‘We’ll call it twenty,’ said Cadwallader. ‘Another Manhattan before dinner? I would advise it – Mrs Murdoch is a good plain cook with lots of plain.’
‘Ugh,’ I said, goose pimples rising at the very suggestion. ‘Nothing with whisky for me, darling, please.’
‘All right, then, a Sidecar,’ said Cadwallader. ‘But don’t let them hear you tomorrow, Dandy. About the whisky, I mean. This town runs on the stuff.’
Chapter Two
It did indeed. One could not help thinking that the various reverends were wasting their time rather, pushing Temperance, in a town where most of the inhabitants who did not fish or farm or shop-keep worked for the whisky distiller who had an enormous bottling hall and bonded store a stone’s throw up the hill from the High Street. From what I understood, moreover, since the Ferry Fair day was a holiday, many of the workers would be quite a bit more sober this day than most others, it being their practice not to filch the whisky in bottles or flasks but simply to glug it down during their shift, then stagger home and sleep it off. As well as ‘the bottling’, of course, there was the usual, more than generous, quota of pubs. A town the size of South Queensferry in Wiltshire, say, would boast a coaching inn and perhaps a backstreet beer shop, but here there were upwards of a dozen separate establishments selling the demon drink, from the Hawes Inn at the top, drawing its respectability from History and Literature and its trade from the ferryboat trippers come to look at the bridge, all the way to the drinking shops such as ‘Broon’s Bar’ at the bottom. The even less salubrious-sounding ‘Hole i’ the Wa’’ had recently fallen down, suggesting that its name perhaps had referred to its architecture as much as its social standing.
Cadwallader regaled us with all of this as we motored into town the next morning, and seemed heartily in favour both of the distillery men topping themselves up as they worked and of the ratio of beer pumps to head of population.
‘Because when you’ve just been through what we’ve just been through…’ he said grimly.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Buttercup. ‘I thought Prohibition was rather fun. You didn’t have to worry too much at home so long as you chose your servants carefully, and the speakeasies were really quite jolly.’
Cadwallader shook his head at her as he stopped to let a crowd of tattered little children cross the road at Dalmeny village.
‘For God’s sake, Freddy, don’t start singing the praises of speakeasies in front of anyone today, will you?’ he said, waving and tooting at the children as we started up again. ‘Off to see the Burry Man?’ he called.
‘It’s hardly likely to come up in conversation,’ said Buttercup. ‘I must say, though, gangsters are much better value at a party than our new neighbours showed themselves to be last night, aren’t they, Cad?’
Cadwallader tried to laugh this off as ‘Freddy’s nonsense’ and although she protested – ‘Well, what would you call him, darling? He always brings a case of gin and one never sees him without those two boys who look like boxers!’ – Daisy and I thought it best to feign deafness.
Within minutes, we arrived at the parking yard of the garage by the Hawes and stepped down. It was a fine morning, a clear sky and just the merest flutter of a breeze from the river and Daisy, Buttercup and I debated together whether to take our little coats and our sun parasols, or both, or neither.
‘Only I do hate putting on a coat and crumpling my frock sleeves then taking it off later when it’s hot,’ said Daisy. ‘I’d rather feel cold until this afternoon and keep my pleats crisp.’
‘Come on, come on,’ said Cadwallader who was holding open the gate for us. ‘Good grief, think about poor Robert Dudgeon, stumping around covered in burrs all day. Stop fussing.’
‘Let’s leave the coats but take the -’ Buttercup began, but broke off at an ostentatious sigh from the gate. She blew a kiss at Cadwallader in passing.
There were a few knots of people already on their way along the road, and there was a definite sense of anticipation about their hurry as well as high spirits. Somewhere ahead of us a clock tower sounded a single note.
‘Quarter to,’ said an old woman, marching along with a giggling grandchild (I guessed) held firmly by the arm, and she quickened her step.
From the Hawes around the sweep of the river there is a shingly beach on one side, separated from the road by the tidewall, and a pleasant wooded bank opposite with just a few prosperous-looking villas. The road itself is broad and even, and I began to wonder why we could not have ridden on in the car, but then all of a sudden one turns an awkward corner and finds oneself right in the middle of a rather quaint little town, with higgledy-piggledy shops and houses jutting out into one’s path, as though the river had washed them up the shore a bit now and then over the years. Across the road, there were some ancient buildings, square and solid, and in between them the town had grown in the most ingenious way: above us, up smart sets of steps, broad walkways led to some really rather grand merchants’ houses, while below, little shops had been tucked in underneath. I had never cared for the vertical ordering of the social classes one sees in Edinburgh, where the rich sit up-top hogging the light and simply pour their potato water (and worse) down on the heads of the poor below, but South Queensferry’s terraces were as pleasing to the eye in their nattiness as collectors’ cabinets or dolls’ houses can be, and I daresay if the plumbing were all that one could wish for, one could live and work above or below in perfect comfort.
The crowds grew thicker as we made our way along beneath another terrace, past the bank and the butchers, towards the Rosebery Hall, where quite a hundred people were gathered laughing together and humming with interest. It was mostly women, old men and children – since all others were at work – and quite a few of the elders were bent double exhorting their young charges to bravery.
‘What are you to say, Isa?’ asked one young woman whose daughter was wiping her grubby face against her mother’s pinny and threatening to weep.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Isa, pushing out her lip
‘Och wheesht,’ her mother replied. ‘If you’re a good girl and say it I’ll give you a ha’penny to fling in his bucket and bring you luck.’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Isa again stoutly.
‘They’re always feart the first time,’ said an old man. He eased himself back against the wall between Isa’s mother and me and spat expressively then, taking a closer look at my party and regretting the spitting, I suppose, he made up for it by wiping his mouth politely on his sleeve and touching his cap brim.
Just then, the clock on the town hall tower struck nine and the door swung open. Two men emerged, coats and collars off, hats on the backs of their heads. They turned back to the dark doorway holding out their hands and slowly the Burry Man emerged. Little Isa screamed, I heard Cadwallader say ‘Good God!’ and a cry went up from the crowd:
‘Hip, hip, hooray!
Hip, hip, hooray!
Hip, hip, hooray,
It’s the Burry Man’s day!’
I do not know what I had been expecting, and I felt foolish for being surprised. After all, I had known that the Burry Man was a man covered in burrs and here was a man covered in burrs, but the effect was staggering. Perhaps I had not imagined it to be so utterly complete. Not only were his body, arms and legs encased, so that his limbs looked like prize-winning stalks of Brussels sprouts, but his whole face and head were covered too, with just the slightest shadows showing where one or two burrs had been missed to let him breathe and peer out. He must have had on some kind of very stout under-garment too, for, as Daisy had said, burdock seeds were torturous little things, and so his outline was bulbous, a huge lollipop head and the monstrously thick green body underneath, making one think of galls on tree trunks and lichen on barnacled rocks. Mouldy, encrusted, vegetative and obscene, when he walked it was the stuff of nightmares.