We could see the wild glare from Jamieson’s forge long before we reached home, a frown on the water, like a bloodstained moon. We put the whins in a jam-jar and set it on the sideboard. Their yellow lamps were still dimmed by dark-green shades, but soon the buds would burst and they’d be brightening the corner and bringing a smile to grandmother’s eyes.
Grandfather nodded at them. ‘If I ever do retire I’m going to keep bees. You can help me with the hives and I’ll get you the sweetest honey that there’s to be had from these flowers. We’ll call it Golden Gorse.’
Then he remembered his acorns. He brought them out of his baggy blue pocket and laid them on the grate. One by one he crushed them with the end of the poker and tipped them into his old blue tea-clipper mug. After that came water and a screw of sugar.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That’ll do me better than Camp any day, since there’s no tea in the house. Will you go down for some later?’
Agnes Meldrum’s Camp Coffee – chicory essence – was the closest we ever came to coffee, till Nescafé flavoured the ’50s with its magic brown dust and nobody needed coupons any more.
He put the steaming brew to my lips. I shook my head, then watched as he sipped his own special brand of Balcaskie coffee.
‘Golden Gorse and Balcaskie Brew – maybe we’ll open a shop, once I’m done fishing.’
Then he was asleep.
A strange man, my grandfather.
No, not strange at all. He was very ordinary. That was the strange thing. He showed me the small short-spined sea-scorpions appearing in the water in early February, and the porcelain and thornback crabs in the rock pools. The whelks had left the pools now and ventured out on to the rocks and skerries. As early as the first day of February the fulmars were flying offshore and the skylarks singing loudly over the fields. Hundreds of gulls fluttered along the newly ploughed furrows in long white bridal trains, behind tractors that looked like busy red-cheeked farm girls coming over the shoulder of the land. But by the third week of the month the fieldfares and redwings were getting ready to leave, and eider ducks were cooing on the tide. Aconites buttered the woods and Dog’s Mercury gold-dusted the ditches. On clear frosty nights Rigel and Aldebaran glittered over the firth, lamps above Edinburgh.
‘And Edinburgh would frizzle up in a second in one of those sparklers. The whole world would go out like a moth.’
I followed his pointing finger south at ten o’clock to where stars were being born in Orion’s sword even as we spoke – out of time.
‘There’s no ten o’clock or anything o’clock in Orion.’ So he liked to say.
When grandfather wasn’t entertaining me, my own first attempts at self-amusement were snatched from the rolling wheel of the seasons as it whirred past our windows. I played on the beach among the tangles after a sea-cat gale in February, and saw the dead sea-cats in among the giant weeds, their slippery corpses not yet stiffened, voiceless things of the sea, which I pulled out by their tails, whirling them round my head and loosing them like unchained comets to land with a thud on the bouldery shore. The old folk and the poor used to eat these sea-cats. Nobody looked twice at them now, not even the niggards who would go out and kill for a coupon. But old George took a different view. After a wintry gale he would ask me to go down to the shore to look for them. ‘As long as you can see blood coming from them, they’ll make a good enough eating.’
He examined each one I brought him, slashed with my penknife to check for blood, and trundled all the way up the brae in my miniature wheelbarrow. The sea-cats, he told me, were so stupid that they deserved to be eaten. During the deep storms they clung to the big stalks of the tangles, not letting go even though their holdfasts were uprooted from the seabed, and so they came ashore, still clinging to the washed-up weeds, to take their last journey, a funeral procession in my little blue barrow all the way up to old George’s dinner table.
Some he kept, others he returned to me to throw back into the water. Down on the beach again, I sorted through the tangles for a fair-sized root which grandfather cut out for me in the shape of a pistol. So my first wars were bruited behind the boat-building shed with a rubbery gun that had come out of the sea. A gun like this would last for several weeks before it shrivelled and stank, but while it was battle-worthy it allowed me to stretch my arm in conquest over the Philistines, and I walked among the corpses of the sea-cats like Samson, setting my foot on their necks and praising God for my victory, bellowing out the words to let George hear them from his window. I was a giant over my foes, the sole survivor of an unsung epic, the battle for the east sands.
Or on Saturday afternoons during the winter herring I’d go down to the pier to see if there were any spare fish. If a boat had landed a big catch, the last herring out of the vessel that wouldn’t make up a marketable quantity were sometimes thrown to waiting boys to sell for pocket money to the cadgers, who then hawked them around the village, or up at the farms, where the fishermen seldom went.
One year there was a Flanders frost in February. That was the name the old folk gave to a south-east gale that brought in the fiercest of frosts, and ice as hard as armour. Many of the smaller craft hadn’t put to sea for more than a week. But uncle Alec had married a girl from Cellardyke, and his father-in-law, known as the Dyker, had a motoryawl called the Jonathan. During the Flanders frost the pipes froze in the school and we were sent home. From the braehead I saw the Jonathan coming into harbour. I raced down to the pier to see if they would have anything left over, but every fish was used up. The cold had nailed my boots to the edge of the pier and I was shivering.
‘Hang on a minute!’ Alec shouted as I turned to go.
The yawl had an old-fashioned pump beside the mizzen mast, but it had a brand-new one too, for pumping bilge-water over the side. He pulled a few times on the handle of the new pump. Nothing happened.
‘Hold on!’ shouted the Dyker, taking Alec’s place and heaving like a hero at the shining new handle.
After a minute’s effort, in a sudden spurt up came exactly one dozen herring, every one of them as stiff as a board. They rattled on to the deck like dead lead soldiers.
‘There’s twelve apostles for you,’ laughed the Dyker. ‘They wouldn’t be looked at in Cellardyke, I can tell you. See if you can find faith great enough in St Monans to believe in them!’
I must have lost my innocence by this stage. Instinct told me that a cadger would see them for the false apostles that they were. And in my wickedness I sold them to a widow at her door and asked ninepence for them, which I was given without haggling. A fearful guilt kept me from spending this money for several days. Then, when Penman’s bell stayed silent and there were no reports of an agonized death in King David Street, I made my way to Agnes Meldrum’s and came away laden with liquorice and sherbet, two bars of Highland toffee, and a roundshot of gobstoppers clashing in my pockets. Just to be on the safe side, I passed along King David Street. Horrified, I heard the old widow sobbing behind her hedge, telling the neighbours that her cat had died. The anguish started up immediately, the guilt. I ran back to the braehead. Over the roofs and all along the coast as far as Anstruther, I could see the spires pointing to heaven, directing my attention to the endless blue air, tinkling with frost, where grim-faced angels, eagle-eyed, scouted for God, swooping down on any signs of nonsense. One minute an empty innocent sky – the next they were in your head, breaking through the flimsy protective skin. That’s how it was – nature was not proof against original sin. Self-disgust and fear sent me flying out to the Blocks, from which I threw all my sweets into the cold heavy swell, the handful of gobstoppers hitting the waves like cannonballs, sending up explosive little splashes before sinking down to where Miller’s watch still kept the time of the earliest crime, stopped at the very moment. On the way back I heard that the widow’s cat had been left out all night in the frost and had died. Relief and fury drove me mad and I ran along to the braeheads again, where in the gathering darkness the Dyker and grandf
ather were trying to extract leeks from the garden using hammers and chisels.
In the worst of the south-east gales, when grandfather had stayed on shore, I sometimes went with him to collect West Anstruther clay, to fill up the holes in the back of George’s crumbling fireplace. A long period of south-easters sucked out the sand from the beach, exposing boulders standing on a deep-concealed bed of bluish-grey clay. This was the stuff old George liked us to bring, because when it dried he said it went harder than the heart of old Pharaoh, way down in Egypt’s land, when he wouldn’t let Moses go. The local saying was ‘as hard as West Anstruther clay’ but George used to say that that was not as hard as the hearts of the West Anstruther folk themselves, heathens who made even Pharaoh look like a softie.
Grandfather had seven men in his crew including himself. Each man brought with him six nets, making a fleet of forty-two nets for the boat. The white winter nets were preserved with alum, which drew in the mouth like lemon. Each man also brought six of the big floats called pallets. The old ones lying among the lumber in George’s house were made of sheep’s hide but the newer ones were canvas, due to disappear in their turn. They were tarred inside with two pints of Archangel tar from the ship chandler’s, and painted with one pint of linseed oil on the outside.
I saw all the preparations, but never the mystery of the catch, because grandfather went out in the dark and the drifters worked during the night. But sometimes in the freezing darkness I rose to look out through frosted glass on a winter firth that looked like another city bobbing on the waves, rivalling Edinburgh. Probably there were only a dozen or so boats, not the hundreds that had filled the firth in grandfather’s much-remembered day – but imagination filled the gaps. The East Neuk fleet were hunting the herring.
They shot their nets before the wind, stopped their engines and put up their mizzen sails. This put each boat’s head into the wind, and the wind kept the nets in line. They shot them down off Crail, drifting away up past the Earlsferry before the tide turned and they came down again. And a whole week on the night tides might earn the boat ten pounds, a single pound for every man, two for the skipper and two for the boat. There were tales of fishermen elsewhere earning fortunes, but grandfather never did, and he shook his head at such stories. Sometimes they came in like the sons of Zebedee, according to George, having toiled all night and caught nothing – a biblical backing for the dignity of labour and the misery of empty pockets. Often only a few shillings tumbled out of grandfather’s handkerchief, as he brought home his earnings in the old-fashioned way he followed till he died. I listened to the old-timers on the benches, talking about the old days when the Fifers caught thousands of cran before the first war, with dozens of English merchants coming from as far as Penzance for twenty years. And I was told about the annus mirabilis of 1913, when the boats fishing out of Yarmouth alone brought in nearly a thousand million herring, my grandfather’s boat among them, before he went to the Dardanelles.
I was told many stories, but sometimes now I wonder if I didn’t dream them all, as the oil-rigs straddle the firth, grandfather lies in his grave, and the white ghost of the winter herring haunts the harbour of my mind.
So February passed, with its frosted flag-rushes by the burn that bled my hands like the blades of fiery-tipped swords, its raw thaws, its needling rains and misty glooms. And its roof-rattling gales. Yet the very gales were a stir of life, blowing red-hot sparks from Jamieson’s smithy right across the harbour in dancing constellations, baring the cold red arms of the country folk as they burned their weeds, drying the sodden clods in the earth. The long silences of the fields were breaking to the high jingle of horse-gear, the early morning cawing in the tall elms. With a wild roar of freedom the burn was unlocked, and twigs and straw continued a journey to the sea that had been arrested for weeks. Days came when in spite of everything winter sowed snow among the spring corn, the fields were white as flour again, and the young year seemed to be turning back to age. But the furrows appeared again like strong dark waves on the earth, giving the fields their inevitable shape, while out on the waves of the firth the winter drifting went on.
It was the spawning season. The herring gathered in dense shoals in the region of a mysterious triangle whose points were Elie Ness, Fife Ness and the May. Locked each year within these lines, proclaimed by nature, precise as Euclid, inexorable as death, the herring teemed with the milkiness of life, pouring it out into the sea. In early winter the men avoided these parts of the firth, fishing in the softer grounds in the middle, or round the Fidra, or off Kirkcaldy. But as February went on, the fish went up the horns of the firth on the south side and came down the north side. They were looking for their favourite birth-beds, between Anstruther and Kellie Law, around the May, off Dunbar, or in the stormy Hirst that lay between Crail and Fife Ness, where many a fisherman’s drowning mouth had closed, on the coarse and rocky ground that the herring loved. The spent herring swam off then, scudding away to deep waters, but where after that nobody knew. Nor could I fathom where at that time I was making for myself. Even now, as I return in spirit to my own spawning place, throwing out the net of words, hoping to catch something of my beginning and my end, I am little wiser. Even my grandfather, who hunted something much more tangible than truth, was never sure of a catch.
‘But there are two things you can always be sure of,’ he said.
Birds and stars. These he swore by, saying that if he fell asleep for a hundred years and woke up at home, before a minute was up he’d be able to tell you the date to within a day or two. Spica appeared above the May at nine o’clock on the first day of March, and soon Arcturus would be over the island, adding its brightness to the lighthouse. The night-flying moths had come now, soft little sparks of light, flickering in the dark, the parachute spiders tickled your face, and in the evenings the hares were boxing in the first faint steam of the fields.
And yet the gales blew harder still, scattering hundreds of herring gulls high and low, setting them adrift above splintering seas, tearing the water into white strips, drying out the winter woodpiles, so that up in the country Peter Hughes started to look at his fences. Then the farmers started ploughing in earnest, turning up the clods in wet black shining waves, which quickly dried and were soon blowing dust into our eyes and teeth.
‘When you bite the dust,’ grandfather said, ‘don’t worry, you’re the opposite of dead – you know the spring has come.’
The spring dust hit us in the face – and Bert Mackay stayed off school to help with the sowing, envied by the rest of us, who couldn’t go to sea with the men. The older farmers, Bert said, would wait till the moon was waxing before they sowed a single seed of barley or oats. In Balcaskie and the burn woods the rooks and crows opened for business, their requiem voices cracked and harsh, but sounding brisker and more affirmative now as the nest building got under way.
On the first day of March
The crow begins to search
So Leebie would say, stopping her sewing for a few seconds to listen to the distinct cawing. On the other hand, she added, no self-respecting rook would dream of building till the third Sunday in the month.
On God’s third the rook
Bestirs himself to look
The Dog’s Mercury that had dressed the ditches was now out in the woods, pussywillows appeared, dozens of daffodils, the lesser celandines and coltsfoot were in flower and the cowslips in bud. Primroses sprinkled the braes, like pale young girls who’d spent winter in bed and come out for company, to die unmarried and give their fragrance to the winds. Sometimes a daffodil trumpeted to an early swallow, or a violet fluttered in the sea-breeze. The small tortoise-shell butterfly and the first dive-bombing bee droning low over the ground made me stop dead in my tracks and listen, suddenly remembering summer. Grandfather pointed to a honeybee settling on a late snowdrop.
‘Look at that,’ he said, ‘two seasons having a quick natter together.’
Spring and winter, meeting briefly, parting, a murmur of
summer.
‘Can you plant your foot on nine daisies at one go?’ Leebie liked to say. ‘If you can’t, then don’t tell me that the spring has come.’
But I was looking for tadpoles, not daisies. The frogs that had lain like blotched stones, sunk under layers of mud, rose now like bog kings from their own spawn, the black jelly floating among the reeds and grasses, to be eaten by anything that moved. Whatever was not eaten, spawned, so that soon last summer’s jam-jars were alive with tadpoles, not one of which ever performed for me the miraculous metamorphosis but stayed as they were, ugly black shooting stars that became quarter-comets at best, wandering aimlessly about the neutral curved space of their glassy cosmos to no apparent purpose.
The vernal equinox passed, with daylight now strong in the sky at teatime, the stars of Orion bestriding the Bass at sunset – and along with the equinox the terrible storms that had grandmother and Leebie up at the windows the whole day, and my mother and aunts wide awake in their beds, their minds tossing on the firth, where grandfather and his boys bobbed like human corks with just several spars of wood between them and a raging lion, shaking its white mane.
During the winter fishing the men sailed in and out of the harbour every morning and I saw grandfather most days between drifts. He took little food with him in the winter, preferring to eat when he got back to the house. But I sometimes ran along to Lizzie Reekie’s better-stocked little shop on the braehead, closer and quicker than Agnes’s, to buy a last-minute round of stores for the night-fishing. Eggs at a penny each if they were pickled, sevenpence for a dozen, and eightpence or ninepence a pound for steak. Once, when grandfather was too busy to come ashore, I took the box of stores down into the boat, and he took time off to fry me an egg. He cleaned the cast-iron frying-pan with steam from the boiler, banged it down on the black lacquered stove, and cooked me my first meal at sea, though the boat was only two inches from the pier and barely afloat on an ebb tide.
Hellfire and Herring Page 16
