The Harbour Girl Read online

  The Harbour Girl

  Val Wood

  Random House (2012)

  Tags: Divorce & Separation, Family Life, General, Romance, Family & Relationships, Sagas, Fiction

  * * *

  Synopsis

  Scarborough, 1880. Young Jeannie spends her days watching her mother and the other harbour girls sitting at the water's edge - mending nets, gutting herring - and waiting for her friend Ethan Wharton to come in on his father's fishing smack. As she was growing up, Jeannie always expected to marry Ethan, who is loyal and dependable. But then she meets Harry - a stranger who has come to visit from Hull for the day - and she falls for him. He is exciting and irresistible, and seems very keen on her. But he breaks his promise to come back for her, and Jeannie finds herself young, pregnant and feeling very isolated. Jeannie moves to the port town of Hull where her new, difficult life with a child - touched by illness, tragedy and poverty - is often made bearable by the kindness of others. But she finds herself wishing for the simpler times of her past, wondering if she will ever find someone who will truly love her - and if Ethan will ever forgive her...

  About the Book

  Scarborough, 1880.

  Young Jeannie spends her days watching her mother and the other harbour girls sitting at the water’s edge – mending nets, gutting herring – and waiting for her friend Ethan Wharton to come in on his father’s fishing smack.

  As she was growing up, Jeannie always expected to marry Ethan, who is loyal and dependable. But then she meets Harry – a stranger who has come to visit from Hull for the day – and she falls for him. He is exciting and irresistible, and seems very keen on her. But he breaks his promise to come back for her, and Jeannie finds herself young, pregnant and feeling very isolated.

  Jeannie moves to the port town of Hull where her new, difficult life with a child – touched by illness, tragedy and poverty – is often made bearable by the kindness of others. But she finds herself wishing for the simpler times of her past, wondering if she will ever find someone who will truly love her – and if Ethan will ever forgive her...

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  About the Author

  Also by Val Wood

  Copyright

  THE

  HARBOUR GIRL

  Val Wood

  To my family with love, and for Peter

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SPECIAL THANKS ARE due to Dr Robb Robinson who kindly and generously gave me permission to use his informative and interesting book Trawling: The Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Industry (Exeter University Press), and to thank him, too, for his patience in answering my ingenuous questions on the subject of fishing.

  Also to Jim Porter of The Bosun’s Watch and Chris Pether-bridge’s Hull Trawler site: Hull Trawler – Smack to Stern, www.hulltrawler.net.

  The Scarborough Maritime Heritage website is a most excellent site and I give my sincere thanks to the archivist for allowing me to use the information therein. In particular, I must mention the factual details regarding the Great Storm of October 1880 in which many ships and lives were lost and which I was able to incorporate as part of my fictional story.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Scarborough, 1880

  THE DOOR IN the wall had been bricked up for many years, long before Jeannie was born. There had once been a shop there and the door had been regularly used, but when the shopkeeper died the building was turned into a rooming house and another door opened up, rendering the original obsolete. It had been blocked roughly and hastily and wasn’t level with the wall, leaving a niche about a brick and a half deep, a space just right for a small thin girl to shelter in. From inside this narrow refuge Jeannie could see her mother’s back as she sat deftly mending nets, and watch the harbour.

  Had her mother known she was there, she would undoubtedly have told her to go back home to Sandside, or sent her to buy bread or call on Granny Marshall with a message, and Jeannie didn’t want to do any of those things. She wanted to wait for Ethan Wharton to sail into harbour in his father’s fishing smack. Ethan was twelve, four years older than her, and he would know that she was there, watching him, so would make a great show of bringing in the vessel without a scrape and tying up with assumed casualness below the castle hill, close by the warehouses and the boat builders’ slipway.

  There she is, she thought, her keen eyes picking out the Bonnie Lass as she nosed her way through the waterway, screeching herring gulls following in the wake. Jeannie’s mother turned her head.

  ‘Jeannie!’ When Mary spoke the name it sounded like Jinnie. She had chosen the name Jeannette, after her own Scottish grandmother. ‘Jeannie,’ she called again, ‘come here. I know you’re there. You can’t hide from me, bairn.’

  ‘How did you know I was there?’ Jeannie asked from behind her.

  ‘Ah! Your mother knows everything.’ Mary Marshall looked up from beneath the shawl which covered her red hair to smile at her daughter. ‘Go now and tell Josh Wharton to go home immediately. There’s news waiting for him.’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘Never you mind.’ Mary’s eyes went back to the nets. ‘He’ll know. And come straight back; I need you for a message to your gran. Don’t dally talking to Ethan. He’s plenty to do without you bothering him.’

  Jeannie opened her mouth to reply, but her mother waved a swift hand so instead she ran barefoot towards the slipway, avoiding the nets and ropes and lobster baskets, to where she could see Ethan, his older brother Mark and their father bent low over their catch.

  ‘Mr Wharton,’ she piped. ‘You’ve to go home straight away.’

  Josh Wharton looked up, pushed back his sea-stained hat and grinned. He said something to his two sons, then stepped quickly off the Bonnie Lass and ran to the cliff path, up the narrow streets and alleyways of Sandside towards the cottages clustered below the castle walls, which seemed from down below to be built one on top of another, their red roofs overlapping.

  Jeannie walked towards the smack. ‘Hello, Ethan,’ she said shyly.

  He nodded, felt fo
r something in his pocket and beckoned her closer. ‘Here.’ He held out his hand. ‘Da said I’d to give you a penny.’

  She took it. ‘What’s it for?’

  He shrugged. ‘Bringing the message, I suppose.’

  ‘Why did he have to go home?’

  He lifted up a pail and turned his head away, a flush creeping up his neck. ‘To see Ma, I expect. She’s having a babby.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jeannie said. ‘I didn’t know.’ She was cross that she didn’t know. She would have liked to announce that his mother had been delivered of a baby girl or boy. But maybe that was why her mother hadn’t told her, knowing that she would blurt out the news.

  ‘Did you get a good catch?’ she asked, and he nodded. They’d gone out last night, when the sea was calm and there was a moon; it would have been a good night for fishing. Not like the night two years ago when her father had gone out and hadn’t come back. She only just remembered him. A Scarborough man born and bred, her mother was proud of saying, as his father and grandfather were before him, though his grandmother, Alice, came from a Hull whaling family.

  Jeannie’s mother had been a Scottish fisher lass who had come down from Fraserburgh to Scarborough following the herring fleet; she’d met Jeannie’s father, Jack Foster Marshall, and never went home again. Mary was never short of work: she was swift and sure when mending nets, and during the herring season – between October or November to March – she went back to her old job on the quay, gutting and curing the ‘silver darlings’, and filling and rolling the huge storage barrels. Best of all were the times when the Scottish fisher girls arrived, for her own mother still came with them and Mary could catch up with news from home.

  She had not stopped working after the tragedy of losing her husband to the sea, for she had a young family to feed. Jeannie had been only six, a year younger than her brother Tom. Tom wanted to go to sea like his father, and had already been promised a job with a family friend as soon as he was twelve.

  If Mary was worried that her son might suffer the same fate as Jack, she never showed it. They were fisher folk, the sea was in their blood, salt in their spittle and seaweed in their hair. There was no other calling.

  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.