Sandlands (29 page)

The first slice is under the gills, angled in slightly towards the head. You don't push the knife right through to the board, but let it stop as it meets the resistance of the backbone. Then you spin the fish around and chop off the tail – the dark, spiny, deeply forked tail – before scraping it away sideways onto the worktop with the flat of the knife. Next you flip the fish onto its other side and repeat the cut at the gills, this time pressing down more firmly and sawing slightly to and fro to sever the spinal cord and remove the head, which slides to join the tail on the blue-and-white tiles. Last comes the tricky part. I must have done it a thousand times, but no two mackerel ever fillet quite alike. The tip of the blade goes in at the dorsal line, just above the backbone and a quarter-inch behind the place where the head used to be. You slide it one way and then the other, parting flesh from bone. Then the same thing below, at the centre line of the belly, scooping out and discarding the guts. Turn the fish again and, grasping firmly by the tail end, insert the knife across its width and draw the blade smoothly towards you, lifting the sweet tawny flesh, working more by feel than by eye and prising gently as you go, until the fillet comes springing clear of the pale, elastic bones.

I've got a pair of mackerel tonight, because my Harriet is coming. I know you shouldn't have favourites, but that's what Hattie is: my first and favourite grandchild. Long and dearly awaited, she was, and then late arriving when she came, almost two weeks after the due date. ‘Starting the way she meant to go on' – that's what Carole always says, with a mother's rough, dismissive fondness. But Hattie is a considerate girl and never late for her grandma, not even nowadays, and doesn't assume like some folks that the old have nothing to do all day and won't mind waiting.

The knife was Billy's – not Bill's, my husband's, but Billy's that drowned. Billy the Kid, we used to call him. It was his knife, that he gutted the fish with as they landed them. We found it, later; it had stayed in the boat with the catch when he went over. He had it for his fifteenth birthday, from his dad, but he never reached his sixteenth, and now it's my filleting knife. The knife has got to be sharp, that's the key; no use trying to fillet a fish with a blunt edge. I know there are folks who swear by a steel, and there's other contrivances they'll sell you these days, with whirligig grinders that turn like corkscrews, but to my mind there's nothing like a good old-fashioned whetstone. Two or three good swipes along each side before I make a start, and that knife of Billy's is as keen as the day it was made.

A quick swab down of the chopping board and I replace them side by side, the four plump, glistening fillets. There's nothing so fine in all the sea as a mackerel's skin: the silver-white tinged almost to pink below while up above the silver-green is striped and squiggled with bold black lines, like seaweed snaking in the shallows, or sand patterns left by the ebbing tide.

I use another knife for descaling: stouter, with a flatter blade. Rasped backwards against the lie of the skin, it sets the scales upright and bristling, and they come away easily, collecting against its edge like slivers of ice when you run your glove along the gate top on a frosty morning. A tool for every task, my own mum used to say, and each one fit for purpose. To snip off the fins, it's the smaller of the kitchen scissors. To pluck away the last of the tiny, threadlike bones, it's tweezers – bought as eyebrow tweezers, from Boots the Chemists, but they live in the kitchen drawer with the wooden spoons and the potato peeler.

She's a good girl, is Hattie, and she loves her mackerel, though it's a rare treat now to find one landed on this stretch of coast. When Carole and Billy were small they were the staple catch from May to November, for my Bill and the other men fishing out of Aldeburgh. A mainstay, a livelihood. The water at times was so thick with them, Bill said, it was like looking down into a vat of churning, molten silver. He almost felt as if he might be snagged and run aground in them: more fish than ocean. And of course you think it will last for ever, when the sea offers you riches in such store. So you take the gift and, like a greedy child, you take too much. But they didn't know, Bill and the others – how could they know, back then, when we'd never heard the word ‘sustainability'? – that they were fishing the mackerel to near extinction in this part of the North Sea. So now it's mainly the flat fish – dab and sole, plaice and skate – plus sea bass, when they're running. Sea bass are popular now; they're where the money is. Any mackerel on the slab is mostly from the Atlantic now, the fisheries in the north and west – except for these two, line-caught up in Lowestoft, a special tea for my little Hattie. I'm doing them the old way, the way she always likes them, dipped top to tail in seasoned oatmeal and fried in a pan of best butter, nicely foaming as they go in but not allowed to brown.

 

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What can I tell you about her, my grandmother? How to encapsulate, how to cut down and trim and fillet for the pan, the weeks and days of her eighty-nine years, lived out within a span of six short miles of the Suffolk sea, but each one filled to the full?

I could tell you, first, that we all call her Ganny, from when I was tiny and couldn't say my ‘r's. I could tell you that the skin of Ganny's hands is rough and raw from handling crates of fish in winter; I could say she's as quick and handy with the knife as any backstreet cut-throat, but her touch was soft as a whisper when she used to comb and plait my hair. I could say she's a quiet subversive, a gentle setter, then breaker, of rules: a licker of fingers dipped in the cake bowl, a dispenser of jam from the jar with a spoon. I could say she knows the words of fifty songs, the old songs, of rope and sail and fishing net, of fishermen and sailor boys and maidens waiting on the shore, of storms and shipwrecks, and a light kept lit upon the harbour wall for a boat that's never coming home. I'd say she knows the words of every verse, but cannot hold a tune.

 

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The young get about so much more than we ever had the chance to do. We women, I suppose is what I mean, though the menfolk never ventured far afield either, unless you count the fishing grounds of Denmark or Norway, or the war. Hattie's just back from Italy: picking olives, if you please. You never saw an olive when I was first married to Bill, or olive oil either, except in the chemist's. I had a little bottle for the stretch marks, I remember, after Carole was born. Now it's in every village shop, and it does give a nice flavour when you're frying fish, though to my mind there's still nothing quite like butter.

Eight months, it is, since Hattie was last here and sitting at my kitchen table – just newly out of college then, a Bachelor of Arts – and now she'll be back full of stories to tell, and brown as if she'd been at sea. I wonder if she remembers that her first granddad died in Italy? Though why she'd think of it, I don't know, when he wasn't really her granddad at all. Captured by the Italians in the Peloponnese in '41, Frank was shipped to Italy and set to work on a farm there. Not much more than a smallholding, he said in his letters, with some scrubby vines and a few olive trees. I kept the letters, even later, after I met Bill; one a week, he wrote me, for almost three years. He was killed joining up with the Allied invaders in the winter of '44. Funny how things work out. If it hadn't been for the times, that rush to wed before a tomorrow that might not come, it could have been an Italian farm girl he'd left on her own and pregnant instead of me.

That was in the mountains in a place they call Abruzzo and fifty miles from the sea, but Hattie's been up near Genoa, almost on the coast. I found it in the atlas. They'll have fishing there, but it won't be mackerel. It will be all the Mediterranean fare: sardines and anchovies and squid, most likely, or setting traps for lobster and prawn. My Bill never laid lobster pots but he always came home with a smile if he happened to snag one in the nets. You get a very good price for a lobster.

Funny how things work out, as I say. It seemed the end of everything when Frank's baby died, arrived before he had the strength for it, poor mite, and bundled off in an old sheet so as not to upset me, the way they did in those days. I never held him, nor even heard him cry; he hadn't the lungs. But perhaps the fates knew best. I was barely seventeen, a chit of a thing myself, and no man on hand to provide.

Marine ecology, that's what Harriet was studying, what she took for her final exams. What, I wonder, would Bill have made of it – his little Hattie, with an honours degree in the life of the sea? I was asking her mum what she thinks she'll do with all this learning, after she's shaken the itch to travel from out of her feet. Carole says she thinks maybe she'll try for the Ministry – our Hattie, allocating quotas, deciding what fish the men can land! Or maybe she'll go back to university and study some more. Her own research project, a PhD. A doctor in the family, no less.

It wouldn't be mackerel she'd be researching, though, I don't suppose. They've never been what you'd call a fashionable fish. Back in the day, when they were plentiful, we took them for granted. An everyday fish, a working man's supper, brought home for the family table because it could always be spared. It never had the glamour of white fish. Bill always said that mackerel were the greediest of feeders; take any bait, they would, he said – as easy to net as fallen fruit. And maybe that's how they gained their reputation as scavengers, with their muddy flesh, somehow unclean, like rats of the sea. Some used to say they fed on the corpses of dead sailors. There were old fishermen's tales of slitting open a mackerel's belly and finding sixpence, a gold ring, a human tooth. Bill would laugh and said he'd never found any treasure – only ever, once when gutting them on the deck, a tiny crab, entire and perfect in every limb as a still-born child.

More went for smoking even then than for eating fresh, as if the smoke might be a purifier, as well as masking their muscular flavour. And Tom Peckitt certainly smoked them a treat, back when the men still landed them aplenty. Me and Bill, though, always loved our mackerel fresh – and Hattie, too, though Carole might turn up her nose and call it unrefined. For me, it's an honest taste, an outdoor taste, of the beach when the tide goes out, of wet rope, sea wrack and tarpaulin.

Then there's all those bones. Bill and me, we enjoyed a mackerel cooked whole just as well as filleted, but there's plenty of folks nowadays won't be troubled picking out fish bones on their plate. Nor do they lift away cleanly, not in the way a trout comes off the bone, or a bass or bream; there's always some fiddle-faddle to a mackerel. But cooked on the bone it keeps its full robustness, for those of us as likes it. I gut the fish and trim off head and tail and fins, then slide some bits and pieces in the cavity for flavour – an onion, sliced fine as you like, and a couple of fresh bay leaves, or a handful of fennel stalks, or rosemary or thyme. Then I lay it on a sheet of greaseproof and sprinkle it with liquid – a squeeze of lemon, or a splash of cider, it used to be, when Bill was alive and I always kept some in the house. Fold up the paper to a nice tight parcel and lay it on a baking tray; thirty minutes in a hot oven and you've got yourself a perfect feast. When you take it from the oven, the greaseproof is puffed up high with steam. There's nothing quite like the moment when you open the parcel and let out the vapour, piping hot and savoury, better than the fug from the chip shop door on a cold winter's evening. It's worth the scalded fingers every time.

 

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I must have made this journey seventy times: three times a year, at least, for my twenty-three years. First as a baby, I suppose, in a car seat or Moses basket, and then as a toddler learning to chant the litany of names. Four stops from Ipswich to where Gampa would be waiting in his old brown Humber estate – Westerfield, Woodbridge, Melton, Wickham Market – and then the uncharted territory beyond, known only ever by the beats of its poetic metre: Saxmundham, Darsham, Halesworth, Brampton, Beccles, Oulton Broad South and Lowestoft. The recitation was as familiar to me at six or seven as the one we listened to in reverent silence while Gampa sat close to the old, mesh-fronted radiogram: Shannon-Rockall-Malin-Hebrides, and Forth-Tyne-Dogger-Fisher-German Bight. Both were part of the secret rhythm of those years, the pat-a-cake, dig-and-delve rhythm, hopped on the pavement in chalk or rapped out with a stick on iron railings, words with no need of meaning but also steeped in it.

The smell of the carriage is different now, without its foreground foetor of stale ash, but the background notes remain as they always were: the shared, overheated air, the plush grimed smooth, and something metallically mechanical. Even before you get off the train there's a sense round here of being out of time, of slipping back into old paths previously trodden, that doesn't exist in London, or is perhaps so deeply buried we no longer feel its tug. At Woodbridge, as soon as the compartment doors hiss open, the air that bursts in is saline and holds the snap of ozone; it carries with it like flotsam the smells of the boatyard and the beach, those Gampa smells of oilcloth, tarred rope and creosote. And fish – of course, of fish.

My visits here could be the pages in a book of recipes: Ganny's many ways for cooking fish, each one shiny bright and treasured, threading through my childhood like a necklace of shells. Sundays were a day apart from all the rest, back when Gampa was alive: the one day a week when no boats went out, making Sunday morning special. Breakfast would be a kipper, salt as driftwood and leathery brown, with a knob of butter to melt in its hollows and thick brown bread on the side, or else smoked haddock poached in milk and perched on a mound of spinach, the fishy milk thickened with flour and coating the spinach to a creamy, gloss pea-green. It was Gampa's favourite, but my brothers hated it – spinach, and at breakfast time! Down at the tideline, while Gampa checked his floats, greased bearings or tinkered with the pumps, Jonah would pick up laver and gutweed by the handful and toss it at Sam, while they chanted in delighted horror:
spinnage spinnage spinnage
. It made me imagine a great underwater spider, crouched beneath a rock to spin out patiently its web of sleek green seaweed.