‘I suppose he wants to make a living. I suppose he’d like command of another ship. If he’d stood up in court and said anything the owners didn’t like, do you really think he’d ever have got one?’
‘Do you think they actually wanted to lose her?’ Margaret asked.
‘Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that, but it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, isn’t it? And my guess is that the wind that sank the Sprite probably blew the owners a nice cheque from the insurance for a leaky old tub that was costing them more money than she was earning. Which would you rather have, in their shoes? I’m just glad that Alec sailed in her in August, and not January.’
‘It’s a pity anybody ever sailed in her at all,’ Margaret said. ‘I think the reports on the other two are a bit fairer, though. Nobody ever said there was anything wrong with them. And the weather was bad. The worst storms since 1925. All the fishermen were saying so.’
Margaret seemed to take comfort from feeling that the Miranda was a good ship, that the owners had raised the alarm straightaway, and that Jim hadn’t been callously left to his fate, but talking about the disasters enraged Lynn, especially talking about the Sprite. Could she do it? Could she stay the course as a fisherman’s wife? She was sure she could do it, because she was going into it with her eyes wide open, with no illusions about it whatsoever. She knew what she was in for, and would not have done it for any man in this wide world other than Alec McCaulay. In another six days he would be home again.
So much waiting and worrying, she thought. So little time together.
*
The skipper’s would-be wife and the third-hand’s widow were together on Christmas Eve in the house on Snuff Mill Lane. It contained a few new pieces of furniture, bought from the proceeds of Alec’s last trip, and all thoughts of selling it seemed to have fallen into abeyance. Five Christmas stockings stuffed with goodies were hanging from the mantelpiece and the tree was decorated, with parcels placed underneath it, their beautiful wrappings waiting to be ripped off by five eager young boys in the morning.
‘I saw three ships come sailing in . . .’ The sweet old carol was playing on the radio. If only, Lynn thought. If only those three ships had come sailing in, her nephews would still have a devoted father, and Margaret a husband who truly loved her. ‘And what was in those ships all three . . . ?’ The loves, hopes and support of sixty families, their men and their boys.
She shivered. Alec had been given his first command, of an old ship, by common report not much better than the Sprite. After everything he’d said about the Sprite he’d sailed on one that was nearly as bad, in the middle of winter, his only justification being: ‘Well, you could stay ashore and get knocked down by a bus, couldn’t you?’ Whatever was wrong with these men, she wondered? He had an old or inexperienced crew – men like him, who would work when nobody else wanted to, either in hopes of getting a better ship next trip, or because they desperately needed a job. But at least she was watertight and they’d sailed with a radio operator. The women’s campaign had achieved the miracle of making trawling safer, but no one could prevent hurricanes or black frost, and in such conditions a ship like his might be capsized and gone to the bottom before any mother-ship could rescue it. She went to the window and pulled the curtain back to stare out at the weather, and wonder what it was like in the Arctic. Her Christmas wouldn’t start until she saw him again. This was what fate had always had in store for her, she realised. It just showed you how useless it is to try and resist it.
Not for them, though. Not for Simon – or Margaret’s lads, if she could help it. She wanted them all to see that there was another life – a better life, away from the fishing industry. For that she had to get them away from Hessle Road as much as she could, away from the docks, and the smell and the spell of the sea.
On that starry, freezing Christmas Eve Alec was at the wheel on the ship he’d nicknamed ‘the slow boat to China’. He ordered the mate to shoot the trawl, hoping he’d calculated right and teeming shoals of beautiful fish were below, just waiting to swim into his Christmas stocking. Just hope it stayed calm enough for long enough for them to stuff the fish room with more than enough quality fish to please the gaffers and let them make for home, as fast as the engineers could coax this old tub to move.
The sparks came out of the radio room to put an end to that pleasant prospect. They had hurricane force winds heading their way, according to a report from the Icelandic weather station. They might just have time to haul the net and run nose to wind for shelter, otherwise they’d have to keep ‘dodging’ and ride it out.
He gave the sparks a grim smile and the adrenaline started to pump. Prepare for the worst, Alec. Battling gales and black ice with this crew would be a challenge for anybody – even the master mariner he knew he was fast becoming. Full credit to the women’s campaign, they’d improved the odds, but if they were caught in anything over a force eight in this old ship she’d stand a fair chance of sinking, radio operators and mother-ships regardless.
There was one thing for certain. However bad it was, he would never tell Lynn. The most he would ever say to her would be:
‘We’ve had a bad trip, and I’m glad to be home.’
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to:
John Conolly, songwriter and performer, for permission to use the words of his song ‘The Trawling Trade’;
The volunteer tour guides of the ‘Arctic Corsair’, Hull’s last sidewinder trawler, located behind the Streetlife Museum on the River Hull and maintained by Hull City Council;
The staff of Hull History Centre, Hull Libraries, and Hull Museums;
Dr Alec Gill, for his many books and videos on the subject of Hull’s fishing heritage;
Stuart Russell, former journalist, for his book Dark Winter;
Austin Mitchell and Anne Tate, for their book, Fishermen – The Rise and Fall of Deep Water Fishing;
William Mitford, for Lovely She Goes;
Jeremy Tunstall, for The Fishermen – The sociology of an extreme occupation;
James Greene, for Rough Seas – The Life of a Deep-Sea Trawlerman;
Jim Williams, for Swinging the Lamp and a very informative pamphlet about the ‘Arctic Corsair’;
Brian Lavery, for The Headscarf Revolutionaries: Lillian Bilocca and the Hull Triple Trawler Disaster;
Rupert Creed, for his play ‘The Northern Trawl’.
My gratitude also goes to many other less well-known writers on the fishing industry and Hull’s fishing community, and to all those people who have shared their experiences on the internet.
The daughter of a Durham miner, Annie Wilkinson now lives in Hull where she divides her time between supporting her father and helping with grandchildren.
Also by Annie Wilkinson
A Sovereign for a Song
Winning a Wife
No Price Too High
For King and Country
Sing Me Home
Angel of the North
The Land Girls
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2017
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