‘A supremely beautiful book that spins its particular story to tell a universal one about a more innocent and natural time, the swift passing of that time, and about the people who make us and whom we never thank’ Sunday Times
‘Rare, visceral writing that inspires one to try to match his capacity for observation’ Herald
‘Beautiful, richly satisfying writing’ Sunday Telegraph
‘The book glitters with memory, like some marvellous parade that marches around the small boy’ Irish Sunday Independent
‘[A] glowing and beautiful memoir of a childhood in a Scottish fishing village … Poetry leaks from Rush’s pen at every turn … if the purpose of memoir is to make real a forgotten world, then Christopher Rush has done everything that could be asked of him’ Mail on Sunday
‘A vivid, powerful account’ Belfast Telegraph
‘Delicate and inquisitive’ Big Issue in Scotland
‘Vivid and lyrical … A masterly work that enlivens the past with beauty and emotion, yet never sags into soft focus sentimentality. Instead its realism, and the author’s heartfelt candour, make it one of those rare books that successfully evoke the human spirit’ Economist
CHRISTOPHER RUSH was born in St Monans and for thirty years taught literature in Edinburgh. His books include A Twelvemonth and a Day (recently listed as one of the one hundred greatest Scottish books ever), the highly acclaimed To Travel Hopefully and the newly published Will. He now lives near his childhood home in Fife.
By the same author
Peace Comes Dropping Slow
A Resurrection of a Kind
A Twelvemonth and a Day
Two Christmas Stories
Into the Ebb
Venus Peter
With Sharp Compassion (with John Shaw)
Where the Clock Stands Still (with Cliff Wilson)
Venus Peter Saves the Whale
Last Lesson of the Afternoon
To Travel Hopefully
Will
A Childhood Remembered
This paperback edition published in 2008
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 86197 974 2
For my mother’s family
And for little Jenny, who never knew them
Prologue: Another Time, Another Place
1. Glimmer of Cold Brine
2. Home from the Sea
3. Queer Fish
4. The Dragons of Eden
5. The Next World
6. Winter Drifting and Spring Lines
7. Summer Hunt and South Harvest
8. The Village Spade
9. The King My Father
Epilogue: End of the Idyll
Acknowledgements
You could smell God on the air in St Monans as surely as you could smell herring. That was in the forties, though, when I was born there, on 23 November 1944, to be precise. Not that precision was required of you in those days, unless you were in school or in church, counting your tables or your blessings, or in either case your sins. A rule-of-thumb philosophy prevailed in most practices, from cheese-cutting in the grocer’s to sex in the fields – you got it right by instinct. And if you got it wrong on occasion then somebody ended up with a bundle of dubious joy or an extra ounce of cheddar from that monolithic yellow slab on the counter.
It surprised me how, in spite of post-war poverty, things often worked out on the side of superfluity, illegitimacy included. Even the undertaker bustled in and scanned the deceased with the deadly blue measuring-tape of his eyes (inch-tapes were for tailors and the snipping out of Sunday suits, also voluminous): alive or dead a body always gained the benefit of the doubt. Especially dead. Nobody went cramped into eternity in a James Miller coffin. Boat-builder and coffin-maker, the ships were tight but the boxes were comfortable. ‘An extra inch or two won’t harm him – he’ll grow into it.’ That was the usual joke, meeting death with a quip and an open-handedness that boasted a generous supply of wood.
There was a good foundation for it. The historian Sibbald, ignoring Gaelic and old Icelandic and other etymologies, derived the name of Fife from an old Danish word meaning ‘the wooded country’. James IV had shorn it of its former glory when he built The Great Michael, the Goliath of Scottish waters, in 1511. But the wasted woods of Fife recovered – fortunately for me, as I carried out in their close and leafy coverts some of my earliest experiments in poetry and in sex (sometimes simultaneously), each of which required the utmost secrecy from the envious eyes and harsh judgements of critics, the self-appointed gods of metre and morality. And of God himself, the severest critic of all.
We’ve come back to God. That’s no accident. You couldn’t get away from Him in the forties. Time’s whirligig always brought in God and his revenges. The air was impregnated with him and with his mint-sweet and moth-ball evangelists. Just as it was with herring, as you might expect in a fishing village on Scotland’s repressed east coast where fishing was an act of faith and not yet a computer-science industry designed to suck the last drops of life out of the sea. The only echo-soundings to be heard then were the desperate plummets of prayer (Out of the depths, O Lord, I cry to Thee!) from those in peril on the sea. Or on the slate. Fishermen with light nets and heavy bills were known to string themselves up from the rafters like stranded fish, staring at the sky, in those dark lofts where they stored their gear, and which also smelled of the sea.
The oldest fishermen swore they could smell a shoal of herring in the breeze as accurately as a gannet, diving from two hundred feet into the waves, could detect the glimmer of a fish another two hundred feet beneath the surface. That was nothing to these old men of the sea, who had birds’ beaks for noses. Faith and science were tucked neatly up their snouts, a faculty per nostril, the aspect of some secret symbiosis. They’d snuff the air when at sea and give the order to shoot the nets, or not. Even the old-timers sitting on stanchions at the pier-ends would remove their pipes from their mouths, lift their grizzled muzzles, sea-dogs questing the air, and tell you they could detect a shoal of herring ten miles off shore. ‘There’s herring out there – I’m fucking sure of it! As sure as God’s my judge!’ Their language was not exclusively scriptural.
But there was more to it than just smell. The old salts of St Monans sometimes struck me as steering that narrow course between lunacy and genius. Later, in my teens, I learned from Dryden that this was entirely likely. Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide. In spite of this my old men were scholars without degrees, madmen without a dangerous bone in their bodies, unless they choked on a fishbone. As a matter of fact we were all mad to a degree, on the scale of eccentricity to insanity, and yet nobody ever came to any harm in this place of open doors and wild, free fields, roamed by children who’d never heard of paedophiles and who had no cause to worry about them. Our world was a protective cocoon, like intoxication. You fell and got up again, amazed and unhurt. God was around anyway, looking after you while spying you out. He was in charge of the asylum that was our village and he ran a Captain Bligh-style ship, a thousand souls under his commandments. Obedience was the operative word, discipline – and ’fishency, Kipps, ’fishency, in this fishermen’s world that lived by fish and smelled of fish and dreamed of fish as Ahab dreamed of whale, blowing his drowned brain.
Ahab was another sea-captain, but an ungodly one, like the Old Testament king he was named after. I knew all about both Ahabs, just as I knew I hadn’t come from God, or from the Bass Rock, or from the back of beyond, as some of the early explanations had it. The truth was simpler and more shocking, in fact. And more mundane.
A stinking drop. That’s what I came from, or so I was advised by a hellfire-and-herring-breathing preacher in the braehead kirk, where the Congregationalists sweated in the dark for their share in eternity. ‘A stinking drop!’ he thundered, smashing the prow of the pulpit like a dogcollared Viking, giving no quarter to any horny rams or ewes in his flock who planned on being on the giving or receiving end that Sunday night. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work, but on the Sabbath day thou shalt not shag – this seemed to be the sub-text of his sermon. Maybe he was just trying to be as discouraging as possible, adding his tuppenceworth of sulphur to anything that lassitude and weariness of the spirit might achieve in the way of Sunday self-restraint. The fear of conception was the beginning of wisdom at the end of the week. And to make it sound as absolutely pointless as possible, he added (shocking the matrons of the congregation), ‘Copulation is friction of the members and an ejaculatory discharge, that’s all.’
You could hear their knicker elastic go twang with holy horror, in the echoes of which there sang a terrible glee. And this proved to be his undoing, as nothing, not even communion cloth, was as sacred as knicker elastic in the East Neuk of Fife, where nobody admitted that sex even existed, though the bible was awash with it and the bulls were hard at work in fields that were green to our very back doors.
As for the effect on the innocents of the flock, if disincentive was his game, it failed to achieve the desired result. Not in me, at least. Too young, I was also too ignorant and sexually untutored to understand exactly what he meant by friction of the members. Even so, something in the language excited me and I came out of church longing to meet a member and rub it up the wrong way. Not the right way. There was never any doubt when you emerged from the holy place with a half-hour-long sermon still burning your ears that everything in the world was wrong – and nothing was more wrong than your loathsome self.
That self-loathing quickly burned off in the sunny days of adolescence, or at least was tempered by sudden surges of self-love. But it occupied a large portion of early childhood, and fairly kept me sweating in the dark too. Not entirely inappropriate, though, when you come to think of it, that concept of original sin – entirely and especially congruent, indeed, to a world which, as I entered it, appeared to have got itself into something of a mess.
There was one week left in November when I was born, and eight hundred miles away or more, as the Spitfire flies, a Soviet-betrayed Warsaw was trying on for size yet another form of military subjugation, Stalin preparing to take over where Hitler had left off. Poles percolated west, a clutch of them fetching up in our little seafaring townships, together with the occasional German or Italian prisoner-of-war who’d opted to stay on and give Scotland a try. Germans, Poles, whatever, they seemed the same to me, Fritz and Stanislaw sharing the same pale thin grins and pensive eyes. One of them, gathering potatoes in a field once, held out to me an enormous smoked sausage, the like of which I’d never seen, and begged me to share it with him. Vill you bite, please? A peace offering, perhaps. They never took to the sea, though, these solid Continentals, preferring the life of farm labourers, sensible Scots earth under their feet, to the unstable element on which my mother’s people took their chances. An understandable choice in the case of men whose whole world had slid from under them, leaving them staring into hell. Not that I fathomed any of this with five weeks still left to run in ’44, when the war was also in the winter of its course. One way or another there was a nip in the air.
At my baptism there was ice in the font. Of all the churches the length and breadth of this sceptred isle, the old kirk stands closest to the sea, a rock built on a rock, its latticed windows lashed by spray, its leprous gravestones leaning like masts, encrusted with centuries of salt, lichens and old rhymes about death and hell that were quite literally the first literature I ever read; while inside the church the constant sound of the wash of waves appeared to be saying something in its muted melancholy way to the spartan pews and pillars. What was it saying exactly? It had something to do with death.
The interior was only marginally more inviting: one of those echoing Presbyterian barns, the whitewashed stone silence unheated sixty years ago by anything so pagan, so mundane, so modern as a radiator. Alec Fergusson, the old lobsterman who doubled as beadle and sexton, had placed the water there the night before, so that when the Reverend Kinnear removed the lid and made to perform the sacrament, he found himself staring at a frozen white shield.
But his arm was strong to smite, as all the Sunday schoolers knew (he was an ex-miner who’d suddenly seen the light, deep in the bowels of hell, and left off smoking and drinking, if not swearing), and his fist was as great as his faith. He brought it down into the stone font with force enough, my mother said, to kill a whale. The circle of ice splintered but yielded no water – it had frozen solid. There wasn’t a drop to be had in the vestry either, the vestry being one step up from a latrine, the pipes iced up too in merry December, when milk comes frozen home in pail, and Mr Kinnear stood breaking the third commandment between his teeth and threatening to break others that God hadn’t even thought of. So old Alec legged it down the outer steps of the church, to where a bursting sea was spraying the tombstones of my ancestors. He brought back a glimmer of cold brine in a brass collection plate. That was how it happened that the waters of the firth, which had been wetting the bones of my forebears for uncountable tides, were used that morning to baptize me – in the name of the Eternal Father (strong to save), and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
My own father could not attend the ceremony and sent his regrets on a postcard. At that point he himself was in peril on the sea, somewhere on the other side of the globe, unavoidably detained by the Emperor Hirohito; and sparing a thought for the absent father, the Reverend Kinnear asked God to listen as they prayed to him to still the restless wave (but jigger the fucking Japs! hissed a youngling of the flock) and bring the father safely back to his infant son. A noble and heartfelt thought – but he should have saved his breath. (So should my uncle Billy, aged all of seven, who’d added the entreaty on behalf of the Japanese and who was soundly thrashed afterwards.) When the father did come home in one piece and greeted the son he’d never seen, the son lashed out with his little fist and hit the invading stranger across the face. Was it that, I wonder, that started us off on the wrong foot? Five years of war, to return to an ungrateful little wretch, a mummy’s boy who’d slept with his mummy for the best part of a year and burrowed blindly into her breasts? Well, now the maternal reign was over. To the victor the spoils, as they say, and to the occupying enemy the young girl’s bed. My mother was twenty-three. I can still summon up some of the cold smouldering rage I felt then, when I was torn from the sleeping place and dropped behind bars, betrayed. Real or imagined, I can’t be sure. But I remember looking through the bars all right, and seeing the expression on that alien face that had swum so suddenly into my ken.
Faces, then. These are the first things that you see, floating and bobbing about you as you lie in pram or cot, or cradled in somebody’s arms, faces with phases and aspects of their own, all of which you grow to know. They were neither young nor old in my brave new world of consciousness without cognition. Nor were they ugly or pretty, wise or stupid, they were simply there, constellating the microcosm that was the family. They were kindly, though, that much I could tell, apart from that one face that I came to fear, the one with the strange grating accent, the face staring unlaughingly at me through the scabby green bars of my cot, the face that made me cry.
That’s all I was to start with – a wafer-thin cry, a winter wailing that went up through the thick green panes of our skylight windows in that house on the hill, up from Shore Street, where it mingled with the smoke from all the other village chimneys, drifted out over the clusters of red pantiled roofs, the reek from the kippering sheds, and was lost among seagulls and steeples and the huge fluffed-up towers and castles of clouds that the fishermen called Babylonians.
It was the time of the winter herring. The sea was busy with boats and from early on I could hear them, the steam drifters hooting in the harbour and the crews calling to one another. I could hear the clamouring and hammering coming from the boat-building sheds too, the muted sylvan sound of axes on wood. There were horses snorting and stamping in the streets, horses bringing the morning milk, horses carrying carts laden with farm produce, horses hauling fishloads in boxes up to the station, where the steam trains puffed and whistled through, horses being shoed in the smiddy right beneath our house, horses clothed in fire, stamping among the sparks. And scarcely any distance away the sea-spray wetted the fields where jingling horses gave way to tractors, two eras in tandem for the briefest possible time, a childhood glimpse of social history on the move.
But the sound that ran through my brain most of all, the sound that I could easily disentangle from the whole natural and social symphony, was that of water: the sound of the living firth. This was my first language and my first university, my alma mater, my alpha and omega, my eternal mother, the sea, the sea.
And my actual mother, she who bore me – that was Christina: Christina Scott, telephonist, eldest daughter of Margaret Marr Gay and Alexander Scott, born 21 December 1921, a child of the winter solstice, now married to Christopher Rush, able-bodied seaman, born 9 May 1919, now engaged in war service. So I’m told sixty years later by certificates of birth and marriage, on whose ageing parchment their love in black ink still shines bright. As I stare now into the laughing teenage eyes of my mother, looking out at me from a 1930s photograph (clad in the garb of her straitened time and place, a coarse heavy coat, and shoes without stockings), I can feel again that warm wave of love she gave out all her life, and with which she must have enveloped even my father. Five years after that photograph was taken, outside my granny’s house, the iron gate she leant against was gone, as were they all, gone to foundries every one, turned to guns, and turning young Huns to corpses – and young Christina was wheeling a pram.
Our house, as I’ve said, was on a hill, a steep winding street with the harbour glinting at the foot. Down we came in winter, in the dark, my mother pushing the pram and me in it, looking up at the bright freezing lights in the sky, among which her young face shone like a lamp. Twinkle, twinkle little star. The words of the song drifted from her lips in hot frosty clouds and hung between us. I reached out for them as the skidding pram ran past the sharp harled wall of the house. That was first blood – a red glove with which I could have touched the stars, but no sensation of pain, just a song in the air, still hanging there, and my mother’s changing face, the sweet love in her mouth turned to an O, and those stars tingling at my fingertips.
Then came the snowdrops. It must have been February 1945 at the latest, and I’d have been all of three months. I was wheeled the mile inland to Balcaskie woods, a gloomy cathedral of evergreens, vaulted over by the interlocking boughs of ash and elm and oak, and wheeled another mile along the nave of this gothic affair, a moss-soft path, deeppiled with needles and the sea-drift of leaves, generations of birch and beech casting their carpets over the marvellous avenue along which the endless altered people came to buy snowdrops from the estate.
First a girl in a green-caped hood, bending over me and crushing the flowers into my face. Why? Who was she? Many years later I saw a white-haired lady at a local gathering and knew in myself that it was she, raped by age. The flood went over me, the memory of how they’d then loaded the pram with snowdrops, a froth of sea under which I was wheeled home, sucking in the green white scent. How valid this is as a piece of recollection I have no idea, but stuck in a pram in the winter of ’45, a wordless little world, I know only that I was aglow with the knowledge of snowdrops, into which no cancerous worm had yet bitten the bitter recognition that I should surely die.
It was Epp who passed on that knowledge to me, both by instruction and by example. Epp was a great-aunt of my mother’s and our landlady at Shore Road, for the house was not our own. She was Queen Victoria at No. 16, well into her eighties when I knew her and dead before I was three, but it wasn’t necessary to possess a memory like mine to remember Epp. A hibernating spider, stuck in a corner, would have remembered her. She was unforgettable.
It was Epp who began my literary, religious and sex education, all rolled into one. And in all three respects as in every other, she was an anachronism. Throned on her massive moss-green velvet armchair, all curves and buttons, she presided over me in a black waterfall of lace and silk, her skirts spilling across the floor and rustling over my feet. Her fists were knotted over the head of an African cane, up which a brace of wicked-looking snakes wriggled and writhed, standing out like the veins on the backs of her hands. From this position she thundered at me every morning about how well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old, and other heroic stand-offs:
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward …
At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay …
On Linden when the sun was low
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow …
Years later, coming across many of these lines at school, I realized with a shock that I was not learning them but remembering them. And suddenly I was back in front of the armchair, standing to attention, no higher than old Epp’s knee, stormed at by the shot and steady shell of her wrathful cannonades, and watching once again the trembling of her dreadful dewlaps as her frail white fists descended on the arms of the chair, beating out the rhythms of the verse. She held the windowed sky in her spectacles and her head was lost in clouds of snowy white hair. She was God’s mother, for sure.
‘Be a brave wee man,’ she lectured me when I cut my thumb and cried, ‘or you’ll never be a sailor like your father, or a soldier like my bonny brothers!’
‘I don’t want to be a soldier! I want to be a fisherman!’ I howled back at her.
‘A fisherman!’ she scoffed. ‘You might as well be a tinker!’
She never failed to pour scorn on my role models, my grandfather and his sons, who went out like matadors to face the bucking white bull of the sea.
‘And you’ll never get a wife either if you bubble like that! None but the brave deserves the fair!’
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave deserves the fair.
I wept all the louder.
When I was bad and uncontrollable and all the men in the house were at sea, I was taken to Epp.
‘Oh, you scoundrel!’ she scolded me. ‘You bad wild boy!’
Then she would tell me that the horned and hoofed devil had flown over the rooftops on scaly black pinions of soot, that he was sitting on our roof right this minute, listening to me, and would be down the chimney at my next word. His mouth was full of sinners and that was why I couldn’t hear him mumbling, but at the next swallow there would be room in his jaws for one more gobbet of begrimed humanity, and that would be me. Didn’t I hear the soot falling? Open-mouthed, I turned my head to the lurid red glow of her grate. Sinister scrabblings seemed to be coming out of the awful tall blackness of the chimney, which led up to the universe, the unknown corners of God’s coal-cellar. Quaking, I turned my eyes back to my torturer, her pale old face laved by flames.
‘You will go to hell!’ she leered. ‘You will be crying for a single drop of water to cool your parched mouth as you lie in the lake of fire. Your throat will be like the Sahara. But Satan will just laugh at you before he crunches you up. And not one drop of water will you get! Not one! Oh yes, my bonny man, you’ll get something to cry for in hell!’
When I ran to her, screaming, she never softened. My hands clutched at her knees, my face buried in her black lap, wetting the velvet. She smelled of moth-balls.
‘Go away, you bad lad,’ she said softly, sternly, stroking my hair. ‘You’re like every other boy that was born, picked up from the Bass Rock you were, that’s where you came from, that’s where your father got you, didn’t you know? Why didn’t he go to the May Island, the stupid wee beggar that he was, and bring us all back a nice wee lass, instead of you, you nasty brat!’
Avoiding the biology of stinking drops, Epp assured me that boys came from the Bass and girls from the May. My father’s ship had gone off course. Someone had blundered, some hand at the helm. I had not been intended, that was all. Ah well, it had been wartime and many errors had been made, many wrongs committed. I was one of them.
‘Ours not to reason why,’ she proclaimed.
And then she was off again at her poetry and her preaching. When she came out of it she told me that since I was a boy I had better make the best of it and behave as well as I could. But like all boys I was born to be bad. There’s your bairn, God had said – make a kirk or a mill of him for all I care. And like Pontius Pilate he went and washed his hands.
Poor Epp. Her two brothers had run away from home, following their father, and had died in scarlet in the Zulu wars, leaving their mother naked in her age. They’d left Epp to grow into an unmarried battleaxe, grinding out her grudge against the entire male race in those tireless tirades of hers. But if she blamed them with one breath, she glorified them with the next, and every breath in her body was dedicated to their reproach and their renown, the latter articulated unconsciously perhaps in the wild volleys of heroic poetry. These were her only concession to their selfish and stupid bravado in throwing their lives away. She was a stern Eve. She had known a sharper sting than the serpent’s tooth, and the apple of life had turned to ashes in her mouth. So she bit back with venom.
But she unbent for the ceremony of the pan-drop.
I was summoned to the hearth. Taking one of the large white mints from a glass jar, the holy grail of her sideboard, she would place it on the whorled bronze corner of the fender and pulverize it with the head of the poker. And always I feared for the precious pieces, scattered amongst cinders and ash. Epp waited there to the end, watching me haughtily as I picked them out and sucked away the last white shards.
‘Away you go now, you young rascal, that’s all there is!’
She lifted the poker and waved me away, shaking her free fist at me. I ran from the room. I was terrified of her in those moods.
But Epp was my first queen and I her adoring subject. Her sceptre was the gleaming poker, her court the flickering hearth with its high-backed buttoned throne. The pan-drops were the favours she dispensed. And how could she or I have known then that I would one day pay tribute to her in the only coins I have ever had to spare – memory’s mintage of hard-won words? Why is it, Epp, that the old lady and the little boy have to meet again after all these years? And will go on meeting until the last day’s tribute has been settled.
Is it because of what happened one winter’s night, that still grips me like some dreadful disease? I remember that night when the grown-ups faced one another across a bare table, all of them as dumb as stones for sheer poverty. The fishing had failed that season and there was nothing to eat. I was up whining for food and there were no toys either, nothing to distract me between ceiling and floor. I roamed the distempered walls, following my gaunt shadow beneath the gas mantles, glancing narrowly at the grown ones as they sat there in that grim-faced gathering that angered me to the bone. Why didn’t they do something? I sensed it instinctively -- that this was what adults were for. Not my father, of course, who wasn’t around that night, out drinking himself drunk again, as somebody said, pissing what little money we had up against the wall, not part of their real world of sea-stress and struggle to survive. But that was their function and burden, to shoulder the heavens that were falling on us, and instead they were sitting there like statues, while I scoured those bare unpapered walls, passing the mouse-hole over and over, out of which no mouse ever came. It had slung its tiny hook and buggered off, my uncle Billy said. And so I was the one who heard the little silver chiming at the door – so small a sound that the others did not even lift their faces out of their fists. Blotting myself against the wall, I glided to the door and stared down at two shining circles on the floor, two bright winter moons that lit up the linoleum. Two half crowns.
Down on her knees, where the grey draughts struck like daggers between the ribs, my great queen had knelt in her empty hall, on the other side of the door. She had laid her old bones down there in the dark, unseen, and had pushed back our rent money that we could not afford to pay. Through the door it had come again, from the probing tips of her white ringless fingers, from Epp, who never said a word, though everybody blessed her for that tender mercy which became her in the end better than her reign of terror.
But she breathed her last, old Epp, before she could receive the thanks of her meanest vassal. Such is the breath of old queens – brief in the bitter mornings of little boys.
One morning I was not summoned for the usual audience. When there was still no summons on the second morning I balanced pandemonium against pan-drop and decided the sweet was worth the death of the six hundred, or even my own in the sulphurous pit. Where’s Epp? I pestered my mother repeatedly and she tried to calm me with a quatrain.
God saw that she was weary,
And the hill was hard to climb,
So He closed her weary eyelids
And whispered, ‘Rest be thine.’
A sentimental snippet from a church magazine? An epitaph picked off a gravestone? It chiselled itself into my brain, all right, revealing itself decades later when pen on paper acted like the key in a lock. But at the time the words merely drew mysterious veils over something which I knew to be ultimate and awful, and I pursued my quest relentlessly for the vanished Epp, keeper of the pan-drops, drawing whispered riddles out of the mouths of everybody in the house. Old George, my great-grandfather, said she was now a pilgrim before God, my grandmother told me she had gone to a better land, and grandfather said she was being made ready for the kirkyard. No. 16 Shore Road was a sprawl of family, and artless infants don’t need a who’s who. It was years before it even occurred to me to unravel the relationships, the aunts and uncles who put the sacred seals and stoppers on Epp’s passing, rather than show me a mystery. Asleep in Jesus, gone to glory, singing hymns at heaven’s gate – Epp haunted me from a thousand hiding places.
At last my father, tired of my questions, told me.
‘She’s dead.’
Dead. What’s dead? What does it mean, being dead? I’d asked the big one, the one that most human beings spend their lives ignoring, preferring not to think about it. What could they answer, after all? Extinction? Putrefaction? Translation? Resurrection? Judgement? Eternal bliss? Eternal torment? The lake of fire? A state when totally irreversible chemical changes have taken place in the body? That last’s for sure. But none of that was on offer and I expect my upturned face and persistent questioning must have preyed on their nerves.
Yes, but what is it? What is dead?
So they took me to meet death.
My father snatched me up roughly under his arm and my protesting mother followed us, through the hallway, past the parlour, and into Epp’s presence. It has never left me – the total blackness of the room in which she was laid out.
The silence was electric – though there was no electricity in that house of gas mantles where at that moment there was no shilling to feed the meter. A match was struck – and failed. The tight little whispers of my parents still deafen me today. Another match, breaking open the blackness and the silence. Criss-cross patterning of the trestle on which lay a big dark shape. Blackness again and another match. And then there she was, in the flaming dark, old Epp, my queen, clothed in whiteness to the wrists, the first time I had ever seen her out of black, her chosen mourning, or her stern eyes so softly closed. Now she was the bride she had never allowed herself to be. And finally, in the plunging confusion of more darkness and exploding matches, a heavy lid thudding shut, the inscrutable workmanship of shining oak, the brass mirror of the polished name-plate, Elspeth Marr, her name, her years. Where’s Epp? That’s where she is now, in there, in the box. And that’s where she stays. Till the last trumpet. The rest was silence.
With Epp gone I ran wild for a few days before I forgot her, if I ever did forget that old queen of the night. My crimes were legion, apparently, though I remember only a few. I dry-shaved myself with my grandfather’s old-fashioned open razor and wore the red results for weeks afterwards. I gulped down a bottle of Indian ink and thought it not too bad, stuck buttons up my nose beyond the reach of the local practitioner, put back a large quantity of my uncle Alec’s home-brewed beer and was as sick as a pig. I also found the rum that my father had brought back from the navy and which had been put into a little brown bottle, left in the medicine-chest in the bathroom and forgotten – till I emerged reeling downstairs, clutching the bottle and the banisters. Jenny and Georgina shrieked at the tops of their voices, the house silvery with aunties’ laughter. My grandmother raised her eyes to the skies, proclaiming the Apocalypse. Uncle Billy began singing a song about fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. I saw fifteen rum-raddled sailors, each with a booted foot set in triumph on a dead pirate, his chest cracking like a crab’s carapace as they caroused on his corpse. And I felt as drunk as all fifteen put together, and ready to take on the whole family, all nine of them.
Not the tenth, though. My father was never part of the family. He was the intruder from the open ocean whose ship had gone wrong, or so Epp had said. He should never have come here, someone had blundered. I wasn’t the error, he was, though he never admitted it and always shifted the blame on to me. ‘You’re the nigger in the woodpile,’ he’d say to me privately when something went wrong, ‘you’re the fucking fly in the ointment!’ One adult day came the realization that he’d been swearing at me, verbally abusing me. But he’d always added, ‘And you repeat that if you dare!’ So I was forbidden to tell the secrets of my prison-house, on pain of the usual punishment, sonny boy! And that’s what he called me as he gave me the instruction I heard a thousand times after that, heard it with fear and loathing. Bend over that chair! And I bent over the chair. I can see it, feel it, describe its green design, smell it, follow its damp threadbare awfulness, its every loose thread. Off came the belt. And that’s the first thrashing I remember. I wasn’t even three, my bottom not even the size of his able-bodied hand.
The day of the thrashing, my first experience of inflicted pain, I escaped from the house and made my way down Shore Road, heading straight for the water, wiping away the tears, ignoring the cat-calls from the other kids. Cry baby cry, put your finger in your eye, tell your mother it wasn’t I. I arrived on the wave-swept rocky shore, the sunken sea-dreams of my folk locked hard in my head.
The harbour crooked its arm around me. It was a safe haven but I left it, left the harbour and drifted east. Nobody stopped me as I made my way past the swaying forest of masts, the fish-curing sheds, the high sylvan din of the boat-builder’s yard, where the scents and sounds of sea and forest met in a strange mingling and the men laboured minutely inside the giant curving rib-hulls of the boats, like Jonahs in the bellies of great wooden whales.
Leaving behind me the last black-painted house, I walked the last of the piers, the east pier, climbed the iron steps in the wall, came down on the seaward side and made my way out on to the zigzagging breakwater that took the batterings from the south-east seas and stood between the town and Poseidon. At the end of this Roman mole I found myself staring into the infinite depths of the sea, a calm cold world of wonder and weeds. It was a magic glass, so green and clear – if I just leaned over a little bit more and looked into it, I might see to the other side of the world …
Did I fall or did I simply let myself go? Better to be with Epp, perhaps, whose rage was all in her head, not in her hand, whose anger was all words. I could hear all the oceans of the world roaring in my ears. The dark tangles parted to let me go by, waved to me in passing, stroking my face, and Epp sure enough came floating up from the bottom of the world to meet me, her eyes still blind and jaw still bandaged but her arms extended. They wrapped themselves round me for the first time – she had never touched me once in all my short life – and I was surprised by her youthful strength and suppleness as she kicked us both up to heaven. My head broke back into the blue world of sunlight and air and suddenly there was water everywhere, changing its texture, a stinging blizzard of brightness and salt. Epp had changed too. I could see now that she had metamorphosed into a man – a fully dressed man, who became a boat and sailed us both back to land, where I vomited torrents of water. I was hurried to the nearest house and wrapped up by strangers, smothered in a grey army blanket whose crude red stitching I can still see out of the corner of my eye. A circle of faces, many voices, a large spoon with something in warm water – Give him some more … put more brandy in … No, that’ll do, I hear he’s had enough already – and then my mother arrived, trundling my old pram, in which I was wheeled home and put to bed.
From there I could hear the voices.
‘I’ll give him a bloody good thrashing when he wakes up!’
‘You’ll do no such thing! You’ve hit the boy too hard already and look what happened.’
‘But Miller’s lost his gold watch – do you know how much a thing like that costs?’
‘It didn’t cost a life, anyway, it was the other way about. Your son’s alive, man. A thrashing’s not going to bring the watch back. And Miller can stand it.’
My grandfather was home from the sea. I was safe. And I slipped into a warm sleep, unaware of the enormous debt owed to James Miller, boat-builder of St Monans, who’d been dressed for a funeral that day, fob watch and all. A debt my father sullenly reminded me of long afterwards. The calculation was easy, even for him. A son’s life, a gold watch. And I had escaped a thrashing, though the next time he administered one and I thought it was over, he breathed for a moment before starting again, standing over me gloating and snarling, And that’s for the bleeding watch! No justice in the world, then, but God’s blind hammer and an implacable little bully. But James Miller lost a time-piece – and gave me a lifetime in return.
With my mother often putting in night shifts at the local telephone exchange in Anstruther and my father working by day and drinking by night, or vice versa, I was put in the care of old Leebie who, like the sibyl, had time on her hands. Nobody had ever worked out who exactly Leebie was – which was far from strange in a village of a thousand souls where inbreeding must have amounted to unconscious incest every now and then. Even Leebie herself didn’t know, or pretended not to. ‘Oh, I’m there or thereabouts on the family tree,’ was the most she came up with when questioned. Ironically it was Leebie who followed the branches better than anyone. She could quote you the dates and places and even times of the hatches, matches and dispatches, as she called them, the names of the forebears, the progeny who’d come and gone, the lines of descent, the cross-fertilization and cross-relationships.
The task Leebie set herself was to bring me up proper, so she said, by putting me in perspective. ‘It’s high time you knew who you are,’ she told me, convinced that if I knew who I was, it would somehow confer on me the consciousness of how I should behave, and so save me from future thrashings. This genealogical tutelage she carried out either at the sewing-machine, her polished black shoes flying on the treadles, or more usually while knitting one of her long black Sunday scarves, the family line and the woollen comforter growing longer together, knit one purl one, as she sat there, patient and persistent as Penelope, hour by hour, waiting for no man, but determined to make a man out of a little boy.
On my mother’s mother’s side she took me back six generations to seventeen ninety something, to a multitude of Marrs and Gays who had never moved more than a mile from St Monans and who had spawned shoals of local offspring, all bearing the same bewildering names as their forebears: William, Philip, David, Andrew, John; Helen, Christina, Elspeth, Margaret, Georgina, Jenny, Jean. And on my mother’s father’s side she reached back again into the black bag of the past, into a time unthinkable, and came out with a clutch of Alexander Scotts, one in every generation, who’d given my grandfather his name. The frightening thing was that she’d known them all, all the way back to that seventeen ninety something, before which was Adam, and all the way down to the last Alexander, my uncle Alec, born in 1928 and not yet out of his teens. William was the youngest, my uncle at seven, and the one who’d sworn at my baptism. My mother, Christina, was the eldest of the children of Margaret Marr Gay and Alexander Scott, and her sisters were Jenny and Georgina. Jenny had black hair, Georgina was fair and my mother was red. Alec was black and hairy and Billy was blond. Grandfather himself was still very dark. His spouse, as Leebie called my granny, was very grey. And then there was me, with my stupid English name that God didn’t recognize because it wasn’t in the bible. I was the son of Christina Scott and Christopher Rush – and of his line Leebie knew nothing at all and didn’t want to. ‘He doesn’t belong here,’ was all she said. ‘But all these other lines now, they come out of the sea, and that’s where you belong, my lad, just you remember that.’
Then she would tell me the story of Mary Buek on the side of my grandfather – whose mother, Bridget Burk, had hailed from Dundee. Mary Buek was a nurse in Dundee, back again in the 1790s, and Leebie had never known her because she had died in 1854, but she’d known her daughter, Margaret Watson, who’d lived till 1892 – and that, for Leebie, was only yesterday.
Always she started the story by asking for one of the pair of black-leaded cannonballs that sat on either side of the fireplace, so symmetrically placed that they looked like part of the decorative fittings of the grate, though I often initiated the narrative myself by bringing one over to her, carried with pride and difficulty to the chair where she sat smoking. Her long silky white hair was usually in a bun, but for some reason she let it down, combing it out for the story, and it came out yellow with nicotine, a weird contrast with the unblinking china-blue eyes and the chipped black teeth. She looked down at the ball, cast off the scarf she was knitting and took out the old bone comb.
‘A fair-sized small shot,’ she said, refilling her tiny white pipe. ‘A present from the Spaniards, though not the biggest shot that hit the Victory that day. But it was just a wee musket ball that did the worst damage.’
Leebie struck another match and puffed. A coil of blue tobacco smoke hung round her head. Some of it drifted up to the blackened beams. The other wisps were sucked up the chimney by the draught from the fire. But her words stayed in the air like a fragrance, and the folk she told me about seemed to enter the room as she introduced them, one by one. Up the lum went the smoke, to fade into the stars – and down came Mary Buek, like a wraith risen from her grave.
Buek at least was the name on the gravestone in Kilrenny kirkyard, not much more than three miles away, but that was just the ignorance of one old local chiseller, according to Leebie. It should have read Burk and he’d put in an ‘e’ for an ‘r’, robbing her of the true sound of her immortality in an age when people still hung over the tombs and studied their stone pages. Well, you can’t always believe what you read, but Buek she became, reborn in stone, and stone is stronger than paper, so Buek she stays – at least until people stop remembering, and when will that be, eh?
So Leebie’s talk drifted on.
Mary Buek came down from Dundee and married a Cellardyke fisherman called Watson, Thomas Watson. He was press-ganged in 1797 and the jolly jack tars took Mary along too, mainly on account of her being a nurse. What could be better aboard a man-o’-war? So the pair of them became guests of His Majesty aboard HMS Triumphant, which took them to Leith. After that it was the high seas and the French wars. The century turned like a tide and lifted Thomas Watson to the position of bosun gunner on HMS Ardent, a line-of-battle ship with sixty-four guns. And it was below the decks of that ship, to the thunder of the guns, that their baby daughter Margaret was born, right in the thick of the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. Some birth that was, in the middle of that death-ridden bedlam, down in the cockpit, the bloody womb of the ship, delivered among the dead and dying. Margaret Watson’s cradle was a rolling man-o’-war that shivered and shook in the North Sea. Her lullaby was the iron song of cannonballs, the rending of timbers, the shrieks of mutilated men. Stranger still for all those suffering and doomed sailors, whose cries were filling the ship, to hear the wail of a new-born baby rising thinly into the world of terrors that they were just on the point of leaving.
So then they were three. And the battle was a victory for Nelson. Their employers would have let them go after that but Thomas and Mary stayed in service for another five years until six months after Trafalgar, and the little girl stayed with them, knowing nothing much of the wide world except ships and sailors during all that time. Her lasting memory was of Trafalgar itself.
Strange today to think that I was taught my first history lesson by one old lady who’d known another who’d been at the Battle of Trafalgar. It’s now the year 2005 and that battle was exactly two centuries ago. Impossible? No. I’m sixty as I write this. Leebie was born in the 1860s and the Trafalgar baby lived to the age of 91. Leebie was in her late twenties when Margaret Watson died – the dove-tailing of eras was far from tight – and she’d heard her talk about Trafalgar often enough.
Margaret remembered the roaring and the rolling, the flashes of fire and clouds of smoke and the song of the guns among the shrieking beams. She remembered her mother standing with arms red to the elbows, helping the man with the shining blades who did such terrible things to the sailors. And she recalled their shouts, which Leebie repeated with stabbing actions of her pipe, the smoke curling out of her blackened mouth as she replicated the scene and gave the orders. Close up, there! Two points abaft the beam! Point-blank, now, point-blank! Fire, damn you, fire! And she remembered the man with the stars on his coat being brought down to the cockpit and laid out on some spare sails, where Captain Hardy kissed him. He asked for lemonade and wine and water, but he never finished it. The tide had gone out of his