LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

our mother.

      Though the Stott and Sons warehouse drivers who came and went would protest about our safety, we’d scramble up the cliffs made by stacks of rice and flour sacks, slip over the top and down into the inner chambers we found or made there. We’d squeeze down rockfaces made by piled-high boxes of tinned asparagus or tomatoes, and hoist ourselves up on the chain winches that ran through the trapdoors in the wooden ceiling to the upper rooms where the boxes of sweets and crisps were kept. We’d hide under crates in dusty back rooms we’d found up tiny staircases that seemed to appear from nowhere. There were no eyes on us in the warehouse.

      Before we went to school, my brothers and I had no children’s stories or fairy tales or cartoons to shape our play. They were banned. Instead we made up games based on mixed-up Bible stories from the Old and New Testaments. We transformed the darkened rice mountains and valleys and walls of boxes of the warehouse into the landscapes of the Holy Land. We’d march round the walls of Jericho, wade across the Jordan, rescue Jonah from the whale and then raise Lazarus so he could fight alongside David as he took on Goliath.

      While my brothers were fencing with swords they’d made from sticks of wood I’d be scrambling up those rice-sack mountains, scraping my knees raw on the rough hessian, fleeing lashing rain and rising floodwater. I’d make arks out of any inner chamber I found, pulling old sacks across the top to keep out the relentless rain and lightning. As the smells of muscovado sugar or paprika or brown rice rose up around me, I’d be pressed into the ark’s hold, feeling the swell of the waves or easing a white dove through an imaginary porthole. Or I’d be Jonah inside the belly of the whale, listening out for the sound of gulls through the whale’s flanks, sounds that would tell me we were near land.

      That ark was mine. I unfurled the sails. I stood at the helm on the deck. I got to decide which way we sailed.

      Sometimes beautiful and incomprehensible lines from the Bible drifted into my daydreams or play: ‘Hast thou entered into the storehouses of the snow,’ the Lord had asked Job as he and Satan took turns to torment him, ‘and hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail? … By what way is the light parted, [and] the east wind scattered upon the earth?’ Or I’d repeat my favourite sentence from the Bible, four words that come after verse after verse of flooding, wind and rain, destruction and desolation:

      ‘And-God-re-mem-bered-No-ah.’

      During those long hours spent listening to Biblical exegesis in Meeting, I could take myself to the imaginary salty, spice-scented hold of my boat or into the whale’s belly as if they were parallel worlds. I can still smell the inside of that ark nearly fifty years later, the feel of the hessian sacks against my knees.

      It came as no surprise to me then to discover that those Brethren ancestors of mine were fishing folk, that they’d lived on the edge of the sea and the land since 1800. Boats and fish were in my bloodline, too, not just in my Tribulation-survival dreams.

      I was the fourth generation of the Brethren Stotts. Unlike the rest of us who had been born into the Brethren, my great-grandfather, David Fairbairn Stott, a Scottish sailmaker, had chosen to join. He was the first. He’d made a choice that would shape the lives of all his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, because, due to the severity of Brethren rules, if you were born into the cult you’d have to be steely-willed to be able – or allowed – to leave it.

      Could that austere Protestantism linger as a kind of tribal consciousness, I’d begun to wonder – like my boat imaginings – long after I’d left the Brethren? If I avoided friends who’d said something that had offended me, if I neglected to return their emails, was that a Brethren thing, or just a human thing?

      I found David Fairbairn Stott on the 1890 census return, where he was listed as an apprentice sailmaker in Eyemouth, a fishing village on the coast fifty miles south-east of Edinburgh, located at the point just north of the border between England and Scotland where the River Eye joins the sea – hence the Eye and the Mouth.

      As far as I could trace from the records, in the nineteenth century these Eyemouth Stotts had either fished or made barrels or sails. When they were not following the herring, they scanned the sea and sky for signs of changes in the weather; they tapped barometers, they mended nets; they baited lines, hauled barrels, and dragged nets.

      For weeks I sat behind a pile of books at a desk in the British Library – sailmaking manuals, books about witchcraft and smuggling and Scottish dissenting groups – reading about the Lowland clearances and how sails were made and how the herring were gutted and preserved in barrels of salt. When I looked at my hands scribbling notes, I thought about the women I was descended from who’d gutted fish for ten hours a day in the fish yard, their hands cut and bleeding from their sharp knives. They must have been in pain every minute of the day from plunging those raw hands in and out of the salt.

      Why would someone – anyone – from an already hard life like this have wanted to join the Brethren? The nineteenth-century Eyemouth I was reading about didn’t seem to be a particularly religious place. It was a frontier town, a hard-drinking, law-defying town. There were Primitive Methodists here in the 1830s; Baptists and Presbyterians too. But most of the fishermen and fisherwomen in Eyemouth were in constant battle with the Kirk – the Church of Scotland – because it collected large tithes or taxes from their profits. The minister patrolled the harbour when the boats came in to make sure no one tried to cheat him of his dues.

      Eyemouth people seemed to be more superstitious than devout. The local history books include lists of things that sailors avoided before the boats sailed. Women were bad luck. So were pigs, hares, white cats, and apples. It was unlucky to give away salt. It was unlucky to give your mother change from your pocket. If a sailor said the wrong thing, an unlucky thing, he had to touch cold iron.

      The devil could snatch you. The sea could swallow you. In Eyemouth, staying alive seemed to be a matter of luck, and making sure you didn’t test it.

      4

      It’s easy to be romantic about lives lived out on the edge of the sea. The history books told me something darker. In the seventeenth century, several Eyemouth residents, almost all of them women, were tortured, tried, condemned and burned as witches, or torn limb from limb because someone had testified to seeing them consorting with the devil.6 Local ministers ran the witch-hunts, it seemed, not just to drive out the devil, but also to sustain their own power, just as Brethren leaders would do with their own witch-hunts and expulsions generations later.

      These were closed communities; people covered for each other. In the seventeenth century, villagers smuggled contraband lace or brandy and hid it in passageways dug through the rock, or stowed it inside hidden chambers they’d made in their chimneys or under floorboards. They’d be hanged if they were caught. The town had its own Masonic lodge, established in the mid-eighteenth century; its members included both smugglers and excisemen, all committed, just as the Closed Brethren were later, not just to religious worship but to sustaining close, secret and lucrative business networks.

      But the nineteenth-century documents told me nothing about my family’s religious affiliations. The census officers who’d visited the Eyemouth fishermen and women had asked them about parents, children, birthplace, birth date, even about blindness or madness, but they hadn’t asked about God. So though I found David Fairbairn Stott on the census returns, I was still no wiser about what he thought about the Tribulation or the Rapture, or where he went on Sunday mornings, or whether he called Sunday Sunday or the Lord’s Day.

      I would have to drive north, I realised, to find out what took David Fairbairn Stott across the threshold of a Brethren Meeting Room for the first time. The books and historical records weren’t going to tell me.

      I’d found his grandmother listed as the widowed innkeeper of the Whale on Eyemouth harbourfront, a ten-bedroomed inn with a bar. How – and why – had the grandson of an innkeeper in a rough town like Eyemouth become a leading member of the

Скачать книгу