Читать книгу In the Days of Rain: WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD - Rebecca Stott - Страница 13

The Rapture was coming. It might come next week or next year, but it was always coming. I was sure I wouldn’t be the only one left behind when it came. I was pretty certain that my brothers and most of the Brethren children in our assembly wouldn’t make it either.

Once all those thousands of Brethren grown-ups around the world had disappeared up into the clouds with their Bibles, I knew my brothers and I would have to get through the Tribulation as best we could. The trouble was that not only the not-good-enough Brethren, but all those dangerous worldly people outside the Brethren would be left behind too. We’d have to find a way of hiding from them and getting to high ground so we wouldn’t drown when the tidal waves came. I thought about that almost every day.

I knew my brothers wouldn’t be much good in an emergency. I’d have to take charge when the time came, find a place for us to hide. I’d gone to look at the coal bunker in our house, but decided against it. It was too dark and dirty. There were spiders. It would flood too when the tidal waves came. The garage at my grandparents’ house was a much better proposition. It was higher up. There’d be less chance of flooding. My grandmother kept stacks of crates of strawberry pop in little glass bottles there; there were candles and boxes of jam tarts from the family business. I knew where she kept the key. We’d be fine there for a few weeks, I thought, if we were careful not to be seen going in.

Because I knew I’d be left behind, I spent much of my childhood preparing for the Tribulation. My dreams were full of floods and lightning and earthquakes. Most of the games I played had boats in them. They were thrilling.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, my father and grandfather ran a Brethren wholesale grocery called Stott and Sons from a cavernous and labyrinthine old warehouse in Shirley Street in Hove. If my father had sole charge of me and my brothers, he would sometimes leave us to play unsupervised in the darkened storerooms while he did something ‘important’ in the office next door. We were not to tell 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.