I also discovered a series of erotic drawings he’d done. He had a draughtsman’s ability rather than an artist’s. The hand that tinted the photographs had taken care and pleasure in depicting women’s breasts. The nipples stood out erect and dripping.
He was musically talented too. He played the piano by ear with astonishing confidence and precision, and if tutored would certainly have flourished. He was best of all on the banjo, and in his quieter periods strummed away on this for hours at a time. It was always a relief to come along the street with slow and wary steps and hear the sound of the banjo coming from the house. Then my pace would quicken again. He was in a safe mood.
But even that safety valve was soon closed off. A man at the other end of the village died, and his widow, who’d heard my father play at some of the town hall concerts, came along to the house with her late husband’s mandolin. It was a beautifully made instrument and my father took to it easily.
The first night he played it we heard a terrible crying sound out in the street. I went to the front door and looked out. The dead man’s dog, a black-and-white collie, was sitting in the middle of the road, staring at the house, and howling.
‘Oh, my God,’ my mother said, coming up behind me, ‘that poor poor beast.’
‘Throw a bleedin’ stone at the thing!’ my father shouted through his playing.
I ran out into the road and sat down beside the animal, putting my arms round his neck and stroking him, trying to comfort him. But nothing could cure his heartbreak. He had heard his master’s voice. So we sat there and cried together. Then my father appeared in the doorway, mandolin in one hand, stone in the other.
‘Get out of the bleedin’ way!’ he shouted.
I got out of the way just in time and he flung the stone. The dog ran howling down the street but then stopped at a safe distance. He reappeared any time the mandolin came out of its case, even if the instrument was never actually played. All my father had to do was take out the instrument and lay it on the table. It was uncanny. My mother cried too and my father stopped playing – ‘because of the bleedin’ noise’. But perhaps a dog had found a way to his heart.
Perhaps.
My mother cried again on 28 January 1953 at eight o’clock in the morning, when the mentally deficient Derek Bentley was hanged for a murder that was committed by his accomplice, Chris Craig. On a Croydon rooftop during a bungled robbery, the eighteen-year-old had told the sixteen-year-old with the gun to let the policeman have it, just as Jack Rush had done in Bank Street, letting the coppers have it, using his fists and his feet and those very words. My mother watched the clock, dabbing her eyes and wondering what that poor woman, his mother, was going through as the seconds ticked by. She told me it was wrong, that it was not beyond reasonable doubt that the words were unambiguous. ‘Let him have it, Chris!’ could easily have meant ‘Give him the gun’, which is what the policeman had asked him to do. My father disagreed and shed no tears. How often had he said to me that he was going to let me have it. And it had been all right for Jack Rush to let the coppers have it – ‘nearly killed the bleeders, he did’ – but Derek Bentley was not excused. He was not excused from hanging either, sentenced by a sexual deviant, a bully got up in robes. I knew all about bullying, and I cried with my mother for Derek Bentley.
I cried again after my father died.
It was 1989 and he was seventy. Decades had passed, and many changes had taken place. We’d left St Monans and gone to Edinburgh. I’d gone from there to Aberdeen University, had graduated, married, become a teacher, a writer. And he’d actually taken a pride in me at last.
‘This is my son – he’s an author, you know.’
Another time, another place. Different house, different people, a wife and family for me, grandchildren for him, and a long slow mellowing. We drank together in the pub. From time to time.
Too late, alas, much too late. It’s the first five years that count. The damage was done. When he lay dying of cancer of the throat in a hospital bed, looking like a skinned rabbit, we said goodbye. It was painfully constrained. He reached out and shook me by the hand. That was it. Father and son knowing they would never meet again – and we were dumb to one another. There were no words. I should have been the one. But I couldn’t find them. They have had to wait till now.
On the day of his death I didn’t cry. But some years later I cried at the end of Kenneth Branagh’s film of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Robert de Niro, playing the monster, stands by the funeral pyre of his creator in that famous scene on the Arctic ice. He is weeping uncontrollably, now that he has had his revenge.
‘But why’, asks the captain of the ship, ‘do you weep for a man who has caused you so much pain?’
The answer from the ice-raft, forced out of him by bitterness and grief, was not Mary Shelley’s but de Niro’s. And it is mine too.
‘He was my father.’
Epilogue
End of the Idyll
Paradise Lost?
Yes, there really was a garden, a golden age of childhood, in spite of my father, the serpent in Eden. Except that in this case it wasn’t the intruding serpent who ended it. There were other intrusions, unforetold actions, and everything came to an end with astonishing swiftness.
They killed the pig, my grinning companion in ignorance, he who shared my solitary moments on the way to school and responded to my scratchings with that idiotic smile. They gave him another grin one morning, a wider one, split him from ear to ear, and I ran howling into the woods.
The pig was killed to be eaten, so they told me, calming me down and sending me back to school – that’s why it was bred in the first place. It’s what it was born for. You feed it, tickle its snout, stick daisies in its ears, scratch it till it grins, give it a name so that it comes running to you when you call – and then you kill it. That’s how it goes.
There were other signs that marked the exit from Eden. The pig was only an individual casualty. Soon the braes were bedecked by hundreds of little cases of living death. Myxomatosis had been introduced – a free gift from man to the rabbit population of Europe, to help them control themselves.
One day I was out with grandfather, up near Balcaskie, when we saw a man lashing out with a stick at one of the crouched grey bundles.
‘He’s putting it out of its misery,’ I said.
Grandfather grimaced.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But do you know what that man does? He works for the nobs in the woods. If there are rabbits about, he goes along to their burrows with a little bit of equipment, and if they’re nice and healthy and the disease hasn’t got to them, he gasses them. He gassed a lot of rabbits before this disease was ever heard of.’
We passed by, and I saw the stick coming down on another of the inert little ornaments that were decorating the fields, like garden bric-à-brac. The man shouted something and grandfather ignored him.
‘Would you do that for a living?’ he asked. ‘Gas rabbits?’
‘Would you?’ I asked.
‘Me? I wouldn’t lower myself.’
Not long after that there were no rabbit warrens around Balcaskie. There wasn’t even a Balcaskie, except in name. The entire wood was ripped up – so that the nobs could enjoy an uninterrupted view of the sea, so it was said in the village. The Bishop’s Walk became a memory, a scented echo. It was a headrush of snowdrops, a girl in green, a woman wheeling a pram. A way through the woods. It was the beat of a horse’s hooves and the swish of a skirt in the dew.
Landscapes, like language, get turned around. Cultures vanish overnight, like knights of old. The herring, that had been the life-force of the tribe, disappeared like its dialect, harried out of existence by the laissez-faire system of the day that gave it no protection, and by modern methods of fishing. The herring had the misfortune to be the only marketable fish that laid its eggs on the seabed, and so the birth-beds were destroyed by the new seine nets that dragged the bottom of the world, looking for cod, the few young herring tha
t survived being easily swept up.
The day of the drifter was over, grandfather said, and with it the life of the herring. Why couldn’t politicians have seen what he saw? Even if they could they would never have thought fifty years ahead. Five was their mental span.
Grandfather watched one of the new boats leaving the harbour. ‘Look at that stupid little tub,’ he said. ‘The sea needs something to hit, something good and solid, not that piece of nonsense.’
With their high heads and long keels and the draught of water they commanded, the drifters were the fisher kings of their day and withstood the stress of storm. The last one left harbour for Yarmouth when I was twelve – another signpost on the move, marking the end of economic innocence.
‘And the men on her,’ grandfather said, looking at the seine-netter, ‘they may be fishermen today, but tomorrow they’ll be labourers at sea, that’s all. Fishing will just be a wage-packet for these young lads, not a way of life.’
He looked at his nets piled up on the pier.
‘And they won’t be interested in mending these either, you’ll see. It’ll be left to old-timers like me, sitting in the sheds, earning their cigarette money.’
So the firth was fished out, just as he said, the boat-building sheds fell silent, and the old men were left to puff their pipes and work their needles. The village churches dwindled and emptied, one by one the shops disappeared – no butcher, no baker, no grocer, no chemist, not even a fishmonger – and a mini-supermarket took over. St Monans settled down to await its swift extinction as a place of second homes for people with more money in their pockets than grandfather could have earned in a year. Blair’s Britain was still a long way off, but Dr Beeching’s axe was poised to hack away all the local railway stations, and Thatcher’s government to remove local control from the councils, so that problem families and drug addicts could be moved in to vandalize the village churchyard and desecrate the memorials to the dead, my own dead included.
The eccentrics decayed too. The village grew saner – and less safe. People started to lock their doors.
Every gain implies a loss, they say. Is the reverse also true? The hellfire went out with the herring, and that was no bad thing. But what did we acquire in place of our lost innocence?
In 1954, when I was ten, the first twelve-inch black-and-white television set was carried into the upstairs living-room of our neighbours across the street – and life in that house died instantly. Living-room? It became a morgue. The shapes of the dead could be seen silhouetted against the ghostly grey-blue flickering of those upstairs windows. Soon there was a set in every house in the street except ours, and the whole street died. But our turn arrived eventually – and we joined the ranks of death. My aunts and uncles stopped dressing up to take the bus to the picture-houses. They folded a few years later.
We also got Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Bill Haley and the Comets, and in March 1956, Elvis Presley. The King was born. A café opened in Shore Street where my friends sat round drinking Coca-Cola, jerking their tight new drainpipe trousers, and singing along to the juke box that thundered out its lyrics across the harbour. Some of the fishermen looked up from their decks and stared, but there were fewer of them now, and they soon grew used to it. Hops and hard men took over the town hall, loudspeakers were set up on the piers and the people flocked to rock to the sound of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. The Holy Rollers and their glad hosannahs were drowned out and swept into the gutter, outcasts in their own country. People were not coming to be saved any more. All the young folk were putting on the agony, putting on the style.
And that splendid family I ran to when troubled? Grandmother died at fifty-nine, her heart weakened by the asthmatic assaults that had plagued her since her twenties. Leebie lived on a little longer but at last she lay like a fallen white candle, its top end guttered and gone out. Alec emigrated to Australia, driven out by lack of work. Billy stayed at the fishing but drove his crew in a minibus to Glasgow airport. From there he flew them to Holland, where he berthed his boat. What was the point of setting sail from Scotland?
‘I’m up among the polar bears these days before I even smell a fish,’ he said
Jenny married a boat-builder – who lost his job when the sheds shut down. Georgina came back pregnant from one of her trips, crushed with shame. She had a baby girl who died when she was two. The father became an alcoholic and fell between the boat and the pier one night, dead drunk, dead drowned. She married again but was unable to have any more children. After that she worked for years in a shoeshop in Anstruther, a dreary divorcee, looking at people’s feet. In her house there was an unplayed piano with stained brown keys, long out of tune.
The Dyker died of cancer.
It took five strokes over two years to kill old George. He fell into a coma that lasted for weeks. Nobody knew when exactly he went at last to meet his maker – or indeed if his maker met him.
The little telephone exchange in Anstruther became automated, like all the lighthouses. Unmanned lights, unwomanned switchboards. My mother left Fife and moved in search of work to Edinburgh, where she was joined again by my father.
By that time grandfather was gone. It happened, like so much else, when I was twelve. Death was the wave that washed him over the side of our lives – as it does everybody in the end.
When I was very young, grandfather once told me a story, which went something like this:
A long time ago there was a road that went up to heaven, like a road goes up a hill. You see, there was a hunted whale that had given birth to a ship that was the earth, and had blown all the stars from the seas into the sky.
And the stars formed that road. And the stars were the herring, glinting and flashing.
The whale swam up the road to heaven, to wait there till it was safe to dive again, leaving us alone on the ship that was the earth, alone with our greed. And in our greed we tried to swallow up the silver …
The road is gone, I think he meant to say. But sometimes if you look through the glinting and the flashing of the herring, you’ll see the whale … there, before it dives.
An old man’s story, that’s all, made up for his grandchild, before he went off to the winter herring, one night by the fire, and on other nights from time to time. He never finished the story – he was obviously making it up as he went along, and was always too tired. And one night he went out like Ulysses, and though fifty years went by, he never came back to his hearth. So the story never had an ending. But now I’ve remembered it, and given it one, and finished it, and told it over again – this time for him. And for all those that I have loved.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my continuing gratitude to Dr Anne and Eugene d’Esprémènil of Cellardyke for their unfailing accuracy of observation. Many a slip might have occurred but for their open weather eye. John Beaton, my agent, has once again proved more patient and indeed wiser than I deserve. Nor could I have written this book without the assistance of a list of folk, all dead now, all alive again, I hope, in its pages. Very much alive is the Profile team, all of whom have been helpful and encouraging, especially my publicist Ruth Killick, God love her, and my editor, Gail Pirkis, who has kept on an even keel an author who showed an alarming fondness for the rocks. Many a page might have foundered but for her watchfulness and knowledge of the craft. In watching over this book she has been the sweetest and friendliest of sirens, singing eloquently yet sensibly, and one whom any sailor would be glad to have on board. For my part I cannot thank her enough.
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