The Harbour Girl (2 page)

Now Jeannie walked slowly back to her mother and stood in front of her. The sun warmed her through her thin frock though it didn’t touch her toes, which she curled and wriggled against the wet paving. She breathed in deeply, embracing the salty smell of fish and wet hemp from the nets draped across her mother’s aproned knee.

‘Will you teach me?’ she said. ‘I’m old enough.’

Mary nodded. ‘To gut or to mend?’

‘Both,’ Jeannie said, and was rewarded with a warm smile.

‘Aye, I will, but you must go to school until you’re twelve at least. You must have an education, Jeannie. Your father always wanted that for both of you, though it’s hard to keep Tom there.’

Jeannie’s brother hated being at school. He couldn’t wait to leave and earn a living on the boats. He was forever playing truant, and although he avoided the area where his mother worked he could usually be found somewhere around the harbour, doing jobs for the fishermen and generally knee deep in water.

The best time was during the herring season when Mary, busy working from morning to night with the other herring girls, turned a blind eye to Tom’s activities as he and other boys waited for the men to bring the catch to shore in baskets and crates. The lads would rush to gather up any fallen herring and race off with a boxful to sell round the narrow streets. Everyone knew they were stolen but even the fishermen didn’t begrudge the boys a few fish or the pennies they sold them for.

Jeannie could run as fast as any of the lads and would have liked to join them, but they told her it wasn’t a job for girls. Only Tom allowed her to sell some, for when they saw her waiflike face, thin frame, bare feet and curly brown hair the housewives they targeted couldn’t resist her innocent charm, or the chance to buy her herring at a cheap price. On these occasions, Tom always kept a few fish back for Granny Marshall. She too mended nets, but she did so outside her own front door, the steep path up from the harbour being now too difficult to climb with her arthritic legs.

When Jeannie told her mother Josh Wharton had given her a penny, Mary suggested she take it up the hill to Castlegate and give it to her gran. ‘She needs it more than we do,’ she said. ‘And tell her I’ll be up to see her tomorrow. Talk to her for a wee while,’ she added. ‘She likes the company.’

But Jeannie was still pondering the issue of school. ‘It’s a long time till I’m twelve,’ she said. ‘Do I have to stay at school all that time?’

‘Yes, but on your ninth birthday I’ll show you how to mend the nets, and then on your tenth birthday I’ll show you how to gut the herring. The knives are sharp, and right now, lassie, you don’t stay still long enough to handle one. If you sliced off your fingers now, there’d be no work for you when you’re grown.’

Jeannie saw the sense in this and said she would try to be patient.

‘Childhood is fleeting, bairn,’ her mother said softly. ‘Make the most of it. Time enough to grow up.’

Later that day, when she had come home to cook supper, Mary said the same thing to Tom, but as she sat by the table slicing bread she had to wrap her legs round his to keep him still.

‘You’ll go to school and that’s the end of it.’

‘Don’t want to,’ Tom muttered. ‘Shan’t! Who said I have to?’

‘Wanting has nothing to do with it,’ she answered calmly, ‘but if you don’t go, your poor auld ma’ll go to jail.’

Tom gave a small gasp. ‘Why?’

‘Because it’s law.’

‘Who made the law?’

Mary sighed. ‘I think it was Mr Gladstone when he was prime minister; and then Disraeli agreed, and now we’ve got Gladstone back again he says you’ve definitely to go to school.’

‘He doesn’t know me,’ Tom said defiantly.

‘I think he does.’ Mary put the bread on a plate and unwound her legs from Tom’s knees. ‘He knows all the children. Now, wash hands and face and come to the table.’

‘My hands are clean,’ he objected, but his mother just pointed to the stone sink in the corner of the room, where Jeannie was already holding her hands under the pump. It wasn’t that Jeannie was exceptionally obedient – in fact she was quite a rebel at heart – but she was hungry and knew from the long experience of her eight years that her mother would win in the end. Supper wouldn’t be put on the table until hands were clean and faces were washed and she and Tom were sitting quietly waiting for it.

That night, in the bed they shared with their mother, Jeannie woke to the sound of a howling wind, thinking that she could hear voices. She lifted her head from beneath the blanket. Tom was asleep at the foot of the mattress, but her mother was gone from her side and was standing by the small square window looking out towards the sea.

‘Ma,’ Jeannie said sleepily. ‘Is it a storm?’

‘Aye, it is.’ Mary turned away and came towards the bed. ‘Go to sleep, bairn. It’ll soon abate.’

Jeannie sighed. Her mother often woke in the night, especially if the wind was blowing hard, and she always went and stood at the window in her long white nightdress with her dark red hair hanging down her back. Jeannie thought she looked like an angel, like pictures she’d seen in story books, except that angels didn’t weep the way her mother often did.

She looked out of the window herself the next morning and saw the mass of ships in the harbour being tossed about by the high-crested sea as if they were made of matchwood. Scarborough lay between the Tyne and the Humber, and ships caught between the two great waterways would race towards it if gales threatened. It was not an easy haven to enter and many ships dipped and plunged beyond the harbour walls, sheltering as close as they could, their skippers praying that the lifeboat would reach them in time to save their crews. There was a flag fluttering on the lighthouse on Vincent Pier, but last night it would have been showing a warning light.

It was raining as Jeannie and Tom trudged to school, but by midday the sun was making a valiant effort to come out from behind heavy cloud. When they left in the afternoon, Tom raced ahead and said he was going down to the harbour. Jeannie shouted after him to go home first, but her words were tossed away by a gusty wind and he either didn’t hear or chose not to. He probably chose not to, she thought, knowing that he and his pals liked to climb into the coggy boats that were tied up by the landing stages and pretend they were at sea as they rocked and bucked on the waves.

‘Where’s Tom?’ her mother asked when she got home.

‘Don’t know,’ Jeannie said. ‘Down at the harbour, I think.’

‘Go and fetch him,’ Mary said. ‘Tell him I want him back here right now. There’s another storm brewing and I want him where I can see him.’

‘He might not come.’

‘He’ll come. Tell him there’s a belting if he doesn’t.’

Jeannie draped a shawl over her head and went out again to look for her brother. She knew why her mother was anxious. Tom and his mates usually played on the sands, leaping in and out of the sea when the tide was full and the waves were high, but they also ran up and down on the pier, a dangerous game when the sea lashed over the wooden structure and they could so easily be washed over.

But there’s no danger now, she thought. The sea was grey, though there was a heavy swell; she had seen it in much angrier moods. Why is Ma so bothered? In the harbour she could see boats being prepared for a night’s fishing and some smacks already on their way out.

She caught sight of a group of boys on the sands and screwed up her eyes to find Tom among them. She couldn’t see him but shouted anyway.

‘Tom! Tom Marshall! You’ve to come home now.’

Some of the boys looked up and waved their hands negatively. Another shouted back but she couldn’t hear him, then one of them pointed in the direction of the castle headland and she exhaled impatiently. She walked along the sands as far as the pier and then went up on to the road, past the stalls which during the day had been selling fish, crabs, cockles and winkles but were now shutting up; past the quay where the fisher lasses gutted the fish and down towards the bottom of Sandside where warehouses and mast builders and boat building yards were situated and she knew she’d find Tom.

He was in a rowing boat on his own, rowing up and down the inlet and turning in circles whilst a couple of men looked on.

‘Tom,’ she called. ‘Ma says you’ve to come home.’

‘Aw, heck,’ he complained. ‘Why do I have to?’

‘Cos your ma says so,’ one of the men laughed. ‘Don’t you know you’ve allus to do what your ma says? Even when you’re grown. Go on, you can come another day.’

Tom rowed back to the shallows, taking a long time to do it, made the boat fast and climbed ashore. ‘You allus spoil my fun,’ he grumbled.

‘Not me; Ma said,’ Jeannie retaliated. ‘Besides, I’ve had to look all over Scarborough for you and I could’ve been at home.’

He muttered all the way until they reached the sands, where he saw his pals playing and raced ahead to join them. Jeannie set her lips and turned her back, heading for home, but in a minute he sped past her, reaching the doorstep before she did.

‘Now then, Ma,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Is there owt to eat? Dunno where our Jeannie is.’

‘Get inside, cheeky little beggar.’ Mary hid a rueful grin. ‘Come on, Jeannie. Supper’s ready.’

‘Why’d I have to come in?’ Tom spooned a mouthful of stew into his mouth. ‘It’s not dark.’

‘Because!’ his mother said. ‘Because I said so.’

‘But why?’ he whined.

Mary heaved a sigh. ‘Because there’s going to be a storm.’ She looked towards the window and remembered that it was on such a day as this, two years before, that a sudden squall had sprung up as darkness fell and her life had changed for ever. ‘I can feel it in my bones.’

CHAPTER TWO

JEANNIE THOUGHT HER mother was wrong. The morning dawned bright and clear although a stiff breeze was blowing; the ships which had been out overnight had come in safely and there had been a good catch, or so she heard as she went off to school. Tom didn’t walk with her and she thought he might be playing truant again.

Yesterday when she had visited her grandmother and given her Mr Wharton’s penny, the old lady had bid her sit down and talk. Jeannie had wriggled about on the cold doorstep and watched the nimble fingers of her father’s mother as she mended nets. Women whose husbands were fishermen brought them to her when they had an odd penny to spare, for there was no other who could mend so fast or as neatly as Aggie Marshall.

A coarse apron covered her black dress, and with her greying hair tied in a severe bun at the back of her neck she looked much older than her fifty-odd years. She’d perched straight-backed on a wooden chair and gazed at Jeannie. ‘Well,’ she had said. ‘What have you to tell me? What’s your brother up to? He nivver comes to see his old gran.’

Tom was more important than she was. Jeannie had garnered that knowledge from her grandmother a long time ago. He was a boy; he would grow into a man and earn a living to support them all, including Jeannie until such time as she would marry a seaman or fisherman who would keep her and any children that they had. Family was essential to keep women from poverty. Aggie had lost two sons and a husband to the sea, and although she had three daughters she relied more on Mary than on any of them. Two of her daughters had married out of the fishing trade and the other was a widow.

‘I’m going to learn to mend nets,’ Jeannie had told her, ‘and when I’m ten I’ll learn to gut. Ma’s going to learn me.’

Aggie nodded. ‘Good. And Tom? Is he still wasting time at school?’ She had no truck with education. She’d never had any, she often boasted, and it hadn’t stopped her from catching a seafaring husband.

‘Ma says he has to go. She says that our da would’ve wanted him to.’

Aggie snorted. ‘Aye, our Jack had all sorts of daft ideas and look where it got him. Bottom of the sea, that’s where.’

Jeannie had chewed on her lip. She’d heard this before from her grandmother, but she could never work out the connection between schooling or lack of it and her father’s death.

‘Your ma should let him go to the boatyards and learn about boat building till he’s old enough to go to sea. That’s all the edication he needs. He doesn’t need to know how to read or write to be able to catch fish.’

‘I like reading,’ Jeannie ventured.

Her grandmother raised her eyebrows. ‘And when do you think you’ll have time to do that when you’re grown and with a houseful of babbies? Go on, be off with you. Don’t be wasting my time with your idle chatter.’

She’d escaped thankfully, and now, as she sat in the classroom with her slate and chalk in front of her and the tip of her tongue protruding, she copied the words written on the blackboard.

‘Where’s your brother, Jeannie Marshall?’ the teacher asked. Jeannie went hot and then cold. ‘And don’t tell me he’s sick.’ Miss Jennings glared at her. ‘I saw him this morning down on the sands.’

‘I don’t know, miss.’ Her cheeks were aflame. ‘He left home before me. He said he didn’t want to be late.’

‘Then tell him he can look forward to the cane when he does come in. I’ll not tolerate truancy.’

‘Yes, Miss Jennings,’ she muttered and contemplated on the unfairness of getting into the teacher’s bad books just because of Tom.

Miss Jennings stood behind her to read what she had written. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘But what have you forgotten?’