It would be hard to exaggerate just how good — or for those who have never read Christopher Rush — what a surprise and relief this book is. In the usual course of events there are few things to lower the spirits like a Scottish memoir, but here in the generosity, invention, compassion and wit of a story of an east coast childhood is the perfect antidote to that melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the crofting world that seems to form the dismal staple of contemporary Scottish memory.
Christopher Rush was born in St Monans on the east coast of Scotland in 1944, the son of a local girl and an English brute of a father just back from the war. Through Rush’s tale of a childhood Eden slithers this reptilic drunk of a father, but in the very nature of the ‘insular and matriarchal’ community that the old St Monans was, it is inevitably his mother’s presence and his mother’s family — alive and dead — who make up the vividly bizarre reality of his infant world.
And what a world it is! A world of crazies and fanatics, of seers, second-sighters and apparitions, a world suspended somewhere between the eternal and the actual, between the Calvinist certainties of the next world and the cold, boils, piles, hardships and beatings that are the only certainties of this.
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