by Maggie Ford
‘Did you want me to leave me wife and child …’
‘Yes, like you said,’ Danny cut in roughly, dismissing him. ‘Didn’t mean to interfere, Mum.’
She smiled at him, then at Pam, leaning forward to plant a kiss on her granddaughter’s wind-chilled forehead, taking in the special perfume the child’s hair possessed, ‘Merry Christmas, love. But pop in a few days before Christmas, Pam. During the day.’ It was a pointed indication that she did not expect George to be with her. ‘And bring Beth to see me. I ain’t even got her little Christmas present wrapped up yet. It’s a doll, not much. but I’ve knitted the clothes for it and it do look pretty.’
‘Thanks Mum.’ Pam leaned forward and laid a kiss on Peggy’s cheek. There was a stirring from the downstairs rear bedroom, Dan coughing. Pam moved back. ‘I’d better go. See you nearer Christmas, Mum.’
She passed Danny with a glare towards him. ‘You an’ George,’ she hissed, her eyes narrowing. ‘You’ve got nothing to quarrel about. It’s not our argument. But you want to keep it going, don’t you?’
To which Danny said nothing as she went out into the early darkness of the cold winter evening.
The weekend before Christmas, Connie went up to Market Harborough. Ian was buying her engagement ring. Before she went, she paid a visit to East London Cemetery and stood awhile beside Ben’s grave.
In the cold wind, the black bare branches of trees shuddering before it, everything else had a grey look about it, the scudding clouds, the monotonous tarmac paths, the lines of headstones poking though a colourless earth, the lacklustre lawns. Even the vases of flowers to the memory of loved ones departed displayed hardly any colour to speak of, their blossoms bleached and drooping.
She hadn’t brought flowers. Somehow it seemed wrong after all this time. But she’d brought a strip of red ribbon on some nameless whim. This she wound around the pot of stiff rain-splattered white chrysanthemums, no doubt brought here last weekend by his parents, their petals already falling in the chill wind. Better to have left them living and bright on their roots until nature saw fit to let them die. For no apparent reason, Connie felt tears sting her eyes and brushed them quickly away. Silly. The time for weeping was over. Why had she brought this piece of red ribbon? Symbol of love? That too had been silly.
There came an urge to speak the words: ‘I did love you, Ben. I’ll never forget you.’ But it would have been sentimental and melodramatic. To wish for it all back would have been hypocrisy because what was gone was gone. Coming here had been a mistake. Her love for him had been buried with him and now she was only sad, not for herself, not for the past, merely that a young life had ended. But that young life was no longer part of her.
In turning away it went through her mind, to go and see his parents, but that too was over. It would be unfair, to her and to them, appearing on their doorstep. She’d write a letter instead, telling them about herself. Then she thought not. She’d always remember him with fondness, maybe with a tear, but best the past be left to itself. She wouldn’t come again to this grave.
Turning one last time halfway along the tarmac path, she saw that the piece of red ribbon shone through all the greyness, the one bit of brightness, it seemed, in all this place of the dead. Then the wind caught her hat so that she had to lift a hand to stop it blowing from her head and she hurried away, in her mind’s eye still seeing that scrap of bright red fluttering madly.
It would come loose in the wind and blow away shortly, get caught up in a tree. Her original gesture would be wasted. But by then she’d be on her way. Her new life lay with Ian. So why was a warm tear still on her cheek?
The weekend gales had died. The weather had warmed somewhat. The following weekend had brought a fine drizzle of rain. Now with an overcast sky and a mild south westerly breeze, one or two more needy shrimpers had been tempted out to see what could be caught before the year’s end. Danny too thought it worth his while.
London’s Billingsgate fish market would take anything. Christmas loomed a week away and people still looked for whatever would help make an East End Christmas tea table jolly on the cheap. Shrimps and winkles, jellied eels, whelks and cockles could be had from stalls outside all the pubs. Billingsgate did a pretty decent trade despite the unemployment that abounded.
Danny knew George Bryant and his father had gone out. He’d seen their boat leave. Idiotically he felt instantly prompted to try his luck, as if the idea of the Bryants making a bit of cash while the Bowmakers sat around on their arses was something not to be countenanced.
Foley, a shrimper Danny was acquainted with, was preparing his boat in readiness to set off too. Danny watched him awhile, then said, ‘Going out, then?’
The man nodded without looking up from what he was doing. ‘Might as well. Heard shrimp are around not far off – this warm spell brings ’em in closer to shore.’
‘Chance of dropping me off on Mush End?’ Mush End, derived from Marsh End, officially known as Chapman Sands, lay near the entrance to Leigh Ray just off the end of Canvey Island. Not too far and a good ground for cockles.
‘On your own?’ The man still hadn’t looked up, but his words were a small warning. ‘We’ll be out some while, I reckon, and you could get fog come up later out on this weather.’
‘Might get my uncles to come along,’ Danny said chattily, but the man, intent on his preparations, had still not paused to look at him.
‘We’ll be ready for off in half hour.’
‘Right!’ Danny headed off to find his uncles.
‘What about it?’ he coaxed his Uncle Pete after explaining the offer. It meant not having to get their own bawley ready. Merely be dropped off on Chapman Sands with their baskets, lavanets and rakes, spending the time raking cockles until Foley’s shrimp bawley came back to pick them up as the tide turned.
Pete shook his head, taking stock of the debatable weather signs. ‘Ain’t worth it, lad. Not really. If fog comes up we could be in trouble there.’
His Uncle Reg had already settled himself in for an easy weekend at home. ‘Not much point sloshing about out there for a few cockles this time o’ the year,’ he’d said. ‘I need a bit of a rest sometime. Help your aunt get things ready for Christmas.’
Danny didn’t argue. All very well for him, but he needed the money if Uncle Reg didn’t. Every little bit helped towards his and Holly’s wedding, he hoped next year, but not if he didn’t take the chance to make whatever bit of cash he could.
They’d known each other for such a short while but all he wanted, more than anything in the world, was for Holly to be his wife. The days they were apart, he on the boat or in the sheds and she teaching, felt endless.
Danny returned to his other uncle’s house. Something told him that he’d be foolish to be out there on Chapman Sands all on his own. Safer with two people. Pleading in his tone, he told Pete of his need to make what money he could, spoke of his wedding, of the cost, all the time seeing the precious half hour to Foley’s departure ticking away. To his delight, Pete finally relented.
‘All right. But we wrap up warm despite it bein’ on the mild side, take a flask and a bite to eat. Could be a long wait for old man Foley to pick us up again, comin’ back in with the tide.’
‘Well, he do know he’s got to pick us up so he won’t leave it late,’ Danny said, cheered up no end at seeing a bit more added to the coffer.
Ten minutes later they were clambering on board the Juniper, old Foley muttering he’d thought they’d changed their mind, and that with the tide going out fast he had to be making headway. Soon they were standing beside their gear on the newly exposed sand and mud under a weak sun watching the boat chugging off into the distance, the putt-putt-putt of its engines dying away to leave silence hovering over the mud flats except for the gurgling of the mud itself and the far-off squeal of a gull.
In the silence the pair got to work, raking a bounty of cockles into the lavanets, tipping them in turn into the wicker baskets.
‘Blo
ody hell’ Danny heard his uncle swear.
He straightened up, rake in hand. ‘What?’
‘Didn’t bring any stakes.’ Stakes were used to mark out a guide for direction should fog shut in as it could do in the estuary, with alarming suddenness.
Danny cocked an eye at the hazy sun, discarded a vague twinge of anxiety and laughed. ‘Don’t matter. We’re all right. No sign of any fog.’ His own words helped ease the brief concern he had felt and he bent again to raking.
At midday, the weak low winter sun already dipping to the honzon, they rested for a few moments, laying down their rakes in the traditional way, points downward and trodden into the sand to prevent accidents by being stepped on. Anxious to get going again, they devoured their couple of thick cheese sandwiches, washed down with stewed tea. Then, rescuing their rakes, they carried on.
They would spend this evening boiling the cockles ready for a lorry to take the cooked meat to Billingsgate in the morning. It would mean Danny not seeing Holly this evening. He was missing her already. But Christmas would compensate for all that. She would be spending Christmas with his family. With no home of her own but a furnished room, his home was already becoming hers, his family hers. Weekends she was more with them than in that room which for all its pokiness she had done up prettily, made to look so bright. She’d do the same to his home. In fact by just being there she brightened it up. Mum loved her already. Dad too had taken to her. And she got on well with everyone she met, with Connie and even Josie whose head was forever in the clouds and as woolly.
Without glancing up, Pete with the instinct of the old cockler alert to the subtle change in the air that would escape other men observed quietly, ‘Tide’s on the turn.’ Today it would come in fast having been held back by a stiffening southwest breeze but there was nothing to be alarmed about.
‘Plenty of time,’ Danny muttered. The cockles were plentiful, the baskets were filling; thoughts of the profit they’d bring in made him headstrong. He continued raking. ‘We’ll see old Foley back any time now.’
To confirm it, he straightened up and broadened his gaze out to the horizon, hitherto much too preoccupied to look. Now what he saw brought a small crawling sensation of alarm along his backbone. He could not see the horizon. What was more, the sky had grown yellow, obscuring what little sunshine there had been. The Kent side of the estuary was no longer visible and a bank of mist was creeping in rolling tendrils to blot out the whole of the nearer shore. Even Canvey, low-lying, had disappeared.
The mud had begun to stir as if coming alive. Tiny rivulets of water were not so much flowing through the shallow grooves and depressions as filling them quietly. A while remained before the tide came in properly, but this with the now rapidly descending fog was its first sign. Danny recalled his earlier smirk at his uncle having worried about a few sticks. Put in at intervals they assured that if fog rolled in, the men wouldn’t lose touch with each other as they gathered the last of their harvest into their separate baskets. But where was Foley? No chance seeing his boat from a distance now. In a swiftly thickening fog, would he spot them? Anxiety, if not yet fear, was becoming real. Raking for cockles forgotten, Danny stared about him. This was becoming no joke.
With the fog had come a chill and he was glad of his heavy doubleknit sweater and the equally heavy oilskin coat, which he had laid across his basket as he had warmed up, but now quickly put back on.
Turning round, he realised he could no longer see his uncle. He could not be far away. ‘I’m over here,’ he called and heard the man’s answering call. ‘Here!’ But the now seemingly solid fog, having come up so fast, muffled the voice and he wasn’t certain from which direction it had come.
‘Where are you?’
‘Here. Where are you?’
‘Here.’
Stupid. Who could tell where ‘here’ was? ‘Just stay where you are,’ came the disembodied voice which no longer sounded like his uncle’s. ‘Don’t go wandering about and gettin’ y’self lost now.’
In the chill clinging shrouds, Danny did as he was told. His basket when he had last tipped his net of cockles into it had been some three or four yards away, to his left, or was it to his right?
Had he turned without realising it? ‘Pete – you still there?’ he called again.
‘Stay where you are,’ The reply sharpened his idea of making towards it.
‘Keep shouting,’ he cried. ‘I’ll find you.’
‘No, you’ll miss me. You could miss me by yards.’
He well knew what that could mean. Lost with an incoming tide. Even so, he couldn’t just stand here. He must have been standing still for quite a while because the water had reached him, moving around the soles of his thigh boots, softening the mud enough to cause his feet to sink into it if he dare move a few inches off. Normally there was nothing hazardous. One knew where the firm parts were and where the soft parts. It was no problem. Now it was. But he had to get nearer that hailing voice. He began to move.
Seconds later he seemed to have gone downhill sharply, water around his knees. He let out an exclamation, heard his uncle call, ‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ he called back, his own voice a lonely sound, surrounded by nothing but whiteness. ‘Just gone into a gully.’
‘I said don’t move, you bloody idiot!’
‘I’ve got to get back on to solid ground.’ But he had turned somehow, and stepping back on to what he expected to be solid footing, he slithered even more deeply into water that came instantly up to his thighs. Now which way? Panic was taking hold. Mindlessly he began to struggle. The tide had been coming in fast, but surely not this fast. Where was he?
‘Pete! Help me! I’m gettin’ out of me depth.’
Whether the voice answered or not, he didn’t know as, slipping, he found himself floundering. A white blanket seemed to have been wrapped around his head. He was all alone, isolated, unable to keep his footing, his thigh boots, his sodden heavy jumper and the oilskin coat all weighing him down. With the incoming tide driven before the stiff chilling breeze, the sea had become choppy. He choked as, losing his footing, water slapped into his mouth. God, the sea was cold. Beneath the water-logged jumper it chilled his flesh to the bone; his brain too in his panic had begun to feel frozen, totally incapable of conveying to him what he must do next.
Seconds later a figure appeared at his side, it too slithering, sliding, hands under his armpits, endeavouring vainly to hold him up. ‘I got yer.’ Pete’s voice. ‘You silly young bugger! Lucky I found …’ He stopped talking suddenly. ‘Listen!’
Out of the silence that surrounded them came a faint putt-putt-putt of a boat’s engine.
‘It’s him. It’s Foley. Thank Christ for that. Shout, Danny! Help! Over here. Help!’
Together they bawled into the fog, unable to tell which way to shout, just bellowing at the top of their lungs. Came another voice, hollow through a megaphone.
‘Hoy there! This is the Millicent. Who are you? Are you in trouble? What boat are you?’
Filling his lungs, Danny bellowed back. ‘We’re stranded on the mud, out of our depth.’ A wave spilled into his open mouth, entering his lungs like a deluge. He broke off, gasping for breath as another wave caught him.
‘Stay where you are,’ came back the voice. It was of course an utterly inane piece of advice. Where else would they go? But this time, Danny was sure he had got the direction of it. To his uncle he managed to splutter, ‘Swim for it. That way.’
‘I can’t,’ came the splutter. ‘Never could.’
Danny tried to hold his face above the splash of waves, finding it a losing battle. He couldn’t swim either, had never seen the point. Thanks to that oversight, came the odd thought, he was now on the point of drowning.
Visions of Connie’s Ben drowning off the gaswork’s jetty filled his mind. He heard himself yelling in panic. Then a voice came from somewhere above him. ‘We’re puttin’ down a skiff to look for you. Hold on.’
For a moment a p
artial break in the swirling fog revealed the boat to be a shrimper, no boom to her mainsail to make easier trawling. Then the shape vanished as fog closed in again.
But, chilled to the bone, the two men in the water felt hope rise as they strained for their feet to touch bottom, still not out of reach, though by now both were becoming desperate as the swiftly deepening water splashed their faces continuously, the sweep of the incoming tide threatening to take their feet from under them. If the skiff failed to find them in time …
Danny was yelling his lungs out, his uncle, finding the chill water overpowering, merely croaking and gasping. He in his state could go under before Danny did.
There came sounds of a skiff being lowered, the splash as it hit the water, voices, scraping sounds as men got themselves into the craft. A strange distracted thought entered Danny’s head as though in a dream. Why hadn’t he and Pete thought of bringing their own skiff with them? Old Foley would have taken it on board. And where was he? The boat here wasn’t his. And all the time Danny could hear himself yelling, ‘Over here! F’Christ sake! Over here!’ As if it wasn’t him at all who called, but someone else. He himself seemed to have no life left in him to yell.
Hands grasped him. Others hoisted his uncle. A voice, somehow familiar, was shouting. ‘Get a line to him! We’ll have to haul him up.’ But Danny could hear nothing as he was yelled at to catch the rope thrown to him, much less help himself. It floated uselessly by him; he had too much water in his body now to reach out and grab it, was totally frozen, incapable of doing anything constructive. ‘It’s no good,’ someone was shouting. ‘I’m going in to help him.’
Someone had leapt into the water beside him. A face came close to his, the words choking and spluttering. ‘Christ, I forgot, I’m no bloody great swimmer.’ Very few fishermen were, oddly enough. ‘But there weren’t no other way to get this rope to you.’ Forced to plunge several times beneath the surface, his rescuer, finally got a rope around him. Just hang on to me, Bowmaker. Right, there, haul away!’
The person knew his name? In all the flurry about him, Danny found himself wondering why. And why he should even think this with water going into his mouth, into his nose, swallowing it by the gallon so it felt. Maybe he was drowning. That too came as a distracted thought. Maybe Ben hadn’t felt anything either, just this helpless swallowing of water while thoughts floated across his brain.