Hellfire And Herring: A childhood remembered

‘A supremely beautiful book that spins its particular story to tell a universal one about a more innocent and natural time, the swift passing of that time, and about the people who make us and whom we never thank’ Sunday Times

‘Rare, visceral writing that inspires one to try to match his capacity for observation’ Herald

‘Beautiful, richly satisfying writing’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The book glitters with memory, like some marvellous parade that marches around the small boy’ Irish Sunday Independent

‘[A] glowing and beautiful memoir of a childhood in a Scottish fishing village … Poetry leaks from Rush’s pen at every turn … if the purpose of memoir is to make real a forgotten world, then Christopher Rush has done everything that could be asked of him’ Mail on Sunday

‘A vivid, powerful account’ Belfast Telegraph

‘Delicate and inquisitive’ Big Issue in Scotland

‘Vivid and lyrical … A masterly work that enlivens the past with beauty and emotion, yet never sags into soft focus sentimentality. Instead its realism, and the author’s heartfelt candour, make it one of those rare books that successfully evoke the human spirit’ Economist

CHRISTOPHER RUSH was born in St Monans and for thirty years taught literature in Edinburgh. His books include A Twelvemonth and a Day (recently listed as one of the one hundred greatest Scottish books ever), the highly acclaimed To Travel Hopefully and the newly published Will. He now lives near his childhood home in Fife.

By the same author

Peace Comes Dropping Slow

A Resurrection of a Kind

A Twelvemonth and a Day

Two Christmas Stories

Into the Ebb

Venus Peter

With Sharp Compassion (with John Shaw)

Where the Clock Stands Still (with Cliff Wilson)

Venus Peter Saves the Whale

Last Lesson of the Afternoon

To Travel Hopefully

Will

Hellfire and Herring

A Childhood Remembered

CHRISTOPHER RUSH

This paperback edition published in 2008

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

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ISBN 978 1 86197 974 2

For my mother’s family

And for little Jenny, who never knew them

CONTENTS

Prologue: Another Time, Another Place

1. Glimmer of Cold Brine

2. Home from the Sea

3. Queer Fish

4. The Dragons of Eden

5. The Next World

6. Winter Drifting and Spring Lines

7. Summer Hunt and South Harvest

8. The Village Spade

9. The King My Father

Epilogue: End of the Idyll

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Another Time, Another Place

You could smell God on the air in St Monans as surely as you could smell herring. That was in the forties, though, when I was born there, on 23 November 1944, to be precise. Not that precision was required of you in those days, unless you were in school or in church, counting your tables or your blessings, or in either case your sins. A rule-of-thumb philosophy prevailed in most practices, from cheese-cutting in the grocer’s to sex in the fields – you got it right by instinct. And if you got it wrong on occasion then somebody ended up with a bundle of dubious joy or an extra ounce of cheddar from that monolithic yellow slab on the counter.

It surprised me how, in spite of post-war poverty, things often worked out on the side of superfluity, illegitimacy included. Even the undertaker bustled in and scanned the deceased with the deadly blue measuring-tape of his eyes (inch-tapes were for tailors and the snipping out of Sunday suits, also voluminous): alive or dead a body always gained the benefit of the doubt. Especially dead. Nobody went cramped into eternity in a James Miller coffin. Boat-builder and coffin-maker, the ships were tight but the boxes were comfortable. ‘An extra inch or two won’t harm him – he’ll grow into it.’ That was the usual joke, meeting death with a quip and an open-handedness that boasted a generous supply of wood.

There was a good foundation for it. The historian Sibbald, ignoring Gaelic and old Icelandic and other etymologies, derived the name of Fife from an old Danish word meaning ‘the wooded country’. James IV had shorn it of its former glory when he built The Great Michael, the Goliath of Scottish waters, in 1511. But the wasted woods of Fife recovered – fortunately for me, as I carried out in their close and leafy coverts some of my earliest experiments in poetry and in sex (sometimes simultaneously), each of which required the utmost secrecy from the envious eyes and harsh judgements of critics, the self-appointed gods of metre and morality. And of God himself, the severest critic of all.

We’ve come back to God. That’s no accident. You couldn’t get away from Him in the forties. Time’s whirligig always brought in God and his revenges. The air was impregnated with him and with his mint-sweet and moth-ball evangelists. Just as it was with herring, as you might expect in a fishing village on Scotland’s repressed east coast where fishing was an act of faith and not yet a computer-science industry designed to suck the last drops of life out of the sea. The only echo-soundings to be heard then were the desperate plummets of prayer (Out of the depths, O Lord, I cry to Thee!) from those in peril on the sea. Or on the slate. Fishermen with light nets and heavy bills were known to string themselves up from the rafters like stranded fish, staring at the sky, in those dark lofts where they stored their gear, and which also smelled of the sea.

The oldest fishermen swore they could smell a shoal of herring in the breeze as accurately as a gannet, diving from two hundred feet into the waves, could detect the glimmer of a fish another two hundred feet beneath the surface. That was nothing to these old men of the sea, who had birds’ beaks for noses. Faith and science were tucked neatly up their snouts, a faculty per nostril, the aspect of some secret symbiosis. They’d snuff the air when at sea and give the order to shoot the nets, or not. Even the old-timers sitting on stanchions at the pier-ends would remove their pipes from their mouths, lift their grizzled muzzles, sea-dogs questing the air, and tell you they could detect a shoal of herring ten miles off shore. ‘There’s herring out there – I’m fucking sure of it! As sure as God’s my judge!’ Their language was not exclusively scriptural.

But there was more to it than just smell. The old salts of St Monans sometimes struck me as steering that narrow course between lunacy and genius. Later, in my teens, I learned from Dryden that this was entirely likely. Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide. In spite of this my old men were scholars without degrees, madmen without a dangerous bone in their bodies, unless they choked on a fishbone. As a matter of fact we were all mad to a degree, on the scale of eccentricity to insanity, and yet nobody ever came to any harm in this place of open doors and wild, free fields, roamed by children who’d never heard of paedophiles and who had no cause to worry about them. Our world was a protective cocoon, like intoxication. You fell and got up again, amazed and unhurt. God was around anyway, looking after you while spying you out. He was in charge of the asylum that was our village and he ran a Captain Bligh-style ship, a thousand souls under his commandments. Obedience was the operative word, discipline – and ’fishency, Kipps, ’fishency, in this fishermen’s world that lived by fish and smelled of fish and dreamed of fish as Ahab dreamed of whale, blowing his drowned brain.

Ahab was another sea-captain, but an ungodly one, like the Old Testament king he was named after. I knew all about both Ahabs, just as I knew I hadn’t come from God, or from the Bass Rock, or from the back of beyond, as some of the early explanations had it. The truth was simpler and more shocking, in fact. And more mundane.

A stinking drop. That’s what I came from, or so I was advised by a hellfire-and-herring-breathing preacher in the braehead kirk, where the Congregationalists sweated in the dark for their share in eternity. ‘A stinking drop!’ he thundered, smashing the prow of the pulpit like a dogcollared Viking, giving no quarter to any horny rams or ewes in his flock who planned on being on the giving or receiving end that Sunday night. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work, but on the Sabbath day thou shalt not shag – this seemed to be the sub-text of his sermon. Maybe he was just trying to be as discouraging as possible, adding his tuppenceworth of sulphur to anything that lassitude and weariness of the spirit might achieve in the way of Sunday self-restraint. The fear of conception was the beginning of wisdom at the end of the week. And to make it sound as absolutely pointless as possible, he added (shocking the matrons of the congregation), ‘Copulation is friction of the members and an ejaculatory discharge, that’s all.’

You could hear their knicker elastic go twang with holy horror, in the echoes of which there sang a terrible glee. And this proved to be his undoing, as nothing, not even communion cloth, was as sacred as knicker elastic in the East Neuk of Fife, where nobody admitted that sex even existed, though the bible was awash with it and the bulls were hard at work in fields that were green to our very back doors.

As for the effect on the innocents of the flock, if disincentive was his game, it failed to achieve the desired result. Not in me, at least. Too young, I was also too ignorant and sexually untutored to understand exactly what he meant by friction of the members. Even so, something in the language excited me and I came out of church longing to meet a member and rub it up the wrong way. Not the right way. There was never any doubt when you emerged from the holy place with a half-hour-long sermon still burning your ears that everything in the world was wrong – and nothing was more wrong than your loathsome self.

That self-loathing quickly burned off in the sunny days of adolescence, or at least was tempered by sudden surges of self-love. But it occupied a large portion of early childhood, and fairly kept me sweating in the dark too. Not entirely inappropriate, though, when you come to think of it, that concept of original sin – entirely and especially congruent, indeed, to a world which, as I entered it, appeared to have got itself into something of a mess.

1

Glimmer of Cold Brine

There was one week left in November when I was born, and eight hundred miles away or more, as the Spitfire flies, a Soviet-betrayed Warsaw was trying on for size yet another form of military subjugation, Stalin preparing to take over where Hitler had left off. Poles percolated west, a clutch of them fetching up in our little seafaring townships, together with the occasional German or Italian prisoner-of-war who’d opted to stay on and give Scotland a try. Germans, Poles, whatever, they seemed the same to me, Fritz and Stanislaw sharing the same pale thin grins and pensive eyes. One of them, gathering potatoes in a field once, held out to me an enormous smoked sausage, the like of which I’d never seen, and begged me to share it with him. Vill you bite, please? A peace offering, perhaps. They never took to the sea, though, these solid Continentals, preferring the life of farm labourers, sensible Scots earth under their feet, to the unstable element on which my mother’s people took their chances. An understandable choice in the case of men whose whole world had slid from under them, leaving them staring into hell. Not that I fathomed any of this with five weeks still left to run in ’44, when the war was also in the winter of its course. One way or another there was a nip in the air.

At my baptism there was ice in the font. Of all the churches the length and breadth of this sceptred isle, the old kirk stands closest to the sea, a rock built on a rock, its latticed windows lashed by spray, its leprous gravestones leaning like masts, encrusted with centuries of salt, lichens and old rhymes about death and hell that were quite literally the first literature I ever read; while inside the church the constant sound of the wash of waves appeared to be saying something in its muted melancholy way to the spartan pews and pillars. What was it saying exactly? It had something to do with death.

The interior was only marginally more inviting: one of those echoing Presbyterian barns, the whitewashed stone silence unheated sixty years ago by anything so pagan, so mundane, so modern as a radiator. Alec Fergusson, the old lobsterman who doubled as beadle and sexton, had placed the water there the night before, so that when the Reverend Kinnear removed the lid and made to perform the sacrament, he found himself staring at a frozen white shield.

But his arm was strong to smite, as all the Sunday schoolers knew (he was an ex-miner who’d suddenly seen the light, deep in the bowels of hell, and left off smoking and drinking, if not swearing), and his fist was as great as his faith. He brought it down into the stone font with force enough, my mother said, to kill a whale. The circle of ice splintered but yielded no water – it had frozen solid. There wasn’t a drop to be had in the vestry either, the vestry being one step up from a latrine, the pipes iced up too in merry December, when milk comes frozen home in pail, and Mr Kinnear stood breaking the third commandment between his teeth and threatening to break others that God hadn’t even thought of. So old Alec legged it down the outer steps of the church, to where a bursting sea was spraying the tombstones of my ancestors. He brought back a glimmer of cold brine in a brass collection plate. That was how it happened that the waters of the firth, which had been wetting the bones of my forebears for uncountable tides, were used that morning to baptize me – in the name of the Eternal Father (strong to save), and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

My own father could not attend the ceremony and sent his regrets on a postcard. At that point he himself was in peril on the sea, somewhere on the other side of the globe, unavoidably detained by the Emperor Hirohito; and sparing a thought for the absent father, the Reverend Kinnear asked God to listen as they prayed to him to still the restless wave (but jigger the fucking Japs! hissed a youngling of the flock) and bring the father safely back to his infant son. A noble and heartfelt thought – but he should have saved his breath. (So should my uncle Billy, aged all of seven, who’d added the entreaty on behalf of the Japanese and who was soundly thrashed afterwards.) When the father did come home in one piece and greeted the son he’d never seen, the son lashed out with his little fist and hit the invading stranger across the face. Was it that, I wonder, that started us off on the wrong foot? Five years of war, to return to an ungrateful little wretch, a mummy’s boy who’d slept with his mummy for the best part of a year and burrowed blindly into her breasts? Well, now the maternal reign was over. To the victor the spoils, as they say, and to the occupying enemy the young girl’s bed. My mother was twenty-three. I can still summon up some of the cold smouldering rage I felt then, when I was torn from the sleeping place and dropped behind bars, betrayed. Real or imagined, I can’t be sure. But I remember looking through the bars all right, and seeing the expression on that alien face that had swum so suddenly into my ken.

Faces, then. These are the first things that you see, floating and bobbing about you as you lie in pram or cot, or cradled in somebody’s arms, faces with phases and aspects of their own, all of which you grow to know. They were neither young nor old in my brave new world of consciousness without cognition. Nor were they ugly or pretty, wise or stupid, they were simply there, constellating the microcosm that was the family. They were kindly, though, that much I could tell, apart from that one face that I came to fear, the one with the strange grating accent, the face staring unlaughingly at me through the scabby green bars of my cot, the face that made me cry.

That’s all I was to start with – a wafer-thin cry, a winter wailing that went up through the thick green panes of our skylight windows in that house on the hill, up from Shore Street, where it mingled with the smoke from all the other village chimneys, drifted out over the clusters of red pantiled roofs, the reek from the kippering sheds, and was lost among seagulls and steeples and the huge fluffed-up towers and castles of clouds that the fishermen called Babylonians.

It was the time of the winter herring. The sea was busy with boats and from early on I could hear them, the steam drifters hooting in the harbour and the crews calling to one another. I could hear the clamouring and hammering coming from the boat-building sheds too, the muted sylvan sound of axes on wood. There were horses snorting and stamping in the streets, horses bringing the morning milk, horses carrying carts laden with farm produce, horses hauling fishloads in boxes up to the station, where the steam trains puffed and whistled through, horses being shoed in the smiddy right beneath our house, horses clothed in fire, stamping among the sparks. And scarcely any distance away the sea-spray wetted the fields where jingling horses gave way to tractors, two eras in tandem for the briefest possible time, a childhood glimpse of social history on the move.

But the sound that ran through my brain most of all, the sound that I could easily disentangle from the whole natural and social symphony, was that of water: the sound of the living firth. This was my first language and my first university, my alma mater, my alpha and omega, my eternal mother, the sea, the sea.

And my actual mother, she who bore me – that was Christina: Christina Scott, telephonist, eldest daughter of Margaret Marr Gay and Alexander Scott, born 21 December 1921, a child of the winter solstice, now married to Christopher Rush, able-bodied seaman, born 9 May 1919, now engaged in war service. So I’m told sixty years later by certificates of birth and marriage, on whose ageing parchment their love in black ink still shines bright. As I stare now into the laughing teenage eyes of my mother, looking out at me from a 1930s photograph (clad in the garb of her straitened time and place, a coarse heavy coat, and shoes without stockings), I can feel again that warm wave of love she gave out all her life, and with which she must have enveloped even my father. Five years after that photograph was taken, outside my granny’s house, the iron gate she leant against was gone, as were they all, gone to foundries every one, turned to guns, and turning young Huns to corpses – and young Christina was wheeling a pram.

Our house, as I’ve said, was on a hill, a steep winding street with the harbour glinting at the foot. Down we came in winter, in the dark, my mother pushing the pram and me in it, looking up at the bright freezing lights in the sky, among which her young face shone like a lamp. Twinkle, twinkle little star. The words of the song drifted from her lips in hot frosty clouds and hung between us. I reached out for them as the skidding pram ran past the sharp harled wall of the house. That was first blood – a red glove with which I could have touched the stars, but no sensation of pain, just a song in the air, still hanging there, and my mother’s changing face, the sweet love in her mouth turned to an O, and those stars tingling at my fingertips.

Then came the snowdrops. It must have been February 1945 at the latest, and I’d have been all of three months. I was wheeled the mile inland to Balcaskie woods, a gloomy cathedral of evergreens, vaulted over by the interlocking boughs of ash and elm and oak, and wheeled another mile along the nave of this gothic affair, a moss-soft path, deeppiled with needles and the sea-drift of leaves, generations of birch and beech casting their carpets over the marvellous avenue along which the endless altered people came to buy snowdrops from the estate.

First a girl in a green-caped hood, bending over me and crushing the flowers into my face. Why? Who was she? Many years later I saw a white-haired lady at a local gathering and knew in myself that it was she, raped by age. The flood went over me, the memory of how they’d then loaded the pram with snowdrops, a froth of sea under which I was wheeled home, sucking in the green white scent. How valid this is as a piece of recollection I have no idea, but stuck in a pram in the winter of ’45, a wordless little world, I know only that I was aglow with the knowledge of snowdrops, into which no cancerous worm had yet bitten the bitter recognition that I should surely die.

It was Epp who passed on that knowledge to me, both by instruction and by example. Epp was a great-aunt of my mother’s and our landlady at Shore Road, for the house was not our own. She was Queen Victoria at No. 16, well into her eighties when I knew her and dead before I was three, but it wasn’t necessary to possess a memory like mine to remember Epp. A hibernating spider, stuck in a corner, would have remembered her. She was unforgettable.

It was Epp who began my literary, religious and sex education, all rolled into one. And in all three respects as in every other, she was an anachronism. Throned on her massive moss-green velvet armchair, all curves and buttons, she presided over me in a black waterfall of lace and silk, her skirts spilling across the floor and rustling over my feet. Her fists were knotted over the head of an African cane, up which a brace of wicked-looking snakes wriggled and writhed, standing out like the veins on the backs of her hands. From this position she thundered at me every morning about how well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old, and other heroic stand-offs:

Half a league, half a league, half a league onward …

At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay …

On Linden when the sun was low

All bloodless lay the untrodden snow …

Years later, coming across many of these lines at school, I realized with a shock that I was not learning them but remembering them. And suddenly I was back in front of the armchair, standing to attention, no higher than old Epp’s knee, stormed at by the shot and steady shell of her wrathful cannonades, and watching once again the trembling of her dreadful dewlaps as her frail white fists descended on the arms of the chair, beating out the rhythms of the verse. She held the windowed sky in her spectacles and her head was lost in clouds of snowy white hair. She was God’s mother, for sure.

‘Be a brave wee man,’ she lectured me when I cut my thumb and cried, ‘or you’ll never be a sailor like your father, or a soldier like my bonny brothers!’

‘I don’t want to be a soldier! I want to be a fisherman!’ I howled back at her.

‘A fisherman!’ she scoffed. ‘You might as well be a tinker!’

She never failed to pour scorn on my role models, my grandfather and his sons, who went out like matadors to face the bucking white bull of the sea.

‘And you’ll never get a wife either if you bubble like that! None but the brave deserves the fair!’

None but the brave,

None but the brave,

None but the brave deserves the fair.

I wept all the louder.

When I was bad and uncontrollable and all the men in the house were at sea, I was taken to Epp.

‘Oh, you scoundrel!’ she scolded me. ‘You bad wild boy!’

Then she would tell me that the horned and hoofed devil had flown over the rooftops on scaly black pinions of soot, that he was sitting on our roof right this minute, listening to me, and would be down the chimney at my next word. His mouth was full of sinners and that was why I couldn’t hear him mumbling, but at the next swallow there would be room in his jaws for one more gobbet of begrimed humanity, and that would be me. Didn’t I hear the soot falling? Open-mouthed, I turned my head to the lurid red glow of her grate. Sinister scrabblings seemed to be coming out of the awful tall blackness of the chimney, which led up to the universe, the unknown corners of God’s coal-cellar. Quaking, I turned my eyes back to my torturer, her pale old face laved by flames.

‘You will go to hell!’ she leered. ‘You will be crying for a single drop of water to cool your parched mouth as you lie in the lake of fire. Your throat will be like the Sahara. But Satan will just laugh at you before he crunches you up. And not one drop of water will you get! Not one! Oh yes, my bonny man, you’ll get something to cry for in hell!’

When I ran to her, screaming, she never softened. My hands clutched at her knees, my face buried in her black lap, wetting the velvet. She smelled of moth-balls.

‘Go away, you bad lad,’ she said softly, sternly, stroking my hair. ‘You’re like every other boy that was born, picked up from the Bass Rock you were, that’s where you came from, that’s where your father got you, didn’t you know? Why didn’t he go to the May Island, the stupid wee beggar that he was, and bring us all back a nice wee lass, instead of you, you nasty brat!’

Avoiding the biology of stinking drops, Epp assured me that boys came from the Bass and girls from the May. My father’s ship had gone off course. Someone had blundered, some hand at the helm. I had not been intended, that was all. Ah well, it had been wartime and many errors had been made, many wrongs committed. I was one of them.

‘Ours not to reason why,’ she proclaimed.

And then she was off again at her poetry and her preaching. When she came out of it she told me that since I was a boy I had better make the best of it and behave as well as I could. But like all boys I was born to be bad. There’s your bairn, God had said – make a kirk or a mill of him for all I care. And like Pontius Pilate he went and washed his hands.

Poor Epp. Her two brothers had run away from home, following their father, and had died in scarlet in the Zulu wars, leaving their mother naked in her age. They’d left Epp to grow into an unmarried battleaxe, grinding out her grudge against the entire male race in those tireless tirades of hers. But if she blamed them with one breath, she glorified them with the next, and every breath in her body was dedicated to their reproach and their renown, the latter articulated unconsciously perhaps in the wild volleys of heroic poetry. These were her only concession to their selfish and stupid bravado in throwing their lives away. She was a stern Eve. She had known a sharper sting than the serpent’s tooth, and the apple of life had turned to ashes in her mouth. So she bit back with venom.

But she unbent for the ceremony of the pan-drop.

I was summoned to the hearth. Taking one of the large white mints from a glass jar, the holy grail of her sideboard, she would place it on the whorled bronze corner of the fender and pulverize it with the head of the poker. And always I feared for the precious pieces, scattered amongst cinders and ash. Epp waited there to the end, watching me haughtily as I picked them out and sucked away the last white shards.

‘Away you go now, you young rascal, that’s all there is!’

She lifted the poker and waved me away, shaking her free fist at me. I ran from the room. I was terrified of her in those moods.

But Epp was my first queen and I her adoring subject. Her sceptre was the gleaming poker, her court the flickering hearth with its high-backed