By the time George and Tom pushed open the door of the cottage the thaw which had been heralded by some of the old-timers - who considered themselves weather experts - was busy melting the ice and snow outside to thick slush and mud, something Daisy hated. Twilight had long since fallen, and inside the oil lamps had been lit.
Daisy was sitting working at the net on the stool they kept for such a purpose, Nellie was dozing in her bed on the other side of the room, and the smell of the evening meal hung in the air. The mellow light from the lamps and the soft glow from the range showed the living room’s meagre furniture to its best advantage. This consisted of a square wooden table covered with oilcloth around which six straight-backed chairs were placed, a wooden saddle devoid of cushions which stood flat against the wall opposite Nellie’s low platform bed, and a smaller table to one side of the range upon which sat the pots and pans and big black kettle.
Daisy jumped up at the men’s entrance; a sleety rain had been drumming at the windows impatiently for the last hour or more and she knew they must be wet through. ‘You got her ready for tomorrow, Da?’ Her father’s boat, like so many, had been pummelled viciously throughout the winter, but the last fishing trip had been the worst yet. It added insult to injury that most of the fishermen had been forced to work repairing the damage to boats and nets throughout the next day which had been the calmest for some time.
‘Aye, she’ll do.’ George was a man of few words but his smile was tender as he looked at his daughter. He was not a God-fearing man like some in the village who would no sooner have missed the Sunday meeting at Whitburn church than ceased breathing, but he believed his Daisy was a gift from the Almighty right enough, and made sure he thanked Him for her daily. And he knew his love was reciprocated. Daisy might be close to her granny - and that was good with Mary being taken when the lass was nowt but a wee bairn - but the feeling between him and his last child was something rare and precious.
In spite of his being away for days and nights on end, it had always been him Daisy had run to when she’d hurt herself as a bairn, even when Mary had been alive. Him she’d told her secrets to, him who had received her baby kisses. He knew their Tom thought he was soft the way he was with the lass, but George didn’t care. He hadn’t cared from the day she was born and had gripped his finger with her tiny hand. He thought a bit of his lads, aye, and still mourned the two who had never reached their first birthday, but Daisy provided a light and joy in his soul that no one else ever had.
‘There’s your dry clothes in the scullery an’ the meal’ll be ready when you are.’
‘Right you are, lass.’
George nodded at Nellie who was now sitting up in the bed as he walked across the room followed by his youngest son. As Tom passed his sister he tweaked one of her shining braids of hair, saying, ‘I hope you’ve mended that net to my standards, little ’un,’ which Daisy answered by sticking out her tongue at him.
Once the scullery door was shut she busied herself setting three places at the table and heating a little more broth for her granny. She didn’t attempt to get the creosote off her hands, knowing from experience it would take a good while with the blue-veined soap and the scrubbing brush in the scullery before the stain would begin to shift, but as she began to serve up the meal she was humming to herself. If she married Alf, he wouldn’t mind her still nipping along to see to her da and Tom and granny, she knew that. He understood that looking after her granny was like caring for a bairn, with the washing and feeding and making sure she was able to use the chamber pot when she needed it, and that her da and Tom would need a hot meal every night they weren’t out on the water. Aye, he’d understand all that.
As Daisy began to sing ‘Blaydon Races’, more enthusiastically than tunefully, Nellie found herself relaxing back against her bolster again with a small smile touching her slightly blue lips. Her lass was singing and that was a good sign. It would all come right, Daisy and Alf, once the lass had had a chance to think about him as a lad and not as one of the family. Daisy was canny, she’d see what side her bread was buttered sure enough.
Nellie shut her eyes, the agitation and panic which had been making her heart race ever since Daisy had arrived home beginning to subside. She wanted to see her lass settled and happy before the Good Lord called her home, and there was none better for her than Alf. Not on this side of the ocean. Salt of the earth, Alf was, and he was right gone on the lass. Anyone could see that. Daisy would be safe married to him and she was too beautiful to be left to her own devices for long. They weren’t all like Alf, not by a long chalk. But it would be all right; if she knew anything about Alf Hardy he wouldn’t take no for an answer where Daisy was concerned.
A touch of excitement took hold as Nellie pictured Daisy on Alf’s arm, and then as mistress of the bonny little cottage at the far end of the village. The next few months were going to be ones of change, she felt it in her water, and pray God it would all be good.
Chapter Two
Daisy was the first to rise early the next morning as was normally the case when her father and brother were taking the boat out. She always slept in her vest, flannel drawers and shift in the colder months, over which she wore a long calico nightgown, and after sliding her feet out of bed she made her way downstairs in the pitch blackness, feeling her way until she could light the oil lamp. Over the years she had perfected the exercise until now she moved without a sound.
Her granny’s rasping snores told her the old woman was fast asleep. She made her way to the table, and once the lamp was lit padded into the icy-cold scullery where she stripped, hastily washing herself all over with water from the barrel and the blue-veined soap which never lathered.
By the time Daisy had donned her underclothes again her teeth were chattering, and after nipping through to the main room once more she quickly gathered her petticoat, thick serge dress, shawl and boots from a chair in front of the range where she had placed them the night before to catch any warmth from the fire.
After dressing she wasted no time in stoking up the range and putting fresh wood and coal on the fire, once she had raked out the ashes and tipped them into the bucket for the privy. Then the kettle was on the hob, and the big pan of porridge she had prepared the night before - so the oats were well soaked - was warming. She always made sure her father and Tom went out into the raw mornings with a full belly, and there was nothing like an outsize bowl of hot salty porridge made stiff enough to hold the spoon for warming a man through.
‘You want a sup tea, Gran?’
Nellie had been awake for a few minutes but lying quietly. Now the old woman hitched herself up in the bed as she answered, ‘When you’re ready, me bairn, when you’re ready.’
In the distance a ship’s horn made a low, drawn-out sound, eerie and melancholy, and Daisy paused in mashing the tea, her gaze going to the window where a tired dawn was struggling to break through the greyness. The seagulls were already flying and calling in the thin early light, for all the world like hungry bairns crying for their mam’s milk.
Daisy shivered. In spite of the fact that she had grown up with the plaintive sound she had never got used to it, and on mornings like this, when it was bitterly cold and windy and her father and Tom were going out on the water, the birds’ cries always made goose-pimples prick her skin.
And then she made an impatient movement, shaking the foreboding away. She hadn’t got time to woolgather, for goodness’ sake. There was the breakfast to see to and the men’s poke to get ready. After handing her grandmother a cup of black tea with a spoonful of sugar, Daisy sliced up the remainder of the mardy cake from the night before. She dropped this into the poke - a hessian bag which the men took on board with them - together with a couple of large potatoes which had been baked in their jackets in the ashes of the fire, the last of a piece of brisket cut into two hefty shives, and two apples from a supply stored on a rack suspended beneath the ceiling in the scullery.
That would keep her da and Tom going till
they got home to a good meal. She already had the rent money put away, and with what she had got for the fish yesterday could do some baking today once she had been to the mill. The farmer’s boy had promised to slip her a couple of rabbits when he brought the milk, so she could make a humpty-backed pie with one and a good pot of broth for tomorrow with the other. And she’d make a sly cake as well as some loaves of bread, and some drop scones for her granny to have with Mrs Hardy’s crab apple jelly.
Daisy found herself smiling at the thought of the food and straightened her face quickly as she heard the menfolk descending the stairs. Eeh, they’d think she’d gone doo-lally if she greeted them grinning like a Cheshire cat, and Tom wouldn’t miss such an opportunity to make some sly remark or other. And it was too early in the morning to chaff with her brother.
‘Somethin’ smells good, lass.’
It was her father’s stock greeting in the morning but always said with genuine approval, and now, as George and Tom - fully dressed - seated themselves at the table, Daisy bustled about serving up the porridge and pouring cups of strong black tea.
Tom sat looking at the slender comely figure of his sister, but he was thinking about Alf. Had he asked her? Alf had been all fired up to take the plunge the last time they’d spoken, and about time too. And he wasn’t just thinking about his friend here. He loved Daisy, ’course he did, she was his sister and a good lass at heart, but she was too headstrong, too wilful, for her own good. Fisherwomen were bred to be gutsy; in the harsh battle for survival they needed to be every bit as strong as their men, but they didn’t all look like Daisy and therein lay the root of his concern. She was beautiful as well as bull-headed.
Tom ran his hand over his face as his conscience pricked him. By, he was a fine one to talk about bull-headedness, the mess he was in. He’d known he was sailing close to the wind when he’d taken up with Margery, her being a miner’s daughter and all, but from the first time he had seen her one Sunday when he and Alf had gone for a walk into Whitburn, he had wanted her. He had broken the unspoken but nevertheless cast-iron rule that fishermen only went for fishergirls, a rule he himself was fully in agreement with - or had been until he had set eyes on Marge and lost all reason.
‘Here, lad.’ As Daisy placed a bowl of steaming porridge in front of him, Tom nodded his thanks, picking up his spoon and beginning to shovel the food into his mouth without really tasting it.
The fishing communities up and down the coast were close-knit and tight, they had to be to survive. Hadn’t his granny told them tales of how hard she had found it to be accepted when she’d first come here, and her a fishergirl from just a few miles up the coast at that? But that was the way of things.
Tom took a long pull at the scalding hot tea, burning his tongue in the process. But a miner’s lass . . . What did a landlubber know about gutting and sorting fish, mending the nets, smoking and wind-drying the fish, and a hundred other things besides? He didn’t know a fisher lass who didn’t have red swollen hands and skin as brown as a nut. They were born old. And there was Marge - white porcelain skin, hair as fair and fine as thistledown and blue eyes so light they seemed to reflect any colour she was looking at. But he loved her, and she loved him, enough to want to be with him as his wife and take on a new life that would be hell on earth at first. He’d warned her, aye, he had that to his credit at least. He hadn’t dressed it up at all.
He would have to tell his da properly, this couldn’t go on any longer. Six months he’d been seeing Marge on the sly, and the first time he had mentioned her to his da had been a week or so ago and then only in passing, while her parents didn’t even know he existed. But after what had happened that time they’d been sheltering in a cave when a sudden squall had threatened to soak them through, he had discovered he couldn’t trust himself alone with Marge. He had made sure they always stayed in the town after that afternoon, heaven though it had been. It was dangerous to be around other folk, there was always the chance someone might see them and go blabbing to her father, but once he had told his da he was going to marry Marge, he would go and see her parents. He’d had a bellyful of this skulking around.
‘. . . eh, Tom?’
‘What?’ Tom came back to the present with a start, glancing at his father who had obviously been speaking to him.
‘What’s the matter with you, lad? You’d better wake up afore we get on the boat else you’ll do neither of us no good. I was just sayin’ to the lass here that we’ll need a nice bit of coke an’ wood for the smoke house when we’re back, God willin’. The last couple of trips haven’t given us much, we’re due a good ’un.’
‘I’ll go up into the woods an’ get some oak twigs an’ such an’ all, Da. They give such a nice taste, don’t they?’ Daisy, after one quick glance at her brother, filled in the awkward pause after her father had finished speaking. What was the matter with their Tom? He hadn’t been himself lately. He had never been what you’d call a talker - not like Alf who was a born comedian - but he’d normally sit and chat with her da in the morning and last thing at night. Lately it had been all you could do to get a word out of him.
‘Aye, you do that, lass. Makes all the difference, a bit of oak.’ George’s smoke house - a narrow wooden single-storey construction situated outside next to the privy - was his pride and joy. He had built it himself when he’d got married, using bricks for the floor from a derelict cottage he’d found one day on the way to Boldon. The tiled roof with its smokeholes had come from the same source, and with its rows of wooden rods on which fish were hung to cure it was a neat little enterprise, as was the wooden frame outside on which the fishing nets were hung to dry.
The men ate their food quickly; Daisy was only halfway through her bowl of porridge when they left the cottage. She knew better than to wish them well or look out of the window at the boats leaving, but by six o’clock the beach was devoid of any apart from one which had been too badly damaged in the recent storms to go out, and on which two fishermen of about Tom’s age were already working. No fishing meant no money, and both men had young families to feed.
They paused in their work on the coble as Daisy walked past on her way to collect the milk and rabbits from the farmer’s boy. Every morning he walked the donkey as far as the first cottage in the village and there he stood, whatever the weather, from half-past six until whenever the last of the milk had been sold.
‘How’s yer granny this mornin’, lass? The wife heard she was middlin’,’ one of the men called over the rising wind.
‘A bit better.’ Daisy smiled back at their grinning faces. She liked these two and had danced at their weddings with the other bairns a few years before. Now she put her concern to them as she said, ‘The wind’s gettin’ worse, isn’t it? An’ it’s straight from the north, an’ the sea’s got choppier since the boats left. Do you think there’s goin’ to be another storm? I thought things would get better now it’s a bit milder.’
‘Aw, don’t you fret, lass.’ The man who had spoken before gestured at his boat. ‘Old Neptune did enough damage last trip to keep him happy for a time. Fair ripped the guts out of her, he did.’
Daisy nodded. It was meant to be comforting, she knew that, but looking at their boat was just the opposite. The coble was the type of vessel all the villagers used - flat-bottomed for stability, shaped to be launched direct from the beach with the tarpaulin stretched like a tent across the bow and a long tiller handle the size of an elephant’s trunk. The tillers were made of strong oak but this one had been snapped right off, and there was plenty of other damage too. And if she wasn’t much mistaken it looked as though the storm clouds were gathering more thickly with every minute that ticked by after the relative calm of the day before.
Nellie said as much when Daisy entered the cottage with the tins of milk and two rabbits, the latter gained by bartering some fine red herrings which the boy’s mother was partial to. ‘Light the lamp again, hinny, it’s grown as dark as night since you’ve bin gone. If you’re goin’
to get them oak twigs an’ the flour, I reckon you’d better be quick about it.’
Daisy was quick, but by the time she got home again just before noon the weather had turned nasty. It took her almost five minutes of standing over the fire’s glow to thaw out frozen, almost helpless hands and body, and then the tingling intensity of feeling was such that it brought tears to her eyes.
There were still the usual dirty coasters with salt-caked smoke stacks, schooners and square riggers on the horizon, but by late afternoon, when the smell of cooking was redolent in the cottage and elemental alchemy had turned slanting sheets of rain to sleet, the seething cauldron that was the ocean was deserted.
‘Come away from that window, lass. You’re givin’ me the willies hoverin’ about like a lost soul. The boats might well have put in up the coast till the storm’s over. It wouldn’t be the first time.’
Candles in the Storm Page 4