Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  And as the year wore into winter, and Tammie dived out of one pair of stiff sweaty sea-stockings and into the next, shrinking from the merest glimmer of water in between, and never going to bed without his socks on, poor Jess’s song of wifely suffering rose in plangency till the customers held their noses in sympathy.

  ‘Sleeping next to him is the cross I’ve to bear nightly,’ she sighed as she snipped and measured, nimble as a mouse, with precise white fingers and tight little tremblings of her neatly parted head. ‘And the ones he wears are full of holes.’

  At this point she would burst into tears, indicating with fluttering hand the shelf-full of stacked sea-stockings behind her, waiting to be purchased.

  ‘He can take his pick, as you can see – but he won’t. And he’ll not even wear slippers in the house.’

  But when spring burst over the coast, all became bright again in the dark little draper’s shop where Jess lived among neat clean fabrics and filthy feet.

  ‘Never mind, Jess,’ Tammie would say to his long-suffering wife, ‘it’ll not be long now, lass. It’ll soon be the time for the pellans again – and clean feet in the month of May!’

  Tammie Limie time. Brought up on the expression, as on hundreds of others, I assumed him to be as mythical a hero as Hephaistos the limper, Ulysses of the boar-gored thigh, one-sandalled Jason and Achilles of the heel, all those whose extremities had been part of their fame. The corn came up like Persephone and the shore crabs’ shells came off like Tammie Limie’s socks. Even Hermes, who played his part in the earth’s awakening, had wings on his sandals. Feet found fame and were all the rage in May. It was a long time till I discovered that this was a modern myth, that a man’s feet had succeeded in making him a legend in his own lifetime and giving a local expression to a time of year.

  Tammie Limie time brought to our shores all the summer migrants – the willow warbler, the wood warbler, the chiff-chaff and the blackcap. Swifts and swallows flashed about the town like painted paper aeroplanes, whizzing between cobblestones and chimney-pots, zooming under the old men’s benches, where they sat stiff-legged and sleeping or smoking in a statuary haze. The weird whooings on the water, the seaweed whispering as the tide drew back to let it steam in the morning sun – they were the music of another planet, and I stepped out on the altered shore like an alien on an undiscovered planet. Even the sea urchins seemed eerie. Grandfather called them Hairy Hutchins, but once I had scraped off the spines, they fitted the Dyker’s chillier description of Dead Men’s Crowns – as bald and brittle as the skulls of Chae and Hodgie stranded up there in the kirkyard in their single black fathom of earth. Sometimes they broke as I gathered them, scooping out the tough soggy insides – strange to see what life was made of in other forms, in those sea-heads without bodies – and I threw the cracked skulls to the birds and fish, to feed on the stuff of existence.

  Break open your head …

  Only whispers in the wind now, the Blind Man’s death threats, in those calm innocent hours, with summer stealing on.

  The first lightning flickered over the firth, where the gannets now gathered in even longer files, flying out to feed in even deeper waters. Mornings and evenings I watched them through George’s powerful spyglass. He allowed me to rest the telescope on his shoulder while he sat at his bible, and I saw how their route never varied. They described a great arc out from the Bass in the morning, and so back in the evening. Always on the way out to their feeding grounds they passed to the north and east between the shore and the May, and always they came back again on the other side, the two arcs from sunrise to sunset forming an invisible ellipse, geometrically perfect. In January and February the sky was unbroken by a single bird, but in March and April the first flakes began to drift, and from May onward the Bass was a blizzard of birds, snowing hard all through the summer months until October thinned them out and November and December were quiet again.

  Standing at George’s window, wide open now for the summer, or on the green vantage point of the braehead, I could see the long files coming from far-off Fife Ness, flying low over the waves. It was best watching for them when there was a hard south-east gale blowing along with dull gloomy weather. Then they showed up a vivid white against the purplish-blue water – ‘like white-clad sea-bound pilgrims’, George used to say, raising his eyes briefly from the page – and as they flew they disappeared from moment to moment in the deep troughs between the rough snowcrested mountains of sea, rising again on wave-wet wings to head for their haven, the great rock out in the firth.

  ‘But a far cry from the Rock of Ages! That’s where we’re headed for – and we must have eyes keener than gannets!’

  Even bird-watching was glossed by scripture, and somehow George’s running commentary was both appropriate and enhancing. The cormorants and shags rose high into the air when passing over land, but the gannets in their great beauty kept to the sea, flying right round the jutting jaw of the ness, rather than cross the land as the crow flies.

  ‘What do you expect?’ George spat. ‘Crows are black devils. It’s the gannets you want to watch, and learn from. They’re God’s own birds.’

  The Bass Rock alone was the land they deigned to light on, he said. It was their temple, their firth-girt castle, and they left it only to pass over the blue ploughlands of the sea. So they remained the lords of the waves, the keepers of the rock, bright beings of distance and air. That’s how I remember them, seen through George’s spyglass and clothed in his imagery.

  Shuggie used to make us sing a hymn, ‘My soul, there is a country’.

  My soul, there is a country

  Far beyond the stars,

  Where stands a wingèd Sentry

  All skilful in the wars.

  There, above noise and danger,

  Sweet peace sits, crowned with smiles,

  And One born in a manger

  Commands the beauteous files.

  I had no appreciation at the time of the beauty of the words, composed by a great English poet, but genuine poetry communicates before it is understood, and the imagery entered my unconscious mind, waiting for sleep to play on it, using the wordplay of dreams. The beauteous files became the long flying files of gannets, George’s whiteclad pilgrims, voyaging across the sea of eternity, avoiding the bank and shoal of time. And the Bass was the kingdom of heaven, from which I had been brought but to which I could never return. So sleep made some sense of the words we had sung for Shuggie without a flicker of understanding. It was not altogether comforting, but the overall impression was of the beauty of those white birds, winging their way in single file to heaven, like the souls of fishermen, freed at last from their toil.

  But the hymn didn’t end there. It went on, including this verse:

  If thou canst get but thither,

  There grows the flower of peace,

  The rose that cannot wither,

  Thy fortress and thy ease.

  There was the Bass again, a fortress in its time masquerading as the kingdom of heaven, or was it the other way round? It didn’t seem to matter much. The problem was how to get there – and grasp the rose. In a second dream, sometimes forming part of the first, the incorruptible rose became the dense flock of gannets that I sometimes saw feeding closer in to shore. The huge white flower, fluttering out in the firth as the birds hovered and dived, turned magically into Miss Balsilbie’s blouse, and as I joined them on the wings of sleep, the blossoms brushed my face as I approached, before springing apart and drifting down into the waves – and out bobbed Miss Balsilbie’s breasts. Or were they Honeybunch’s? And so the dream went on, the snowy rose opening and shutting, the blossoms rising and falling in a milky fountain, speaking to my wide-awake spirit while my body lay asleep, of that unknown country far beyond the stars. A dream that remains, a month to remember.

  But most memorable in May was the quality of its light. On a sunlit morning when I looked at the new leaves and plants and grasses, they exuded an unearthly luminosity, as if the light were al
l liquid. And this film of brilliance on the moist fresh foliage was like a clear green voice, a crystal song in the air, sad because so beautiful, and yet so brief.

  It was the quality of the light that led my spell-bound feet up from the shore and into the country, where the uddered cows stood over their hooves in buttercups, lowing soft and swollen and veined in the rich golden sea, flecked with daisies and clumps of purple clover. Blue vetch berivered the ditches, the leaves of the raspberries and wild roses running wilder now by the roadsides, and the thistle strongholds were running up their butterfly pennants, Red Admirals fluttering among the green spires and towers. The thrumming of the insects threatened fields and sky with the coming of some kind of midsummer madness. But in cool Balcaskie, where I sheltered from a shower, the bluebells out-rang the rain in their dim and misty silence. Coming back out of the trees, even the hawthorn blossoms seemed to be singing to me, scent becoming sound, filling my head with the memories of all the Mays that ever were. On the way home I broke some of them off in sprays for grandmother to put in jars and fill the old house with the fragrance of her youth.

  So the month moved us into that magical period that grandfather always referred to as the start of Milner time. Like George, grandfather too had his bible, though it was a secular one, Milner’s Gallery of Nature, compiled by one of those Victorian divines who were inspired by the creation rather than the creator, and who wrote about it with encyclopaedic ecstasy. Grandfather read it avidly and often pointed to the page where Milner stated that between 21 May and 21 July there was no astronomical night, and the sun swung like a dimmed lamp only a few degrees beneath the horizon. I stuck my head high out of the skylight window of the braehead house and saw Milner’s afterglow hanging like a mist of hawthorn flower, over the red and green harbour lights, powdering the sky to the west. I knew then that the time was near when grandfather would be bringing back his lines and taking down the black nets from the garret, to get ready for the summer herring.

  When he did come home at the end of May he littered the piers with hundreds of cod. They were arranged in scores on the bare stones, each score divided into fives: four with their heads up, and every fifth fish with its head down, tail pointing to the boat. They lay there like legions of lead soldiers, exhumed from the ice-cold hold of the Venus, to be stripped of their armour and turned to fodder under the June sun.

  Some of the new steel drifters flung out their lines all through the windless blistering days, but the older wooden drifters like the Venus headed for the herring again and the summer drave. Some of them sailed to Shetland, following the shoals southwards through June and July, but grandfather had seen enough of Shetland and settled for Peterhead, closer to home, most of the St Monans fleet going along with him. All through the summer months they fished up and down the northern half of Scotland, landing their catches at Peterhead and Aberdeen, and returning to the firth in August.

  But there would be the space of a week, maybe ten days, while the gear was being prepared for the drave, during which grandfather stayed at home and took me out in the Jonathan with the Dyker, some days fishing out of St Monans, others out of Cellardyke, depending on how their luck was running. They shot creels for crabs, sprooled for whiting and cod, went out with the harlins for haddock, or gave the herring jigs a go when grandfather would say, ‘I’m gone in a day or so, let’s start thinking herring.’

  As the fish seldom moved much in the middle of the day, and were mainly caught in the early morning and the evening cool, they were able to take me along with them before and after school.

  That’s when I learned about ‘meids’.

  ‘Meids’ was the word they used to describe their way of establishing their position at sea when they were not far from the land, and the commonest question I heard asked on the pier when a fisherman had just brought in a good catch was: ‘What meids were you on?’ It was a bearing on the land, enabling them to keep returning to the same patch of sea where they knew they were sure of a good shot. At the drift-net fishing, the sprools or the jigs, an exact meids did not matter so much. But when they anchored nets, laid lines or shot messenger creels, the meids had to be precise so that they could haul hours or days later.

  Grandfather and the Dyker were dead-eyed demons at the meids, and their method was simple. For an informal meids they took any large object on land and steered the Jonathan until it was lined up with it in conjunction with a second object in front of it. The East Neuk countryside was mostly flat farmland, and for the St Monans men and the Cellardykers its one high green point was Kellie Law. It was well up in the country, beyond Balcaskie, beyond Balcormo, by the Carnbee loch.

  After Kellie Law the kirk steeples of the villages offered the most obvious landmarks, some of them needle-sharp spires, others rising like distant pyramids in the blue deserts of space. When we were well out towards the May from Cellardyke, the Dyker showed me how Kellie Law loomed over Anstruther Easter kirk and Chalmers Memorial kirk in one perfectly straight line. ‘Kellie on the kirk’, was his term.

  But for a more accurate cross-bearing on the land, they used what they called a sharp meids. For this they took two pairs of objects, waiting until the known four were lined up, two and two. When the boat arrived at the apex of the imaginary triangle, they let go the anchor and started to fish.

  When they were taking a sharp meids their favourite objects were the chimneys of certain houses or any of the bigger buildings they could fix on. Looking for lobsters, the Dyker’s favoured meids was: Watson’s oilskin factory chimney over Tom Melville’s kippering kiln plus the big lum of the gasworks in line with his own cottage chimney, which he had painted bright orange, right down on the shore. He called this meids ‘oilskins, kippers and gas’, and it brought us to the hard rocky ground where the lobsters were caught. But if we wanted crabs on the sandier ground, he took the Jonathan a mile out from this meids, and instead of his own chimney, used the steeple of St Adrian’s. He called this ‘the back of the kiln’, and it was there we caught partan crabs.

  Grandfather’s lobster meids was a simpler one. He lined up both sets of the chimneys of Darsie’s Lodge with the kirk steeple, and called it ‘Darsie on the kirk’. For the partans he used the lums on either end of Tammie Limie’s house and took them in conjunction with the ones on the lodge. He called this ‘Darsie and Limie’ but sometimes referred to it as ‘Limie’s lums ringing’.

  Out there at sea in the early summer hours I saw for the first time all the burghs from a distance, spread out along the coast, the red clutter of roofs smudging the hazy tracts of countryside, and above them the spires and steeples that were landmarks to grandfather but fingers to me, beckoning from the green fists of the graveyards, where all my people lay.

  Other mornings we came so close in to shore that we were able to talk to the old men who fished there at the edge of the rocks. They cast their crab-baited handlines into a gap among the tangles, waiting till the corks jerked and sank before hauling in their red codlings and taking them off to fry up for breakfast or supper. We were close enough to see the grins on their faces and to congratulate them on the catch.

  Blue days at sea. They came to an end when it was time at last for the summer drave.

  Grandfather followed the old traditions. When he went to the early drave he used his oldest nets which the years of barking had made narrower, and which caught the younger, smaller herring. As the hunt wore on, the herring grew bigger and the spawn began to form, so he brought ashore his old nets and set down on board the widest and best that hadn’t seen so many seasons of immersion in the barking boilers.

  Barking the nets, though it narrowed them down over the years, lengthened their lives by preserving them from the corrosive action of the salt sea and all its weed and scum, especially bothersome at the height of summer. So the great lines and bait nets were pushed back beneath the benches in the garret and the black summer nets were pulled out and hoisted down into the yard.

  George usually left his bible and c
ame down for the barking.

  ‘There’s no substitute for the bark of the oak,’ he would say. ‘Melt that down and you’ve got the best solution for a herring net.’

  Grandfather asked him how many of the Balcaskie trees he thought he could strip of their bark before he was caught and prosecuted. But he did his best by his nets, stretching them out dripping hot to dry in the wind and sun.

  Few driftermen took the trouble at the end of the ’40s to bark their mizzen sails. But even in the age of the steam boiler grandfather wheeled his canvas in a large barrow to his brother-in-law in Elm Grove. Great-uncle Jimmy had been a sailmaker and still had a barking pan in his back garden.

  Jimmy harked back to the days of the Fifies and the Zulus – the sailing boats that had preceded the steam drifters. Barking the sails for boats like these, he said, was not something that could be accomplished in a back garden. There were three hundred and fifty yards of foresail weighing nearly a ton when dripping wet, and two hundred and fifty yards of summer mizzen sail. At the end of the line fishing the winter mizzen mast and sail were taken down and the mast was hauled up the brae by horses and rollers to the rough moorland opposite the school, where the women spread out their white washing on a yellow blaze of whins. Here the summer mizzen mast had lain all winter like a fallen tree.

  Gallons of water were hosed into the barking pan, the fires crackled, the sail-broth bubbled and the steam rose into the sun.

  ‘I was sent running down the brae to the butcher,’ said Jimmy, ‘to ask for seven pounds of solid sticky white fat for chucking in. One of the old men wondered whether they should chuck me in as well, just to enjoy a good mouthful of soup before the rest of the ingredients made it uneatable!’

  Instead they poured in twenty-one pounds of tannin and fourteen pounds of oakum, and everything melted together and was stirred with a huge stick. The sails were spread wide on the coarse grass and the liquid brushed well in, like thick old brown wine. Then they dried in the midday sun and were turned over for the same treatment on the other side. Grandfather said that the Venus’s mizzen sail was like a woman’s handkerchief compared to the giant canvases of the old masterpieces. All the same he took care of it and restored it every year.