Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  ‘You’ll be just like Tom Tarvit,’ Leebie would say to me. ‘Not a toe to your foot and not a tooth to your head.’

  In which unfortunate circumstance – Leebie always added – I’d be unable to go to the shops. Eager for the shops, not so much because of anything that was actually on offer on those late ’40s shelves, as because of the adventure they presented in getting there, I settled down to earn the kingdom of heaven, the right to keep my toes, and also to leave the house on my own.

  Battling to the baker’s then through heavy seas of wind that pitched me from side to side of the street and did with me what they wanted. Clutching the coppers tightly in my pink freezing fist, I pushed open our front door, only to be knocked flying as it came back at me like a cannon on the recoil. My mother held it open for me and I edged my way through the blue murder-hole and found myself in the grip of my first screaming north-easter.

  It ripped off my cap, diminishing it to a speck halfway across the harbour, to be intercepted by a disappointed gull. It tore at my hair, tugging at the roots, shredding it to spikes, forcing the tears from screwed-up eyes. It punched me full in the face, bullied the legs from me, knocked me flat on my nose, spun me round like a top, lifted me up by the seat of my pants and catapulted me to the corner of our street. I tried to turn up the narrow wynd but the wind shot down like a battering ram and thudded me against the harbour wall, panting for breath. When I wanted to walk it made me run. If I tried to run, it drove me back. If I stood still it rocketed between my legs, sending me sprawling, splay-footed, into the gutter. As I lay there reeling, some words from Epp ran through my dazed brain. The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. And that much, so I reckoned, was for sure.

  At last I came somehow to the foot of the big broad wynd and began the ascent. Up at the top of the hill I could see all the houses puffing like steam drifters, chugging a passage through the storm. The crews were snug inside, fathers, mothers, youngsters, munching their yesterday’s bread. Only I was out and about this morning, riding the dawn, bobbing like a berserk cork in the invisible rivers of wind, and still not a roll for breakfast in our house. I had to reach the bakehouse or we would perish one and all. But the storm wind stood in the way. There was only one thing to be done. I spread my arms wide, turned myself into a gull and flew straight up the brae, landing in a perfect pouncing dive right at Guthrie’s door. Why was it that I could never perform that feat again, except in dreams?

  They never understood my heroic undertaking, the men in the bakehouse that day, safe in their quiet solid world of dough that rose no further than their oven doors. It was a dim windless little world, the bakehouse, dusted with snow-flour and icing-sugar. The bakers stood white-elbowed among the slow storms of yeast, their faces red as their fires. And the freshly baked bread stood in battalions behind them in beautiful order, piping hot and waiting to be bought and eaten. I passed through to the shop, under floury hands that tousled my hair.

  ‘My mother’s rolls, please.’

  Mrs Guthrie picked a baker’s dozen from the last piping tray, passing them to me with an expert swirl of the paper bag.

  ‘Run all the way home now,’ she said.

  But then she took a cream cookie from a very small tray of cakes, put it in a separate bag and handed it over the counter with a wide pearl-strung smile.

  ‘That’s for you.’

  I stood before her, open-mouthed with gratitude and worship – Mrs Guthrie, now my queen, the apple-cheeked baker’s wife with the flashing teeth, apples in her face and apples in her pink brocaded bosom, as she rested her breasts on the high counter, displaying her cleavage, and placed her broad bare arms across the wood, bending to say goodbye. Flour on her wedding-ring touching my face, flour sprinkling her butterfly spectacles, snow-blinding her flashing eyes till I wondered how she could see, flour in her hair, lending it its only whiteness, raven-haired Mrs Guthrie, queen of the apple-tarts, now queen of my heart, Mrs Guthrie, now white bones in the green mound of the kirkyard hill, still smiling beneath the white unbroken bread of the January snow.

  Or I was sent to Agnes Meldrum’s shop and house in Virgin Square, off the east pier. Agnes served between endless cups of tea, sipped from the saucer, while her mother, who had seen out a century by the time I was born, sat unblinking in a basket chair, her hands knotted like Epp’s round the head of her stick, never uttering a word. The customers always greeted her out of politeness but she came out of the corners of her hundred years for nothing and nobody, and I had never heard her speak. Some folk even said that she was dead – had died years ago and Agnes had had her stuffed, though nobody dared say so in the shop, even in a whisper. The opposing story was that, far from being dead, she had preternatural hearing and could hear your thoughts, even though you were at the other end of the village with your head under water. That at least was my uncle Billy’s view. Alec belonged to the other camp – that she was stone dead. Although it was obvious, if you stared at her for a long time, that she was subject to certain minuscule movements, Alec attributed these to ‘nerves’, of the sort that kept a fish quivering long after you had killed it. But Alec was older. Billy by this time was all of ten – and gave out truths with the absolute majesty of his decade. To be ten seemed to me to be in the fullest glory of life.

  Agnes herself was in her seventies. Her shop counter was really an enormous old dresser. In its dark mahogany drawers she kept her personals, as she called them, bits and pieces of linen and lingerie, together with whatever spinsterish secrets could not be sold over the counter to a mere boy.

  ‘Don’t you go near them drawers,’ she was forever warning the boys who came into her shop, searching for sweets. ‘Them’s my unmentionables.’

  All the goods that could be mentioned – and they were precious few – were laid out with neat precision on the dark wooden shelves that lined the house from wall to wall and ceiling to floor.

  Agnes’s father had been a master-mariner with an extraordinary taste for literature. He had brought back from his voyages books from all over the globe, amassing a library which might have graced a medieval monastery or a Renaissance university, along with other volumes of the nineteenth century. The ministers and schoolmasters of the time buzzed like bees about the Meldrum house, sipping the nectar of knowledge.

  Nor for long, though. Captain Meldrum perished in the China seas in his early fifties and his library suffered an even worse fate. Agnes and her mother had no liking for books and no understanding of their value. The shelves were stripped bare and the books bundled off down to the cellar, where they lay for years in tea-chests for the dampness and the rats to do their worst. Periodically Agnes would rescue a few, pulling them from the chests, blowing off the loose tea, and placing them on the shelves of the house-turned-shop, next to the eggs. Not for any educational purpose. Egg boxes were an invention of the 1950s, and until they became available customers with a taste for eggs and the classics could consume interesting breakfasts. Agnes used the contents of her father’s books as packaging. Systematically she tore out their pages, crumpling them into balls and using them to separate the eggs, each egg individually wrapped in a scholarly leaf, and the dozen or half dozen popped into ordinary brown paper pokes that would not have been proof against most message boys, including myself – not without the additional protection of the academic wrapping.

  An entire library was shredded in this way over a period of decades, in the course of which a dozen eggs could have improved a man’s mind no end, and an egg a day for three or four years produced a Master of Arts. But the eggs were rationed, like everything else, the precious coupons limiting your entitlement, and meanwhile the mice were nibbling away at the roots of the tree of wisdom, and Agnes simply ripped her way through the great works. Now, where leather-bound, gilt-spined editions of Milton and Shakespeare had once stood like palms in the wilderness of Virgin Square, jars of humbugs and Chivers jellies offered
themselves like manna to us post-war indigents with nothing but holes in our pockets.

  Agnes went round the shelves with the list: a tin of Lyle’s golden syrup; a tin of Fowler’s treacle; a half pound of margarine; half a dozen eggs; a tea loaf; a packet of Rinso; a bar of Sunlight; a packet of Wild Woodbine; and a quarter of black-striped balls.

  ‘That’ll be nine shillings and elevenpence, and no doubt you’ll be getting the penny for going. Do you want to spend it here?’

  ‘The boat’s not in yet, my mother said to say.’

  ‘I’ll put it on the slate. Your grandfather can pay me when he goes to the lines.’

  ‘My granny says he doesn’t go to the lines until the spring.’

  ‘There will be no herring in the firth this winter,’ said old Mrs Meldrum suddenly, staring over the head of her stick into seas of space a hundred years away. I looked into the fathomless eyes and Agnes looked from her mother to me, and then down at the slate.

  ‘You’d better tell your grandfather what she said. If she breaks her silence it’s only to speak God’s truth.’

  As I reached the door the old woman repeated her prediction. The voice came out of an empty sea-shell, brittle and white and dry, as if the ghost of a crab had spoken. I opened the door and the bitter whisper followed me into the wind.

  ‘There will be no herring in the firth this winter, you mark my words.’

  The prophecy was fulfilled. The winter fishing started on the second day of January and lasted till the end of March. The days were gone that my grandfather talked about, when winter mizzen masts and sails were stepped and rigged. Now you could hear engines chugging in every boat, though still the change was made in the nets from black to white at the start of the year, white for winter. The fleet left the harbour every day and night, drifting up and down the firth in the hope of herring. From east to west, from north to south, from Fife Ness to Elie Ness, from close inshore to as far out as the May Island, and across to the Fidra, the Bass and Berwick Law, they shot their nets over and over, hauling them in heavy with living silver, or sometimes, as Leebie used to say, ‘as empty as Kilrenny kirk’.

  This particular January was a disaster, just as old Mrs Meldrum had foretold.

  ‘Bloody old witch!’ muttered grandfather. ‘It’s like hauling in the middle of the first week that ever was – before God even made the fishes!’

  So he came into harbour that year and told me instead about his first night at sea, when he was a boy, and not much older than me.

  Now in another millennium, when I shut my eyes in winter, I can hear the story and see its teller, sitting on a bench by the white bowling-green. Another old man was with us, an older man than my grandfather by far. Gloved and overcoated, capped and scarved, he was little more than a shrunken voice, trembling on the edge of the bitter wind that blew that day.

  ‘It’s a cold wind,’ he said, ‘a cold, cold wind.’

  ‘It is that,’ said grandfather, ‘but it’s turned westerly at long last.’

  The old reedy voice became thinner still.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it’s farther west than that. It’s farther west than westerly, let me tell you.’

  Grandfather smiled, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

  ‘How far west can the wind get?’ he asked. ‘How far west can a westerly wind actually go?’

  The old head shook on its frail stalk, its eye sharing the secret with the invisible eye of the wind. Thou canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth – so Epp had said, quoting scripture. But this ancient seadog, long retired, seemed to know the secrets of the wind even better than God.

  ‘Aye sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a far west wind, farther west than westerly by far.’

  Grandfather never answered. But I hear him speaking now.

  It was on a boat called the Regina that I first went to sea – a sixty-foot boat made of Scottish larch, with a keel of American elm: 1071 KY, that was her number. Old Jock Dees was the skipper, Adam his son, Alan Keay his son-inlaw, Ecks Ritchie, Rob Ritchie and my father. That was the crew for my first time at the winter herring.

  It was the second day of the year. My father wrapped me in a huge jacket and I stood on the fo’c’sle trap. Cold? I’ve never felt cold like it, a westerly half-gale it was, and there was no appearance in the Mill Bay, off Kilrenny, or off the coves at Caiplie, or even at Crail, when we had all the lights in a line in the small hours of the morning. But just off Kilminning farm we saw five gannets that took a sudden dive, all together, like a white hand plunging into the water.

  ‘That’s the hand of God,’ said my father.

  ‘Let’s follow that hand then,’ Adam said.

  So we went the way the hand pointed. We shot the anchored nets and left them there.

  Head on then it was, coming home in the dark, with all the harbour lights lighted and the white spray flying in our faces. Lumps of it struck me between the eyes like ice, the white whips lashing my cheek till the flesh quivered and I wanted to cry. I wouldn’t sit down though, and my father put his arm around me. Everybody was wondering what the morning would bring when we sailed back to the nets. Would we have anything to show for our tiredness and cold? Would we even be able to haul the nets at all for the weather?

  Jock Dees, the skipper, was in no doubt.

  ‘It’ll be a fine morning the morn’s morning,’ he said, ‘for the wind’s far west now.’

  We got three cran that morning, the first catch of the season and me ten years old. Each man got ten shillings and the boat got five. The skipper should have had two shares but he only took one. He gave me the extra shilling, the one that was left over, for my first time at sea. A mere pittance for a night and a morning of cold and exhaustion and wetness and sleeplessness and hunger. One shilling. But I’ve never spent it yet.

  The first of an old man’s stories, recalled in stark detail, even to the numbers he cited. And I still have that coin of his that he passed on to me, the one that he could never bring himself to break, with the head of Queen Victoria, and the date, 1875, I who pay more in taxes each month than my grandfather earned in his whole life.

  At the turn of the year now, as I sit in rooms of amber before an embering fire, and I hear the wind veer from west-south-west to north-west, I take out the shilling and stare at it, and those old scenes and stories come creeping back into my mind. And the faintest feeling of guilt stirs as I remember one other saying. It was said to me by Leebie (who lived on into my teens) when I came home much too late one night, in the small hours, not from catching herring like my grandfather – the fish and the father-figure were both gone by then – but from a youthful party and smelling of drink.

  ‘A far west wind, like all good young men, goes soon to its bed at even.’

  That’s what she said. Winds don’t change their habits much, though young men do.

  Later I lay back in my grey army blankets in the long night, listening wide-eyed to the loud hallooing of the owls as they tore their prey with rough strife up in the wild woods, beyond Balcaskie. And from farther west and up country I could hear the weird and wilder cries of the geese in their midnight arrivals at Kilconquhar loch, where they drowned the witches long ago. Once I nearly drowned too – and Miller’s fat gold watch now lay at the bottom of the sea, beyond the breakwater blocks, its ticking long stopped. If Miller hadn’t pulled me out in time, then I would have stopped too, just like a watch. Like Nelson and all his crew, like Thomas Watson and Mary Buek, in spite of the victory, in spite of the life-affirming rum.

  I opened my eyes wider still, listening. Not far from where I was sleeping lay the dead of the village, frozen like fish in a black fathom of earth. Could they feel this terrible cold, tinkling on the jack-frosted panes? Could they hear these cries, these terrible thoughts of mine?

  And old Epp was lying up there with them, a whiteness in a box, packed about by blackness, Epp who had said that the dead know not anything, denying her own stories of eternal torment. Agony or extin
ction, earth or fire, which was it? One day we would all be dead.

  I closed my eyes tight in my terror, shutting out the stars.

  2

  Home from the Sea

  We lived on in Epp’s house while certain legal wrinkles appeared, and were ironed out again – on the deep brow of time, in Leebie’s sonorous parlance. She may have mixed her metaphors but it wasn’t hard for me to imagine a forehead under the steam iron – I simply thought of my father’s. He had a way of raising his eyebrows any time I happened to squint at him out of the corner of my eye, as if to ask me what I was looking at, and the effect was ugly – a field of furrows in that arrogant pink flesh. I had already developed a tendency to play with images. They came at me in my dreams. But leaving Epp’s house was no dream. It was a short journey up the hill, away from Shore Road and into one of the newly built council houses sitting in what had been the previous year a green sweep of field. The war itself now seemed like a bad dream, people said. Men had left the village and died, but even more had come in, men like my father, eager to pull off those bell-bottoms and be fruitful – and all those hopeful new families had to be housed.

  The house itself was clean and light and without corners and cubby-holes and stairs, free from the dark retentions of the old house. All the new memories were waiting for us to make them, waiting to be impressed on the smart-smelling linoleum, the freshly papered walls. They came, in time, and were imprinted, indelible as the patterns themselves. And in time I came to hate it, that house, and left it without regret, closing its door behind me one day with the toe of my boot. It was a place where I merely marked time, not lived. I stepped out instead into the brand-new decade of the ’50s – and into my grandfather’s house.

  Whatever the wrinkles were (and I never found out), they split us up, forcing me out from under the strong gentle wings of my mother’s folk and into the clinical prison of No. 16 Inwearie Street, where my father now held sway – the cock of the midden, as Leebie said. But whenever I had the chance, I left the new house to its unformed identity and made a beeline for the braehead.