Hellfire and Herring Read online

  So she cared for her family by instinct and old world country faith, but she never took a drop of her concoctions herself, placing all her trust instead in the prescriptions which the doctor scribbled out for her on his frequent visits. She shook her head admiringly at the appalling scrawl left in Latin and black ink on the mantelpiece, saying how ‘awful clever’ he must be that nobody could make head nor tail of his spiderwork, and how this one was sure to work, to help her heart beat its murmurs and her lungs allow her a little more air.

  They seldom did. But I ran down to Bett’s the chemist twice a week for her medicine and her library books, much to old Bett’s consternation. He passed the preparations in their dark brown bottles over the counter to me as if he were placing arsenic and antimony, mercury and lead, the complete Crippen’s compendium all at once into my five-year-old hands. I reached up for the package, but still he held on to it, as if reluctant to let it go, looking fearfully into my face as he finally relinquished his hold.

  ‘Don’t drink it, now, whatever you do! For God’s sake don’t drink it!’

  I handed him last week’s library books and he let me have two or three others, all modern romances, first skimming the contents carefully for the passage where Gloria lay back in the bracken and Bob placed his burning kisses on her lips. Why did she lie there and get burned? It made no sense at all and I could see even upside down that p. 109 of The Crimson Room was a problem. Mr Bett was an elder of the Old Kirk and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of what each of his customers had already borrowed.

  ‘Don’t read them now, will you? For God’s sake don’t stop and read them. Are you reading yet?’

  And he followed me anxiously to the door.

  ‘Run all the way home now!’

  I looked back and saw his worried hands stroking his red chin. The chemist had a highly inflamed face. Perhaps he had been the victim of burning kisses. Or had drunk one dose too many of his own medicines.

  ‘Well, and what did Jockie Bett have to say?’ asked my grandmother. Unable to go out, she was always eager for the slightest snippet of news.

  ‘He said not to drink the medicine – and not to read p. 109.’

  And everybody laughed.

  Leebie was the only one who did not approve of grandmother’s potions, though she dutifully did the fieldwork. In the unwritten law of Leebie’s medical lore, there was only one sure cure for anything: the kaolin poultice. If you’d lost a leg, Leebie would put a pot on to boil and offer her poultice as a cure for amputation. Doubtless if you applied it for long enough the leg would simply grow back. The trouble was that everything in her repertoire involved heat.

  ‘It’s got to be scalding hot,’ she said grimly.

  As the water came to the boil, the tin of kaolin bubbled like a volcano. An aunt or uncle guarded the door to stop me making a break for it, while Leebie spooned out the steaming grey lava, smearing it over large squares of lint with a kitchen knife, as though it were for eating. I blew on it frantically.

  ‘Stop that, you rascal!’ she roared. ‘It’s got no good in it if it isn’t piping. Take off his shirt!’

  Kicking and howling, I was held down by a ring of hands, while Leebie held the dressing across both palms, preparing to slam it on my chest, to be followed by another across my back and round my wheezing ribs, to beat off the coughs and colds, the boils and blisters and bouts of fever.

  ‘Lay it on canny, for pity’s sake,’ pleaded grandfather. ‘It’ll take the boy’s skin off like that.’

  ‘Don’t be soft in the head, man. Would you rather drown slowly or all at once?’

  ‘I’d rather not drown at all at your hands.’

  ‘Away you go back to your boat!’

  And she slapped it on like a bricklayer throwing his mortar, a dead-eyed doctoring that had me drumming my heels on the table for thirty seconds while the flames engulfed me. But before a minute was up, there came the inexpressible relief of that barely bearable warmth which took half a day to dull down, by which time the squares of lint under shirt and jumper had lost their adhesiveness and the poultices had slid down to a rumpled clamminess encircling the waist. But for half a day you were a schoolboy hero, everybody wanting to sit beside you, even the girls, to breathe in the warm waves of kaolin, of which you were the fragrant Aquarius.

  Leebie was the faded old signpost standing on the very edge of the family circle, outside which floated the faces of strangers. She appeared to have been approaching the grave for so long, her lifeline was now running parallel to it, if not inclining away. The polished nut of a skull, shining through the bunched white hair, the bare arms, tough as congers, the nippy spider-crab fingers, nimbly working the old Singer, the ancient shanks shuttling like pistons, little shiny black boots tip-tapping on the treadles – she seemed unkillable.

  ‘We’ll have to shoot her in the end,’ grandfather would say.

  She darned our stockings, patched our elbows, let down turn-ups, turned collars, let out gussets, took in waists, took up hems. Necks were knitted up or slashed away, sleeves lengthened, whole wardrobes remade, nothing was wasted. She was a hearth deity for sure. But as she sat in the corner, black-shawled and hooded, the thread in one hand, the snipping scissors in the other, she seemed more like the sisters of Fate all woven into one.

  ‘They’ve been too long at sea, these men,’ she would say when grandfather’s boat was slow in returning, ‘and I don’t like the look of that sky.’

  Then she’d go back to her sewing, muttering as she worked, and the others shifted their feet and told her not to be a silly old wife, and laughed. But their eyes would wander to the windows all the same, knowing her instinct for weather, and they’d go quiet all at once, and in the sudden silence the Singer sounded strangely sinister, and Leebie was the awful spinner of life and death.

  Grandmother was the frail white witch of the family, but Leebie occupied the sharp end of its medical life, making up her hot bread poultices for boils or skelbs (splinters), afterwards extracting the shards with tweezers, or lancing the boils with red-hot needles. The uncles submitted to this for the salt-water sores ringing their hands and wrists where the oilskins rubbed constantly against their not yet hardened skins. And some of the village fishermen came to her with slow, gloomy feet, shuffling up the path, to be cured of their piles, caused by the endless wetness of life on deck. Treatments were carried out in the kippering shed, out in the back garden. The best cure, Leebie said, was just a bucket of scalding hot water.

  ‘Take off your trousers, fill the bucket to the brim, boiling hot, sit on it – then run like hell!’

  But as few would face such an ordeal, Leebie had other medications to offer. Her most famous was Stockholm tar, normally used to seal the leaks in the bottoms of boats, and in the human department applied in exactly the same way: heated and rubbed well into the affected area – usually, according to the uncles, with the toe of her old Wellington boot. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul, they always added. And pray to God you never have to go to the kippering shed, except for kippers!

  Leebie herself was matter-of-fact about it.

  ‘A good dollop of hot Stockholm tar up your behind and you won’t be worrying about piles any more,’ she would say. ‘Go on, get your breeks down, boys!’

  The fishermen came sheepishly but they left the kippering shed with a lighter stride and with glad faces.

  But it was grandmother who soothed me when I was ill, held my head when I banged it hard against the sides of the whirling world; she cleaned my cuts and wiped my nose; she warmed my bed with a big stone hot-water bottle, always wrapping it round twice with a towel so that it wouldn’t burn my toes. And when I came in dirty, she stripped me and sat me in the kitchen sink amid a mountainous landscape of bubbles, beating the blackness out of me with bars of carbolic, rubbing me down in front of the fire till I was pink and tingling and resurrected.

  ‘There you are, your father’s got nothing to pick on now, has he? And I’ve mended the tear
in your trousers – he’ll never see it.’

  Still when I think of her, she is the provider, filling the kitchen with her plain and wholesome fare. Broth and potatoes were the staple diet, with the mutton removed from the soup to serve as a second course along with the mash. Or if there was no meat, she turned the tatties into a meal in themselves by beating them in with turnips and onions and lashings of pepper, whipping them into an explosive clapshot. A little dripping instead and they became stovies, all served up on the same faded azure narratives of willow pattern. I chose my morsels with care, slowly uncovering the pigtailed lords and love-lipped ladies, meeting by pools and gardens and on bowered bridges, allowing their blue stories to evolve, mouthful by mouthful.

  Bannocks and baps and loaves of crusty bread came out of the side-ovens of the grate when we couldn’t afford to buy from Guthrie. And she worked her way through endless quantities of fish. The king of fish, as she called it, the humble herring, became in her hands fish for a king. ‘Never mind the king,’ said grandfather, ‘it’s a fish fit for a Fifer.’ She boiled them, fried them in oatmeal, roasted them on the brander, smoked them into kippers in the garden shed, shredded them into hairy potatoes, producing variety out of sameness. Herrings and haddock and cod landed on the chipped blue crockery day after day – and shoals of flatfish to be picked to the bone.

  The fish were brought to the house in bunches of six or twelve, knotted together by their mouths, dangling like dumb silver bells from my grandfather’s finger, their tails sweeping the path as he strode over the doorstep and into the kitchen, slapping them heavily into the sink. Grandmother wrenched off their heads, lobbing them through the open window to the prowling cats and the hysterical gulls. She cut off their tails and slit open their bellies with her flashing knife. She ripped off the scaly sheen of their skins as easily as my auntie Jenny peeled off her nylons after work. Then she filleted them and flung the bones after the heads, embracing the cats and birds as well as ourselves with the village motto, Mare vivimus: we live by the sea.

  Long hours at a time she stood at her kitchen sink, working slowly, stood there while the tides came and went, her menfolk going out and coming home, the years passing as she grew older without ageing, because illness could age her no more. Often she paused, the knife in her hand, fighting away her asthma. I stood and looked at her – the bowed, beaten back, bent with suffering, the mouth opening and shutting in the same silent agony as the fish, now dead. She laid her hands on my shoulders for a few minutes at a time, for support of both kinds, and we stood together in silence, each of us incapable of finding words. Then she carried on patiently. She taught me how to gut and fillet. She showed me St Peter’s thumb-mark on the side of the haddock. She gave me the top of my grandfather’s egg.

  But it is the crabs that remain, crawling horribly into the present. The big partan crabs were brought into the house like fallen knights, their armour-gauntleted claws folded quietly on their bellies, as though they were dead and laid to rest. But when they were picked up they sprang to attention, the claws wide open, waiting for the attack. Grandmother laughed at the panic that sent me to the other side of the kitchen. She dropped them into the pot, holding them by the back, where the blind waving pincers were unable to clutch and tear. I watched, horrified, as the water began to boil and the crabs crimsoned in death, the claws gripping grimly on to the rim of the pot as they tried to vault their way to freedom, to joust with me on the kitchen floor.

  ‘Gran, they’re getting out!’

  So she put on the heavy iron lid with a flat stone placed on top. But still they come scrabbling out of the pot and into my dreams, those crabs that dined on sailors, all bubbling and bulging and red with rage and terror. Could some merciful stiletto not have been inserted between the armoured plates, to reach the vital parts and deliver a quick kill?

  ‘Don’t let it bother you, Kiffer, their nervous systems are not like yours. They’re not so highly strung.’

  She knew more about crabs and boys than I realized at the time. All the same I was not convinced, and having failed to secure a merciful end for them, I dreamed again of those demon faces that would be visiting the sins of the grandmothers upon the children down the generations, starting in sleep with myself, with infestations of eyes that wobbled wickedly on stalks, and claws that tore me to gobbets where I lay. For a time they made night hideous.

  Between them my grandparents had produced five children who had survived. After Christina, my mother, came Jenny and Georgina, and then Alec and Billy. Jenny was the wildest. With her whirlwind affection she had inherited grandfather’s dark colouring and nightfall shock of hair, the big brown eyes, the brow of Egypt. They called her the black tornado. She swept through the house leaving nothing and no one uncleaned or unkissed. She lifted me like the wind, clasped me kicking and howling to her bosom, killing me with her red wounding lipsticky kisses.

  ‘Let me be! Let me be!’ I yelled, as she rocked me on her blind undirected longings.

  You do something to me–

  Something that simply mystifies me.

  Then she was out of the door and pedalling her four furious miles to Cellardyke, where she worked in the oilskins factory. And singing all the way she went, to the clouds in their flying, the sun on the sea. Outside the house they called her the Daft Diva.

  Georgina was her opposite in every way: blonde, blue-eyed, quiet as dew. She cupped her chin in her hands, rested her elbows on her knees, fixed her eyes on a far strand, and sighed quietly to herself. That was Georgina, a landscape locked up, waiting for some spring to come and free her and fill her full of life. When she was at home she worked for Burgon the fish-merchant, but for part of the year she followed the southward passage of the herring as they shifted from Shetland down to East Anglia, Georgina walking in their wake like Ruth the gleaner, old George said, and often adding, ‘But she’ll never find a man like Boaz.’ She came home with sand between her toes, her hair coarse with salt and her knuckles rubbed raw to the bone, ugly purple cuts from the gutting troughs disfiguring her pale fingers. I kissed them for her and she smiled.

  Always she brought back with her sheets of music that were worlds apart from the old Scots songs which my granny loved to listen to. Then she went into the Room, where she sat by herself, practising her newfound treasures. I crept in quietly after her, creaking the uneven floorboards, and without looking round or interrupting the flow of a phrase, she lifted a hand and beckoned me to come. I stood behind her, watching the white bruised fingers running over the old brown keys. Her hands, playing these miraculous melodies, seemed to heal their own wounds. She accompanied herself in a slow tuneful voice, still not turning round, but smiling to me with the lilt of her head.

  The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,

  Sing all a green willow;

  Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,

  Sing willow, willow, willow;

  The fresh streams ran by her and murmured her moans;

  Sing willow, willow, willow;

  Her salt tears fell from her and softened the stones.

  ‘Sing me another one, Georgina, please, another one.’

  ‘Another one,’ she said, closing her eyes and smiling. ‘All right, another one, another one for Kiffer.’

  She sifted through the new pile of sheet music, chose a piece, and placed it above the keyboard, looking at it for a long time. Then she sang.

  How should I your true love know

  From another one?

  By his cockle hat and staff,

  And his sandal shoon.

  He is dead and gone, lady,

  He is dead and gone,

  At his head a grass-green turf;

  At his heels a stone.

  The walls of the Room fell away and Georgina and I were the only ones left in the world. We sat together under the single sycamore tree that spread out in time’s green field. I was her lost love for whom she mourned, so I kissed her on the cheek, telling her not to cry, and sh
e bent her head, brushing my face with her hair. But now the new music came up out of the floor, filling the sky.

  White his shroud as the mountain snow,

  Larded all with sweet flowers,

  Which bewept to the grave did go

  With true-love showers.

  The song went through my groin like a sword, thrilling with some sharp indefinable comprehension. It aroused in me something wafer-thing, tenuous as a ghost, the memory of a memory, something I had once known but forgotten. The tune, Walsingham. What was Walsingham? And Ophelia’s song. Who was she? What was I remembering?

  But they were broken up, these episodes, when the ‘boys’ came bursting into the house, bringing breezes from the sea.

  ‘What are you playing that old rubbish for, Georgie? Come and listen to the wireless – and make us a cup of tea.’

  I watched Alec and Billy grow up, though I never knew it at the time. Alec was Jenny’s counterpart, his beetle-black hair brilliant with Brylcreem, the hair on his chest running over his shoulders, on to the nape of his neck and all the way down his spine. He loped about the house looking for lost shirts and jumpers, naked to the waist, a genial grinning gorilla. He read books about explorers and talked of going to Australia. Billy was fair-faced like my mother, but he was the one who had my grandfather’s deep abiding passion for the sea. He never Brylcreemed his hair, never hurried to climb out of his fisherman’s gear, as Alec did, when he came home from the sea. He padded about in his thick white sea-stockings, exuding the fishing like a poem never recited but carried in his head, and which made his eyes shine. I always knew if he was at home the moment I came through the front door. The sea-scents clung to him, even after he’d bathed.