Читать книгу Memory Hold-the-Door - John Buchan - Страница 7

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Our sea was the Firth of Forth. Twenty miles across, the butt-end of the Pentlands loomed over the smoke of Leith. The island of Inchkeith lay in the middle distance. To the east it was possible on a clear day to see the line of the Lammermoors, North Berwick Law and the Isle of May. But of this far prospect a child was scarcely aware. The castle of Edinburgh, an object of romance to me as a milestone on the way to the Borders, was not identified with the distant lump seen dimly above the spires of the capital. The Firth was a thing of short prospects for the eye and very long prospects for the fancy.

In the winter I was barely conscious of it, except as a fog-filled trench, or a yeasty desert of white-caps, from which came stories of wrecked fishing-boats. Once, when I had a notion of being a sailor, I played truant from school and spent a delirious afternoon at the end of the pier, buffeted by rain and drenched with spray. But in early summer it became an absorbing thing. The shore in the neighbourhood of the town was a foul place, smelling of drains and rotten fish, but to the east, beyond the scarp of Ravenscraig (famous from Sir Walter Scott’s ballad of Rosabelle), there was a mile or two of clean coast, part of the demesne of Dysart House. It was possible to enter this by scrambling over rocks and scaling a wall, and we children came to regard it as our special preserve. There a succession of low reefs enclosed little sandy creeks, where we could bathe in a strong salt sea in the company of jelly-fish and sea-anemones. Behind lay a sea-wood of battered elders, and at the back of all great thickets of rhododendrons, which in May were towers of blossoms. It was a perfect playground for children, for we were alone except for the gulls and a passing smack. Sometimes on a holiday we followed the coast eastward, past the once notable port of Dysart, to the fishing hamlets of the Wemysses and Buckhaven. Dysart in particular was a joy to us, for in its little harbour were to be found craft from foreign ports and sailormen speaking broken English. One especially I remember, a Dutch fore-and-aft schooner, painted green, with a cage of singing birds and a pot of tulips in the cabin, whose skipper gave us tea and mushrooms, and promised to all of us places in his crew.

Those summer afternoons on the shore opened up the world for me. In my father’s congregation there were several retired ship-captains, who had sailed to outlandish spots and had on their walls ostrich eggs, and South Sea weapons, and ship models under glass. In such folk I had little interest in the winter time, but in summer I cadged greedily for invitations to tea, when I could ply them with questions and beg foreign curios. Under their tuition I learned to carve ship models for myself, and became learned in the matter of sails and rigging and types of vessels. But my interest was less in seamanship than in the unknown lands which could be reached by ships. I became aware of the largeness of the globe. At the time I collected foreign stamps and to this day the smell of gum, with which I plastered them in an album, brings back to me that spacious awakening.

The woods were, on the whole, a solemn place, canopied by Calvinistic heavens. Their world was an arena of pilgrimage, romantic, exciting, mysterious, but governed by an inexorable law. The sea also invited to pilgrimage, but how different! It offered a world sunlit and infinitely varied. All things which fascinated me in books—tropic islands, forests of strange fruits, snow mountains, ports thronged with queer shipping and foreign faces—lay somewhere beyond the waters in which I swam with indifferent skill. I never attempted to harmonise the two worlds—I never wanted to. But that summer shore was a wholesome emancipation. It seemed to slacken the bonds of destiny and enlarge the horizon. It saved one small mortal from becoming an owlish and bookish prig.