But there was no question of error, for there was no doubt where I was bound for now.
Epp appeared, dressed in white, her jaw still knotted and leering, and the poker still in her hand.
There’s nothing more for you now!
You will go to hell now – you will go to the burning fire!
I tried to run out of the kirkyard but Sangster stood at the gates, whirling a flaming sword, forcing me back in my terror, backwards and downwards, downwards and into my grave.
When I woke up the last of the field had been cut. The workers had gone home and all was silence and stubble. Only Alec was standing there, looking down at me curiously and grinning, lighting up his pipe.
‘If you stay there much longer I’ll have to charge you for the plot.’
He reached down and pulled me up with one hand. I rose stiffly.
‘Nightmares?’
I nodded.
Nightmares.
They worsened with the weather, when the nights were wild and eerie. The heartbeat of the hearth, to compensate, grew stronger, redder, and I felt the simple things more keenly – steaming mugs of tea at ten, a stone hot-water bottle like a volcanic island in the arctic drift of the bed, a Georgina song to break up the monotonous monochrome dribbling at the windows, the wolves in the roof and the bears in the chimneys, wind and rain sweeping the earth and making the sea smoulder and hiss.
But sometimes when everyone but granny was away from the braehead house and my mother and father were both on night shift, I crept along to Alec’s house to see if there was a red glow in his window. He kept long hours.
‘When you get to my age,’ he said, ‘you sleep less and less. The closer you get to the long sleep, the less you need the naps. It’s logical.’
So he’d stick a mug in my hand, climb aboard his rocking chair with the big foot-rest, light up his pipe and swing and smoke for hours, like a steam drifter gliding through the dark. A crowd of shadows joined us round the fire.
‘Some folk ask me how I can sleep at all – sleeping next to a crowd of dead folk.’
Looking through Alec’s window, I could just make out the dark humps of the headstones, crowding the mound that rose to meet the moon, just a step away from his cottage.
‘I tell them that’s the most peaceful place on earth out there. It’s the poor lost souls that worry me – the ones I can’t bury because they’re rolling about in the dark, known only unto God, with the sea rolling over them.’
There was Fergus Hughes, for example, who appeared to his old mother Alice at the moment of his death. He left for the sea one wicked night on the Harvest Reaper with the rest of the boat’s crew. It was their last chance to save their anchored nets off Kingsbarns. Fergus was on duty at the halyards when the tackle snapped and he was pitched into the sea.
Less than half an hour after he’d left the house, as his mother sat with her knitting by the kitchen fire, she saw him suddenly appear in front of her. One arm was leaning on the mantelpiece and he seemed to be warming himself in front of the coals. But he was still wearing his oilskins and she knew from the old stories that this meant only one thing. He was a dead man. Sure enough he turned his head then and looked at her. His white lips moved without the sound of words and she saw the water streaming down his face before he disappeared into the fire, like steam sucked up the chimney by the wind.
‘I’ve never seen a ghost.’
Ah, but it wasn’t a ghost old Alice saw, it was his spirit double, what the old folks used to call a fetch.
I tried to picture people older than Alec, who’d buried the village six times over. Or old Leebie, with her white walnut head, who also talked about fetches.
‘But how, how …?’
How does a fetch appear?
‘Yes, how?’
Easily.
Picture yourself drowning. It’s a dark night and you’re tossed into the water with your oilskins and boots and all your heavy gear. You kick your arms and legs and try to gather the sea to yourself like a sheaf of corn. But the harvest is too big. Soon your arms are full of the sea and your legs are tired. You think you might go to sleep. So you stop your threshing and let the sea do the harvesting. The firth is filling your boots. You go down like a stone. You think you can hear your shipmates crying to you far above the waves and you vaguely wonder how they’re going to get you out on a night like this when every man is fighting for his own life. But it’s only the roaring in your ears that you’re hearing – the roaring of the darkness telling you that you’re a drowning man.
At such a moment where would you most wish to be, do you think?
‘At home.’
That’s right. At home, with your mother, and drying off at your own fireside. Grown men cry out for their mothers, you know, at the point of death. We’re all our mothers’ sons. That’s where the drowning Fergus Hughes most wanted to be in his dying seconds, and that’s where the force of his longing projected that last image of himself, making it materialize before his mother’s eyes. It was her son’s last wish that she saw, and not his ghost.
‘Did they ever find his body?’
But Alec wasn’t listening now. He was a remembering mouth, nothing more, rocking in the dark.
The same thing happened to Euphemia Christie.
She was just a young thing, poor lass, her man at Yarmouth for three whole months, and a month-old bairn that he’d never seen, lying sleeping in the crib on the floor. She was making infant clothes and her foot was rocking the cradle as she worked. Andrew Christie was caught in the chest by a swinging boom and went straight into a heavy sea. He was never seen again – except by Euphemia. She looked up from her work. Her foot and fingers froze. He was coming across the kitchen floor in his oilskins, dripping wet, and so real that she spoke out loud to him.
‘Mercy me, Andrew, what’s this that you’re home from Yarmouth with never a breath of warning?’
He answered her never a word, but he bent down and looked hard and long into the cradle, his sea-swept eyes taking their fill of the bairn he’d never seen. Then he faded into the fire, like Fergus Hughes. And when she looked across the kitchen floor there wasn’t a drop of water to be seen.
The telegram came the next morning, but she hardly needed that. She was already wearing black when she answered the door to the boy from the post office, and he read it through to her without her so much as turning a hair. She had shawled the bairn in black as well. The crib was like a coffin. A message like that – typed out on post office paper – that was nothing to the one she’d had the night before, when her husband came to her for the first and last look at the son he’d never seen and would never see in the flesh. It was exactly the same situation, you see – the man appearing in his mortal struggle just where he yearned to be. That’s what the power of thought can do.
And that’s just single drownings. Imagine what happens when a whole crew goes down or when a whole fleet is lost. The day I was born, 19 November 1875, was the blackest day ever for the east coast of Fife. Five sailing boats went down with all hands on the way back from Yarmouth, the Vigilant, the Janet Anderson, the Excelsior, the Agnes and the Rising Moon. Thirty-five men lost their lives and a hundred and thirty children on just a few miles of coastline lost their fathers. Some of the fathers saw their children – just like Andrew Christie. Can you imagine the sheer force of human emotion that ran through the sea that night, with all those men drowning? That was a power bigger than anything you could invent. Who needs a wireless or a telephone when you’ve got a wave like that, running up the North Sea, through the air, through bricks and mortar, and into the human mind?
As Alec catalogued the disasters and the apparitions, I saw them over and over, my ancestors, rising and falling like the sea, rolling in drowned generations through my head. Pale upturned faces sank slowly through the water, dreaming their last bitter dreams of kirk and kin, a quiet cradle and a pair of milky breasts. Then the waves closed like curtains over the sea-dreams, saltwater filled
up every corner of the skull, the last particle of longing fell out like a silver coin from a turned-out pocket, and the dreamless head bumped gently on the seabed and lay there for ever for the tiny fish to take the place of darting thought.
But the strangest drowning of all was Mary Prett’s – one that still sends shivers up my spine, though I’m not one for the terrors, as you know.
She had seventy years on her back. She’d had a good life, and she still had a good man to help her while away the hours left between them and the kirkyard. Every Saturday night they went to the whist drive in Anstruther, and that’s where they’d come from on the night she took her life, home on the last bus, happy with a few wee drams inside them, and her talking nineteen to the dozen as usual all the road home.
Well, it was three in the morning maybe, by John Prett’s reckoning, when she rose, and pitch black it was too, and the worst night of the year for gales and rain that folk could remember for years. He thought she’d gone down to the water closet when he heard the back door bang, and so, with him a bit befuddled, he dug down deeper into the blankets and went back to sleep. When he woke up it was as light as it could be on such a terrible morning, but there was no Mary to be found inside the house or at the neighbours or anywhere round about. They searched the town from east to west without finding a hair of her. Fearing the worst by then, they combed the shore and looked over the end of every pier, probing the tangles round the point of the Blocks as it was a low tide.
‘Wasn’t she drowned?’
Oh, she was drowned and dead all right, no doubt about that, but it was the manner of it that was the weirdest thing. It was late afternoon when the bobby came up to John’s door and informed him that she’d been found – at Kilconquhar, of all places, which as you know is more than a two-mile walk from here. They’re later risers up there – too many retired and retarded folk, if you ask me. Anyway they finally got up out of their beds to find the body of an unknown woman floating face down in the loch, a white nightgowned thing among the reeds and rushes and nothing on her feet.
‘Why did she do it?’
That’s the first mystery. But there are other questions, don’t you think? A woman perfectly right in the head gets up from her sleep in the dead of night and decides to drown herself. She has less than ten steps to walk to the harbour. It would have taken her the same number of seconds. But instead of that she battles two miles in her bare feet, and nothing on but her nightgown, along a road she’s never travelled, and to a place she’s never been. Why? She makes her way through solid sheets of rain, ripped and shredded by the winds. Her nightgown was in tatters. My God, I can remember that night. It was so bad that if she’d just turned at the loch and walked all the way back again, she’d have been dead by the time she reached her doorstep, through sheer exposure. But she threw herself into that dark and freezing water, far from her own fireside, and left other folk to work out the whys and the wherefores.
‘Maybe she was … made to, somehow.’
Cold covers to look for in the middle of the night, that’s for sure. They closed over her all the same, and she went back to sleep, this time for ever. Nobody knows what kind of mind she had that night or what went through her head on that journey.
‘I’ve never been to Kilconquhar loch.’
Don’t go there. Do you have any need to go? Stay away then. It’s an unholy place, that loch. Maybe she was called there by something. Some spirit of the water. You know what the power of thought can do. It can draw a woman out of her sleep, out of her bed, two miles away, take her on a pointless journey, and make her take her life. Kilconquhar loch – in the old days, you know, that’s where they drowned the witches.
‘Were there witches in Fife?’
There were witches everywhere. They cursed the corn, blighted women’s bellies and made all the fish forsake the firth. Lighthouse lamps went black and barns became beacons, luring ships to the reefs. A fall from a horse, a lost footing on a slippery deck, a bloated cow, a dead infant, a man’s member shrivelled up to nothing between his legs – oh yes, the witches were busy enough round here, and they sowed skulls in kirkyard and sea.
It’s a long time now, but they used to burn them here between the kirk and the castle. My predecessors had the job of scattering the ashes to the four winds – they wouldn’t bury them in consecrated ground, you see – and the charred bones that were left were lodged in the kirk loft just under the steeple, and there they stay to this day. I can take you up and show you if you’ve the stomach for it. A funny thing when you think of the folk sitting in the pews on a Sunday – a vault of black bones right over their godly heads, just behind the whitewash. A rotten roof for kirk folk, but fine enough for whited sepulchres, what do you think? It was either that or they tied them to a stake at low water and condemned them to suffer the washing of two tides.
‘I’d rather be drowned than burned.’
Would you? Drowned at the stake? How would you feel, watching the tide coming in that day, I wonder? Would you think of apple-blossom, seeing the lines of surf advance? First it tickles your toes and washes your feet – that’s all right. Then it’s slapping at your legs and thighs, and chilly fingers are grabbing at your groin – not so nice. Think of it up to your chest, with the sound of the waves like thunder in your ears. You take your first mouthful of cold salt water – it tastes bitter. You don’t want too much of that. But it’s filling your nostrils now, sucked up in hard hurting lumps into your lungs. You struggle with the combined powers of wind and tide for two paltry minutes. Then all your struggles cease. Your eyes are sightless as water, the waves are combing your hair – tossing like tangles, without a wish in the world. Your head is filled with foam – it lolls and lollops with the turning tide. Now all’s still. A drowned statue stands at the stake, underneath the sea. The crabs and conger eels advance.
Wouldn’t you rather suffer the red tide of the other stake? Spreading from your toes to the top of your head again, a million times more agonizing, but faster than watching a six-hour flood lapping your way. Would you live to hear your own skull burst like a bomb in the blaze? And your heart crack like a roasted black chestnut, a shrivelled-up stink? I wouldn’t think it likely. They say the heart is a bugger to burn. But what terrible ways to have to die, burning or drowning, cinders or salt on your tongue, ashes or silt behind your eyes, your skull a white-hot shard or a cold coral stone. What a decision, eh? Hopefully you won’t have to make it, though. With any luck you’ll die in your bed. Many years from now.
With any luck.
But many years later, with Alec long dead, the nightmares he gave me are still alive.
One final irony gave him the last laugh. In his closing winter he suffered a very short illness and pneumonia set in, which proved fatal. Some people joked that that was one grave he’d at least be spared from preparing.
When they got to the kirkyard it was snowing. The marble maidens stood in their stone petticoats, over their ankles in snow. And the grave was already dug.
9
The King My Father
A lec once said he’d very likely given me enough nightmares to fill a book. He spoke truer than he or I knew at the time. But of all the fears that darkened my days, none was worse than the fear of my own father. Why I call him king I have no idea, but it’s clearly something to do with Hamlet. The king my father. He was more of the wicked uncle than the father, more of the cutpurse than the king, a usurper whose reign of terror I resented, an alien figure, never absorbed by the culture that surrounded him, never woven into the fabric of my mother’s fishing upbringing.
Every Eden has its snake. And so let me bring mine out of the undergrowth, to supplant the beautiful Adam I longed for and never got, the intruding serpent who made my mother’s life a misery, and still haunts mine.
My father was born on 9 May 1919 in Middlesbrough, the son of Elizabeth Hicks, housewife, and Jack Rush, bricklayer, journeyman.
A small black-and-white snapshot falls out of the folde
r of documents along with the certificates of birth and marriage and death, and I can see now with a shock something of what produced me. My father has conveniently dated and inscribed it for me, ‘Dad and myself, 1937’, so I know I am looking at my eighteen-year-old father and my paternal grandfather standing at the open door of No. 24 Bank Street two years before the outbreak of war.
My grandfather Jack is a Lawrentian figure: out for the occasion in his stocking soles and braces and collarless shirt, metal sleeve-garters clamped around his upper arms. He’s a small man (I can see where my lack of height comes from) but his shoulders are like a bull’s. And there’s the belt which he’d unbuckle to thrash his son. One hand is thrust in his pocket, the other is round my father’s much less impressive shoulders. My father is not yet fully formed, though in two years he will be classed as able-bodied. He’s much more smartly dressed however, quite a dandy in fact. Wide striped trousers and waistcoat to match, and what looks like a nice silk tie, also striped. I can see the gleam on his shoes. He has taken trouble with himself for the photograph. His thick glossy hair is full of waves, falling away from the period-style middle parting. Good pronounced eyebrows – I wish I had them. I have his nose, though, long enough and straight enough, and I’m thankful for that.
One thing is missing – the wedding ring that will be slipped on to his finger in 1944. And the smile of the proud father – he doesn’t yet know that I am waiting for him in the womb of time, to be delivered by Caesarean section from the belly of his Christina, whom he has not yet met. He’s probably never even heard of Fife, though he’ll have heard of Hitler. So the finger is ringless as yet. But I’m struck by the artistic quality of the hands. Perhaps that’s because he’s holding his favourite prop to help conceal his teenage embarrassment that his father is gesturing apparent affection. The prop is a banjo – an instrument that will feature in this interlude, now that I have been visually reminded of it.
Hellfire and Herring Page 27