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.
* * *
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.
A Friday teatime treat was Ganny’s fish pie, made with the scraps from the end of the catch: heads and tails and handfuls of brown shrimp, dabs and sprats too small to weigh and sell. She always let me mash the potatoes to go on top; standing on a stool to see over the edge of the bowl, it took both my hands to press down with the masher and squeeze the lumpy mixture up through the mesh of tiny, diamond holes until it curled and toppled like lugworm casts in the sand. I could shell the peas, too, sending them popping from the pod to rattle and jump in the enamel basin. I even sliced the slippery, eye-streaming onions with the little vegetable knife, but I wasn’t allowed to touch Ganny’s filleting knife – ‘your Uncle Billy’s knife’, though he died before I was born and was never as old as I am now. Billy the Kid is what Ganny and Gampa used to call him, and it suited him better than Uncle. That’s what he stayed, after all – forever a kid of fifteen.
Billy’s loss was the first to line her face – still a young face in the photographs before his death, abruptly aged in those taken after. The first loss: but its mark was criss-crossed over with many more. There was Gampa, of course – a long, drawn-out departure, first in the bedroom they shared and then in the little back parlour when they moved him downstairs. Hushed and curtained, it felt like church when they nudged me in at the doorway, the figure in the bed less Gampa than a plaster saint. It was a tumour in the colon, releasing and reseizing him, cruel as a cat; they must surely have wished he could follow his son down swiftly underwater, and never come up for air. Cancer played games, too, with Ganny’s friend Rebecca; hers was in the kidney and looked to be beaten, Ganny told us, before it came back everywhere at once and took her quickly in the end. With Harry Housego next door, who’d survived the war and German prison camp with nothing worse than the shade of a limp, it was, finally, his heart; his friend Philip Root had fought in the Battle of Britain but died in his armchair at the nursing home in front of Bargain Hunt. Then there was old Rose W
ilderspin who nursed her Albert for five whole years before outliving him by less than one, succumbing to septicaemia after she fell among the raspberry canes on her allotment. ‘It’ll soon be only me left,’ Ganny likes to say, with as much determined pride as sadness.
Mackerel was always my favourite. Sometimes she fetched smoked ones from Mr Peckitt’s smokehouse, which was just a shed with a stovepipe chimney. She’d bring them home in a packet of greaseproof paper, folded in at the corners as neat as a hospital bed. Old Tom Peckitt, according to Ganny, had been in the Post Office and before that the army, and must have learnt those corners in one or the other. The skin takes on a coppery sheen in the smoke, one colour overlaying another like the foil and cellophane on a Quality Street. I used to beg Ganny to let me peel it off, as satisfying as easing the scab from new pink skin. We’d eat it just as it came, squashing the flesh onto triangles of toast that were cut so thin they’d curled up their corners to the grill and dried to a clean snap. Real smoked mackerel – Mr Peckitt’s smoked mackerel – is a world away from the sad little fillets you buy in Sainsbury’s, with the colour of burnt toffee and a texture to match. It’s the colour of creamy café au lait and so soft you’d think it had been whipped, and there’d be just the fish and the toast and a jar of Ganny’s cucumber pickle.
Best of all, though, I liked them straight from the catch, silver and black, so gleaming fresh you’d think they’d flip and flop away from Ganny’s surgeon fingers and Uncle Billy’s knife. I loved to watch her at work. In no time at all there’d be two perfect fillets, jacketed in oatmeal and sizzling in the pan.
* * *
It was years before Mother even told me he was a boy, Frank’s baby. Yet I still felt his absence like the loss of a limb. That’s what you hear people say, isn’t it, but it’s not quite right. He was dragged from inside me before his time, a bloody bundle – ‘flesh of my flesh’ as the Bible says. It wasn’t like an arm or a leg torn off with the splinter of bone but something more slippery, something inside, and it left me emptied out, a gutted fish on the slab. It floored me far worse than the news, when it came, about Frank, whose face and voice by then had faded in my mind until he felt as if I’d made him up, with no real existence of his own outside the weekly storybook of his letters.
If Frank’s boy had lived he’d have been thirteen when I married Bill, and very soon another man to help out on the boat. If he’d lived, then maybe our Billy would have stayed at home that day, stayed safe at home until he was grown. There are fewer drownings on the boats these days; you never seem to hear of them, at least. The ship-to-shore is better now, for if they run into trouble – digital, like everything else. And the forecasting, too: they always seem to know when storms are on the way. Although, of course, when Billy went it wasn’t in a storm – just an averagely heavy swell, as Bill told the coroner. He was reaching to release a tangle in the nets and he slipped and went over, got himself trapped beneath the hull. Death by misadventure is what they called it. Just one of those things.
Frank was a farmer before he was a soldier, though the good Lord spared him few years for either. But Bill was always a fisherman. It was in his blood, and through him in our Billy’s, too. It was Bill who was the Aldeburgh boy: the boat had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s before. Me, I’ve lived here all my life: in this village, in this cottage. I was born in the big iron bed upstairs which still feels empty without Bill beside me. My marriage to Frank was restricted to his leaves so we never had a chance to set up house; when he left me expecting, I was glad to be at home with Mother. After the war there were no jobs for women, and Father, then Mother needed looking after. By the time they were gone... well, by then I was courting Bill. I look at little Hattie with the world at her feet: her olives in Italy, her PhD. But in those days things were different. It really never crossed my mind to leave.
* * *
Eighty-nine years, and all in one place, is impossible to imagine. I’ve lived for less than a quarter of that, but I’ve combed beaches on three continents; I’ve snorkelled among corals, and looked through a microscope at xenophyophores from three thousand metres down on the deep seabed. I’ve visited half the capitals of Europe and lived in one of them, while Ganny’s never even been on the Tube.
The boat was Gampa’s but the cottage was Ganny’s, left to her in the fifties when her parents died. She was getting on for thirty when Gampa married her and moved in, but she still looks skinny, a mere child, in their only wedding photograph, clutching the arm of a stocky, weather-beaten man of twenty-two. It seems odd to think she’d been married before. A widow. The word seems all wrong for the girl back then who’s half as wide as Gampa and squinting against the sun, though she grew into it much later in her second widowhood.
Grew into the cottage, too: although it’s only her now, she still seems to fill it. But when I think back it was maybe always that way, inside the house. Down at the beach and on his boat, Gampa felt like a giant to me, with his broad jaw and arms like knotted cables, and his great, square hands in constant motion. Indoors, though, he was a very different man: still, quiescent, he hardly seemed to fill the space he stood up in. A big fish, they say, don’t they, in a small pond. And Ganny was always mistress of hers, while Gampa came and went like the shoals he followed, out in his boat to the fishing grounds but back every evening to his chair by the fire. Rather like the fish themselves, in fact. I read how North Sea mackerel in the same way as salmon run each spring and autumn between feeding grounds and spawning grounds a thousand miles apart, drawn by who knows what deep patterning of under-water currents or ancestral memory or DNA, and always to the same square mile of sea.
And here am I, too, swimming back home in the familiar channel. Woodbridge, Melton, Wickham Market. Funny how, in all those years of incanting the names, it never struck me as strange that the station known as Wickham Market should actually be at Campsea Ashe. There’s been no car to meet us here since Gampa died. There was no persuading Ganny behind the wheel, and the old Humber rusted under the apple tree for years before it finally disappeared, whether sold or gone for scrap I never knew. There’s a taxi firm in Wickham that we normally use but today I can’t resist the lure of the lush June lanes, dripping with late afternoon insects and the musk of elderflower. I’ll walk.
* * *
Bill was the Aldeburgh boy – have I already said? He was the one with brine in his veins while I am the landlubber, born and raised six miles inland. Most of the Aldeburgh fishermen live in the town, but Bill’s family were only the tenants of their two-up two-down in the little flint terrace, one row in from the beach. He had the boat but I had the house, so Blaxhall was where we made our home. It has the feel of seafarer’s country, even this far from the coast. From November to March every dip in the lanes seems to fill with water but in summer it’s sand that gathers in the hollows.
This is a land of sand. The earth hereabouts is nothing but; it’s a wonder anything grows in it at all. On the common it’s a pale powder grey, soft as ash and lifted by the slightest breeze, but on the roads it’s as golden yellow as any treasure island beach. Every May or June it starts its creeping invasion, sending fingers across the tarmac from right and left. Baked to dust by the sun, it shakes out from around the feet of the bracken and cow parsley, the campion and cuckooflowers which swell the verges. You could almost fancy it the work of strange, secret tides which rise in the night to cover the fields and lanes, then slip away before daylight to leave new spits and sandbars like a signature on the landscape. A land with the imprint of the sea.
The house is never free of it either, however often you sweep. It blows in on the draft through doors and windows, sneaks in on feet and clothes disguised as mud but dries to fall as sand and settle in the cracks and creases of the furniture, and form small dunes, if you’d let it, behind doors and in corners. Once I found a miniature cockleshell, finer than the finest bone china, just lying on the kitchen floor. I’ll never know how it came to be there.
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sp; * * *
Ganny found a seashell, one time, inside the cottage. She revealed it to me like a secret. She’d kept it safe in her old tartan shortbread tin on the top shelf of the dresser, with her hoard of hag stones and the change for the paper boy on Fridays. Letters, too, tatty and yellowed, bound up in a bundle with string. From her first husband, she said, who died in the war – Frank, his name was – but she never offered to untie them. The shell was perfect and pearly white, as tiny and translucent as a newborn baby’s fingernail.
Some of the hag stones were ours – Sam’s and Jonah’s and mine – that we’d found with Ganny down on the beach while Gampa plucked snags of weed from his nets. Don’t get your feet wet, she’d say, and end by standing with you, holding hands, with the foam washing over your shoe-tops. The stones only have power to ward off ill luck if the sea has worn right through them. Some have a hole so big they’re like a pebble amulet, but others you have to hold up to the light, or against the back of your hand and blow to check if you can feel your breath. The larger ones Ganny strung outside by the cottage door, but the smaller ones went in the shortbread tin. What with her hag stones and her herbs and infusions – willow bark for sprains, clove for toothache, sage for throats, green mint for chests – they might have thought her a witch in the old days. But fishing folk are a superstitious lot, and wouldn’t think twice about it. I’ve seen some of the men loop a hag stone on a string around their neck when they put the boat out. Maybe Billy the Kid should have worn one.
The sun is still like a three-bar fire on the back of my neck although it’s nearly six o’clock and the skylarks, from an invisible altitude, are babbling their salute to what’s been a blazing day. From unbroken blue three hours ago in London the sky has acquired, arcing in from the west, that high fan vault of rippled cloud that Ganny taught us to call a mackerel sky. It came as a surprise, years later, to discover that it wasn’t just her name for it.
Sandlands Page 23