Hellfire and Herring Read online

  When he was a boy he had a tame seagull, he told me, which he’d taken from the nest when it was young, feeding it on fish-scraps and crabs until it grew. After he let it go, it kept coming back to perch on his chimney-pot every morning and wake up everybody in the street, waiting to see him on his way to school, landing on his shoulder to be fed. It came to the schoolroom window, distracting the class and turning the schoolmaster purple. He tried to wring its neck and received a vicious pecking, almost losing an eye. Grandfather received a terrible thrashing. Then old George came up and thrashed the schoolmaster and took grandfather off to sea, where the gull accompanied the boat, sitting on the mast day and night like the albatross.

  ‘I could shout out loud in the middle of the ocean,’ he said, ‘and it would appear out of a clear blue sky and land on my arm. It made me feel like a god.’

  After that I longed for a baby seagull, but they could be obtained only from the May Island, and I had to make do with a sulky jackdaw with clipped wings. Apart from gobbling crusts it did nothing, according to my great-grandfather, but sit there in splendid black silence, brooding miserably on the sins of the world. Uncle Billy came one day with scissors to clip its tongue too and make it talk. Operation completed, he lectured it relentlessly.

  Nebuchadnezzar the king of the Jews

  Sold his wife for a pair of shoes.

  It paid not the slightest attention, glaring back at him with an expression of bored contempt. It could stare out anyone, even old George.

  ‘You’d be likelier to get a word out of a bloody worm!’ snorted Billy, throwing back into the garden the wriggling morsels on which the bird refused to be fed.

  Even when he liberated it from its rabbit-hutch on the clothes-pole, it refused to accept its freedom but stayed with us to become a source of nuisance, and eventually of outrage, raiding the paper bags of morning baps which Mr Guthrie, with unfailing expertise, hurled on to doorsteps and into open vestibules, standing up in the delivery cart while his horse ambled up the street without stopping. The neighbours began to swear murder. To save its life, old George came up to collect it. He walked more than a mile upstream to the burn woods, the jackdaw under his jacket, and left it there to work for its living at last.

  ‘And if not, God will provide for it,’ he said.

  Within less than a week, to everybody’s astonishment, the wingless wonder was back, sitting in the middle of the garden, one eye cocked expectantly at the house. I sacrificed my morning roll, dipping it in milk and taking it out in a saucer. My father had just come back from night shift and turned ugly with rage. He threw down his bag and stumped out of the back door, leaving it swinging. By the time I reached the door the bird was in his fist. It had no time even for a squawk. One vicious twist and I was looking at a bloodied pile of feathers, twitching on the grass, and a head pitched at a pathetic angle, one eye still cocked absurdly at the house. My father stormed back indoors.

  ‘It’s your neck that needs wringing!’ he shouted at me. ‘You brought the bloody thing here in the first place! It was you that wanted it!’

  And he started cramming his breakfast into his mouth. He always wolfed his food. I went outside again and looked at the uneaten saucer of sops, sitting next to the mangled remains. My mother was dabbing her eyes.

  ‘It didn’t ask for much,’ she said. ‘What were a couple of crusts of bread a day, for pity’s sake?’

  I ran to her, hid my face in her dress, and filled up with black hatred.

  ‘It was a sin.’ Old George made this grim pronouncement when he heard of it. ‘That bird came back like the dove to the ark. And not a sparrow falls without your heavenly father knowing it. He’ll have something to say to your father, you can take my word for that!’

  That was the only time I ever saw my great-grandfather up in Inwearie Street. Generally old George kept to his one room in the old part of grandfather’s house, separated from the rest of the family by a streaming river of wind. There he lived on among broken creels and coils of rotten rope, deep into his eighties. He was a bible-boatman, old Geordie, who had given up the fishing in his youth to go to the whaling, and was now, as he put it, voyaging to eternity.

  ‘The scriptures are my charts,’ he said, ‘the star of Bethlehem my guiding light, a broken Christ my figurehead.’

  He never looked back a single day, rarely remembered things, as grandfather did, seldom referred to the past, unless it was the biblical past. His eyes were set on heaven, his haven.

  And he never altered his gear. Every day he put on his old pilot-rig of navy blue – coarse trousers, waistcoat and reefer coat, polished black shoes and cheese-cutter cap set squarely on his head, though he scarcely needed to care for sun, wind or rain, for he sat on the old sea-chest most of the day, at the low table facing the sea, his back to the door. His arms were spread out stiffly on either side of the great open bible into which he stared for hours, the pearls of wisdom forming in the oyster-beds of that old deep-sea brain, the lips clammed shut behind the spiky silvery beard.

  But though he was an iceberg of a man, nine-tenths of him sunk in the scriptures, the tip of his nose stayed alert to whatever was going on around him and he had a wild beast’s sense of hearing.

  ‘Is that you, laddie?’

  I stood still as a stone among the heaps of old nets, baskets and creels that littered the room just under his. I was a magic fish, flitting among all those meshes, too subtle to be caught.

  ‘Come on up now, I can hear you breathing.’

  I went slowly up the bare wooden steps.

  ‘What is it, Gramps?’

  There was no need to ask. It was the same every time. I went and stood by his side, scenting his ninety years, near enough, and more than seventy of them spent at sea. He rose without stiffness and went over to the stove, where a black pot of broth was simmering. He dipped the ladle twice, filling the deep dish to the brim with rich steaming soup. Then he jabbed a large spoon into the bowl where it stood like a sword.

  ‘Eat,’ he commanded.

  ‘I’ve had my dinner, Gramps.’

  ‘Eat them up,’ said the stern voice, ‘they’re good for you – they’ll stick to your ribs.’

  Soup was always plural in the mouths of the old folk. I ate as I was ordered, while he watched every mouthful with a kind of grim satisfaction. Then he pushed the plate to the side, lifted me on to his knee without tenderness, and began his sermon: Jonah and the Whale.

  ‘Do you know what size a whale is?’ he asked when he had finished reading the text.

  ‘As big as this room?’

  ‘Bigger.’

  ‘As big as the whole house?’

  ‘Bigger.’

  I shut my eyes tight and tried to picture the leviathan.

  ‘Go into Miller’s boatyard,’ the voice commanded, ‘and stand beneath one of the big new boats they’re building there now. Look up at it from where you’re standing. That will give you some idea of the size of a whale and what its belly can swallow.’

  I saw again the men in the boatshed, moving minutely, like worms in the great curving coffins that they built about themselves day by day – till the voice brought me back out of the mouth of the whale. Old George’s eyes shifted to the window and seemed to touch the blue horizon.

  ‘A whale can make the sea boil like that broth over there. A whale can lift a ship on its shoulder, crack it open like an egg with a toss of its head. It can deliver it to the deeps with a single whack of its tail, never to come up again. That’s just one of the things a whale can do.’

  There was something of Herman Melville in George’s delivery. He claimed to have met the great author, whose grandfather was buried just a few miles from where we lived, in an upland graveyard at Carnbee, overlooking the blue sea. But George needed neither the bible nor Melville to tell him what a whale could do to a ship.

  And what a whale could do to a man was even worse. To be swallowed like Jonah – imagine passing through those curtain jaws and them swishing
shut behind you, ushering you into the awful underwater theatre of your own death, where your last act is played out in darkness. Imagine that darkness, deepening, ever deepening, as the great fish plunges downwards to the bottom of the sea, and you inside its belly, with the oceans of the world roaring round you, like being in a long thundering train in a never-ending tunnel. And as you roll and slither in your despair among the half-digested carcasses caught in those walls of flesh, some of them that are still alive even tear at you in your last agonies, though you are unable to make out, thank God, what monsters they are that rip into your flesh.

  ‘It was disobedience to God’s will that put Jonah in the way of the whale,’ the old man stormed at me. ‘And that should teach you to obey and to fear the Lord with all thy might, and with all thy heart, and with all thy soul.’

  But it hadn’t always been that way with old George, my mother told me. He had turned to God in his age. As a young man he’d lived wild and wicked at the whaling. She told me the stories that grandfather had told her, pressing them to my lips like secret kisses at bedtime, warning me not to let on to George that I knew anything of his wild days without the Lord.

  The best story was about one of his drinking episodes. In a public house in Stromness, just back from the Arctic whaling, he placed bets with an Icelander and a Dane that he could outdrink the two of them put together. Mug after frothing mug they lined up on the bar in two rows, one for George and the other for his opponents to share. They drank them down doggedly, desperate men glaring at one another dead in the eyes, searching for a glimpse of weakness, the bolting blue madness of despair. At last young George made his move.

  ‘I’m tired of playing boys’ games,’ he said. ‘To the cellars!’ There he bought a barrel of ale for each man, and they lay down on the floor, the three of them, side by side, and turned on the taps. The flow was slow but steady. Their eyes bulged and their fists clenched, nostrils dilating. Their feet went rigid. Only their throats worked convulsively.

  The Icelander was the first to go. He rolled over suddenly and started vomiting. The other two carried on, lying a little apart, yet locked in a terrible struggle, each determined to prove himself the drinker rather than the drunkard. The changing bets flew round the closing circle of men, the odds altering according to the slightest flicker of expression in the faces of the prostrate giants. Sovereigns, crowns and krona jingled in sweating fists, and the heads of kings and queens of the northern hemisphere were set at odds.

  It was over without warning. The Dane’s stomach ruptured suddenly and he drowned and died where he lay, in a torrent of blood and beer. The young George calmly stood up, all eyes fixed on him. And with his head a red expanding balloon, he walked back to his ship. He had drunk enough, he said, to float it all the way to Baffin Bay.

  ‘He was a knocker-out,’ my mother said simply. ‘Every man was afraid of him. He just laid them all low.’

  My bible-punching great-grandfather – a knocker-out of men. I shut my eyes tight again, trying to fuse the sedate, stern-jawed old scripturalist and the ale-swilling giant of the Davis Straits.

  Only once did the savage and the saint flash together in one picture. That was the day the Jehovah’s Witness came to the door. It was a Sunday, after church, and everybody was at home when the knock came.

  ‘See who’s there, would you, Kiffer?’

  This was as far as I’d got in pronouncing my own name, much to my father’s irritation, but it had become my accepted alias. On the doorstep stood a man grinning widely behind a pair of glittering glasses.

  ‘Do you want to buy a copy of The Watchtower?’ he asked.

  ‘No thanks,’ my grandfather said, coming up behind me and shutting the door.

  The man’s boot got in first. I looked down at it, beautifully polished and black.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind letting me in I’d be glad to explain what it’s all about – in the name of the Lord.’

  Grandfather opened the door wide again, letting in the last half dozen words.

  ‘In the name of the Lord? I think you’d better see my father,’ he said.

  He turned to me, his eyes twinkling.

  ‘On you go, lad, take the man over to the old house, will you?’

  I led him up the old wooden steps while he patted my head, humming a hymn happily to himself. He knocked with his leather-gloved hand on the blistered door. Behind it sat old George in his Sunday silence, steeped in the scriptures up to his lips, the only part of him that moved, murmuring the words to the sea-fronted windows, pondering the prophets, nodding all to himself. There was no answer to the first knock, so the glove knocked again. George didn’t like to be disturbed on a Sunday. I turned the handle and went in.

  The old one half turned in his chair and saw the man standing behind me. His eyes were chips of ice.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘I wondered if you’d like to buy a copy of The Watchtower, sir?’

  Old George moved faster than I’d ever seen him move before. He sprang at the man like a lion, seizing him by the lapels of his raincoat, drawing him up close to his bristly jaws so that their eyebrows nearly touched.

  ‘How much?’ he spat.

  ‘Sixpence.’

  The man’s voice shook with fear.

  ‘Sixpence!’ roared George. ‘You want me to give you sixpence, do you, for your own pathetic, perverted little brand of the bible?’

  The man’s arms dropped limply to his sides and all his pamphlets tumbled to his feet, littering the outside steps all the way down in a holy river. My great-grandfather had him by the throat.

  ‘Have you ever read the bible?’ he sneered.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, sir, many times. And if you’ll just …’

  ‘What are the first words of Isaiah, Chapter 55?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir, I mean, I can’t think.’

  ‘Think?’ leered George. ‘So you have to think, do you? Well, think now!’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘You can’t remember!’

  George’s teeth were bared and his beard bristled with rage.

  ‘Well I’ll remember for you!’

  He jabbed at the ceiling with his forefinger, his arm straight as a steeple.

  ‘Ho! Everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy, and eat!’

  He let his victim go but remained with arm aloft, a magnificent ruin, dwarfing him, his finger still stabbing the sky like a spire.

  ‘How can you have the brass neck to come to my door demanding money for preaching the scriptures, when scripture itself expressly forbids it?’

  He was breathing quickly through his nostrils. The man in the raincoat twitched his mouth into a quick smile.

  ‘Isaiah didn’t have any overheads,’ he said.

  The desperate joke failed. George spun the man round, gripped him by his starched collar and the seat of his trousers, and trundled him down the steps, flinging him out into the street. Every member of the family was standing there awaiting the expected exit, doubled up and splitting their sides – all except my grandmother, who was hiding inside the house for the shame of it, she said. George looked at them all laughing, but the anger never left his face. He harried the fleeing figure with his rage.

  ‘And if you dare darken my door again I’ll break your bloody neck!’

  The seller of pamphlets, bereft of his wares, hurried even faster on his way.

  ‘Just count yourself lucky this was the Lord’s day! If it hadn’t been the Sabbath I’d have thrown you off the pier!’

  And he stormed back up the steps to his room without a single word to any of us.

  Cold porridge he was, old George, the fires of his youth burnt out of him long ago. When I wanted comfort and my mother was not at home, I went to my grandmother. Out of her grey frailty she doled kindness and warmth as if she had nothing else to live for.

  Asthma was her curse. It shackled her to the house all
day long. It was a chain you could hear rattling inside her, a chain forged from gaspings and wheezings and wild little cries. Some days it kept her in her chair for hours at a time, head bowed, hand over her eyes, her shoulders shaking, the drowning going on in her mouth as she battled for breath like a spent fish.

  When she was a girl of twenty her father died at sea on the way home from Yarmouth. There was nothing to warn the welcoming family that the skipper lay dead in his boat. So when she heard that it was coming into harbour, she ran down to welcome him, waiting on the pier for the presents he always brought back at the end of the season. But it was a body draped in oilskins that was brought ashore and given to her. She fled home with her grief from the sea, shut herself in the cellar and threw herself face down on an old chaff mattress which had lain there for years. There she cried herself to sleep and lay till night, not answering the door, till they had to break it down and carry her into the house. Fever blazed through her for a week and when she came out of it her father was already buried. For a month or more she could scarcely walk and her health was ruined, the doctor said. She had been a prey to asthma ever since. When I was born she was barely fifty. Now I realize that she always looked eighty.

  But a lifetime of illness did not make her indifferent to our aches and ailments. She was an expert on all the old homely cures that couldn’t be bought from the chemist and which she prepared herself in patient stages, stripping the seasons of their offerings, for which Leebie was sent out. Leebie came back from obscure fields and humble hedgerows with scourings of ditches, baskets brimful with rose-hips and cowslips and hawthorns, dog roses and dandelions and poppies. Rarer scatterings were identified only by their efficacy or otherwise. ‘I used that last year and it helped your uncle Alec’s catarrh.’ Whole seasons were laid to rest. Like the summery dust from butterflies’ wings, they faded and fell into a fine powder in a blue-check cloth on the floor, encouraged by granny’s pale sickle-bent presence – a waning moon by the mantelpiece, beneath which the mixtures matured. There was one which she called her all-purpose mixture. After it was boiled and distilled came the devil-may-care stage when almost anything could go in. ‘The rest is just for taste,’ she said, adding honey and vinegar and lemon, quince and crab-apple jelly, bruised sugar-candy and oil of sweet almonds, and pouring in port and old plum juice and rum and green ginger. This was the panacea, to be taken four times a day, no matter what you had or how bad you had it, or even if you only thought you were going to get it.