In the Days of Rain Read online

  Could any of these Stott children read? If the older ones had been taught their letters it would have been at one of the many Grimsby Sunday schools, like the one the Primitive Methodists had opened in 1867, just a few streets away from the Stott house. The younger children were luckier. Annie and David had just enough time between their mother’s death in 1876 and their father and stepmother’s death in 1889 to attend the new public-funded school. They had learned to read, write, and do sums.

  I was the oldest girl in a family of five children, with an absent father and a hardworking, sleep-deprived mother. I knew that Agnes and her young sisters would have been carrying those babies around in Grimsby, mashing up food, wiping noses, cleaning up cuts, singing songs, telling stories, just as I did. I helped my mother feed my adored twin brother and sister, born when I was nearly six, and I read to them and listened to them read when they were old enough.

  But there were older Brethren ‘sisters’ who helped my mother – shadowy, kind women who baked and stitched, who took us out for picnics or to the beach. My mother had electricity, a washing machine, a sewing machine and a food mixer; she had powdered mashed-potato mix, tins of Spam and sliced pineapples in her kitchen cupboards, and her own car parked outside. She taught me to read long before I went to school. I’d like to think that at least some of those Grimsby Stott children had books stowed under their pillows as I did.

  But though they’d suffered through those early years, Agnes and David must have considered themselves on safe and solid ground in their new house in bustling Port Seton, with its brand-new harbour and all those boats out there bringing in trade to the Wilson sailmaking sheds.

  6

  The disorder of Agnes and David’s early life in Grimsby was due in part to the alcoholism of their father and the worn-down compliance of their mother and stepmother. But now that I’d been to the Eyemouth fishing museum and read the local history books, I was beginning to see a bigger picture. The chaos and bereavement the Stotts had lived through was also caused, at least to some extent, by the Lowland Clearances that propelled so many Scots from their farms into a migrant life in search of work or towards one of the emigration ships sailing to New Zealand, Canada or America. The destiny of the Stotts, like millions of their fellow Scots, had been determined by violent historical forces.

  From the mid-eighteenth century, as part of what historians call the Clearances, the owners of large Scottish estates began to clear the ‘peasants’ off the land and put sheep in their place, to maximise profits. In the Lowlands, near the Borders where my family lived, small tenant or landowning farmers were forced off their farms not by violent eviction, as happened in the later Highland Clearances, but by stealth. Landowners hiked rents, and eventually farms and businesses went bankrupt. Tens of thousands of Lowland cottars moved to newly-built villages or to cities in search of work or to the coast to fish, and thousands emigrated.8

  The Stotts had once been tenant farmers too. I’d found Robert’s grandfather, James Stott, listed as a tenant cattle-farmer living in Gairmuir near Lauder in the Borders in the 1790s, thirty-five miles inland from Eyemouth. He’d been declared bankrupt in 1799, five years after the Earl of Lauderdale’s agents had decided to hike the rents. Like thousands of other bankrupt labourers and tenants, James gave up his farm and went to the city to look for work. He set up as a butcher in Edinburgh, while his three sons later left for Eyemouth to look for work as fishermen or drovers. The family had stayed put until the storm of 1881 forced them to migrate again.

  I stood on the edge of the remote drovers’ road etched into the hills in the rough high moor at Gairmuir, watching it undulate through the heather and gorse and disappear into the mist. This was the road my drover ancestors walked alongside their cattle to the Edinburgh cattle market. They’d called it the Thieves’ Road, a farmer told me. Robbers attacked the drovers at night when they returned from the city carrying the money they’d made at market.

  The rain began, lashing diagonally in great lines, bringing the night down with it. Up on the hill a mile away, lights glowed in the windows of a remote farmhouse. You’d be glad to see the light from your home, I thought, if you were a young drover out here alone in the rain with the dark closing in on you. You’d be glad to get inside and bolt the door against the robbers and the night.

  Of course the displaced labourers and tenant farmers weren’t just looking for security when they joined the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Free Church, or the Open or Closed Brethren in their thousands in the religious revivals of the 1880s. Joining a non-conformist Church must also have been a way of rebelling, of closing their doors on all outside authority, refusing to rent a seat in a pew or to pay tithes to a corrupt Church or to kowtow to a landowner who had cleared them off their land.9 What looked like an act of extreme religious dissent was also a political one.

  By the time Agnes and John Wilson arrived in Port Seton in 1885, five years after the new harbour had been built there, and at a time when migrants from all over Scotland were flocking to the town, there were hymns being sung out of six buildings on Sunday mornings, including two Brethren Meeting Rooms, a Methodist Hall and a Mission Hall. Around the corner local builders were digging the foundations for what is listed as a Fishermen’s Bethel, a chapel for sailors.

  Brethren were kin; they were in fellowship together. They shut out the rest of the world, but they looked after each other. Brethren married other Brethren and had large numbers of children. They worked hard. They prospered. They kept themselves apart. After the chaos Agnes and David had lived through, they must have been looking not just for stability and faith, but also for a door to close defiantly against the turmoil. Of all the religious groups in Port Seton they might have joined, the Closed Brethren offered them the greatest degree of separation from the world.

  7

  ‘Were your folk Red-Tilers or Blue-Tilers?’ the Port Seton fishmonger asked me when I asked for directions to the Brethren Meeting Room. He’d looked up from the parcel of crab he was wrapping for me and raised an eyebrow. ‘Brethren Meeting Rooms are ten-a-penny round here. Red-Tilers don’t talk to Blue-Tilers. No one knows what that’s all about. Queer folk.’

  He pointed in one direction to a building with a red-tiled roof, and in the other to one with a blue-tiled roof. Despite all the detective work I’d done, I had no idea which one my family had belonged to. Where had Agnes and David Fairbairn Stott broken bread?

  It proved easier to figure out than I had feared. The noticeboard outside the red-tiled Meeting Room did not welcome visitors, so I knew it belonged to the Closed Brethren. The blue-tiled Meeting Room did welcome visitors, so it must belong to the Plymouth – or Open – Brethren. My folk, then, had been Red-Tilers.

  It must have been difficult to live in Port Seton in the 1880s, I thought, without attending one of these churches and chapels. Agnes and her husband were probably breaking bread with the Red-Tilers before her two orphaned brothers stepped off the boat. The Port Seton Brethren had most likely helped John set up his new sailmaking business. Even if they hadn’t helped out financially, they would have told the family that if they were prepared to give up their will to the Lord, they’d find a better life to come once he had taken them skyward in the Rapture. Agnes would see her mother and grandmother in heaven, and all those siblings and cousins she’d lost.

  If Agnes had taken David and four-year-old Joseph along to the red-tiled Meeting Room, the boys would have been treated kindly, helped along, listened to, given a seat in the centre circle. Eventually they’d be asked to break bread, and then to preach. It would have given them a strong sense of belonging, safety and purpose, a conviction that they were the chosen ones and that the Rapture was coming soon.

  From the census returns of 1901 I could see that David Fairbairn Stott had married Lizzie Durham, the eldest daughter of a prosperous fishing family. They’d been Brethren too. The census officers recorded that David was running both his own sailmaking shed on the harbourfront and a shop
that sold shipping tackle. He’d become well-to-do. When he bought the first car in Port Seton, cousins had told me, Lizzie wouldn’t get into it in front of the house. She was afraid the neighbours would think she was putting on airs, so her husband and children had to pick her up at the edge of the village. It was the Protestant way. Work hard, save money, do well, but don’t flaunt your wealth.

  Though David now had security, prosperity, community, wife and family, he still had to watch his back. He knew the Brethren assembly might withdraw from him at any moment if he didn’t comply with the rules. Brethren used the verb ‘to withdraw’ to mean ‘to separate from someone unclean’, but really withdrawal meant expulsion. If you were withdrawn from you couldn’t break bread, you were out of fellowship, you’d lose everyone you trusted, everyone you knew, immediately and for always, and you’d be forced to live among the unclean people, Satan’s footsoldiers. Sometimes a single individual might be withdrawn from; sometimes whole assemblies.

  So, in 1905, when Lizzie and David Stott and the other Port Seton Red-Tilers heard about an acrimonious Brethren rift in a small Northumberland market town called Alnwick, just seventy miles south, they’d have talked and prayed about little else. They’d seen it happen before; they knew that rifts like these could get out of hand and spread, engulfing neighbouring assemblies. It never ended well.

  The trouble in the Alnwick assembly had, according to Brethren pamphlets I’d found, been caused, as usual, by disagreements about degrees of separation. One group of Brethren believed they should be out in the world saving souls; the other insisted that they withdraw from iniquity and prepare for the Rapture. Thomas Pringle, one of the older ministering brothers, locked the nineteen dissenters out of Green Batt Hall, their Meeting Room, and issued a letter excommunicating them.

  The distressed ‘outs’ followed Brethren rules and wrote to the neighbouring Brethren in the tiny village of Glanton, eight miles away, asking for guidance about what to do. The Glantons, also following Brethren rules, urged them to seek reconciliation, but would not break bread with them.

  Three years passed. Thomas Pringle refused to retract his excommunication. Most of the remaining Brethren in Alnwick left to join the defectors. Soon Pringle was breaking bread with only one or two other Brethren in Green Batt Hall, but he was still certain he was right.

  Although David and Lizzie Stott and the other Port Seton Red-Tilers were sympathetic to the Alnwick ‘outs’, and frustrated by the way Pringle was behaving, Brethren rules stipulated that they were not to get involved. If they did, they might find themselves withdrawn from too.

  In 1908 Brethren leaders in London took Alnwick off the list of approved assemblies. With so few Brethren left breaking bread together there, it was no longer viable. The Brethren in Glanton decided they could now break bread with the Alnwick ‘outs’. It proved to be a disastrous decision. Other Brethren in neighbouring assemblies declared that the Glantons had broken Brethren rules; they were now unclean too.

  Once Brethren assemblies across the north of England and southern Scotland had started taking sides, the trouble spread south. A Brethren woman who belonged to an Edinburgh assembly that had taken a fierce anti-Glanton stand visited Stoke Newington in north London. The Stoke Newington Brethren appealed to Brethren leaders in the nearby Park Street, Islington, assembly. Was it safe to break bread with her? If they did, would they be excommunicated?

  The London Brethren patriarchs consulted, prayed and debated. Thomas Pringle, they finally ruled, had been right to pull up the drawbridge on the Alnwick defectors; the ‘outs’ had been dangerously ‘intercommunional’. The Glantons, in supporting the Alnwick defectors, had broken Brethren rules too.

  The London Brethren excommunicated not just the entire Glanton assembly but also all the Brethren up and down the country who’d supported them, including, of course, the Red-Tilers in Port Seton – among them Lizzie and David and their little growing family.

  In this new large-scale rift, the Glanton sympathisers in Port Seton, held on to the red-tiled Meeting Room. The smaller number of hardliners, now calling themselves the London Brethren, took over the former Fishermen’s Bethel on South Doors, a six-minute walk to the west. From satellite view on Google Maps it seems that this building had a grey-tiled roof. So there were now three Brethren Meeting Rooms in Port Seton, with blue-, red- and grey-tiled roofs.

  All this excommunication was not just chillingly familiar to me – I’d watched the ministering brothers in our assembly suddenly turn on and expel once-respectable members of our fellowship – it was beginning to look like some kind of collective psychosis.10 The fact that there were three Brethren Meeting Rooms in this tiny fishing village was not just absurd, it was shameful.

  The crab parcel in my rucksack had leaked in my bag. It had seeped through the pages of my copy of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and stained them brown. It felt appropriate. The intense and small-minded sectarianism of these people turned my stomach like the crab-juice stains on the pages of my book.

  The Glanton rift must have affected the whole village in those years before the Great War. There would have been trouble amongst the newly divided fishing crews, daily tensions in the Stott store on the harbourfront, and tight lips on Main Street on the Lord’s Day as three Brethren groups made their separate ways to the Plymouth, Glanton and London Brethren Meeting Rooms: red, blue, and now grey. Didn’t these people have enough on their plates just surviving the winters and feeding their children without having to engage in religious feuds as well?

  My family, Lizzie and David and their children, my cousins tell me, were ‘in the Glantons’ for only four years. David and Lizzie Stott, increasingly uncomfortable with the inter-communional ways of the Glanton Brethren, rejoined the hardliners over in South Doors. My great-aunt Greta, their fourth surviving child, born in 1913, would tell people proudly that she was the only one of the family who’d never been ‘in Glanton Brethren’. By this she meant that she’d never breathed the ‘liberal’ Glanton air; she’d been born after the family returned to the hardline Brethren. She was pure Brethren, pure Exclusive Brethren. During the later years of extreme separation that pure blood would matter.11

  8

  The Great War broke out in 1914, but as an older man David Fairbairn Stott wasn’t called up until 1916. Following the Biblical injunction ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, he refused to fight, and was one of hundreds of Plymouth and Closed Brethren sent south to Wormwood Scrubs prison in London to await military tribunal. He served out his sentence of hard labour in Dartmoor prison along with other religious and political conscientious objectors.

  The coincidence was striking. Sixty-three years later my own father would be sent to Wormwood Scrubs too – sentenced not for conscientious objection, but for embezzling money to feed his roulette habit. I was sixteen when my father went to ‘the Scrubs’, as it was known. My grandfather Robert had been fourteen when his father was sent there. He’d been forced to leave school to take care of the shop because his mother had three-year-old Greta and one-year-old David to mind. Our household had suffered too. While I was studying for my A-Levels my mother had bailiffs and debt collectors calling at our door.

  My father did not like his father, Robert, but in his dying days he talked about him tenderly. He empathised with him. ‘It must have been hard being the son of a conscientious objector in a fishing village like Port Seton,’ he said, looking at the photographs I’d found of his father as a young man wearing a suit, his hair slicked back with oil, trying to look older than his years. ‘Before the war he’d written poetry and hymns. He was learning fine lettering so he could paint signs for local shops, but when the war came he had to stop all that and mind the shop. Customers gave him a hard time; many of the villagers boycotted the shop. He was only fourteen. My Auntie Bessie used to say that sometimes he’d lose his temper and hurl tins like missiles across the shop.’

  My father smiled.

  Like father like son, I thought.

&nb
sp; ‘Things got worse,’ my father said, trying to sit up so he could rummage through the shoebox of photographs. ‘While my grandfather was in prison, my father’s younger brother Morton – he was only ten then – contracted a bacterial infection in his leg; the doctors rushed him to the hospital in Edinburgh. My grandmother had to travel back and forth to visit him every day with baby David in his pram. The doctors had to cut out a chunk of Morton’s leg to drain the poison. They said he wouldn’t recover. When they sent him home they expected him to die.’

  There was a little white coffin in this story, I remembered. A little white coffin and a Brethren procession. I’d heard my father tell this story before. But now that he was dying, I knew this would be the last time I’d hear him tell it.

  ‘The prison warden allowed my grandfather to go home,’ he continued, lost in a photograph of Lizzie pushing the pram along the seafront at Port Seton during the war, ‘so that he could see his son one last time. But by the time he’d got all the way from Dartmoor to Scotland – and it must have taken days in wartime – baby David had died instead.’

  ‘Meningitis,’ I say, remembering, thinking about how poor Lizzie must have had to break the news to her husband.

  ‘The Brethren,’ my father went on, ‘carried the little white coffin along the coast to the graveyard in the next village. Then David had to go all the way back to Dartmoor, leaving Lizzie to teach Morton to walk again.’

  I’m thinking about Robert trapped behind that shop counter, an open target for the taunts of local lads. Did those boys say the words that all the village must have been thinking – that David’s death and Morton’s leg had been a punishment for his father’s cowardice? That it served those nose-in-the-air Stotts right? Robert must have hurled a fair few more tins then, perhaps even cursed his father. But there would have been older Brethren men looking out for him, I remind myself, and the Brethren sisters would have been helping Lizzie. That’s what Brethren did. At least the Stotts knew they weren’t on their own.