The One-Gallus Gang fought a valiant rearguard action all the way. They bore off the precious potatoes in the school wheelbarrow and built a huge beacon on the beach which burned for three days and three nights, and there they roasted every last potato, consuming the entire school harvest of that year. They crowned this feast with bars of burnt chocolate salvaged from a low-flying off-course Messerschmitt which they’d brought down simply by firing some of the potatoes into the propeller as it went over their heads. The pilot surrendered and so the gang avoided the Marship and were decorated instead.
‘This is one of my medals,’ Billy said, reaching casually into the drawer and pulling out an award which grandfather had said he’d won in the Dardanelles.
‘He did,’ said Billy. ‘We both won the same medal, awarded for valour. Mine should have been a Victoria Cross but they’d run out by then and they simply took what they could get for the ceremony.’
But all that was nothing, he said, compared to the exploits of the One-Gallus Gang in old George’s day. Great-grandfather had been a founding member. In those days they cut off dogs’ heads for fun, crucified cats, played football with hedgehogs and roasted them along with the potatoes. They dug up the bones of buried teachers who had belted their great-grandfathers, and they drank rum out of their skulls, washing down their three-day banquets with contraband spirit, seized from the excise officers. The One-Gallus Gang was a regiment with a long and illustrious history – and all I had to do to belong to it was to cut off one of my braces, said uncle Billy, reaching into the drawer again and taking out the scissors.
‘Here you are, it’s simple, only you have to do it yourself – it’s no good if somebody does it for you.’
I held on to both braces, and the following year took them both off proudly to wear my first striped elastic belt with a silver snake clasp.
Another of Billy’s stories was that the headmaster was really a woman dressed up and that the plus-fours allowed her to wear her long ankle-length bloomers without being rumbled. Women were unlikely to land headteachers’ jobs, he explained. Six out of seven were sex-starved spinsters but the seventh was always a man. Mr Gourlay was the proud possessor of a pair of tits, kept secretly pressed beneath his – or rather her – checked waistcoat. And underneath the bloomers – well, we won’t go into that, said Billy, grinning and winking and tapping the side of his nose.
‘But what about going to the bathroom?’ I asked.
‘Women don’t go together.’
‘But what about Mr Gourlay’s – I mean Miss Gourlay’s – wife? He’s married. I’ve seen her. She comes to prize-giving.’
It was another clever deception, all part of the plan. Mrs Gourlay was also a dissembler, a man dressed as a woman. They were all what were called bohemians …
And so it went on. There were genes for fiction in our family. I inherited some of them. I wish I’d inherited a few more. Did such stories merely spring from the delight in fantasy, I wonder? Or were they a subconscious escape from the daily misery of school life for boys who were either unacademic or highly imaginative? The regime suited neither and the imagination continued to work underground.
And me? I found refuge in – of all things – a pig, drawn to it by Miss Sangster’s assurances that I was pig-ignorant. The walk to school each morning was a glum business. I avoided the cracks in the pavement, tightrope-walked the kerb, picked a leaf from a hedge every ninth step – and tapped my head furtively against a certain wall seven times to ensure my mother would not be dead when I got back home at the end of the school day. I invented rituals endlessly, designed, I think, to keep me safe from the dragons.
The last stop before school was a house with a large garden which had been turned into a smallholding. Hens clucked about. Pigeons murmured in a loft. Potatoes, carrots, radishes and leeks grew in ranks – and giant golden onions heaved themselves out of the ground like Russian churches, buried up to their domes. The coping stone was missing from a single section of the low wall and this enabled me to lean over and scratch the pig as he gruntled about his sty. I envied him his pastoral torpor, the king of illiteracy, innumeracy, ill manners, and at the same time encouraged him to wallow in it, scratching his back every morning till he grinned sleepily at me and fell ecstatically on his ample side into the mire. How far away he was from the bewildering world of sums and the banalities of Birmingham: where was it situated, how many people lived there, and what did they do? Whatever they did, they didn’t scratch this pig – which was as dumb as me and just as wise. Between us a bond grew up. When I approached the smallholding each morning he ran to me and sidled smilingly up to the wall, waiting to be scratched and tickled. We grinned together in the sun, united in ignorance. Then I went into school, every morning, every year.
So we were passed on from Miss to Miss, season by season; booted and balaclava’ed, coughing and cod-liver-oiled in the winter, shirt-sleeved and sweating in the summer; harelipped, stuttering, gap-toothed, warted and all. We threw up our bean-bags and caught them on our heads. We sloped our writing towards the door. We chanted our tables, touched our toes, calculated the price of carrots, parsed our nouns, prayed for our king, suffered under Miss Sangster and came out into the light at the end of that dreary tunnel relatively unchanged. We had grown skins, perhaps, to make us insensitive to dreariness without vision. In the coarse curriculum that we followed, there had been little to awake the sleeping imagination, and those bunned and bespectacled old battle-axes who belted us about the bare legs were hired assassins, paid to kill creativity and keep the Gradgrind mills turning. Ramrods without breasts (except in Mr Gourlay’s case), steam hammers somebody must have cared for once, they themselves knew nothing of love and all their lives were rehearsing for death.
5
The Next World
The Holy City – that was what they called us in the East Neuk of Fife. People booked early for churchyard plots that ran east–west rather than north–south, so that when you stood up at the last trumpet, you’d be facing Jerusalem – just in case you’d lost your sense of direction after an eternity in the earth. Resurrection was nothing if not literal in those days. Meanwhile, until the old Jerusalem passed away and the New Jerusalem rose out of the Apocalypse, East Neukers could always come along to St Monans if they wanted a whiff of the temporal alternative to the Holy City. Here ten churches catered for the spiritual needs and zealous propensities of a thousand souls; and at an early age, when ten was the awesome numerate ceiling which I just managed to touch, by standing on mental tiptoe, that was impressive. The churches were as many as the many-tided sea, against which they were individually etched. Religion was the rock on which our fishing township was founded, and the varieties of religion it practised, with acrimonious exclusiveness, were the rocks on which true religion foundered. But nobody saw it that way, least of all the fishermen, who relied on the Rock of Ages to keep them from the literal reefs.
Among us there were Roman Catholics and straight Presbyterians and Congregationalists; there were Open Brethren, Closed Brethren, Fergusson’s Brethren and Duff’s Brethren – any Brethren at all that cared to construct an entire theological alphabet out of one undotted iota or jot or tittle of the law; there were Pilgrims who, like the Brethren, did not believe in salaried ministers (Jesus having been without a stipend), but who, unlike everyone else, did not believe in churches either, except in the figurative sense, and so brought God under the fabric of one another’s roofs; there were Baptists and Evangelists and Jehovah’s Witnesses round the doors – except old George’s. And there was the Salvation Army, terrible with banners and brass. They hell-fired at you in the streets one and all and summoned you to judgement through your letter box. They spilled out on to the piers, where the setting sun turned the tranquil harbour to a lake of fire. This was if you did not come to church.
And if you did come to church they made it even worse for you. They leaned over their pulpits and pleaded with you to come forward and be saved till their faces t
urned purple and the veins broke out on their brows, under the stormtossed wrath of their raging white hair, so that they looked like something from the world of Moby Dick. Religion in the Holy City was not offered to you as a polite cup of tea – they shot it through you like a dose of salts.
This next-world sentience was not confined to – or by – any particular time or place. It was built into your genes, felt in the heart, inhaled and exhaled, heard, smelt, seen and felt, dreamed, drunk, sweated and bled. You couldn’t even ask the butcher for a pound of mince without remembering God. Geordie Grant, with his cloud of white hair and a spare rib in one hand, had the smell of Genesis on him.
Most of the shopkeepers were church elders, or sweet-sucking spinsters who could see out a sermon the length of a Polish winter. Some of them doubled as Sunday school teachers and your penny sherbet also cost you an interrogation on last week’s text. ‘For God so loved the world … Right now, finish it off for me, chapter and verse, and earn your sweeties like a good boy.’ It was puzzling to have goodness demanded of you while being assured with every second breath that you were a vile sinner through and through, and could do nothing about it except pray for God’s forgiveness and grace. The other puzzle was trying to remember what precisely these vile sins were that you had committed. Murder and adultery were not on your personal list, that much was certain. You didn’t even know the meaning of adultery, let alone commit it, although it was one of the big shalt-nots that was hammered into you every Sunday without fail.
Sunday mornings were always the same. You knew it was Sunday the second you woke. It wasn’t just the cessation of the sound of drudgery, it was the quality of the silence, a seventh-seal quality, like in the Book of Revelation, when the Lamb opened the final seal – and there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. My ideas about heaven were understandably confused during my first decade, but I was in no doubt about one thing: it was a big place. It had to be, to accommodate all the souls, even just the tiny percentage of saved ones, of all the people who had ever lived since the beginning of the world. Furthermore, heaven was the place where we’d all meet again, after death, and folk meeting up with their families after an unimaginable length of separation were hardly likely to sit around in a sort of polite Sunday silence. Not the families I knew. Though nobody would actually spit or shout or make rude noises, there would be quite a buzz, there was no question about that. So for all that multi-global gossip suddenly to cease for half an hour – the idea simply took my breath away.
I used to lie still at first light on Sundays, my nose and ears just above the blankets, assessing the air for information – of the eternal sort. What would God’s broadcast be about this morning, in the ether, in the heart? Because we were told that just as God could hear your thoughts, whether you were addressing him or not, so you could hear his words, if you only listened.
I listened. To begin with the sea and the seagulls were the only things that moved – blue whisperings on the shingle and white circlings over the chimney tops. And webs of sunlight winking on the green weed-grown walls of the quiet piers. Even the boats seemed to behave themselves on Sundays – none of that rowdy jostling and bobbing and creaking.
After an hour or so the village started to shake itself into wakefulness. I could see in my head what was happening. At first it was just the fringes of the tapestry that fluttered and stirred – the old folk who never properly slept and were always up at the crack of dawn. Slippered old wives shuffled across their doorsteps, scrubbed sparkling white or gleaming with Cardinal polish, scattering the crumbs of their frugal breakfasts over their front dykes for the sparrows in the street. An old man tottered to the end of the farthest pier, lit his pipe and smoked in silence, staring across the blue stretches of the firth, remembering.
After that the scrollwork from the village chimneys appeared on the sky and the Sunday morning smells of sausages, bacon and eggs, and fried tomatoes came curling out of open doors to mingle with the scents of the sea. Down in Gerrard’s emporium the reprobates were already buying the News of the World, and their kids were loading up with lollipops and bags of caramels to take back to their godless sitting-rooms. And the Peatties and the Sharkeys and the Dohertys had already taken the bus to the chapel in Pittenweem for early morning mass. Only those who walked in darkness would dream of waking God up at such an ungodly hour, or of worshipping in such a pagan place. The Pittenweemers were torn-arses and scum. All who were not St Monansers were torn-arses and scum. Everybody knew that – in St Monans at any rate. But all along the windowed streets Calvin’s children, God’s various elect, were wending their way to the appointed places.
The main parade was put on by the members of the Old Kirk. Under its sea-splashed walls came banker and bankrupt, spinster and strumpet, schoolteacher and fisherman. From all points of the compass they came in tributaries of black and navy blue, in which the hats of the women bobbed like brightly coloured corks in a stream. Along the nave and into the white arms of the transepts they spread. And the kirk took them all in, under its lichened slates, just as its green graveyard eventually accepted the whole spectrum of the town.
The Old Kirk stood to the west of the village, reachable only by that skull-and-crossboned bridge over the stream. It was a square and squat-steepled crucifix of an edifice, the spire indicating the eternity from which the houses tailed away in a curving line to the east. On Sundays the hymns floated backwards like celestial breezes over the red roofs.
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
And one by one, in the holy places, they struck up their songs of praise.
From the Braehead Church:
Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin,
Each victory will help you some other to win.
From the Gospel Hall:
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Saviour all the day long.
From the Meeting Place:
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine;
O what a foretaste of glory divine!
From the Mission:
Rise up, O men of God:
Have done with lesser things.
From a converted fish-shed with a rusted tin roof and an accompaniment of drips and draughts:
We love the place, O God,
Wherein thine honour dwells.
Through the chinks and cracks in its old wooden boards I stared once, round-eyed, at the benched bent breathings and the deep holy silences of its congregation. Amazingly, I couldn’t recognize a single soul. Who were they? Where did they live during the week? Was working for a living also sinful, like the music of the organ which, to the glory of God, never once sounded its trumpet blast against the Jericho of these damp and rotten walls?
And from the Pilgrims on the pier:
Who would true valour see
Let him come hither.
In the middle of the divine din the Salvation Army burst from their hall and swung through the streets to fight the good fight and stand up for Jesus like soldiers of the cross. A brazen battalion, clad in scarlet and black, and wearing the helmets of salvation, the breastplates of righteousness, the shields of faith and the swords of the spirit, they went marching as to war, and if Sundays in St Monans felt like a competition about who could shout to God the loudest, the Sally Ally won hands down. As to what God thought of it all, heaven knows. The noise in itself was deafening, and he must have despaired at the conflicting babble of faiths. None of them could find any room for doubt, and with nothing else to unite them, they were divided by their convictions and turned the little town into a Babel without a tower. Babylon the Great had fallen but a new one had risen in its place, biblical history repeating itself. God sighed and pulled the clouds over his head.
For some it was the music of the organ that was the wind of sin. Others couldn’t suffer the practice of paying a man a salary to preach to his flock. The narrowest and most fanatical of the
sects had been known to wreck the radios of their sinning offspring, throw the works of Shakespeare into the harbour along with the Sunday newspapers, and divide the damned from the saved in their own kitchens, putting up partitions so as to fulfil the biblical injunction not to take meat with sinners. One, a joiner by trade, built a sliding screen which came neatly over the table so that the family could sit down and eat – together but divided.
What began with Epp was carried on at Sunday school where, in spite of God’s wrath – or more likely because of it – we learned to sing to him with cheerful voices, raising the braehead roof, or sometimes grouped at the water’s edge on a warm summer’s day, adding our raucous offering to the chorus of village praise. But that was rare. Normally we left the sunlight behind us and went into the gloomy stained-glass presence of the Lord, where they suffered little children to come unto him – and those who did not come regularly would suffer. Not now – but on that terrible day. So while the doomed stayed at home listening to Max Bygraves on the wireless, we came along to sing-along-a-Jesus and let the damned follow Max into the flames. The best plan was simply to bawl it out, whether you believed in it or not. After all, God would surely award marks for trying, wouldn’t he?
But God was no respecter of persons and he was no respecter of years. Even the sins of our tender decades and half-decades would be sufficient unto the Day of Judgement to ensure that we burned – in the fire that needed no coal or kindling or scrumpled-up copies of the Sunday Express to keep it flaming every day. God was the captain, Satan the stoker, sin the spark and human flesh the fuel that ensured the eternal inferno.
Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning,
Give me oil in my lamp, I pray,
Hellfire and Herring Page 13
