Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  But it’s the faces that fascinate me in the end: my father’s handsome, no doubt of that, and acutely uneasy. Why had he lost all that uncertainty by the time I knew him? Was it five years of war? Was that what brutalized him? Or had that been achieved already, by his father Jack? Jack too has good thick hair, but beneath it the battered face stands out like a relief map of the Himalayas (he once beat up two policemen, my father proudly told me, who’d come to tick him off for being drunk and disorderly), and though he’s probably fifty, he looks seventy. Except for the black hair. The eyes too are black, black caves lost under bushy brows. The great gash of a mouth seems slack – but when I look closely, I can see that it’s pursed and firm and unforgiving.

  Photographs are old emotional territories, maps of the past, charts of the heart. I lay the 1937 one of my father beside one of my teenage mother, leaning against that now vanished iron gate. It was taken in the same year, though she’s two years younger, at sixteen. She too is innocent of what’s in store for her: a brief wartime romance, followed by marriage to a violent and vengeful drunkard. That’s why she smiles so sweetly, with unclouded eyes and wide grinning mouth. Outside No. 32 Gourlay Crescent, St Monans. Where ignorance is bliss.

  My next photograph is of a wedding. It is February 1944, and my parents have met, courted and married. And somewhere along the way, to use that quaint old phrase, fallen in love.

  So there’s the photograph, the visual accompaniment to the marriage certificate. It would have been a black-and-white photograph – except that the artistry I noticed in those banjo-toting hands was no illusion. The hands have tinted the wedding photograph delicately, allowing us to get close to the colours of the occasion. My father was skilled at this, and villagers would bring their family photos to him to be tinted, for a few shillings or perhaps a few bottles of beer. No amount of skill, however, can tint away the poverty, or colour in the absence of ceremony. It seems to have taken place in a guesthouse, not in the Congregational Church, though its minister, the Reverend Lodge, did the honours.

  Six decades later I have a better understanding of my father, one of the millions of young men who hadn’t gone to graveyards and to flowers, every one, but had gone to girls instead, surviving a five-year relationship with 32,000 tons of cold wet metal to enter a postwar period of much dreamed-of peace and plenty and to dig their hands deep into chronically empty pockets. But they were ripe for romance when they came up to the Scottish naval airbase of Crail, HMS Jackdaw, a few miles from my mother’s village and a few yards from where I live now, and met girls like my mother at the sixpenny hops – girls who were equally entranced by the sudden disembarkation into their lives of shiploads of clean-shaven southern sailors. Can you wonder that they fell in love, in the way that people did in the forties? I used to thumb through those tinted photographs of my father, looking ridiculously lean and impossibly handsome, and saw at once why my mother had fallen for him, though I spent my childhood wishing she hadn’t. But I’ve been busy unspending my childhood since it ended, and it has taken the death of my father and years of sweated prose to achieve this moment of – what can I call it – reconciliation? Not quite, but let’s say recognition.

  My father is in a sailor’s uniform – which simply means he didn’t have to spend the money, which wasn’t there anyway, on a bridegroom’s outfit. The demob suit will come later. But his telephonist bride has no uniform to disguise the fact that she can’t afford a white wedding. Instead she does the best she can: a feathered forties hat, rather stylish actually, dark brown coat open to show the painfully thin pink dress, handbag and gloves found somehow to almost match the coat, borrowed probably. If she’s wearing anything blue, it’s not on show. And those shoes – too clumpy for her slender but shapely legs. God, she’s lovely! All slenderness and smile, a strawberry blonde, a beauty.

  That night they take off all those wartime togs, my mother carefully removing the green leaf brooch pinned over her left breast, and suddenly he’s all over her. And a cold coming he must have had of it in the unheated accommodation in which I was conceived: rented rooms on a steep windy hill overlooking the harbour, a fishmonger across the street and a blacksmith next door. Once she told me she was a virgin till her wedding night, and urged on me the same restraint. I was off to be a student in the swinging sixties and I followed neither her precept nor her example, but her theory was that a man quickly loses respect for a woman who has submitted to him before marriage. An unfounded belief, but it reflected the starchier forties. What she didn’t know, on 25 February 1944, was how quickly her own matelot would lose respect for her, no matter how pure she’d kept herself.

  Exactly nine months later (less two days) I was born, the punctual product of honeymoon passion. But well before then the Emperor Hirohito had sent his greetings once again, and passion was put on hold till the end of the war.

  That’s when the trouble started. The outbreak of peace spelt bad news at No. 16 Shore Road, where hostilities were waiting to happen.

  I struck the first blow, as you know, and the blow was followed by banishment from my mother’s bed. The sailor was home from the sea.

  As soon as I could walk I used to join the cats in the gutting sheds before graduating to the fierier delights of the smiddy, watching the brief lives of sparks. Born in the forge, they flew out on the wind, where they died like bees in the street. Briefer still the stars struck by the hooves of the Clydesdales, clashing on the cobbled floors, the sound of iron on stone, mingling with the hooting boats, the screaming gulls.

  My father soon realized that life in an east coast Scottish fishing village was not the paradise he’d dreamed of, and he urged my mother to turn her back on her people and return with him to Middlesbrough. It was asking the impossible. So the able-bodied seaman, who’d learned the art of signalling in the employment of His Majesty, settled for signalling of a different sort at the local railway station on the princely wage of two pounds ten shillings a week. Bricklaying in Bank Street or signalling in St Monans – there was little financial difference and not much else to do. He saw the trains in and out, and I saw myself as a two-year-old engine driver – till one day I was lifted up on to the footplate, saw the red furnace roaring within, and looked straight into the mouth of Epp’s hell. Death by water seemed preferable and I returned to my first fancy, to be a fisherman.

  But the earliest Christmas present that I can remember was not a boat, it was a Hornby railway set. I can picture it nearly six decades later: the curved lines of track that fitted together to form a circuit, the smart moss-green engine with pistons that actually operated the wheels, the tender, heaped with shining black plastic coal, and all the carriages with their doors and windows. It was beautifully made and doubtless expensive. A world of signalling and telephone operating had gone into its purchase. So it was a pity that I broke it on its first day. How was he to know that the son he had produced was destined to be useless with tools and a menace with his hands? Before the Hornby I had played with gas masks, which looked, felt and smelt mysterious. I took some stupefied and fleeting interest in the Hornby and then damaged it, not hugely or deliberately but through innate practical clumsiness. I was sitting on the floor at the time, holding in my hands two pieces that should have been one, when I looked up and saw a strange sight. My parents were dancing. No, they weren’t dancing exactly, they were gently wrestling. Recollection has made sense of it. He’d made to strike me, and my mother, fiercely protective always, had intervened, grasping both his hands. I can see the sweet winning smile on her face as she looked up into his eyes, quietly pleading, and the reluctant smile on his as he submitted to her soft words and strokes, her face in his chest, so petite. She wooed him away from me and I was saved, unaware at the time that I had been in danger of the first return blow. He glared at me. ‘Next time you’re for it,’ he seemed to say.

  I didn’t have long to wait. As soon as I discovered language he discovered that his son, apart from being clumsy, was also a linguistic dunce w
ho couldn’t pronounce the letter r – a malady common to two-year-olds. But in my case it was obviously a sign of stupidity or stubbornness, or it was sheer laziness, the Scots, so he maintained, being slovenly in their speech through their innate indolence. They just couldn’t be bothered to get the pronunciation right. Later it was decreed by him that only English should be spoken at home, or anywhere else for that matter, and although I slipped into Scots in playground and street, and in the braehead house, it was always with my head turned over my shoulder, to ensure he wasn’t within earshot. Otherwise there would have been trouble. As a matter of fact he rarely visited grandfather’s, but when he did I was struck dumb, unable to identify myself comfortably with either camp. Then I was accused of being a rude mumbler and told to speak up, for God’s sake – ‘Or I’ll make you sing out, sonny boy, if I ’ave to clip you across the bleedin’ ’ead!’

  Such was the noble English that rolled from his tongue. One day I unwisely pointed out that his omission of certain letters was not dissimilar to my own. I don’t suppose I argued a particularly cogent case, but I put my toddler’s point of view and was thrashed for bloody cheek.

  By an unfortunate coincidence I didn’t like rice pudding either, which also began with the offending letter. This led to a scene of sadistic bullying in the gloomy Shore Road house, in front of a dark green curtain which screened off the marital bedroom. I was something short of three, I think, and he’d be twenty-eight. My mother was not at home and so the master of language and cuisine was in charge.

  He made me a massive bowl of rice pudding and put me on a stool. I was ordered not to move a muscle except to eat. There was no way I was going to get off that stool until I’d eaten it up – every bleedin’ spoonful, every bleedin’ drop!

  The spooning began. I gagged and was slapped, gagged again and again and was slapped each time. Concentration to prevent this was difficult. Tears filled my eyes and fell into the bowl. I was slapped again. This went on until the bowl was empty.

  And after each hateful swallow I was ordered, ‘Now say “rice”.’

  ‘ ’ice.’

  Slap.

  Rice!

  ‘Wice.’

  Slap.

  Rice!

  ‘ ’ice.’

  Slap.

  Rice! Rice! Rice! And at the end of this you’ll be saying ‘rice’ or I’ll be making you another bleedin’ bowl, sonny boy!

  Personal tidiness was another of his obsessions. A boy on the loose with other boys in the salt-and-tar environment of a working fishing village is not going to stay spotless. I was as physically adventurous as my friends and came home stained and torn. Each missing button, each scuff and snag were punished by clouts across the head, punctuating the tongue-lashings and the black looks. Complete bedragglement meant a belting.

  ‘You come ’ome like that again if you bleedin’ dare!’

  Even my injuries – bruised forehead, grazed elbows, skinned knees – were thrashing matters, whereas in granny’s house they meant hot water and ointment applied with smiles and shakes of the head. Tender loving care had been left out of his vocabulary, perhaps as a result of his own experience of the father-and-son relationship. Not that I could have understood that at the time. I simply saw how other boys ran into their homes bleeding and begrimed, with never a hesitation or a tremble at the front door. I usually crept in at the back.

  I envied my friends their fathers, and often daydreamed that mine was this one or that. Why couldn’t I have had uncle Alec as a dad? Or Billy? Or grandfather? He was old but he was kindly. And he put his arm round me. And called me ‘son’.

  Money – or the lack of it – lay at the gnawed heart of my father’s bitterness, and I suppose I symbolized the frustration of his hopes. He’d had five years of youth ripped out of his life by war, and he’d come up to Scotland to settle for life as a railway worker. Not that there would have been money in Middlesbrough. The family he left behind could tell him that, and did. But it was natural and easy to blame the place he was stuck in, and to lash out at those who were nearest and most vulnerable. For some reason he had chosen not to be a fisherman, though his naval experience would have given him a good start. Possibly, like many wartime sailors, he was simply sick of the sea and had vowed never to leave the shore again. I don’t know what was in his head, because he never told me. We never talked.

  So here he was, a two-pound-ten-a-week signalman with no prospects and a useless sort of son. Was this what victory amounted to? And those years of dodging torpedoes and dive-bombers – for this?

  For some men the love of a good woman is enough to banish discontent. But my father was a malcontent, and the good woman failed to satisfy him. My mother worked long shifts at the telephone exchange, also for a meagre wage, but somehow even their combined pittances couldn’t pay the rent and the bills and leave enough over to eat. Holidays were out of the question.

  The other consoler of bitterness is the bottle – and this is what my father took to. But he who drains the bottle drains his pocket and his pride. And so the vicious circle ran round us, closing tighter and tighter till it erupted in violence, violence that went beyond the level of the seemingly statutory thrashings, and embraced my mother too.

  She was a thrifty and selfless soul who spent little on herself all the days of her life. All her care and concern was for those around her, her mother, father, siblings, me – and even the man who abused her. Only once do I remember my gentle grandmother breaking out in black anger, when I was maybe seven.

  ‘Look at you!’ she addressed my father. ‘Waltzing in here all done up like a tailor’s dummy in your three-piece suit and your fancy tie! And your wife bare-legged and it bitter winter out there! Haven’t you more need to go and buy her a pair of stockings and a decent pair of shoes?’

  He walked out. And bought not a pair of shoes or nylons but a skinful of beer. When he came home that night, raging drunk, I could hear the slaps and shouts going on for so long, I got up and ran to the bedroom. She was cowering in a corner of the bed and he was over her with his arm raised.

  ‘I’ll bleedin’ kill you! I will an’ all! I’ll bleedin’ swing for you!’

  I believed him. In my terror I ran to the woodshed and came back with the axe. By the time I reached the bedroom he’d slipped in his stupor and was sprawled on all fours in front of the bed, his head lowered, as if for execution.

  I lifted the axe and looked straight into the horrified eyes of my mother. She screamed and I dropped the axe. This roused him and he turned, reached up and seized me by the hair.

  ‘You get back to your bleedin’ bed! And you get up again if you bleedin’ dare!’

  Everything was bleeding – including my mother. That was the night that fear turned to hatred.

  There were many such nights. Arguments about money – why wasn’t she a better housekeeper? Arguments about drinking – he never took her out. Drinking was a man’s affair. But I watched other married couples, my friends’ parents, walking arm in arm to take the bus to the Regal and Empire picture-houses in Anstruther. They seemed so normal, so serene, and trod the streets like saints in some heaven they inhabited, the impossibly distanced dimension of the ordinary, the everyday, the country from which we were somehow excluded, to which we didn’t belong.

  My mother stayed at home, except when she was working nights. And he came home legless, starting up the minute he swayed in through the door. Even when she never said a word, he erupted, seeing the reproach in her eyes.

  ‘Money, money, money! All I ever bloody hear from you! Well there’s your bleedin’ money!’

  And he dug into his coarse black railway uniform trouser pockets and took out fistfuls of coins, coppers mostly, flecked with glinting silver, hurling them at her head, turning his back on her and scattering them behind him up the long dark corridor as he stormed his way to bed, leaving her weeping in the corner.

  That is how my crimes began.

  We had a good-hearted neighbour called Lizzie,
also poor, but whose husband, a quiet man, stayed at home. ‘He’s happy with a glass in the house,’ she said.

  Occasionally my mother would send me across the garden to Lizzie’s back door, to borrow a shilling to feed the gas meter, so that she could make a meal. After a time I took it upon myself to go to Lizzie’s unbidden and borrow a shilling for this or that – a loaf of bread, a pound of margarine, ‘some tea for the pot’. These shillings I squirrelled away in an old tobacco tin at the back of a cupboard. As the weeks went by I grew bolder and begged for two shillings – to buy some messages, to pay the insurance man, ‘to tide us over’. I stepped it up to half a crown. And still Lizzie never came and asked for the money to be repaid, never as much as mentioned it to my mother, too decent for that. It seemed to me that it could go on like this for ever. I went up to five shillings, two half-crowns. Things were getting serious and the tin was heavy. I recall no feelings of guilt. I knew it was wrong – that’s why I kept concealing the money – but at the same time I was accumulating a hoard of treasure that would save the day.

  Inevitably the day came when Lizzie knocked at our door, grown suspicious by my latest request for ten shillings, and by the fact that she’d lent out more than a month’s wages. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t spent a penny of it. Nothing would convince my father that I hadn’t intended it for myself, that I was simply trying to help. And I lacked the vocabulary to explain. Words froze in my mouth whenever he turned on me. His anger and my fear made me inarticulate. The evidence was against me. If I’d intended the money for the family, why hadn’t I produced it? For the obvious reason – my mother defended me – that if I’d produced it I’d have had to explain where it had come from. I’d simply followed my instincts without thinking it through.

  ‘Instincts nothing! The boy’s a bleedin’ thief!’