by Ian Stephen
‘Aye, sure, man, like in Easy Rider. Aye the Faith got me aff the drugs an tha.’ We were in the house of an NZ/Iranian couple. And the Iranian cove’s mother lived with them. She couldn’t speak English but one night her son said his mother would like to cook for us.
We were trying to cool it on the drink and one by one we would repeat the mantra, no chemicals man. So we just drifted by there, most nights. We were all about seventeen years of age.
So how did these religions fit together then? They seemed pretty different.
That was because prophets or Manifestations of God brought the same message, renewed from age to age but adapted to the needs of the time. So the law of Moses was a harsh one for a desert tribe. Jesus spoke to the individual and Muhammad built nationhood. Laws for society. The message of Bahá’u’lláh was for a new world order.
The new message was that science and religion should go hand in hand. Other principles were the equality of men and women and co-operation of all nations in a world commonwealth.
Sounded like pretty radical guys for nineteenth-century Iran.
I couldn’t see it then but it’s pretty clear now, it’s all about stories. I’d been fed stories with my milk and then with tea and three sugars. The river of Jordan had flowed into Westview Terrace and the waters of the Red Sea parted when you got clear of the lighthouse at Arnish. Catechism wasn’t so good. Remember, it was a big surprise to find that Manscheefend was three different words. Some of the phrases stuck with you, just the same.
There were a couple of nutcase teachers who had you learning chunks and chunks of psalms. This was mid-primary – before the shift to the Central Belt. You just couldn’t keep them all the lines in your head so you had to work out which verse you were going to get, plus one or two either side in case someone mucked it up and she’d stomp on to the next seat. An insurance policy really but it was good practice for arithmetic.
And it was worth the time to learn these few verses. Otherwise you’d probably get belted. Of course the idea of a scented woman in crisp clothes swinging a slim, split thong of top grade saddlery from over her shoulder – that does things to the Scottish male psyche. Did I mention this before? Don’t get carried away. I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there was nothing erotic about getting the strap in P5. Very specialised stuff.
Bri-Nylon outfits and hairs on her chin. A straggly moustache and slavers running from her mouth when she got worked up about something. A roar in the back of the throat which changed to a smiling softer tone when the headmaster took a look in to make sure there were no serious casualties. She had this habit of throwing the wooden-backed duster. So you had to get good at putting the lid of your desk up in time, as a shield. There was a cloud of chalk in the air. Then it was more psalms. It was good for developing your reflexes. Mine are still pretty good. So it was all education of a kind.
They couldn’t get rid of her so they made sure you got a good teacher before and after. The good ones – and I think all the others were good ones – they told stories half the time. New and Old Testament and Pinocchio on a Friday afa. Do you say that in other places? Our word for post-noon.
Staffs pointed at rocks, causing them to open and release sweet running water. Bushes burned but never fell to ashes. Loaves and fishes were shared between thousands. Two fishes to be precise. Now speaking as a guy who wasn’t that keen on the salt herring, I could still appreciate the fact that they did look like they’d come from the Bible. They lay in their brine by a new batch of crusted loaves (more than five) at the cornershop. And I’d long borne witness to the debates as to whether my father or the sister should get the last one after half a dozen each had been scoffed. I was well placed to understand that satisfying a multitude with a couple of them was pretty good going.
The new stories, down by the new auction mart, took us into Iran. Only it was called Persia then. It was near the middle of the nineteenth century. A change was coming. There was a figure, a bit like John the Baptist, who paved the way. He was called the Báb, which meant that he was the gateway to the new religion. But the Bábí Faith was seen as a breakaway from Islam rather than a new religion. So the Mullahs went all out to stamp it out. Devotees were publicly tortured before execution. Reports of European observers include descriptions of people shod like horses and driven through the streets. The leader, a merchant from Tabriz, was shot in a barrack-square. He was suspended from a fastening to a wall, along with a disciple. When the dust cleared he was not to be seen. He was found in a nearby room, continuing the dictation of a last letter. He then said something like, ‘This task is completed, you can do your business now.’
So the story goes.
I was ready to give up on drink and drugs. I wanted to believe. I read the main account, Nabíl’s Narrative, in a fine edition, bound in dark green, embossed in gold leaf. Edited by the Guardian of the Faith who honed his grasp of rhetorical English at Balliol College, Oxford.
I’m not seventeen now. I’ve been back to that book. The translator and editor’s main stylistic influence, he said, was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. There could be a whiff of Sir Winston in there too. The editor’s notes and footnotes add observations of Western commentators in English and in French but, with the exception of an account by the doctor who examined the leader, after he was beaten with the bastinado, these are not first-hand accounts.
Nabíl’s own account was gathered, many years after the events, while sharing the exile of one Mírzá Husayn-‘Alí, who claimed to be that next Prophet or Manifestation of God. In that respect, his narrative is similar to the way that the events surrounding a carpenter’s son, from Nazareth, became fixed texts. Nabíl is a very fine storyteller. Author and editor list their sources. The genealogy of stories.
No disrespect to Nabíl’s Narrative but the best stories came from our mentor’s mother. She cooked us chicken, marinated in crushed walnuts and pomegranate puree. This is a day’s work, in preparations. I ate slowly to taste every mouthful. By this time I wasn’t smoking or drinking alcohol. Yes, I quit on the drink when I was seventeen. Food was always important but it became like a religious observance.
I don’t think it was just that chicken dish. It was the drama of the stories and there were a few warning signs in our own latter days. Waking up covered in puke again. The deaths of Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison.
One of our number had already met his death, like the Stones guitarist, in an outdoor pool, at a party, far from home. Some mates were becoming Jesus-freaks and others were talking about Guru Maharaji. Some of us were just inquisitive but the real devotees were the storytellers. Or maybe their conviction is what gave them the power to yarn for Scotland. Our local radical Christians didn’t have long hair. Well, maybe the women did but you couldn’t see that. It would usually be tied up in a bun or in a hat. (There will now follow a short digression on the subject of hat shops. Omit the next paragraph if you cannot see the relevance of this indicator.)
If you wish to appreciate the cultural forces at work in the Long Island it is important to observe and appreciate the central role of hat shops. In a fragile economy, then based mainly on the world fashion industry’s taste for Harris Tweed and the international restaurant trade’s appetite for prawns, SY could boast not one but two specialist retailers of hats. If it were not for this data, an observer would be tempted to conclude that hats worn by the religious community would all be in the style of sober head coverings, essential for modesty. More systematic sampling, without prejudice, will produce the following results:
Wide brims and narrow;
Red as well as blue or black
Yellow, less common but noticeably present in the congregations and not only at Easter – not a major Festival, anyway, in Long Island religious observation.
Then there are the additions:
Lace trim – completely acceptable;
Feathers – mandatory.
And that’s only the menswear.
But whether we were still
religious believers or no, we were also doing the ‘Stop The War’ chant with Country Joe. I would sign up for any band called ‘The Fish’ anyway. It just couldn’t go on, this missile against missile balance of international power, not for much longer. Took a lot of arguing that one, with people who remembered being caught out, ill-prepared for the blitzkrieg of ’39. My olman for one. In an alliance with his brother-in-law fae The Broch.
It already seemed like another mythology, talking about my generation. I was born in 1955. Ten Years After – the name of a rock and roll band with a very fast guitarist by the name of Alvin Lee. Ten years after VE day, prisoners were still awaiting repatriation. Or exhumation.
I read the Qu’ran in translation. I couldn’t tie in all the loose ends. We’d sit up talking till after closing time. Keeping us out of temptation.
‘What about the Hindu religion?’
‘Well, that was so far back in history and there was so little written material that traditions developed. That’s why it’s now impossible to reconcile all the details.’
‘The Buddhists – these guys don’t really have a god, never mind heaven and hell?’
‘Cultural layers are so dense that it’s impossible to know what the original message was. But you can still see the influence of the Buddha’s positive energy. That’s why there’s a need for a new Manifestation of God from age to age.’
‘So another guy could appear tomorrow?’
‘In theory yes, just that Bahá’u’lláh specifically wrote that his message would be valid for a full thousand years.’
Now I can see how that’s a time period with a ring to it. We should do a study of architecture designed to last for a full thousand years. Albert Speer would be to the fore and maybe Nicolae Ceausescu’s favoured few would sneak in to be in that number. What’s with all the columns and domes?
I thought there would be a bit of resistance to this mystical period, from the olman and the olaid. Not so. They’d observed everything I was doing, the drugs and all and just held back. My olman could sense a tide turning and this was it. The direction was right, even if he couldn’t get his head round the details. As long as we were talking shit we weren’t smoking too much of it.
My olaid was almost envious when I said there was a new wind blowing, enough to stop the war in Vietnam. ‘Do you not have doubts?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I know we’re all part of something though we can’t agree on the details.’
‘I envy you,’ she said.
I was amazed to hear that my Brocher olaid had underlying doubts. She’d been brought up to full churches of fishermen in genseys, while hail blasted outside. There were even trumpets and other brass.
I got doubts later but I suppressed them. The food helped. Let me run by a few highlights. The food, not the doubts.
A Basque dish where the singed and peeled red peppers are marinated in walnut oil and cayenne. That was when my SYtalian mate brought me along to the wee Roman Catholic Church. We were invited across for tapas after the Mass which was a wee bit ornate for my taste. See, the Presbyterian vibe stays ringing in your ears, after all.
Basmati rice, cooked till al dente then placed on a covering of thinly sliced potatoes in oil. The pan is then placed on top of three crushed cans so the heat at the lowest setting steams gently through, so it all comes out from the pan with the cloth under the lid. Like a pudding with the potato crust gone brown around the white grains. Yes, you’ve guessed, that was the Egyptian Bahá’í.
A thick mutton curry where leaves are added towards the end of cooking time and you don’t have to do like the cook does and lift a green chilli and bite into it absentmindedly, as you’re finishing the dish. And by the way you shouldn’t do as I did and gorge yourself on the rice with the subtle spices, not realising it’s just a starter before the high pile of thick chapattis arrives with said steaming bowls of meat. That was my taste of the Punjab on Newton Street, before a discussion on Islam in the modern world.
The gammon, marinated in molasses and rum and studded with cloves before boiling and baking by the not-so-young rebel from the Free Presbyterian church. This guy wasn’t getting on very well with the new minister.
‘I’m not expecting him to live in a stable but I don’t see why he needs the church to build him a house that size.’
But that wasn’t the main issue.
‘I lent the man my wheelbarrow so he could get a start on the garden. Good to see him roll his sleeves up. But I’m having a hell of a job getting it back. And the question to ask is this. If you can’t trust the man with your wheelbarrow, can you really trust him with your soul?’
My mother’s liver and bacon casserole with tomato reduction in the gravy, waiting for me, just round the corner, after a New Zealander’s faithful copying of a dish of lamb in green herbs, taught her by her Iranian mother-in-law before she departed the Island to live in Holland. So I had two dinners in pretty quick succession. But by that time it was getting a bit late to get up the road for the first ever blood-donor session – because members of our gang had just come of age to donate and we were working on developing our individual social consciences to go with it.
So I legged it up the road, after the two quick dinners, made it just in time and did the business but the big hall started to go wooh wooh wooh like Hitchcock and I was on the deck. That wasn’t the worst bit. The worst bit was that when I came to, they offered me brandy and I said, ‘No, sorry mate, I don’t drink now.’ And I suppose that’s when it was pretty public – hell, he’s got a weird Oriental Religion. Pretty normal for a wild guy to get a dose of the cùram – hardcore born-again Christianity – or, to put it another way, fallen into the care of God. But this was different. As Kenny F said, ‘What the hell breed of cùram are you suffering from?’
Soon there was thirty or forty of us, all ‘into’ different religious stuff and the tribe was seen as a threat. Which was great because we were the outsiders getting bombarded with letters to the Gazette from elders of the Last Bastion kirks. But we had some free-thinking champions who wrote punchier letters back than any of us could. This guy wrote, in answer to the issue of the possible threat posed to the youth of our island by Oriental Religions, ‘Does the previous correspondent believe that Jesus Christ appeared in Kyle of Lochalsh?
Quo Vadis
I helped discharge the Quo Vadis. These were boom years. All the records were tumbling. There were different ways of doing things. Like in Athletics. Things had never been the same since Dick Fosbury made the straddle-jump seem just as outdated as the scissor-jump, when you saw people doing it, fast time, on old newsreels. You couldn’t see how it could work, just coming in from another angle, turning and then he was over the bar backwards with his feet up in the heavens. Everything was changed. The heights went up and the times went down. Everything was moving faster.
The scale of Quo Vadis scared us all but we were in awe of her, the high red steel and the turning radars. The antennae that made you glance into the bridge – you could hardly call it a wheelhouse – with all the dials and screens. If anything, the talk had played it all down.
At least the herring wasn’t going to fishmeal. All these Norwegians and Faroese tied up with their stock of whitewood barrels lashed on deck. They fixed a price with the skippers, then took on casual labour. That was us, Kenny F and me, in the line with the rest of them, queuing like the dockers in our history books.
I stuck close to Kenny and usually got picked. He was heftier than me and had the reputation of being a grafter. Flat rate, no overtime, no tea breaks. You worked right through till the load was done. And one woman of the few amongst us, spread a sweet, maroon salt on the fish as they wriggled up the conveyor. She was just old enough to remember this from before, with the belching steam-drifters. And the crack flying with the knives.
‘But the hours, a ghràidh, the hours we worked.’
And we worked them again in the here and now. So the Quo Vadis could get out for another shottie. I
took my turn, pressing the electronic counter, the Norskis’ tally against the East Coasters’. Got distracted when my opposite number told me there was talk of a Daimler, for a bonus, company car like, if the accountant could swing it. No point givin it tae the bloody taxman, like.
The top fish they scooped for the sample looked much like the herring you’d cadged on a string from the Daffodil, the Lily, the Ivy – the Scalpay drifters. Deeper down in the hold, they became faded and soft. So the further into the shift you went, the more dull the fish became. There wasn’t a lot of shine to them. No firmness left. That’s it, you saw what was missing in the herring, not what was there. Except for the eyes. The bloodshot eyes of seven hangovers in a row. And hardness now in the sockets that contained them, the bony sunken mouth below it.
I met the Quo Vadis again a couple of years later. She was anchored to her quota, out in Loch Shell. She’d taken the lot on the first night of the season. Most of it had gone to the fishmeal factory. Markets weren’t ready for them. They’d slapped the ban on fishing herring in the Minch. That included the Scalpay boats, and the last of the drift-netters amongst them – they were all tied up too. These boys were out of a job.
I had a summer job, up that loch. Up, over the burn, into fresh water. I’d to row anglers around and try to steer their casts towards the sea trout. It was as dry a summer as I can remember and the sky just got heavier.
Colin insisted on these patrols in the estate launch. We fired up a Merc inboard with a push-button start. A sweet piece of engineering in a planing hull. It was a novelty for me, being free of the laws of displacement for a while. It was supposed to be serious anti-poaching stuff but the real reason was just to get away from the Lodge for a while.