  ‘And if I had a herring come into every mesh,’ he said, ‘how rich a man do you think I’d be?’

  ‘Rich enough to retire?’ I asked.

  ‘What would I have to live for without the herring to fish?’ he said. ‘It’s what I was born for.’

  All his best gear was kept in the garret: coils of net ropes and messenger ropes beneath the benches; canvas buoys and green glass floats hung from the rafters; herring baskets and barrels stacked in piles; lobster creels, partan creels, lanterns, dead-eyes and grappling irons. There were all kinds of lines too – small lines and great lines with their huge hooks that went down hundreds of fathoms, and sprools and jigs that sank into the sea unbaited but came up jerking with fish. Boxes of pirns, corks, mending needles; bottles of oil, tins of alum and cutch – and a great kist crammed with old sea-clothes. Oilskins hung from nails round the walls, the yellow forms of old fishermen, vanished heads haunting the empty sou’westers, thigh-length leather boots standing strangely upright, though the sea-legs had long gone that had steadied them on slippery decks. And across the rafters lay the giant cod, every drop of juice squeezed out of them by the June suns of the season past.

  On summer days, when the high blue heat came in through the skylight, I lay back on piles of half-mended herring nets and closed my eyes. I could smell them, the spirits of the sea, and those strange wraiths of the deep that they talked about round the fire. They were everywhere, lingering in the lobster-creels, flitting in and out of the wickerwork through which the sunlight waved and winked like the sea itself, coiling into nostril and eye, salting my drowned brain that had so nearly stopped ticking. Even the shiny hooks that had hung deep down in the water, so many fathoms out of sight, had come up from the seabed flickering with stories, waiting to be taken off and fed on like fish. When it rained I put on the giant oilskins, opened the skylight, stuck out my sou’westered head from the wheelhouse roof and steered the ship straight into the blur that lay beyond the harbour – till down in the galley the cook called me to come below and take my tea. They made a makeshift bed for me up there, where I sometimes slept when my mother and father were working night shifts, and by night on my mattress, lying among nets, the rafters shivered in black waves, the dried cod came to supple life, swam in white shoals through my sleep, and the yellow oilskins were the drowned fisherfolk of the family past, floating in the night-sea of my dreams like golden ghosts.

  We were a tight-knit crew. My grandfather was the skipper of the house, and the house followed the fortunes of his steam drifter, the Venus, as it breasted the seasons in search of herring, the mainstay of our lives. Nights of hard hauling streaked my grandfather’s arms, the blue veins standing out like knotted string, and lay in the tiredness of his eyes. Days he tossed back like spray from his head. The years broke over him as though he would never be done but would keep on sailing into the skyline. No matter where you go, he used to say, there’s always a horizon – in front of you, behind you, all around.

  How can I describe him, lock him in a frame of words?

  He looked like a Spaniard, my grandfather, the midnight blue of his hair streaked with foam. His skin was burnished by the burning suns of the high seas, the Bay of Biscay breaking in his eyes. They were eyes that held the lure and lore of the long horizons. The sea sounded in his mouth, in the tall lunge of his walk. Or it lay flat calm as he sat at peace, taking his sore sleep, upright in his chair. The big bones of his chest and shoulders showed up through the tightness of his navy-blue guernsey. Shrunk in the washes of all seasons that ever were, its sleeves came up over his knobbly wrists, and his elbows shone through. Two mother-of-pearl buttons fastened his jersey at the side of the neck, where he always wore his loose-knotted kerchief, dark blue with white spots. The trousers were two dark waterfalls plunging to his stockinged soles. In winter he stuck his huge feet on the fender and puffed dreamily at his rolled cigarettes, his stockings steaming away furiously, a raggedness of holes and darns. I touched them and they burned my fingers. But he never noticed. His eyes were lost in the red embers of that deep remembering that was always his.

  Or he strode out like a Viking in his thigh-length leather boots that took him across the seven seas in one of his giant strides. He spread the black honeycomb of his nets wide on the waters, filled them with the salt sweetness of the sea, lifted them dripping with moonlight and fish. He came back smelling of tar and tangle, saltness and sun, sea winds and Woodbine and bottled beer. Then he lay down in his box bed, and the tides turned him in his sleep, the sea rolling his cigarettes for him as he dreamed and dozed.

  It was grandfather who took me on my first teetering walks. He bestrode the burn in its foaming winter spate. Or I stared through the huge straddling arch of his legs in rainy July, his outstretched hands reaching to the other side for the ears of winter barley. He rubbed the grain between brown millstone palms, gently blew away the chaff, and urged me to eat. W
e walked on then, following the clamouring water, chewing in silence, the earth freshness in our mouths. I wondered if the farmer would be angry if he knew we were eating out of his field.

  ‘The hell with the farmer,’ grandfather said. ‘The disciples ate corn on a Sunday, didn’t they? Straight out of the field – and so did Jesus.’

  There were times when he took me down on his shoulders, deep into the belly of his boat, where the dead fish lay in stilled shining legions, open-jawed with the horror of drowning in air, the silent protests emanating from a thousand accusing mouths and astonished eyes. The dead in the kirkyard swam at me again in a dense shoal. How awful to be a fish, or to be where old Epp was now – to be underneath the floor of the world, beneath the waterline, to be in the black wave of earth or sea, where the blind worm and the slippery eel never saw the sun. I shuddered, and grandfather took me into the little cabin.

  It was full of men. Bulky as bears, they hunched round the tiny table in a red-faced circle, sipping scalding tea through their whiskers and laughter. Half a dozen half-pint mugs clattered on the wooden board, slammed down by scarred, knotted knuckles. Grandfather took me over to his bunk and showed me where he slept. A space too small for a man like him – a space between dark wooden boards, with blankets stitched together as though they were a shroud. So this was where he slept while his vessel drifted – in this narrow underwater coffin. But as I looked again at the bunk, I noticed the small strands of shag scattered about the pillow. My grandfather would lie smoking his cigarettes in death, rolling and puffing at his ease, while the old earth itself rolled like a ship and sped on into time through the dark blue seas of space. And when the good old earthship anchored at heaven’s gate, journey’s end, grandfather would sit up and nip out his cigarette, sticking it behind his ear. He would throw out a mooring line, stretch his legs, take two mother-of-pearl buttons from the pearly gates to replace the ones he’d lost from his guernsey last winter. Then he’d walk in and ask God for a light.