Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning,
Keep me burning till the break of day.
That’s what we sang, and even as I sang I sweated. The image came too close to home and crackled with damnation.
You will go to hell! You will go the burning fire!
The Sunday school teachers confirmed Epp’s gospel of doom and put flesh on her still furious bones.
Look in the face the fact that you are bad, that you are a cracked vessel, leaking sin, that you have done wrong.
You do wrong every day of your life, from eye-opening to eye-shutting. You did wrong from the first breath that you took, O thou child of weak-willed Adam and foolish Eve. You did wrong to be born at all, thou offspring of original sin.
Conceived in sin and born in sorrow, you are an error, a living wrong, a perversion of the creation.
God sees everything that you do, everything that you think and feel he hears and senses. He hears every lie told, every wicked whisper of the heart, every impulse in your idle hands, your fingers and feet, your immortal soul. An empty seat in Sunday school, a vacant pew in church, where you ought to have been – every absence is a witness against Christ the Son, every negative a positive assault, carried out by you. He who is not for him is against him, and God the Father will not be mocked in the person of his Son. A text unlearned is a failure to love him. A crude word is another nail hammered into his crucified hands. And a refusal to believe in Him is the sure and certain road to eternal damnation.
The bible is God’s revelation to man. Church and conscience are of no avail in themselves, good works are useless, a kind and caring heartbeat is unheard in heaven, and a gracious life already dead in God’s eyes, unless these things are accompanied by prayer, by scripture and by belief. Belief in the bible is the cornerstone of faith in God. You must know your bible then, better than you know yourself, for you will never truly know yourself until you know your bible: every book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, every sentence of it, every word of it, every syllable of it – which is the inspired word of God.
The bible is your sword of salvation. To defend yourself against the Adversary and attack the armies of the ungodly, you must first know the length and breadth of your sword, from point to hilt and from edge to edge. Now let Satan see that you can wield the whole sword effectively. Are you ready now? The books of the bible by heart. Off you go! Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth … All the way from the Creation to the Armageddon, right down to Revelation.
Now you must know all the vital strokes and how to deliver them with precision and speed against the enemy, the eternal enemy of man. Put your swords under your armpits, and when I say, ‘Draw your swords’, find the following texts as fast as you can. Remember that whoever is slow with his sword and uncertain with his thrust is a prey to Satan, who is swift as a tiger and strikes like a snake. Are you ready then, soldiers?
John, chapter three, verse sixteen. Draw your swords!
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Mark, chapter sixteen, verse sixteen. Draw your swords!
He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.
First Epistle of John, chapter one, verse eight. Draw your swords!
If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
Revelation, chapter twenty, verse fifteen. Draw your swords!
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
So with our swords in our hands we were equipped for the fight against principalities and powers of evil.
But the white-headed men who peered over the pulpit counted my blessings, totted up my sins, lamented my fall, demanded my faith and put a sword in my hand with which I never felt properly at ease. Eventually it rusted in its sheath and I took up a pen instead.
Still at one time I succeeded in drawing my sword better than the best of them. One summer the evangelists descended on us. We had no idea where they came from or where they disappeared to, but we knew very well why they were there: to spend every day of the seven-week school holidays luring us away from our play and whipping us up into a frenzy of self-loathing and love of Jesus. If there were men among them I remember none. All I recall is a bevy of red-lipped, blazered and straw-bonneted young girls wearing cotton print dresses and with bare sandalled feet. They blazed into our midst and sent the minister and the Sunday school spinsters packing. They opened the double doors and let the sunlight and the sound of seagulls come breezing in to break up the stained-glass silence and the dim religious light. They marched us down to the sands and sent us into the waves to be cleansed and born again to cries of Hallelujah. The firth had become the Jordan. And if those clear-eyed, honey-haired girls were not exactly a band of angels, they were their beautiful assistants, coming for to carry us home, and carrying accordions instead of harps.
One of them in particular I remember. She was in charge of our bible education and was determined to make us faster on the draw and more accurate with the chapter-and-verse thrust. As an incentive she carried in the inside pocket of her scarlet blazer a stack of bookmarks, all bearing coloured illustrations of scenes from the bible, and all done in lurid Victorian detail, sentimental or apocalyptic. The first to whip the bible from under the armpit, locate the given text and rattle it out, became the owner of one of these bookmarks. They served no functional purpose for me as I had no books to put them in, but suddenly all my collections of carefully accumulated cards from the cigarette packets gone through by grandfather and my uncles lost their appeal. The trains, the aeroplanes, the clipper ships – their glamour had gone and all I wanted was to win these biblical bookmarks. Not for myself but for the sake of the beautiful evangelist. Even the cigarette packets themselves seemed tawdry now. I went home and looked at them in their secret drawer: Four Square, Three Castles, Black Sobranie, Turf, Wild Woodbine and the Players packets with the red-bearded sailor on the front, the kindly seaman who stood in for my father, I would have swapped all of them for one bookmark. So I became a demon with my sword, a little soldier impressing his lady, the tall young girl who kissed me with her red lips a dozen times a week as I went up to collect my bookmark. The summer went on and I never missed a meeting.
Ah, but summers end. And so do games. After the very last gospel meeting she went down on her knees in front of me, her spotless cotton dress touching the ground. She took both my grimy hands in her clean ones, looked earnestly into my eyes, and asked me the question I had dreaded.
‘Christopher, are you saved?’
The game was up. It was about more than collecting coloured cards and impressing an angel. I shuffled an embarrassed ‘no’ with my scuffed shoes and a shake of the head, but the pain was so delicate on her pale brow, so exquisitely sweet on her sad red lips, that I allowed her to save me. It was a multiple conversion. Bert Mackay was saved along with me – and a girl called Cynthia. But it was Bert she used as an example to reinforce the enormity of what we had just done.
‘Bert comes from a farm,’ she said, looking at us with sweet solemnity. ‘He that putteth his hand to the plough and then looks backward is not fit for the kingdom of heaven. Remember that, all of you, for Jesus’ sake.’
‘What did she mean?’ I asked Bert afterwards.
It was Bert’s turn to educate me.
‘You shouldn’t look back when you’re ploughing,’ he said. ‘If you do, your line won’t be straight. You have to fix your eye on a point in the distance and never take it off. That way your line will be perfect.’
I was not yet ten years old. Next morning she left with the band of hope in the big bright van in which they’d come seven weeks before. She blew me a kiss and I went back to the dragons. All my former queens were dead or disappeared, Mrs Guthrie, Miss Balsilbie, Honeybunch. Now the beautiful
evangelist was my angel queen and the sweet chariot was taking her away. My lip trembled. But it was not just because I knew I’d never see her again. It was because I knew I’d never plough that straight unswerving furrow. I was a Judas, a nine-year-old Iscariot. And she was betrayed.
I was left with a guilty secret, an uneasy relationship with God – who knew very well that my salvation had been a charade – and a collection of bookmarks. With no books to put them in, I laid them in the drawer beside the cut-out fronts of the packets of Players and Woodbine, till I decided that Jesus and the bearded sailor, though not dissimilar to look at, made uneasy bedfellows, one advertising tobacco and the other eternal life. Eventually I offered the bookmarks to old George, who frowned and pursed his lips at such fripperies but was pleased to hear how I had acquired them. He paid me the tribute of actually using them and I felt a faint gladness when I saw them sticking out of his pulpit bible, marking his favourite texts.
The absence of books from our house did not mean any lack of stimulation. Epp had thundered forth her heroic poetry, Georgina’s songs spoke of doomed lovers from another culture and hinted wistfully at their sad stories. The old folk told me countless tales. But other than these, and the scraps of stories chiselled on the kirkyard slabs, it was the bible that was my first sustained contact with a narrative masterpiece in the form of printed literature.
Adam and Eve were creatures of dust and bone, Adam composed first out of the dreary dust of the ground, to which he was bound back, and when he slept, God the butcher broke open his body, ripping out a rib, exposing it like the ribs of the ships in the boatshed – and so Eve was made. Dust and bone with the smell of death on them, they were a grim couple, Sunday school teachers without their clothes, the merest shades of people, inhabiting a garden where there was no sound or smell of the sea, and where a serpent slid, subtler than any conger eel, a cold-blooded killer with a brain in its sharp little skull. It knew all about the apples of desire.
And so they yielded, and knew at once the sinful nakedness of Honeybunch, walking cool as she liked through Alec Fergusson’s cucumbers as he mended his bicycle in the garden, walking bare buff and beautiful into the waves, never to come out again. Then the dreadful disembodied voice of the Lord God was heard walking in the garden in the cool of the day, a walking voice, spying into their sin, telling them that they were found out.
The serpent was punished, as grandfather once punished a conger eel on the pier, writhing and snapping at his heel till his heavy boot crushed its skull into a pulpy silence. But Adam would have to butter his bread with the sweat of his brow, and at his life’s end he would have to go back to the ground from which he’d been taken, back to the old kirkyard with the rest of the town. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. And Eve would conceive and bear in sorrow.
So out they went, like bad boys and girls, a flaming sword at the school gates forbidding them any second chance. They were a dreary desolate couple and they had let us all down. The whole history of the world proclaimed their failure. They had spoiled things for the rest of us, for the rest of our lives. And yet I felt a crushing sorrow for them as they were sent out, the same sorrow as I felt for Cain, who stood in a field and denied his brother’s murder to God’s own face, blustering, brazening it out. Am I my brother’s keeper? I know nothing about it, honest!
Yet even as Cain fibbed, his brother’s blood came bubbling up from the ground like a red tongue, telling all, tolling out the truth. What hast thou done? What hast thou done? And so Cain too was cut off from God and driven out from community and kin, an exile to the end of his days. And his punishment was greater than I could bear.
But Cain knew his wife and she conceived. Strange words. Of course he knew his wife! What did it mean? And what did it mean that the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men? Words hung up like underclothes around the images they never quite created, hiding the man and the woman and what it was that they did. What was it that lay behind the winks and grins and sudden silences in those interrupted adult conversations, taken up again in low voices after I had left the room?
‘She didn’t, did she? Oh, tell me she didn’t!’
‘She did, she did, the first time in Balcaskie, the second time in Peter Hughes’s barley, and then she even did it in the ice shed. And do you know what happened?’
‘What, what …?’
Jenny and Georgina crouched so close by the fireside, bare toes touching on the fender, that their breaths met to seal the conclusion with a kiss.
‘Oh, God sakes, I don’t believe it!’
‘It’s true!’
The tinkling music of their laughter and low voices, stirred to pinkness in their long white nightgowns, lured me into the room.
‘Tell me, tell me …’
‘It’s not for young ears to hear. Away you go now, cockie.’
‘Geordie’s looking for you. Go and learn your bible.’
I went and learned my bible. And nothing was ever normal again.
Joseph haunted me from Egypt, where he lay like Epp, embalmed in a coffin. Before that, in prison, he had interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh’s butler and baker. The butler had a good dream and was released, but the baker’s dream was bad. I knew all about bad dreams.
Mr Guthrie came out of the bakery with the baking trays on his head as he always did, right up to that last Sunday morning. Three white baskets on the chief baker’s head, the bible said, and in the topmost basket Pharaoh’s bakemeats, which the birds of the air came and ate. The three white baskets were three days, and in three days, Joseph told him, Pharaoh would have him hanged, and the birds would eat his flesh. And so it came to pass.
Mr Guthrie hanged himself from the beams of the bakehouse in the small hours of a Sunday morning, locking the door behind him. Nobody knew why. One of the bakers had to smash the window to get at him and was sick when he saw what he saw – Mr Guthrie hanging high from a hawser, with his head wrenched to the side and his haddock’s mouth bursting a black grape of a tongue. And the seabirds breaking open his skull with their beaks and feeding on his brains. Poor Mr Guthrie.
I felt sorry too for Lazarus the beggar, Lazarus full of sores, lying at the rich man’s gate as he fared sumptuously every day, while the dogs came and licked his sores. But I felt even sorrier for the rich man, because Lazarus went to heaven, but the rich man went to hell, where nobody licked his wounds, or gave him a single drop of water to cool his burning tongue. I knew what it would be like to hear a voice tell you that this was for ever, with no resurrection except to eternal torment. And not one drop of water will you get!
Was I deprived? Abused? Did I miss out somehow on Sleeping Beauty? Would I have been better off with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Rhetorical questions, I think. The bible was black gold and I was rich beyond the dreams of literary avarice – give or take a little scarring of the soul. In the end it is the Book of Job I remember best. A difficult story for a child to read for himself, especially in the language of King James, but old George cracked it open for me and never tired of telling it. I even asked for it, knocking on the blistered door, and he always obliged. He never read it from the page, though, telling the story instead in his rough distinctive way, which I can still remember, word for word.
This is how he told it.
Job, you see, was a real toff, because he was a very well-off man, but he was also a man of God, and he had a heart of gold.
One day, when God was holding forth, Satan turned up.
‘And what have you been up to?’ God asked.
‘Wandering round the compass,’ Satan answered. ‘North, south, east, west, on land and sea. You know how I like to travel.’
‘Have you heard tell of my servant, Job?’ God asked. ‘Did you see any sign of him? Now there’s a man of faith for you! He’s what you call a pillar of the kirk.’
‘Och, him!’ scoffed Satan. ‘Aye, I came across him all right, but he’s nothing special. He’s got every cause to be religious. Just
look at how you’ve feathered his nest all these years. Cupboard love, that’s his religion.’
God took that a bit hard. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Do just what you like with his gear, but no harm to the man himself, mind.’
Satan went away rubbing his hands.
Next thing you know, Job was tucking in as usual, when one after another the messages started coming in.
Bandits have raided your cattle and murdered your men – I’m the only survivor!
Lightning has struck your sheep and their shepherds – I’m the only survivor!
Fierce tribesmen have carted off your camels and done their drivers to death – I’m the only survivor!
A whirlwind from the wilderness has smashed your son’s house to smithereens, and all the young folk have lost their lives in the ruin – I’m the only survivor!’
These were some punches. But Job took them like a man, right on the jaw, and this is what he said:
Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.
And he never said a word against God.
Next time God was holding forth at the bench, Satan turned up to put in his needleful.
‘So,’ said God, ‘where have you been stravaiging to this time?’
‘Oh, the usual,’ said Satan. ‘Boxing the compass, round and about. North, south, east, west. You know how I like to travel.’
‘And what have you to say about Job now? He’s still the godfearing body he always was. Even though you made me wreck him, he didn’t crack, did he?’
‘Skin for skin, as they say,’ Satan answered. ‘Hit him in the flesh itself, right into the very bone, and he’ll soon squeal.’
‘All right,’ said God, grim-faced. ‘He’s all yours, but don’t make it fatal.’
Satan took a bearing on the earth and went for Job like a gannet. He struck him with saltwater boils, blistering him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, and Job sat in agony in the ash-hole, itching uncontrollably and scraping himself with shards of shattered earthenware.
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