Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  Apart from the Gospel Ship George had hung one other painting in his room on the wall opposite his window. It was a study of the sea-view from that very window, painted when he was a boy. In the painting it was blowing a full gale from the west. The whole firth was a single white sheet of spray and scores of sailing boats were battling up from the east. Their huge foresails were reefed right down, with only the smallest bit of the mizzen sail unfurled. One of the boats had caught the full weight of wind and was heeling over on the crest of a sickening second of fear, perpetuated in paint, her gunwales and lee deck dipped into the churning sea right up to the commons, the white waves licking like fire at the main hold. To the west of her a bunch of tiny wild faces was staring from another boat at the whole exposed length of their comrades’ keel, as if in some critical surgical operation someone’s entire backbone were on show. Their features were too small to be made out, but the sheer horror of the moment was written into the rigid thrust of their shoulders and heads.

  A flood tide was running. But the sea was not so heavy close inshore, as if the artist had felt the merciful grip of the wind on the land – the jutting tip of Elie Ness always allowing that small benefit to St Monans harbour when there were westerly winds. So some of the boats had already made the weather side of the harbour, and with both sails lowered, down before the wind they were driving fast, their bare masts of magnificent stiff pitch pine growing like trees again out of the blossoming white breakers, while further out, the supple yards of knotless larch were bending to the set of sail as the skippers took their chances, hurrying into harbour through the eye and teeth of the storm.

  I stood in front of this picture countless times, and George often told me that he had stood on the braehead as a boy and counted three hundred ships like that sailing up the firth. So when the thick theatre-curtains of sleep swished open on my dreams, the three-score sailing boats of the painting multiplied into the three hundred of George’s boyhood. The paint melted and moved, flowed like the sea, the ships rolled and rose and fell, and flying like a gull again in my sleep, I was sailing before the wind into the flung froth of the clouds, the spray roses bursting in my face like Miss Balsilbie’s blouse …

  Struggling out of the spun yarn of dreams one early summer morning, I looked out from the window and saw an empty harbour. The fleet had sailed north, leaving a population of old men and boys to be threaded into the lives of women, and I wouldn’t see grandfather now until some weekend in August, when all the men in the town would reappear.

  By June all boys were to be found among the rocks at weekends and after school, combing the shore for what was to be found. We raked between the skerries for greatline hooks, new nails and lumps of lead and copper to sell to the boatbuilder for a penny if the weight was good; we hunted for the little glass balls from old lemonade bottles, to use as marbles; we sailed paper boats made out of old school jotters, using sand as ballast, and if there was a westerly wind and a jabble on the sea, we watched them sail out of sight or become waterlogged and sink; we rodded for whiting or rock cod, not killing them but keeping them alive in pools, throwing them back into the sea if nobody needed cat-meat – we had no use for them ourselves but were afflicted by a feverish need to fish after the long winter, when the perennial June question was, ‘Are there any in yet?’ Sometimes the village effluence obscured the water in the region of the sewage pipe, and if not breaking pellan pincers or cutting wriggling segments of lugworm, we’d bite off pieces of limpet in our mouths to make them small enough for bait. The practice, not having killed us, must have immunized us against every infectious disease known to man.

  Or we made our tinny fires.

  My preferred container for this was the larger size tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Grandmother kept her empties for me, always leaving a generous coating of syrup in the bottom for me to scoop out, Pooh Bear style, then she washed them and put them on the sink for me to take down to the shore. A clasp knife and a flat stone were used to punch a neat hole like a little door, one inch square, out of the vertical curved surface of the tin, sometimes enlarging it with a piece of strong iron hooping from a broken barrel. This sucked the draught through the fire, which we built inside the tin, with the lid off, the hole being placed to face the prevailing wind. Our fuel consisted of brittle bits of stick from the remains of old herring baskets, crumbs of cork, small nuggets of sea-coal. The poker was a greatline hook heated in the fire until it was a red-hot worm, then hammered into a crinkly straightness between two stones.

  The Lyle’s empty interior glowed again, not with syrup but with flames. On it we then placed a smaller tin as the cooking pot. In this we cooked our first bachelor meals – potatoes and peas from the fields later in the year, but during June and July mussels and whelks. When these were scarce, or the jealous gatherers chased us away, we kicked the limpets from the barnacled rocks and roasted them three at a time on the upturned lid of a tin of Cherry Blossom shoe polish. Their unappetizing saltiness was not enhanced by their daily availability.

  Mussels on the other hand seemed to me too good a morsel for a haddock or a cod, even though thousands of them used to be shelled as fishbait for the lines. In grandfather’s day the horse-drawn carts had brought home huge blue mountains of them from the mussel beds in the River Eden coming into St Andrews, and the fishing crews had put them in stone circles between the skerries to keep them alive and fresh for bait. Nets were laid over them to stop them spreading and to keep out the oyster catchers, the birds grandfather always called ‘mussel-pickers’. The remains of these old artificial beds could still be found among the rocks west of the kirk. We called them the mussel scoops and if we went scooping for mussels for our tinny fires, one of us always took along a bottle of Grimble’s Malt Vinegar, plundered from somebody’s larder. And so we Robinson-Crusoed our way through June and the summer months.

  In bad times whelk-gathering became a matter of bare necessity, the black seasons when the fishing failed and some poor fisherman would be found strung up among his nets in the loft, or staring up from the harbour bed, openeyed in his endless sleep. Once, the train stopped when it ran over something laid on the line in the darkness – and a head was picked up in the morning. It was hard to imagine, grandfather said, the crazy despair that had been locked up in that head, now empty of any emotion.

  Grandfather called them the black seas, the ones that yielded not a single fish but sent men and women alike out on to the rocks, lifting every available stone along the coast, searching for whelks for sheer poverty. In better times we gathered them just for a few coppers to rattle in our pockets, to spend on Lucky Bags and liquorice and sherbet dabs. In freezing wet weather the whelks clung together, and gathering them was a dismal business. In the spring and summer months it was a blue and golden time out on the rocks, but then the whelks scattered, and bringing them together in a pail or a sack was slow work, unless there was a summer mist, which brought them all out like snails in the rain.

  When he had a day or two to spare before going off to the summer herring, grandfather took me up to Kellie Law under a soft blue sky in which stray clouds floated in silvery wisps. The warm silk of the south-west breezes stroked the fields, scarcely stirring the still green corn. The barley was just beginning to brighten. By the sides of the hot bright roads stone-crop, with its Midas touch, was turning the tops of the lichened dykes to bright gold. Poppies, not yet sprayed out of existence, stained the fields, over which masses of thistledown floated in ghostly galaxies and drifted across the footpaths, where deep green mosses softened the fallen stones. The hedgerows were lit by wild roses, dog roses and hips, and elderflowers hung in big white sweet piercing blossoms. All along the night roads the thick fragrant dampness of honeysuckle could be breathed in like crumbs of cake. But right now the ditches were cracked and dry, and in the purple noon the electric blue threads of dragonflies hovered over the burns, down to the last trickle, but yellow and straggly with aspiring irises and mantled with green cress.

 
; On the high slopes of Kellie Law we sat and stared at the landscape stretched out beneath our feet. On the sprinkled farms and cottages we could see tiny people, seemingly unmoving, embroidered like the characters on some vast green sampler. Some were scattered at their work, others were in some kind of procession. One was strung out like a trail of bright flowers, sprinkled from the kirk at Carnbee. The other was a long narrow black column. But except for the colours of their clothes, one black and the other bright, there was no telling whether the distant files were marrying or burying parties – no sound or movement came up from below, and their imagined laughter or tears were rendered suddenly irrelevant, surrounded as they were by the sheer simplicity of green. It was at that moment that the packed patchwork of people’s lives frightened me for the first time. These fields had taken thousands of folk who had tilled them over the centuries, and had spread over them like a great green bedcover. Those who worked the fields today would be ploughed under before they saw the oaks look any older.

  ‘The country boys are seeing to their brides and their burials,’ said grandfather.

  We sat and looked at the procession of people printed on the landscape.

  ‘One way or another there’s always ploughing to be done.’

  Fisherfolk marriages used to be left till later in the year, body clocks and social calendars ticking according to the cycle of work. I recalled a snatch of one of old Leebie’s sayings.

  Marry in March and you’ll bend like the larch

  Marry in Lent and you’ll surely repent

  Marry in May there’s the Devil to pay

  ‘Any time’s a good time for marrying,’ said grandfather, ‘if you’re in the mood – but I’ve never heard of a good time for dying.’

  Grandfather called the culmination of the year Milner’s peak time, when Altair, his favourite summer star, was a dewdrop in the south-east, reigning over the firth, and the afterglow so strong that the sea was a silver glimmer all through the dusky night. He told me that George claimed to have sat on the summit of an Orkney hill at midnight on the solstice, one of a rum-filled ring of wild young men, and seen the sun’s upper rim flaming just beneath the skyline. Nobody else saw it, but George was a full head higher than the rest of them and that extra head gave him the edge.

  The green sleet was arriving now at its fullest growth in the sea, turning the rocks into whalebacks of slipperiness, but we prided ourselves on being able to skim like birds along the shore without a stumble, while a bad bruising or a soaking was the lot of the visitor boys from Glasgow who came at the end of June and whose feet went sliding from under them on our rocky coast.

  At low tide in the mornings the steam rose from the tangles in a warm gentle mist, the whelks crawled out on to the rocks, and the pools lay like broken mirrors among the black crags. Now the eiders had stopped their whooing. Only the hissings and whisperings from the laminaria broke the silence of the shore, depopulated of its waves, as the tide held its blue inaudible distance. The rest of the seabirds too fell quiet for a space, as if they could sense that summer was tilting. There were fewer shelducks now and the wheatears had left the coast. The black-headed gull was shedding its executioner’s hood and the winter white cap was coming on in its place. The cormorant was starting to lose the white thigh-patch on its black-green glossy feathers. The Great Square was already looming out of the sea late at night, a sure sign of autumn, and by midnight Pegasus was prancing between the May and the Bass.

  Only a narrow and a quiet eye could see these things, the wintry decline of life beginning even at the height of summer, death stirring in the midst of life. Summer seemed, in fact, to grow stronger still for a space, the orchestral chatter of insects increasing as the birdsong declined, the bluebottles sunning themselves on the sunny side of the dykes, the invisible point of life expanding.

  I made my way in slow motion to the harbour.

  In the tar-and-tangle of the afternoon the old remaining boats creaked on the still tide, their dancing days done, and as I lay on my belly on the warm pier, the moored mind kept time with them, rubbing and bobbing against the sleeping moss-grown stones. The June sun beat like a golden gong in the sky. Opening my eyes again, my head hanging over the edge, I watched the flatfish flapping slowly in and out of the harbour mouth, taking the sun on the sandgreen seabed, where the seagulled sky was superimposed like a dream, birds and fish mingling in an impossible element. Around me drifted the tall tobacco tales piping blue and easy from the after-dinner daze of the old salts, who sat with their backs to the stones, caps shading their eyes as they gazed into the sea’s golden drench, into the insubstantial air.

  But I had no ear for their stories today. I shut my eyes again. The smell of centuries was all around me, dark as a drug, and the rocking voices of the old men, smelling of sun and salt, made my head sink slowly into the deep green mirror far below. Summer was outstretched in a blue stupor on the pier. In the bright darkness of the old afternoon the village slept, and all my ancestors rose from the waves, preserved in the tang of my sea-dreams.

  Time was at anchor here.

  7

  Summer Hunt and South Harvest

  July was the janitor that clanged shut the school gates for a sweet seven weeks. It seemed like the eternity promised by the evangelists, except that we were a long way from angels. Inevitably we looked for trouble.

  Smoking out Harry Watson was a game we learned early and which never lost its appeal. Harry Watson was the harbour master, his office at the head of the middle pier not much bigger than a drifter’s wheelhouse. He was a wrinkled kipper of a man, his skin cured by years of dozing his days away in his tiny cabin, his feet up on his sloping desk, the coke stove glowing a hellish red, and the walls blackened by the tobacco that he smoked till he fell asleep, his chair on the tilt, and not a cubic ounce of oxygen left to explain why he was still alive.

  In winter the office was a haven of heat, and as many old men as could squeeze inside stood bunched around the recumbent Harry, like strings of herring smouldering over sawdust. They were keeping in touch. The cold weather had put an end to Nancy’s prancing about in her knickers up Petticoat Lane, and so they left the bench and added their pipe smoke to Harry’s.

  But in the hot summer weather only Harry could bear the engine-room torture of the place. He kept the stove at full steam even through the dog days that melted the tar on the piers, and he lay back in his chair in a sulphurous paradise, snoring like a funnel, the pipe hanging slackly from the lolling head. Standing on Golly’s shoulders, I hoisted myself up the tarred wall and on to the hot corrugated roof. Then Peem threw up some old torn netting which I stuffed in fistfuls into the saw-toothed tin chimney before dropping back down to watch the fun. The last of the smoke drifted across the harbour and was gone. We waited behind a barricade of fishboxes for Harry to emerge.

  It was astonishing how long it took. Sometimes there were anxious moments. Had we asphyxiated him? But always the door was flung open and the white-bearded old devil flew out with the fumes, toothless, pipeless, spitting and snarling, his eyes streaming and his arms waving as he tried to disperse the clouds. We shoved over a few fishboxes and ran out with our water pistols.

  ‘Satan’s on fire! Quick, call the fire brigade!’

  We ran off along Shore Street, leaving a drenched and steaming Harry shaking his fist and gasping out scripture. ‘The wicked fleeth while no man pursueth!’

  Reaching the west pier in triumph we looked back to enjoy the spectacle of the old men trying to hoist Harry shakily to his roof to free his choked funnel. Out of the clutches of our teachers, and with most of the able-bodied men away at sea, we ran wild like this for some days with the first taste of liberty.

  When Harry had cooled off and was asleep again, we came back to the harbour with a bucketful of sea-scorpions which we’d trapped along the shore. We fixed a good-sized cork to each one, jabbing them on to their spiny backs, tossed them into the water, then stood back and waited for the swimming gala to be
gin. The cork was a deadly burden for these short-spined fish, popping them skywards when they tried to dive, and producing agonized aquabatics to rounds of applause. Like comic torpedoes they traced crazy lines all about the harbour and we joined in the fun, tearing off our clothes down to our pants, diving into a harbour emptied of its boats, chasing them in dolphin droves with screams and splashes and salt-caked laughter. But we always freed them in the end, returning them to the sanity of their cool cellars among the rocks and weeds of the shore.

  One summer a bigger specimen came into harbour. I saw it from the backyard first thing in the morning, swimming between the May and the shore – a black boomerang that ripped open the firth, shot up higher than the lighthouse, crossing the white orbits of the gannets, and crashed back into the sea, sending mountains of snow cascading to the clouds.

  I ran up to George’s room. He was standing at his open window, not fully dressed as he usually was, but with his spyglass at his eye. The pages of his bible were fluttering in the blue breeze.

  ‘What is it, Gramps? Can I see?’

  He passed me the glass and I saw for the first time the savage cut and thrust of that living scimitar slashing and thrashing the waves, the battling bull head, the powerful fin, and the tigerish tail that mauled the water, churning it like a propeller.

  ‘What is it? Is it a whale?’

  ‘Aye, they call it a whale,’ muttered George, ‘but I wouldn’t. It’s liker a wolf.’