Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  I took it literally at five years old, and even at ten.

  ‘Yes, you could have walked across the sea all the way to Edinburgh – no need to take a train!’

  Behind mindshut eyes I saw the busy boats, the plummeting white gannets striking the shoals, heard the shouts and screechings, and sensed in my soul the wonder of the moment – man and bird and fish brought together in a miracle of sudden abundance, the whole cosmos killing and recreating itself in a circle of sacrifice and sustenance. And grandfather walking across the water, his arms outspread to enfold me.

  For weeks they never stopped, he said, landing at Anstruther and Pittenweem and St Monans in turn, sharing out the catches among the saturated buyers, and steaming across to Newhaven and Dunbar and right back again to Fife Ness round the long clock of the month.

  ‘I still dream about it,’ grandfather said.

  Sometimes he dreamed that after half a century the herring had returned in August, and he woke up with the cry ringing round the room, though it was only in his head: There’s herring in the Haikes! There’s herring in the Haikes!

  Some folk had dreams, he said, that one day King Arthur would return to Britain, that he had never really died but had gone to a mysterious place called Avalon. ‘But King Arthur’s dead and gone – and the fish’ll follow him, just you wait and see.’

  Prophet or realist, grandfather said they were killing the sea. And I didn’t have long to wait. But the boom-before-the-bust stays with me till I die: one single blinding image of St Monans harbour seen from the braehead, lying beneath my feet, glittering in the morning sun, with what looked like a billion fish, silver bullion in boxes, but also lying loose everywhere, littering the piers and pavements, spilling out into the streets and slipping back into the water, the swooping gulls going mad as they gorged and circled and swung, nobody to stop them sharing the excitement, the wild bonanza.

  After that it was the East Anglian fishing. But before he left for Yarmouth grandfather liked to accompany the Dyker to the lobsters. They had cast their shells in June and July, coming inshore when the increasing temperature of the sea told them that the time had come. And as they provided tasty bites for fish with their armour off, they sought the seclusion of holes in the rocks rather than engage in an unequal jousting on the seabed. They were easily caught by fishermen in August when they needed food to build up the calcium in their new shells. By September their flesh was at its sweetest, but the meat grew tougher later in the year, when the wintry tail in particular became hard to eat.

  Every year at the extreme end of the summer, grandfather and the Dyker made new lobster creels, and they took me with them up to Balcaskie, where the ash trees were growing wild. If somebody had beaten us to the best ashboughs, they took dog-rose stems instead, whittling away the thorns with their penknives, the blades of which had dwindled to slivers with decades of honing. They had been using them since they were boys. The Dyker liked the stems of the whins best of all, but grandfather said that only a man whose hands were filled with time would take the trouble that whin-stems required. They were best because they were the strongest, but they refused to bend into the required half moons unless they were given a good steaming over the backyard boiler.

  They also disagreed about lobster bait. Fish-heads failed to satisfy the Dyker, who went to enormous lengths to entice the lobsters into his creels. He stretched herring nets across the harbour mouth to the annoyance of the other fishermen, weighting the nets with chains along the bottom. Or he dropped fresh herring guts into muslin bags and pinned these to the bottom of the creel. But grandfather always insisted that stinking mackerel were good enough bait for a lobster.

  ‘A lobster is different from a crab,’ he told the Dyker. ‘Crabs go into creels on scent, lobsters on sight. You don’t even have to use flesh for bait – anything will do.’

  The Dyker looked away, smiling at the sea. But to prove his point grandfather set three of the creels aside. He baited one with a piece of white rubber from a sea-boot, another with a shiny piece of tin, and a third with a broken white plate. To the Dyker’s dismay some of his own creels came in empty whereas grandfather’s were full, and the one with the piece of tin had two lobsters in it.

  ‘There’s your answer,’ said grandfather. ‘They go in with their eyes and not their snouts, just like I told you.’

  I showed this trick to Peem and Golly. Peem’s brother had become a plumber and Peem himself was soon to lose all interest in seawater. Golly’s interest in girls was short-lived. Girls cost money, he argued with a maturity beyond his years – lobsters made it for you. He stole a creel and tied it to a tangle in a rock-ringed puddle just behind the west pier. A lobster was taken with the very first tide. Then he stole the blacksmith’s long poker, and using it as a cleek, he raked out lobsters from the rocks as if they were magnetized. His nickname adapted to his success and he became known as Lobster Golly.

  August threaded our noons with dragonflies and stroked our faces with thistle seeds. Summer had stood still for a time but now its settled silences were over. Berries replaced blossoms, and seed vessels rattled where flowers had waved at us in passing in July. Campion and cow-parsley and dog roses still filled the ditches, the convolvulus rang its white straggling bells in the hedges, and harebells embroidered the braes with their wild clear blue. But the swifts were leaving in large numbers and the swallows had taken to sitting in long rows on the telegraph wires. They were waiting for the autumn call. Up in Balcormo Den the big beech with the initials carved in a heart was already beginning to yellow. The hymn boards in the churches reflected the passage of time. If you listened on a Sunday to the voices drifting across the village roofs, you could hear nature making the choice and calling the tune.

  Change and decay in all around I see,

  O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

  But the biggest change in August was in the fields, as the sun wove into them the bright threads of autumn, green turning heavily to gold across the quilted country. They stood like churches emptied of their people, the white heads and colourful hats gone from the pews as daisies and corn-flowers and poppies made their straggling exits.

  If you closed your eyes, the sound of the wind in the barley told you the time of year. All those secret whisperings and sighs of satisfaction, the long slow susurrations of fulfilment – summer had its special music. But an August wind, no matter how soft and gentle, was always an anxious one. It roamed and probed the waves of grain, sometimes with quick little questionings, sometimes with gustier surges of aimless undefinable longings.

  Then the whiteness came on the cornfields, and they rattled like urgent papers turned by an anxious hand. And when the restless sounds died away at dusk, the setting sun slid like a big drop of blood into meadows where the trees stood half shrouded in the early evening mists and the cattle sometimes disappeared in a sea of milk. The earth hoisted the stars on its shoulder, the afterglow had gone. When I saw Pegasus breaking the waves with the first stars and making his way to the fields by nine o’clock, I knew that autumn had come. The horse was now a reaper, pawing the corn, swinging Andromeda all the way to the west like a great silver scythe.

  It was time for grandfather to sail to Yarmouth. Before he left, the nets had to be mended. This was work for old women who had nothing left to do but talk, and old men whose last pleasure was tobacco. But grandfather never minded putting in a needleful himself when he had nothing else to do, always insisting on mending every last broken leg on a mesh, and frequently whittling away at old bone needles, which he preferred to the wooden ones, and which he made as a hobby, decorating them with tiny carvings of the old sailing ships, tea-clippers and Fifies and Zulus.

  For the Yarmouth fishing there could be up to a hundred nets at a time in the Venus’s fleet. A net cost anything between three and five pounds, not including its four ropes. A twomile messenger warp for the whole fleet of nets could cost over twenty pounds. Even a box of cutch to bark them was thirty shillings, and
a hundredweight was needed to the tub every time they were treated. With the herring dropping to only ten shillings a cran, many hundreds of cran had to be hauled before the crews could even cover their costs. Grandfather used to say that they were fishing for four weeks in every season just to keep the boat afloat and the nets in the water.

  Mended, boiled and barked, all the nets were then taken back down to the boat, and by the end of the first week in September the fleet had sailed for Yarmouth.

  The East Anglian fishing was the highlight of the drifterman’s year but it was always accompanied by loss of life, and some children were allowed out of school to see their fathers away, in recognition of the possibility that they might never see them again. I went down to the pier with my mother and aunts to see the men off, grandfather and Alec and Billy, and even grandmother managed to come down with Leebie, arm in crooked arm. There was a colossal noise going on in the harbour – too much steam on the boats, and they were blowing it off. The wind was a hard south-easter, blowing the smoke from the funnels straight across the town. The crews handed out some of their biscuits and grandfather gave me an apple. Then the ropes were slackened and flung back, the engines gathered like lions, stems bristling for the harbour mouth, pennies were thrown on deck for luck as they passed beneath us, hands waving and grinning faces looking up from the water, last goodbyes shouted out hoarsely in the grateful confusion, masking our emotion, that sick fear that the sea would take one of ours – and then they were gone.

  ‘Aye,’ said Leebie, ‘and somebody’s body will never come home again. That’s always the way with Yarmouth.’

  Nobody said anything. We came home in silence, my mother holding my hand hard. I wanted to eat the apple that grandfather had given me but my stomach was too tight. I went along to the braehead house, up to the garret, and looked out over the town, emptied yet again of its men. And the days were drawing in.

  September started with the saturation of summer in the earth and ended with winter pre-echoing emptily in the rising winds, with their early autumnal liking to the north-west. The jam-making had moved through all the crops, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries and apples, in that order, and finished up with plums and pears, the wasps pirouetting like dying dancers in the midnight purple ballrooms of half-emptied plums, the fallen golden-drops lying like eggs in the cool grass. The bees winged their way wearily from flower to fading flower, overtaken by the lighter air-traffic of floating seeds, and the failing bluebottles blundered drunkenly into dew-beaded spider-traps that glittered and shivered among rose-hips and brambles.

  The harvesting that had started in late August went on daily in the wide fields, all the efforts of men concentrated on the land, now that the fishermen had gone south, taking with them their new chaff mattresses made from the first cuts of corn. The golden tide receded as the combines cut down wave after wave of shining grain and soon summer’s murmurings were a forgotten dream. Distance stood heavy with the annual lament from the stubble fields, piping farewell to the earth. The sharp still sound of the dead seasons hung in the air like a scent, forgotten, then remembered.

  But these were not the thoughts of the workers. They stood the sheaves of corn in stooks to face the Bass Rock and dry out in the sun. Peter Hughes set down three huge barrels in the centre of his field. One contained treacle, a second baps, and the third beer. Only the men drank from the beer barrel, but men, women, children and horses clustered round the treacle. I dipped in Guthrie’s floury baps, holding each one like the infant Achilles for a near-as-damn-it total immersion, and brought them out again dripping with sweet black molasses. When I could eat no more I staggered off to the burn, drank it down in deep gurgling gulletfuls, and let my head and hands hang in the cold clear water until there was nothing left of existence except the pearled pebbles on the paperweight world of the bottom, and a billion silver bubbles singing in my ears.

  The month went on, tingeing the leaves, peeling the petals from the last of the roses, dropping them in slow cold circles round the ginger-jar’s blue mouth. The southbound swallows assembled in their flocks, the robin’s autumn song reddened the wind, and shoals of jellyfish purpled the tide.

  ‘It’s getting right back-end now,’ Leebie would say.

  The goosey mornings arrived, so called by the old folk either because of the coming of the geese or because of the pimples raised on our shivering flesh as we stood in the cold dim light of dawn, hurrying into our clothes. With the swing of winter already in legs and lungs we strode up to Balcaskie to look for conkers. The field-flowers and feathered grasses that had brushed our wrists and knees as we walked had been cut away. The roadmen had scythed the verges and cleared the ditches. All that was left was a flowerless aftermath, strewn with dead daisies and lopped pink poppies – and the dandelion clocks were the dead heads of the dominies drifting across the stubble fields, fading bubbles from the backyard boiler, the morning ghosts of the harvest moon, dematerializing into day.

  In the frosty sunsets a milky stillness settled on the earth, the dew fell heavier now from tall clear skies, and the old winter friends were reaching down to us again – Capella glittering in the north-east and Aldebaran well up by midnight. The mellow harvest moon rose like Jockie Bett’s big burned face over the beds of stubble, and stone jars of cider appeared from nowhere.

  We had arrived at the equinox. Light and darkness held one another, two dancers in perfect harmony, poised on a pin-point of rest. After this moment the music of the dying year would grow stronger, darker, and the fall-away of life and light would throb like a lament.

  Towards the end of the month the weather was different in the ears and nostrils and on the tongue. Sharp winds came in from the east, ruffling the water, and soon the gales were growling round the gable-ends of the houses, breaking the stained-glass lattices of the trees. One after another the leaves began to fall in like windows and the cold sky came pouring through. A great coldness returned to the sea, which resumed its autumnal roaring. The shadows clustered thickly on the walls. The black roses are back, the old folk said – and they drew their chairs closer to the fireside and began muttering about hot toddies and long johns and porridge again in the mornings.

  George’s porridge pot stood cold now over an unlit fire. He refused to have one on. He’d stopped eating as well as speaking. Only the wind turned the pages of the big black bible by the window. And even Leebie couldn’t nag him into turning back to life.

  Leebie used to say that if Jack Frost didn’t appear by October he’d be late in the year and his visit would be long and hard. But the goosey mornings often came early – a dark purplish-blue sky glaring white at the horizon, with a shiver in the air, and later in the day you’d look up at the sound of the huge arrowheads of geese winging their way over firth and fields. The frost was on its way. You could even hear it coming in the sea, a sonorous echo as the full tide splashed among the smaller stones of the beach, crackling like tinfoil, a sound not heard since last winter.

  ‘She’s got her head on a north-west pillow tonight,’ the old men would say of the October wind, as they heard the north-westerlies falling away at sunset, ghostly over the fields.

  And in the morning, sure enough, came the frost. Winter’s first white fingertips parted the curtains of the year. The frost set fire to the trees and they burned like braziers black and gold in the foggy fields, yellows and oranges and reds, torches of rowan and ash sending up flares through the falling leaves, signalling the death of the year. A single poppy, drained of blood, stood stiffly in a ditch, the stopped heart of summer on the edge of the stubble.

  October washed the streets and sky a pale gold. Mornings arrived like the postman, throwing open the gate and marching up the path to hammer on the door. I awoke to the farmers breaking up their fields again, the ploughs pulling behind them long black-and-white streamers of seagulls and rooks. Engines throbbed far and near as the tractors lorded it over the land. The four-legged kings of the fields were out to grass and fewer horses
now stood in the streets. The sun’s white fist was punching holes in the clouds that charged along the tops of the low dykes, the swift wild rains blowing by, the last shows of light sweeping the fields in broken golden arcs. Splinters of sunlight lay in the cart-tracks like broken bottles and winked at me from wisps of straw stuck in the scattered lumps of dung.

  Out in the bay the gulls rode at anchor, ruffled by strong cold winds. The town stood as if I’d never seen it before – etched sharply against the black and silver sea, the chimney-smoke from all the houses scrollworked across the clouds. Raindrops glittered on the kirk spires and all the gravestones were on fire.

  Suddenly afraid of the vast unstoppable nature of change, I ran madly up into the country where the hands and arms of the trees were now showing through as the winds stripped them down, producing a paper pantomime of coloured snowflakes. Rose-hips blazed out from the hedgerows, and on the shining black coffins of the last brambleberries the flies laid themselves down and died, like the lovers in Georgina’s songs.

  Not a flower, not a flower sweet,

  On my black coffin let there be strewn,

  Not a friend, not a friend greet

  My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.

  Love lay like the bird’s egg I came across in a ditch, cold and unnoticed as a stone since the spring. I came back heavily at sunset and sat in the garret, thinking of Georgina in Yarmouth now with the men, remembering her songs, her gentleness. The moon rose out of the sea like an old drowned skull and the clouds quickly shrouded it. I tiptoed up to George’s door and listened. At one time he’d have caught the footfall of a spider. Now he’d stopped listening altogether. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Was he talking in his sleep? All go unto one place, all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. I looked through the keyhole. The window was open and the hooded moon looked in at the fluttering pages. The voice seemed to be coming out of the bible itself. There is no new thing under the sun.