Even by his standards it was a brutal thrashing. My mother stroked the weals on my backside and applied calamine lotion. Then she went off to her night shift, telling me to stay off school the next day if sitting down proved too painful. But as I lay face down in bed in the morning, he appeared holding my coat and ordered me to get ready. We were going out. I thought I was going to be marched to school but he propelled me in a different direction, his hand on my collar. I asked him where we were going.
‘To the station.’
But we’d passed the turning to the railway, I pointed out uneasily.
‘Not that station, you fool! This is a police matter.’
I panicked. What would be done with me?
I’d be locked away, was his answer.
Would my mother be able to see me?
No, I’d be sent far away, to Glasgow or Dundee. And there I’d be put in the company of boys who knew a thing or two. They’d be worse than the jailers. But most probably it would be neither place. Because of my age, too young for borstal, the likeliest sentence would be the Marship.
‘And there they’ll ’ave you for bleedin’ breakfast!’
Fear, sick fear took hold of me as I pictured this bleeding breakfast, quite literally, and I tried to run away. He dragged me along by the scruff of the neck, people staring in the street.
I pleaded. I had other money saved up that he didn’t know about – in another tin. It was mine. He could have it all.
‘I don’t need your bleedin’ money, boy! You ain’t ’alf goin’ to cop it, and that’s all there bleedin’ is about it!’
As we turned the corner to the policeman’s house at the end of the village, my mother came off the bus from her shift. She ran up and asked what had happened now.
‘I’m taking this bleedin’ thief to the police,’ he said. ‘He’s got to be charged and punished, ’asn’t he? He’s broken the bleedin’ law!’
I saw the withering look on my mother’s face, a look from which all love had drained. The years have defined it for me (emotion recollected in tranquillity, maturity) as contempt.
‘My God! What kind of man are you? And how many laws have you broken? Ask yourself that.’
With that she loosened his grip on me, put my hand in hers and took me home, turning before she did so to say one more thing to him.
‘And can you speak a single sentence without that horrible word bleedin’ in it?’
It surprised me that he said nothing and showed no resistance. Maybe he was startled by the look on the face of this woman whose ancestors had faced the wrath of the sea and whose emotions had turned to sudden anger. She left him standing in the street, to wander off in the direction of the Cabin Bar, where he achieved such a state of blind drunkenness that he was unable to carry out the thrashing that he threatened as he blundered through the back door. He passed out instead and I helped my mother to get him into bed. As I did so many times.
Only occasionally did the drinking lead to such total penury that there was literally nothing in the house to eat, though it was a hand-to-mouth life at times. One morning there was a cup of water for breakfast, and my mother’s wretchedness led me to risk the Marship again. I started slipping down to Agnes Meldrum’s and asking for minuscule amounts of groceries, to be put on the slate. The massive slabs of butter and cheese on the counter meant that if you were really stretched – and many were – you could ask for just a couple of ounces, which Agnes would cut off with hairline precision, never erring on your side, not like Mrs Guthrie and her baker’s dozens. Even a pennyworth would go on the slate. In this way I stowed crumbs of food behind jars and pans in the pantry and left my mother to discover them with little cries of surprise that made me feel like Santa Claus.
‘Oh, look what we have – and we never even knew!’
‘Oh, Chris, see what’s been forgotten!’
She called him Chris but me Christopher. How strange that he gave me his name but saw nothing in me to identify with.
This scheme of mine also had a limited life. Agnes sent up a bill after a decent interval and I was bent over the chair again. This time there was no threat of the Marship, as my altruism was evident, even though it still resulted in a good thrashing. After all, I had to be taught a lesson. I was always being taught a lesson. And it was always a good thrashing, a phrase whose irony struck me as often as he did.
But even this did not deter me in my determination to save us from starvation. I stole off to the harbour at nights, dropping silently out of my bedroom window in the small hours and darting like a shadow down to the boats. I knew which ones had been stocked up ready for departure, and so I clambered quietly down the iron rungs of the piers, thrilling to the mysterious movements of the moonlit water, the bobbing boats, the green and red harbour lamps turning the tide to emeralds and rubies, winking at me in connivance. Down below decks and into the galley, stepping from vessel to vessel, taking just a little from each, I built up my own set of stores in our garden shed, taking from it as occasion demanded, planting things in the larder like a night-tripping Lapland elf – a couple of slices of bread and bacon, a knob of margarine, a pickled egg.
Word went round that there was a thief in the town, a robber of poor fishermen. Grandfather took a dim view of it and I cringed in secret shame, ceased my pilferings and lay low. But I forgot about the store in the shed and it mouldered and was mouse-eaten. Eventually it was discovered. It was long enough after the boat-thief period to pass as a purely domestic crime. I’d been stealing from the larder, that was all. A simple thrashing matter. But my father questioned me closely and was convinced there was more to it than met his narrow eye.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I thrash you, which I’m going to do in a minute from now, I’ll just make extra bleedin’ sure, that’s all. Bend over that chair!’
The thrashing that followed made bleeding certain.
Later the doctor called to see my mother on another matter and examined me with owlish concern. There was a long low conversation between them. He made repeated suggestions, quietly, seriously, and my mother kept helplessly shaking her head and crying. Nothing happened.
And all of this when I was still in the early years of primary school.
The move to the new council house came in my second year of primary school, and for some reason things deteriorated. The drinking deepened and took a more regular hold, the thrashings reflecting the change. The violence was always worst when my mother’s menfolk were at sea. When they were ashore my father was quieter. But sometimes they were at hand when he was being abusive, and there were physical fights, blood on the wallpaper, broken furniture, doors off their hinges. Uncle Billy stood up to him once when he made to strike my mother after a drinking bout, and a fearful fist fight followed. Neighbours ran to the end of the village – few owned telephones in those days – and now there really was a police matter, only it was the father, not the son, who stood in the dock. Not literally. The bobby simply came along on his bike and took charge of the chaos that was our house that night.
Far from being terrified by the arm of the law, I remember feeling impressed and empowered by the policeman’s sudden palpable presence. The black uniform and heavy glossy gloves, the polished shoes, silver buttons, cap and badge, the truncheon, the notepad – they all combined to produce this overwhelmingly tactile sensation of power – power to bring peace and restore order and sanity again. The notepad especially had quite an effect on me. The pen was busy on the paper: when, where, why, what exactly? Who threw the first punch? Was it a blow, or was it a form of restraint? Some of the language eluded me, but its drift and effect were enthralling. Chaos was being quelled and emotions controlled by a few words, quietly committed to paper. I noticed how my father had gone meek as a lamb under the policeman’s questioning. He was pointing his pen at him, a slender stiletto, like a little silver dagger, and the bully lowered his eyes. Where was the spirit of Jack Rush? Wasn’t he going to let him have it? No, the officer was a huge man
. Jack Rush’s offspring beat up those who were smaller, younger.
So things went quiet for a time.
One night he came to me with a smile on his face. My mother was working a night shift. He called me by my name. Did I remember that time he pretended he was taking me to the policeman, just as a joke?
I remembered it. I didn’t remember the joke.
And I’d offered him all the money I’d saved?
So I had.
How much money had I saved, exactly?
Every weekend I did some sort of work for my grandmother – shopping, grass-cutting, weeding. She couldn’t pay me much, but as the months went by the pile grew heavier with threepenny bits, sixpences, shillings, half-crowns. I’d followed my mother’s philosophy of thrift. Proudly now I went for the tin and presented my fortune. Fifty shillings. A week’s wages.
How would I like to make twice that much? Even ten times that much? In one night?
But how could it be done? I asked, intrigued.
It was easy. In fact I didn’t have to do a thing. He would see to everything. All I had to do was give him the money, to take with him to the pub. I felt uneasy at the mention of the pub, but he said he was going to have only one drink. After that he was going to take part in a game. It was called gambling.
‘If I win,’ he said, ‘I’ll bring you home a fortune.’
‘What happens if you don’t win?’
‘I’ll win,’ he grinned. And he pocketed the money.
He was brought home in the small hours, swearing and staggering. His gambling friends left him on the floor, where he produced not the promised fortune but pools of puke and piss. I tried to move him to the bed but he was a dead weight – blindly, snoringly, senselessly drunk. I gave up and went back to bed.
Unable to sleep, I left the house with the drunkard in it and walked the three and a half miles of darkened coast to Anstruther. The men were at sea. The firth was a black glimmering, emptied of life. Not a light to be seen, except for the lonely lighthouse flashing off the May. The stars glittered like coffin nails in a black sky. It was winter. I was frozen by the time I reached Anstruther. When I arrived at the little telephone exchange I could see the dim glow from the first-floor window, telling me that my mother was on duty. I opened the back door and went up the winding stone steps.
‘Mercy me,’ she gasped, ‘is somebody dead?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s, it’s – him.’ I could never say the word ‘father’. Or ‘dad’.
‘He’s not drunk is he?’
I nodded. ‘Blind.’ I had learned the gradations.
‘But he hasn’t got a nail to claw himself with. Where did he get the money?’
I explained, and she buried her face in her hands. Then she made up the fold-down bed for me and covered me with a blanket.
Many’s the night I walked that stretch of coast to the exchange, getting to know every twist in the road, and slept beside her, often wakening to watch her white pensive face in the semi-gloom, listening to her calm tones as she took the calls. Her voice was measured. In spite of her troubles she remained a tranquil instrument of information. But there was a heart in the assured, official voice which all the local folk adored. When they stopped to chat on the line her voice changed immediately to the soft, cosy one that I knew so well. And there was a background calm to the mysterious tickings and clickings of the switchboard, a soothing testimony to order and efficiency, which sent me to sleep. It was like the policeman’s pen, processing the mysterious passions of life. Who, after all, made calls at three in the morning? And why? But they did. People who were frightened, people who were ill. And my mother’s voice was like an angel’s in the dark. She was always there.
When we got home after that particular night he was still there on the floor, cold and soaked in what he had expelled, and gradually coming to. With a lot of effort we got him to his feet and he staggered to the bathroom, leaving the door wide open as he pissed my savings into the toilet.
‘Ask him if he won,’ my mother said in a tight voice, her switchboard serenity left behind.
I stood right behind the bent, degraded figure.
‘Did you win?’ I asked.
‘Nope!’
That was all the answer I ever got out of him, and I have detested the sound of that slang word ever since. Whenever I hear it I see him bent over there in the bathroom, his uncaring back to me. I see the look of shame and misery on my mother’s face. And I hear her murmuring the words in disbelief.
‘How could you stoop so low as to rob your own child of his money?’
My grandfather gave her the answer.
‘A man who will stoop so low as to raise his hand to a woman, will stoop to anything.’
I used that line in the only piece of writing for which I ever won a prize. When I was ten, the churchy village ladies who belonged to the local Temperance Association decided to put up the money for the best essay to be written on the evils of alcohol, the competition to be administered by the school. This was my first conscious piece of creative writing, and if it still exists, which I doubt, it will be lodged in some mouldering folder labelled ‘St Monans Temperance Association Essay Prize 1955’. The prize was presented the following year.
Apparently the essay created a profound impression. I’d written from the heart and had left out no details. The joke went round the school that I could hardly fail to win – I was the boy with the worst drunkard in town for a dad.
But it was no joke at home. The Temperance Ladies spoke to the headmaster, who made phone calls. The policeman arrived for the second time at our house, accompanied by a man in plain clothes. The notepad came out again. I was not made privy to the talk that took place between them and my mother, but I was questioned by the man in plain clothes about what I’d said in the essay. Was it all true? Had it all happened exactly as I’d described it, or had I used my imagination?
‘Did you deliberately exaggerate?’
I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, but sensing retribution I clammed up and said very little. It was just an essay. I just wrote it, that was all. When my father came in from his shift he was astonished to find officialdom waiting for him. He’d threatened to throw the policeman out if he appeared again, but again the spirit of Jack Rush deserted him. After the two men left he turned on me fiercely.
‘You write another word about anything – if you bleedin’ dare!’
That was all he said. No thrashing ensued. I felt a warm glow. The power of the written word had made itself felt. And I ignored my father’s warning.
When the prize was presented at the end of the school session, it was a book, Stories of King Arthur and His Knights, retold by Barbara Leonie Picard for the Oxford Illustrated Classics, and it cost twelve shillings and sixpence.
‘More than a day’s wages,’ said my father, glaring at the dust-jacket. ‘Why couldn’t they have given him the money instead?’
Congratulations were not in order.
I read it from cover to cover, cried when Gawain died, and wept again with Bedivere when Arthur was taken away in the barge by the black-clad damsels. Naturally I read it not as fiction but as a chronicle of the truth, overwhelmed by sheer sadness that an entire culture and fellowship could simply die and disappear, leaving nothing but a story behind.
But the story was there, and the book is still on my shelves. Even if I were to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, it would not mean as much to me as this little book did at the time, and still does.
My father was one of those black knights who stood in the way. Often I wished him dead – I even prayed that he would die and leave us in peace. No Galahad was going to ride up to our front door and smite him through the body with a fifteen-foot lance. No black dwarf would bar his way on the railway bridge. I imagined alternative scenarios, an accident on the line, a drunken fall into the harbour on the way back from the Cabin Bar.
There was a partial answer to my prayer. He suffered headaches and began to act
oddly, leaving the house and saying he was going away. My heart lifted – but he always returned, strangely sober. The sobriety was even more frightening than the drunkenness. He sat blackly in his chair, like a bomb waiting to go off. For a time he entered a mental hospital for assessment. They returned him to us, saying they could find nothing wrong with him – his personality was his problem (and ours) and he was not in any way unbalanced. He scoffed at their stupidity.
‘They know nothing, them bleeders!’
For another period he did leave home, went back to Middlesbrough and worked in the foundries, staying with his sister, my auntie Bessie, and her family. Within a year or two he was back again, strangely chastened, never to break out again into such terrible rages, such blind fits of drunkenness, but still a smouldering presence, causing a gloom to descend whenever he came through the door. He got back his old job on the railway.
While he was away from home I rummaged through bags and boxes that he’d left behind in cupboards, and discovered his old love-letters to my mother, written in his navy days, when all he ever wanted was to have her beside him, to kiss and cuddle at the fireside, as he put it, and as he imagined it, lying in his bunk, writing on cobweb-thin paper and going over home in his head.
Sea-dreams. He’d wanted a lot more than that and hadn’t got it. Bitter frustration lay at the heart of his wasted life. Plucked at nineteen from a grimy red-brick box, in which he’d been thrashed by his own father, he was set down by the iron claw of European politics in an even less inviting habitat: the wet and slippery deck of one of His Majesty’s battle-cruisers, where the combined attacks of U-boats and the Luftwaffe had a way of making your legs quiver on an already less than stable surface. I didn’t understand that at ten years old. But I did ask myself a question as I sat on the floor surrounded by a sea of skeletal letters. What happens to all that love, that youthful adoration? How can it simply disappear? Where does it go? Where is it stored? You can still make out the words on the tracing paper. But where is the love itself? A question not so much rhetorical as unanswerable.
Hellfire and Herring Page 29