That world, and the fish that kept it alive, are gone now, and one by one the characters who shaped his childhood have all graced the town’s kirkyard on St Mark’s Eve. They must have made a strange parade — the ‘fetch’ of ‘old Leebie’ and of that sexless Gradgrind of a harridan, Miss Sangster; of Rush’s grandfather with his stories of the sea, his ‘bible-punching’ great-grandfather, George, who drank a Dane to death in fair combat; the ghost of ‘old Penman’ himself, and behind Penman even, the ancient sexton who had hosed down Honeybunch — the same grave-digger who had buried a typhus victim alive and opened his pauper’s grave years later to find the bones contorted into an eternal scream of horror. ‘Who remembers Bridget Burk now?’ ‘Old George’ demands, as the young boy looks at the initials of his great-grandmother carved in the bark of a beech tree. ‘Your grandfather and me, that’s who. And when we’re gone, maybe you’ll remember her name. But once you’re gone, there will be nobody to remember even that much. She’ll be these initials and nothing else, till this tree falls — and after that nothing at all.’ Old George was wrong. Nobody who reads Hellfire and Herring will forget Bridget Burk or anyone else in its pages.
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