But as the shoals moved eastwards along the shore, everyone knew that the winter herring was coming to an end. Old George, standing at his window, watched the fleet coming home one day at the end of March.
‘Here come the Ishmaelites,’ he said. ‘They never died a winter yet, God be praised.’
Some knack of knowing told him that the winter fishing was over, and that when next the men went out to sea, they would be taking with them the spring lines for the deep-diving cod that moved invisibly in their cold soundless shoals.
Down on the shore in the quieter weather the tide was creeping up the dry stones of the beach. The water, which had been wintrily muddy in the evenings, in the mornings became clear as glass all along the coast, and scum could be seen now floating on the flood tide. Then the first green water of the year appeared whenever there was a fresh wind blowing from the north-west. The sea turned a living blue, with further out the long lanes of deep emerald green that could never be seen in winter. In the shrimp-filled rock pools, where the baby porcelain crabs scuttled like loose thumb-nails, the green sleet started to grow and the whelks to gather in larger numbers, wet black ruby clusters. At low tide the broad blades of the oar-weed tangles were exposed, lapping listlessly above the water like aimless eels, indicating that the tides were going further and further back. Far out on the firth the gannets were ploughing round the Bass. And the birds were threading past each other in the great tapestry of migration, the fieldfares flying back to Norway while the settling shelducks closed their wings for the first time on the coast, their arrival established.
But I knew for sure that spring had come when grandfather came in after the last haul of winter herring and took me along to the shallow waters west of the old castle to look for the sticklebacks that swam into the bay on the big March tides. He called them ‘troonts’ – sticklebacks was the English name – and the females were called ‘baggies’, perhaps because of their distended bellies full of eggs about to spawn. Always they died during the night, unless we threw them further out, and if we came back that way early next morning, we found them lying lifeless for lack of oxygen in the water, their big upturned bellies like floating graveyards under the blue sky. But the males, called ‘doctors’, with their red fronts, usually survived, so we took them home to be kept in jars of fresh water in the house, often for many months, and always outliving my tadpoles.
Butterfish and grannyfish came coasting in, and the lumpsuckers which grandfather called ‘paddles’. Sometimes they came inshore in the middle of February and cast their skins and prepared for spawning in the lamb-like days of late March, or early April’s calm glassy weather. Grandfather showed me their eggs once in a crack between two rocks, guarded by a male fish, which lunged at his pointing hand like a living Lilliputian blade. But when caught on rocks between tides by the suckers on their bellies, they showed no interest at all in Gulliver and his shipboy, their only audience, and we left them there to wait for the next sea.
Back at home I felt sudden rising surges of desire to get outdoors again at once. A terrific feeling of well-being, and yet a craving for some undefined something, drove me up clothes-poles to hang there for as long as I could, hugging them tightly between my legs, a silent fire in my groin, a silent scream issuing from my wide-open mouth, grinning at the sky. The same feeling sent me racing back down to the sea again, where I ducked my bursting skull into the waves, tore it out at last, gasping madly for air, and shook it wildly, laughing like a lark, scattering the stinging barbs of brine from nostrils and eyes and tongue.
April brought the first bird’s-egg-blue skies under which the trees and hedges were misted with green. By the end of the month it would be a gathering wave, and in answer to the annual urge the birds flew by, busily ignoring us, their beaks stuffed with nesting materials. The wheatears appeared, and at sea the eiders and gannets were joined by cormorants and terns. Young flounders and eels swam into the harbour and we looked out our fishing lines, brushing off the cobwebs, inspecting the hooks and making the first idle surveys for bait along the shore, where the sea anemones and urchins were appearing in the clearer water. As the insects arrived and the ladybirds started to show themselves off on the opening ash and birch leaves, the year got out its paint-box, ready for the wildflowering of wood anemones, dog daisies in the frog-filled ditches, red dead nettle and heartsease up at Balcaskie. Bluebells began to flower there, the burn at the kirk brimmed with marsh marigolds all the way down to the sea, and the graves were dusted with speedwell and forget-me-nots.
From the kirkyard hill I looked out on an intensely dark blue sea, the skyline sharp as a razor, and a breathless clearness like an unheard music filling the air. Bats brushed my hair briefly as I came home from the braehead late at night. The hedgehogs were beginning to brave the roads, though the roads were quiet enough in those days under the first faint traces of the afterglow in Cassiopeia. Vega, the torchbearer of summer, blazed out again, and by the end of the month a miniature airforce was breaking up the skies. The swallows were with us once more.
When the spring madness entered the blood, some of the bolder boys played truant. Echoing the older traditions, a few yawls were still hauled up the brae and into the field opposite the school ready for tarring. They offered hiding places for the day-long playing of cards and the smoking of cigarettes, three shalt-nots in one. None of them actually featured in the Ten Commandments but it had been hammered into our heads that there were hundreds of unwritten sub-sections for which God had simply not had the space on those primitive stone tablets which Moses had been given on the mountain. So I erred on the safe side and refused to join Peem and Golly and Bert as they slipped out of the school gates instead of answering the headmaster’s whistle.
But once, after an early morning thrashing from my father, I committed the dreadful crime alone, following my shadow out of the playground and into the field. The yawls, cratered with barnacles and slimy with weed, were raised high up on trestles like wooden horses – Leebie had been telling me all about Troy. Sidling round to the starboard side, where I couldn’t be seen from the school, I clambered up the rough ladder, pulling it after me, slid under the tarpaulin and curled up in the belly of the boat. Bert and his gang had left enough evidence to damn them, cigarette ends stubbed out on crushed treacle sandwiches, crisps and crusts littering the clinker-built boards. And a picture magazine in which the women wore no clothes at all but went about their household chores like Eve, doing the dishes and seeing to the hoovering completely naked, as if they’d had no time to dress, or had simply forgotten.
I tossed the magazine aside, lay back and looked up at the single blue eye of sky, then closed my own and waited for the day to pass and night to fall, when I and my mind’s companions would make the horse-boat give birth. We’d drop out of her belly in a wicked litter, swing open the school gates, scale the drainpipes up to the shaky slates, and signal to the sails waiting out there in the firth under cover of darkness. Then they’d glide inshore, dark sharks’ fins, piloted by Poseidon, bearded like grandfather, and the village would fall in flaming ruin. Sangster would be ravished, whatever that was, along with all the old maids who taught us, including the headmaster, who’d lose his plus-fours and also his mock wife, who’d be made into a male eunuch, whatever that was. But I’d be paying no attention to any of this. With the steps of Achilles and my hair aflame, my sword before me, I’d be making straight for the palace, for the king my father, the cock of the midden, to lop his limbs like Geordie Grant and wreak the vengeance that should have been the Lord’s.
When old George asked what I was learning these days and I told him it was about Troy, he grunted and spat.
‘Pagan trash – but you can learn one thing from it.’
That was when he quoted the only verse I ever heard from him that hadn’t come out of scripture.
The walls are down of old Troy town,
Her maids are maids no more.
Her sons are dead, they should have wed –
All lost for one great whore.
When I asked what a whore was, he referred me to the Book of Revelation and the Great Whore of Babylon – ‘A first-class whore if ever there was one.’
Whether the pagan intrusion or the spring weather was to blame, George suddenly took it into his head that I was to have a day off school while he took me in hand and cleared my mind of what he called ‘unnecessary nonsense’. I imagined a day spent sitting on his sea-chest, spouting chapter and verse, or a long voyage on the Gospel Ship. To my surprise he got out his walking stick and told me to get ready for a long walk up country.
Out by Elm Grove we went, past Chae Marr’s elms that were chequering the sky, green and blue, and on to the old Black Road to Balcaskie. It was lined with ash trees, their sooty seeds rattling in black bunches, keys to a year that had been shut away and forgotten. But the new leaves were springing open, unlocked by light, and the limes were lighting up the sky. Up in the woods the oak buds were bursting like drops of blood, while the silver birches stood like sea gods swept by their own waves, golden flowers that they showered back into the ground.
But we went further afield than Balcaskie – I’d never been this far before – more than a mile from the village, and then another mile, to Balcormo Den, where George stopped at a kingly beech, spread out easily across two centuries. There were no leaves on it yet, but the strong smooth bark was engraved with dates and initials, bound by arrow-pierced hearts. Old George pointed with his stick at one of the emblems.
There they were, his own initials with those of my greatgrandmother, Bridget Burk, and the date of their great passion. Out of that passion had come my grandfather, and my mother, and now, George said, myself. But soon enough I’d just be a notch on a tree, for all my passion, nothing more. Or a chiselling on a kirkyard slab.
‘Who remembers Bridget Burk now?’ asked George, jabbing at the initials in the bark. ‘Your grandfather and me, that’s who. And when we’re gone, maybe you’ll remember her name. But once you’re gone, there will be nobody to remember even that much. She’ll be these initials and nothing else, till this tree falls – and after that nothing at all.’
He turned from the tree to face me, pointing his stick into the blue sky.
‘There is only one abiding entity. Love the Lord, the One that endureth for ever. And remember this above all – love no flesh, and trust no flesh!’
And there ended the lesson.
Even then George didn’t stop. We walked on and on, inland and upland, till we came to Carnbee, a country parish high in the air and miles from the village. From there, the firth that had always seemed so huge an expanse of ocean now looked like a little blue lane between fields and sky. And high up in Carnbee kirkyard he pointed at a grave and said that this was the dust from which one of the great writers of all time had sprung – Herman Melville, creator of Moby Dick. George had met him before he died. I asked when it was, but George couldn’t recall. Sometime around 1890, he reckoned. He’d stopped paying much attention to man’s time a long time ago.
And so we came back from our field trip.
Antares now started coming out of the water like an old drowned friend, his sea-lamp still lit, shining east of the Bass; and in the early fluttering night-time, flecked with pipistrelle bats, Leo was already sinking into Kellie Law, the lion dying on the hill. Sudden explosions of swifts took place by the burnside, over grasses speckled with fragments of hatched starlings’ eggs. On the shore jellyfish littered the sands and the first shore crabs cast their shells. The jellyfish were helpless on shore, but once, swimming early in the year, I came under their ugly purple whiplashes and was stung to a frenzied retreat to land, where I took my revenge on those that were stranded, whipping them to shivers with one of the long rubbery-rooted tangles, a wholesale slaughter without a single drop of blood.
Close inshore, squadrons of gannets were dive-bombing the water, sending up white smoky plumes of sea. Huge flocks of them left the Bass in the mornings to feed in the North Sea, the long white files always returning each evening to their rocky sanctuary. Baby mallards whooed along the shore in the twilight and shelduck and eider babies were bobbing on the waves by the end of the month.
With the glass high on old George’s wall and easterly winds coming in from the firth, the thick weather now swept along the shore. But instead of the brooding banks of greyness that lingered in winter, the fogs of April were white and patchy, with bays of clear weather between the horns of mist. Under the strong winds the sea turned dark blue and the skyline turned sharp as a sword.
Early in the month a hazy purplish-brown streak like thin smoke would form itself into a line just above the horizon’s edge and the cold became cutting, so that the old men sought the shelter of the dykes and the thick harbour walls to carry on their conversations. All during the hours that this haar lasted there was a splendid clearness. George took down his telescope, opened his window and pointed the glass at the May, its cliffs rising like blue icebergs out of the choppy sea. The lighthouse-keeper was standing at his cottage and his shadow was sharp and black on the whitewashed wall.
‘In this sort of weather you can see the shadow of a seabird on the water thirteen miles away,’ said George.
One morning I was standing in the yard with grandfather just as he was getting ready to go off to the lines. It was the first day of the Easter holidays, just before nine o’clock. I realized that I was not at school and started to whoop for joy.
‘Ssh!’ whispered grandfather, suddenly gripping my arm. ‘Listen!’
A second later there was a very slight splash from the rocks a hundred yards away.
‘It’s the tide-cry,’ he said. ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard it this year. And that’s the tide I’m going on.’
When there was low water and a big tide and the sea was flat, the silence would be broken in this way by the rustle of a small wave moving the tangle blades or running up the slope of a skerry to fall back over the steep landward edge of the rock. This was the tide-wave’s first arrival as the ebb changed through slack water to flow. That split second in which the tide turned could never be heard in winter. My grandfather had heard it in his blood a single second before it happened.
In the early days, before Easter came round, there were no fishermen at home, and my mother took me along to the braes west of the castle to roll my egg, which she had boiled in very strong tea until it had gone a golden brown. We sent it spinning along like an old cracked sun through the paler galaxies of primroses now bewildering the braes. It stopped on the sea-bleached boulders at the bottom of the field, where the violets grew. After I had sat munching my egg among ladybirds and straw-gathering sparrows, there would be a bar of Highland toffee and a bottle of lemonade.
I ran down to the rock pools before going home, eyeing the cold clear water for shrimps and blennies. We took home a bunch of bladderwrack, so that Jenny and Georgina, separating the buds, could lay them on the embers of the fire late at night to see if they would pop when the names of their true loves were whispered to the dying flames, unheard by the rest of us. A silent hissing consumption by the fire, with smoke and steam drifting dismally up the chimney, was a sad affair. A sudden explosion was greeted with gales of laughter, and there was talk of wedding bells.
As the fire settled into a dead white ash, old Leebie quietened everybody by telling us that it was St Mark’s Eve, and that if we were to enter the old kirkyard and keep watch there all night, we would see the apparitions of all who were to be buried there in the coming year. Anybody with nerves of steel had only to go along and wait. But it would be a long haul till dawn, and you could breathe again only if your own spirit-double – your ‘fetch’, as Leebie called it – had failed to show up and join the line of doomed villagers that passed among the graves. I shivered and wished my grandfather were at home, to tell me in his sensible kind way what stupid nonsense these old women talked.
But by that time grandfather had been three weeks at the lin
es.
It all started with a line – and a hook let down into the blue water. Barbaric flint and bone, sharply shaven, and shards of wood, barbed, baited and hung beneath the waves from lengths of gut – a hook in the water was the oldest symbol of the fisherman’s faith. When grandfather was away at the line fishing, I cycled along the coast to Cellardyke to see the Dyker. He had the burgh coat-of-arms painted brightly on the side of the Jonathan. It showed a man in a boat with an enormous hook let down over one side, and the motto underneath in golden lettering, following the curve of the wave – Semper tibi pendeat hamus: may you always have a hook in the water.
For me it started with Leebie’s needles and pins, stolen from the brass box by the sewing machine. I stuffed my pockets with some of the strong pack-thread that she used to make sleeping-shrouds for the men -- thick sea-blankets stitched tightly together – and stole down to the slipway to try my toddler’s luck for the tiniest fish in the harbour. A whitened wave-worn stick for a rod and some bait were then all I needed. The scrapings of flesh from an old crab’s hairy pincer, a shrivelled segment of lugworm, a single fish-scale through which I could see the sun, it scarcely mattered that the bait failed to meet its own definition. For the catching of a particular fish was not what was important in that first May when boys brought out their rods and lines, making them out of the debris and detritus of house and harbour. To have a hook in the water – that was what the sudden bleeping in the blood demanded after the long winter.
So I lay down on the tarry, sweet sun-warmed stones of the slipway and looked into the sea. It was high tide, and the water was calm and clear and green. Ignoring the alien reflection of my own face, I studied the stabbing, dagger-thin fish as they slashed the water without a scar, gliding away among cool boulders and weeds which just a few feet of sea made so mysterious. I let down my harmless hook into the green element and, holding my breath, entered the world of the hunter.
Hellfire and Herring Page 17
