Hellfire and Herring Read online

  My mother too was out of the house for most of the day and sometimes at night. She worked the switchboard in the post office down at the harbour, taking the calls from the boats by radio, transmitting information. She was the mouth and ear of all the local fishing news and sometimes sent me round the houses with what she called The Word.

  ‘The Halcyon had a good shot of cod behind the May this morning.’

  ‘The Shepherd Lad has landed ninety cran at Peterhead.’

  If the news was good there could be a penny a time in it for me. Otherwise it was a long nod of the head and a quietly shut door.

  Later my mother moved to the little telephone exchange in Anstruther, where she’d worked during the war. Night shifts were her speciality – she got by on very little sleep and improved her mind with reading. It was during the war, before I was born, that she’d fallen asleep over her book and dreamed that her cousin Andrew, who’d joined the airforce, had been hit in his Spitfire and had died. Sometime later the switchboard woke her and the message came through.

  ‘I knew it was the hour he died,’ she said, ‘because of the chapter I was on.’

  She accepted the immaterial as an unremarkable fact of life.

  ‘Maybe it was just telepathy,’ somebody suggested.

  ‘Just telepathy? And what telephone wires does telepathy run on, I wonder?’

  A clever woman, my mother. As soon as you say telepathy you’ve admitted to a form of communication that is not man-made.

  Sometimes she took me to the sands, west of the village, where the gloomy ruins of Newark, a seventeenth-century castle, stood on the cliff edge, towering over the rocks below. One blue day I left her on the beach in her light summer dress and climbed up to the castle by the back route, the safe grassy bank, to play among the ruins. What had been the great hall was now a gaunt shell, grass-grown and open to the sky, and the walls were gone that kept you from one false step to a hundred-foot drop to rocks and sea and certain death. Flying around up there, my Spitfire wings outspread, dogfighting madly, blindly, I halted at the beetling edge just in time to see my mother, standing far below, one hand over her mouth and the other arm extended, as if to touch me. I waved to her and she waved back, beckoning me down to the beach.

  She took my face seriously in her hands.

  ‘You have to be more careful, Kiffer. If those children hadn’t been dancing round you, you’d have gone right over the edge.’

  ‘What children?’ I asked, astonished.

  She looked at me and smiled, her hands in my hair.

  ‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘I thought as much.’

  Thirty years later I picked up a copy of Sibbald’s Bygone Fife in a second-hand Edinburgh bookshop and dipped into the history of Newark Castle. There was talk of youngsters, six of them. At one time, the author said, the great hall must have rung to the sound of children’s laughter. I had the sudden terrifying sensation of falling through space, and the bookseller ran to steady me and to offer me a glass of water.

  ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

  ‘Not me,’ I said, denying experience, ‘but my mother could see them – six at a time. And call them up too.’

  The bookseller smiled. But I saw my mother again, the flimsy dress fluttering in the sea-breezes, a mere speck on the sands far below me, but one arm extended protectively, as if to save her son, by whatever means. Had she read the book, I wonder, Sibbald’s local history, during one of her night-shift vigils? Read it and forgotten what she’d read, except in the unconscious mind, into which she plunged her arm at a mother’s terrified moment, coming out with six children, dancing in a three centuries’ old ring, a maternal thought-force around a small boy, fiercely jealous and full of love? And even if she had, would it explain the experience? It’s easier sometimes to believe in ghosts. But it’s not a ghost story – that’s how close I was to my mother.

  As for the sentimental little scene I concocted in my early prose, where I lie in bed with her, and she tells me all about my heroic able-bodied father, and how he’ll be coming home one day – it had as little basis as the dream I never had, that my father telegraphed the village post office that he was on his way, and how his ship came swaying drunkenly over the morning horizon, sending the low sun spinning into space. It sliced the May Island in two and sank the Bass Rock, which went growling to the bottom of the sea. Then it crashed through our small harbour and kept on coming, right up the brae, battle-scarred and glorious, until the point of its prow splintered our window panes, and there was my father, under the white ensign, wearing white and gold braid, straddling the bowsprit with bell-bottomed trousers and waving madly to me from on high as I lay back in my bed in amazement …

  No, I lay in bed with my mother, all right, and we spoke about my father, but it was usually after he’d beaten her up and was lying drunk asleep, and she’d moved into my bed, where we lay naked like lovers, stroking and kissing, unfolding each to the other in butterfly whispers while the blind winds wailed outside our window, and that beast in the next room snored and swore in his sleep. It wasn’t his ship that came swaying drunkenly home with a bosun-gunner on board, battle-scarred and glorious, and powder’s blue stains scattered on his skin, it was the drunken bastard himself, night after night, come home from the pub, to make my mother cry.

  ‘Another night like this,’ she wept, ‘and maybe I’ll go to Jesus.’

  I lay there chilled to the bone by the thought that my mother could ever leave me and go to Jesus. And that’s the first and last time in my life that I contemplated murder. The woodshed axe, the gutting-knife, the pickaxe through the eye. Then trip him that his heels may kick at heaven … And that is just how close I came to my mother. You can’t get closer than that – to want to kill for a person, to love that someone to death.

  3

  Queer Fish

  Somebody once said that heaven lies all about us in our infancy, but from what I can recall, it was more like growing up in a Bosch boneyard, with devils on the rooftops, hell beneath the floorboards, and the growing child well and truly trapped somewhere in between. Somewhere? There was nowhere else to go. Not that the priest and doctor came running over the fields exactly. One came on a bicycle and the other in an Austin Cambridge. But the medicine man and the God man were just figures in a many-peopled landscape, where the dance was a crowded one, and if Satan led the ball, as the preachers believed, he did so with a masterly and ceremonious humour. The place was crawling with weirdos.

  Crawling is not completely metaphorical – one of them, called Bowfter Sandy, did actually get down on all fours and go around biting people’s ankles. He even featured famously in a braehead church sermon, in which it was announced that Nebuchadnezzar was alive (if not well) in St Monans, an indication of the eternal cycle of truth to which the bible gave witness. There was nothing new under the sun. When the king lost his reason, his hair and his nails grew long, and he went down in the field like a wolf and ate grass.

  As soon as church came out that day, I joined the gleeful pack of Sunday schoolers that went haring down to Bowfter’s house, pulling up fistfuls of grass on the way, which we stuffed through his letter box, bidding him tuck in and clamouring for him to come out and bite our legs. He skipped the proffered meal but otherwise did his best to oblige us. The door burst open and suddenly he was among us as we whirled about his well-grassed front garden, avoiding the snapping mandibles. Surprisingly agile for a dimwit of sixty, he grazed one or two who’d come close enough to thrust their grass bouquets into his yellow-fanged jaws, as though they were feeding a mad cow. When summer came and lawns grew long, the poorest old men would come round the doors asking if they could sharpen your mower blades and earn a shilling or two for tobacco. ‘Oh, never mind about the mower,’ folk would say, ‘we’ll just get Bowfter to come along for an hour later on – he can cut the grass and have his dinner all in one!’

  Unbelievable? I haven’t even started. The really difficult thing to swa
llow, though I was assured of it from an early age, was that God not only made the world but made man in his own image and made every individual man and woman in it. In which case even God must have had his mad March moods. And why had he put so many oddballs all in the one place? There seemed enough of them in our little village to share out round the whole globe and still have some to spare. What I never realized at the time was that all our seafaring townships were swimming with shoals of queer fish and that the same was probably true of all the villages of the world. Were people ‘normal’ in cities, then? I have no idea. But if sanity is a mere statistic, then God couldn’t count in the ’40s, and still hadn’t learned by the ’50s. Not in St Monans.

  St Monan. A martyred missionary maybe – who came out of the Celtic Dark Ages and found a spring to drink from, right on our doorstep. It washed a long salt voyage out of his mouth and also put iron in his blood and probably in his soul. Something must have given him staying power – other than crabs and black bread – on that windswept landfall, where the best living accommodation was a sandstone cave, now concreted over by the cretinous North-East Fife District Council in order to create a pointless little patio. King David II, Robert the Bruce’s son, liked the water too. Or it made him well. Or the saint’s spirit saved him from shipwreck. Or a Neville’s Cross arrow leaped miraculously from his wound – as arrows do – simply at the mention of St Monan’s name. Take your pick. The fact remains the King built a chapel over the shrine, hence our fourteenth-century church, the Old Kirk. The spring remains too – and even as late as the ’40s you could still see an older fisherman soaking his nets in its brownish water, believing that the iron would make them more durable, and perhaps even secretly hoping for the saint’s blessing on his boat. Why not? He had nothing to lose – except perhaps the sceptical pride of a self-respecting Calvinist who didn’t believe in Romish saints.

  Anyway, the saint stayed, the name stuck (if it ever was his name) and a village ticked over. St Monans, my birthplace.

  Seagulls were what you heard in St Monans all the time, bearing vocal witness to the quantities of fish landed in those days, when the boatsheds rang with the sound of the adze on freshly cut keels of American elm, the harbour with the bartering of merchants and shouts of fishwives, and the curing sheds were ecstatic with the reek of newly smoked kippers. The little haven swayed like a forest, so many masts you could step from east to west on the decks of stacked and jostling vessels, and the fish gleamed from pier to pier like heaps of bullion, breaking the sun a billion times. The reflections were everywhere. It was the silver age of the great herring boom, though nothing to what my golden-age grandfather must have seen as a young man, when a single boat gave work to a hundred hands. Still it seemed astonishing enough to me, the sea’s bounty, a miracle of fishes to go with the loaves in Guthrie’s bakehouse. I soon came to know a good catch, ninety cran, a hundred cran, and the boats that were likely to make them. There were lucky boats and unlucky boats, sober boats and drunken boats, and there were religious vessels and irreligious ones, though most of them had names that rang with the sound of scripture: the True Vine, the Magdalene, the Shepherd Lad. They went out without computers or echo-sounders to face wind and wave and they shot their nets in the name of the Lord whether they believed in him or not. Most of them did, but even if they didn’t they played it safe. O, hear us when we cry to thee! Fishing was a dangerous business and an act of faith, and the faith of the fisherman was recorded on his boat.

  The faces remain: the douce Dutch faces of my ancestors, the Nordic seas that glimmer in a pair of Viking eyes, the suns of Spain that burnish this or that complexion. Faces floating just beneath the surface of sleep, men drowned by memory. Ancestral winds wrote wrinkles into their faces, these yesterday’s men. History got worked into the flesh, like the lines of passage, entered on the log-books of their parchment skins.

  Faces. I remember sailors who are now turned to coral, farmers that are kirkyard clay. I remember old wives who kept the secrets of the town about their scrubbed doorsteps – toothless sibyls who sat in the sun to stay alive an hour longer and weave village gossip on the cracked old looms of their tongues. And still in dreams I re-encounter them, in the cobbled closes and on the bouldered beaches, where their faces and forms first broke in upon my childhood.

  Hodgie Dickson was the first to peep through the blanket of the dark on those wild nights when the town trolls strode through the corridors of my sleep like ghosts in technicolour.

  Hodgie lived with his brother Frankie, not far from us on the braehead, in a house at the west end of the village, right at the top of a steep hill. The house had a narrow paved yard in front, where Hodgie used to work away with bits of timber. Apparently he was building a boat, though nothing remotely boat-like ever emerged – if it had, the tiny yard would have been unable to contain it. The pavement outside the low wall of the yard was always strewn with the detritus of Hodgie’s handiwork and I often stopped there to pick up woodchips and shavings to take along to the burn to serve as toy boats.

  In my dream I saw myself stopping to speak to Hodgie as usual. He was wearing his fisherman’s black jersey, with neck-buttons, kerchief and cap, and his thick brown kersey trousers. Half bent he was, with his back to me, worrying and whittling away at his wood as always. But the ground on my side of the wall was swept strangely clean, so I asked him for one of his odds and ends. He answered me with a silence unusual for him, as if he hadn’t heard me.

  ‘Hodgie,’ I said, ‘don’t you have a piece of wood for me today?’

  He paused in his planing and polishing. The back of his skull was a closed door.

  ‘No, not today,’ he said, though still he never spoke, never turned round.

  ‘Why not today?’ I asked.

  He turned to face me, but with the same unspeaking mouth. Then he lifted his arm, the other still holding the plane, and pointed down the steep brae. Following his finger I saw a small procession of figures at the foot of the hill. As they came upwards and closer I made out six men dressed in black and moving in single file.

  ‘What are they coming for?’ I whispered, afraid.

  I knew what they were coming for.

  Even yet Hodgie said nothing – but he stood aside from the wall where he had been working, and it was then that I saw what it was he’d been making all this time. He’d been making it all his life. As have we all. Where had I seen that box before, with its terrible solidity and smell?

  The six men stood beside us, all in black. The leader spoke.

  ‘Is it ready, Hodgie?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Hodgie, ‘it’s ready. I’m ready.’

  Hodgie was dead within a week.

  It was such a short journey from his house to the old kirkyard, just a few steps, that his brother said no hearse would be needed. He and five others carried Hodgie’s coffin on their shoulders, out of the yard, past my spy-hole in the fence, and along to the graveside. Six pall-bearers, dressed in black. Nothing unusual about that.

  If it was precognitive it was not a word I knew. I told my mother and she said it could be ‘coincidence’. That was not a word I knew either. But I reminded her of her own dream of cousin Andrew, the airman who died, and she went quiet.

  After Epp and Hodgie there were others, and King Death moved swiftly through the village like a character from a morality play, simple, stern, inexorable. The hearses and cars wound their way up the green mound of the sea-girt kirkyard, a shining soundless trail, distanced into ants. I spied on them from afar with a wary eye, or hid in the cornfield that swept down from our house.

  When there was to be a funeral old Penman, the town crier and announcer of exits, strode slowly through the streets like a medieval leper, swinging his arm, ringing a huge deep-throated hand-bell, whose iron tongue accompanied his own, that told you the day, the time, the place. Only the hour-glass and the scythe were missing. Otherwise he was the ultimate bellman.

  From the back of beyond it germinated, the distant clangin
g, before you were aware of it, like a summons, a pulse in the blood, a slow whisper from the sea. Conversation faltered as the tolling grew closer, louder, as if the church itself, steeple, bell and belfry, had risen from the rock, groaning on its foundations, and was grinding its way through the village to bid us remember our end. And the memorials marched along with it, the village dead, an army terrible with stone banners of epitaphs and texts: Behold He Cometh, The Day Dawns, The Kingdom of God Is at Hand, We Shall Not All Sleep. Mortality was on the move, hauling eternity in its wake.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ my grandmother whispered. ‘Old Penman’s ringing his bell. Somebody’s dead.’

  Her words hung in the air like a sudden pall, and just for a moment everything stopped. The uncles stopped clattering their dominoes on the bare wooden table; the girls’ bubbling laughter burst in their mouths, leaving the air around their heads expectant and empty; Leebie paused in her patchwork, the Singer needle poised like a stuck sword – the whole family sat gorgonized, marble heads laved by the flames that lurched suddenly up the lum as the fire spat in the silence.

  ‘Who is it, do you think?’ asked Jenny. Her face had gone white under her black mane. ‘Who can it be?’

  ‘Just listen,’ said grandmother, ‘and we’ll hear.’

  The clanging filled our street now, and the accompanying announcement. The town crier had a voice like grating shingle, sucked backwards by the sea. The words broke over the stone heads like waves.