The Fisherman's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  Most of this sea fare was washed down by pints of beer from dozens of pubs along Southend’s bustling sea front, the Kursal, with its switchback and its roundabouts, its fun palaces and its sideshows blaring in the ears of those who converse in loud, sharp Cockney accents, and families taking tea in trays down on to the beach from refreshment booths dotted along the Prom, a shilling deposit charged on the tray. Kids licked ice cream cornets; sucked at sticky scarlet seaside rock with Southend lettered all the way through the white, peppermint centre. Some would buy a few sticks of rock to take home to friends to prove they’d been at the seaside for a day or part of a week (not easy for the bread-winner of a London East End family to give them a full week when he got paid for only three days holiday if he were lucky); kids tore off shreds of fluffy pink candy floss that melted in the mouth and left a grubby rime around their lips. The empty stick on which it had been spun would be used as a flagstaff for a sand castle.

  The buzz of Southend-on-Sea was a noise unto itself: tinny music, shrieks from the ghost train, the haunted house, the scenic railway; aromas of hot sausage, fish and chips, vinegar. Shops selling gaudy hats with ‘kiss me quick’ written on them. Bathing huts and bright swimming costumes, middle-aged women in print dresses, paddling, hems held thigh high to avoid the wavelets, men with trouser legs rolled up to the knee, people who burned their skin bright pink and shiny to peel for the rest of the week in homes, offices and factories. Kids armed with buckets and spades, castles to be built and water to be brought to their moats to disappear as quickly as it was poured in. All rowdy and busy. But here in this back-water fishing community on the far edge of a holiday resort, it was quiet and peaceful.

  For a little longer Josie put off that moment when she must turn for home. Even the gulls were silent, feeding far off at the water’s edge. The only sounds to be heard were those directly at her feet. They had to be listened for attentively, or one might become aware of them quite suddenly. Tiny sucking, plopping sounds, the oozing of worm casts being thrown up, the brief scurry of a crab, the soft snap of a cockle shell closing at the approach of a foot.

  The silence made Josie shiver. She hadn’t planned to be out here at all, but she had been so angry. She shivered again. It was getting cold and she hadn’t even brought a coat.

  It had been Annie’s fault, going off at her like that, and Mum taking her side. Anyone with half an eye could see Annie as Mum’s favourite. She was so pretty, and she knew it. Tall like Dad, but so waif-like she was the envy of every girl who struggled for that fashionable look. Nineteen twenty-nine dresses made her look even thinner.

  It was a dress that had started the row. All she’d done was borrow Annie’s second-best one to go out in last night. To hear Annie when she’d discovered it, one would think she’d borrowed the Crown Jewels. It hadn’t fitted properly anyway. Thin though she was, Annie was still nearly a size larger than herself. Well, she would be. Annie was twenty-two, and she was only seventeen, well, coming up to eighteen next month. Between them was Pam. Connie was the eldest. Poor Connie.

  Josie thought of Connie as she began negotiating her way back to the shore, using the slightly more raised ripples of mud which were harder than the troughs in which mud could come up to her calves. Connie, at twenty-four, though sometimes she behaved like thirty-four, always looked for the dire side of life in a fearful sort of way as though it would pounce on her. Courting Ben Watson, son of a tugboat skipper, she seemed to live in constant dread of anything happening to him in his work. Like last week, when that tugboat sank and she had felt so certain Ben was on board, was drowned. Laughable. Not at the time of course. But everyone had got worked up over nothing. She was always on about the Devil always lying in wait for those who enjoyed life too much and thinking things were too good. As if things could ever be too good.

  Josie thought again of Annie. When she got back she would snub her. It was what Annie deserved, leading off like she had. She cast her now angry eyes towards the incoming tide. Not easy to pinpoint, but it would steal back in with silent swiftness as if drawn by an invisible magnet, implacably filling hollows and dips, seeping into each, unnoticed, the hollows joining up into pools, lakes, encircling a careless wanderer until the only route of escape was to wade to drier ground. Reaching level parts, the tide became a moving creature quietly lifting the scores of tilted boats upright from their muddy slumbers to set them gently bobbing.

  The slippery mud oozed pleasantly between Josie’s toes to flow over her instep, causing her to be wary of losing her footing and ending up on hands and knees. Already her shins and calves were coated. No point rinsing it off in a salt-rimed pool if she only had to step again into more mud. As yet there’d be no pools to wash in by the sea wall. She’d clean up when she got indoors and hope Mum wouldn’t see her before that.

  There was mud on the low-waisted skirt of her pale blue dress, and a streak or two in the waves of her short, light brown hair where she’d touched it with hands that had tried to sweep some of it off her legs. Josie looked down at herself and giggled. No one would guess her to be nearly eighteen, judging by the state of her.

  ‘Look at the state of you. Look at your dress. No coat. Over your sulks now, I suppose. Anyone’d think you was seven, not seventeen.’

  ‘I’ll be eighteen in three weeks’ time.’

  ‘No one would guess it.’

  Peggy Bowmaker glowered at her youngest daughter, who dropped her gaze to look away. Josie knew better than to give verbal defiance. Once angered, Peggy knew she might slap out at Josie; lightly, as a symbolic reminder that she was still worthy of respect, but embarrassing to both of them, since the top of her head reached only as far as the girls’s eyes. They had all of them grown beyond her five foot one inch height and were wont to pat the top of her fair hair and call her ‘Tiddy Mumma’ in playful affection. She put up with it; any sense of being ridiculed even in play would be superseded by pride in her children, their fine health, their good looks, their bearing, their slim but strong build. It wasn’t merely that she was blinded by love – they were all of these things. Others had said so.

  Peggy, christened Elizabeth in eighteen eighty, over forty-eight years ago, but not called that since that day, gave her youngest daughter a small shove of reproof.

  ‘Ought to be ashamed of yourself, messing about out there like some kid. I suppose I’ll be expected to wash that dress for you. Well you can wash it yourself. And iron it when it’s dry. And put it away.’

  ‘I’ll start on it now,’ Josie muttered with half-concealed recalcitrance.

  ‘No you won’t,’ Peggy shot at her. ‘I’m getting tea ready. Do it later. And be sure you come down looking like a lady,’ she called after her as Josie made for the narrow squeaky stairs to the upper floor with its two bedrooms. ‘For once try to act your age.’

  It was untrue. Josie did act her age most of the time. But some of the rebellious little girl in her still lingered. Secretly Peggy felt sad it was fading so quickly, her last living child no longer a child. Peggy would never have admitted to anyone how much she clung to the child in Josie. If Tony hadn’t been knocked down by a train just a couple of hundred yards away from his home – the irony of it all that the train had been going so slow – she might not still be hanging on to Josie’s disappearing childhood.

  Five years ago now. Tony had been nearly ten years old, the last of her brood. One small lovely young life wiped out in seconds. He hadn’t known what had hit him. Playing ball with mates, climbing over the level crossing gates to retrieve the ball, excited by his game, full of vitality, and deaf to the warning shouts of people emerging from the station who saw him, the train gathering speed, a driver with his mind still back in the station not concentrating – at least that’s how she’d always see it, no one could make her see otherwise – all over in a split second. Perhaps he had seen the train at the last second, known a moment of terror. She hoped not, hoped he hadn’t suffered even that fleeting fear. They said he hadn’t known a thing
about it.

  He’d be nearly fifteen now. For a long time she’d felt utterly numbed, couldn’t really recollect what she’d done or what had gone on around her those days after it had happened. These days she smiled and sometimes laughed, but it had been years before she could. Even now she often felt she smiled and laughed only on the outside. Before Tony’s death she had always lived in fear of losing a child; prayed that no one in her family would die. She herself had died a thousand deaths, as mothers do for fear of losing their children. Even Daniel, her husband whom she still loved dearly, she could have got over in time had he died. But there was nothing worse than losing a child, especially the youngest and, to a mother’s mind, the most defenceless.

  Drawing in a deep sob of breath through her teeth, she straightened her back and turned as her daughter’s rebellious footsteps thumped across the ceiling above her, and set about cutting bread for tea.

  The front door had opened, Connie and Pam coming in together. The two girls worked not far from each other. Connie worked in the office of a local firm of engineers in Chalkwell, Pam was a legal secretary. Clever. All her girls were clever: no factory work for them. Josie was bright too; if only she wasn’t so volatile. She seldom kept a job for long, always looking for something better. She was between jobs now. Annie had said there was chance of an opening at the Cliffs Hotel for Josie. Though now they’d had that row at dinner time, it appeared debatable whether Annie would pursue it.

  She’d already been home once today, at dinner time. She didn’t usually, but said she’d been stewing all morning over Josie borrowing her dress without permission and couldn’t wait any longer to have it out with her. The result had been a row, ending with Josie throwing herself out of the house while Annie had stalked off back to work. Fancy, travelling two stations home on the train at dinner time just to have a row and then two stations back to work, entirely missing her dinner – talk about cutting off her nose to spite her face, but that was Annie. And what of Josie, going out last night dolled up in someone else’s dress, trying to make herself look older than she was? Trouble with Josie was, she thought herself a free spirit. Well, perhaps she was. But all this looking for this something better, as she called it, meant the only one she hurt was herself.

  But she was a good girl. They were all good girls.

  She heard their voices talking brightly, then Connie called out to her as they took off their hats and coats. Peggy called back that she was in here, in the kitchen. In that moment the street door opened again and now came Annie’s voice, slightly sharp, cultured, the three of them talking now as they came to find her.

  ‘Sorry I’m a bit late, Mum.’ Connie sounded breathless as they burst into the kitchen. She was usually home before the others. ‘I needed to go and post a letter to Ben and missed my train. Can I help?’

  Peggy smiled. Yes, they were all good girls.

  ‘You can make the tea, love,’ she said.

  ‘Is the table laid yet, Mum?’ asked Pam.

  ‘I was going to do it after I’d done the bread.’

  Pam grabbed the tablecloth from the drawer of the old side-board under the wall shelves beside the kitchen range. Annie, already taking down plates, looked towards the kitchen range and the frying pan noisily sizzling. ‘Sausages,’ she stated with a snort of contempt.

  ‘We always have sausages on Fridays.’

  ‘They ruin my figure, Mum. I’ll only have the one.’

  ‘Hardly anything of you to speak of now.’ Peggy smiled. ‘How was work today? Meet anyone nice?’ She worried about Annie. Nearly two years younger than Connie and no young man in sight yet.

  Annie sniffed and said. ‘Huh!’

  ‘There must be lots of nice young men going in an out of that hotel of yours. At least one of them ought to be unattached.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Mum.’ Annie stood holding a plate to her bosom, what there was of it. Most young girls these days flattened them into the sylph-like fashion with those ridiculous bras, a bit of shapeless material with straps, not worth the two shillings and sixpence they cost. She could have made them herself from pieces of old sheeting for nothing.

  ‘All I ever see is old codgers at that hotel,’ Annie was musing.

  ‘You don’t go out enough in the evenings to meet anyone,’ Peggy told her. ‘That’s your trouble.’

  ‘Who would I go out with? All the friends I had are getting engaged or married. I’m the only one left.’

  ‘And whose fault’s that?’ Peggy turned the sausages in the pan, took a peek at the potatoes she was boiling and would mash for the men’s meal. She tested them with a knife. Almost done. ‘Pam, butter the the bread, will you, love?’

  She turned her attention back to Annie. ‘You’re far too finicky. That nice lad you was going out with last year. He was very hurt, you givin’ him up. An’ he was so nice, an’ all.’

  ‘He was a brick maker. I don’t want to live hand to mouth. Anyway, we weren’t going steady.’

  ‘About time you were, miss,’ Peggy said sternly, sawing a couple of exta slices – the men’d come home ravenous, they always did. She held the loaf against her chest which was far ampler at her age than those of her daughters, perhaps a bit too ample for her small height, but she was past caring about fashion and the slim shape it dictated. ‘Trouble is you aim too high,’ she muttered. ‘What’re you looking for, Annie? A lord? An earl or something?’

  ‘That’s silly, Mum. I just want someone who can look after me …’

  ‘In the style you’re accustomed to,’ Peggy interrupted with a chuckle. ‘That’s a laugh for a start. Your dad in his shirtsleeves in a cockle shed servin’ summer holidaymakers. And me, helpin’ him when it gets too busy. Well, maybe one day, Miss High’n’Mighty, you might find your earl or whatever you’re looking for. Maybe when you’re old and grey and the moon turns to cheese.’

  She said all this with good humour, faintly surprised when Annie huffed and swept out of the crowded kitchen to lay the table in the other room.

  ‘Now you’ve upset her,’ Connie said. She fumbled in the knife drawer for spoons to accompany the cups and saucers. ‘She feels it, you know.’

  ‘Feels what?’

  ‘Not having a steady boyfriend when all her friends have.’

  ‘It’s her own fault. She’s too picky, that one.’

  But Peggy’s mind had moved on. This was the first time this evening Connie had come into any conversation, Connie who usually had plenty to say for herself. She had grown very quiet, very thoughtful since that tugboat disaster earlier in the week. When asked if anything was wrong, if she was all right, she’d present a jerky smile and say that she was fine. But obviously she was brooding. It had been traumatic for her, and ever since she had written every day to Ben, hurrying to post it and watching for the postman as though he bore her life’s blood with him. Yet she’d be seeing Ben on Sunday. It was hard to know how to combat it, but all Peggy could do was stand by and wait for it to pass.

  ‘I’ve not got a steady boyfriend yet,’ Pam had butted in.

  Peggy forced her mind away from Connie and smiled sympathetically. ‘You will,’ she said. ‘Just enjoy yourself while you can. Life’s too short.’

  Pam didn’t reply. She had told a lie and it was important the lie be believed. No one knew about her and George Bryant. Dad would go potty if he found out, because of him and George’s dad and that row all those years ago. Something to do with a boat, she wasn’t sure. Dad wouldn’t talk about it, would not even hear Dick Bryant’s name mentioned in the house. Not that it ever was. The families seldom came in contact with each other. The Bryants were shrimpers, trawled the estuary, and saw themselves as proper fishermen, not like the cocklers. Although with the estuary getting more polluted with the growing amount of shipping letting out oil, the finicky shrimps had moved away, were harder to find, and the shrimping industry had been declining for years. Cockles lay, buried under sand and mud, and oil didn’t affect them. The cocklers did well a
nd always would.

  But one day Dad would have to know about her and George, and Pam dared not contemplate the result. It was her constant nightmare.

  ‘You’ll find a nice boy eventually,’ her mum encouraged, innocent of Pam’s thoughts. ‘Then we’ll give you a nice engagement party just like the one Connie and Ben are having in June. They are such a lucky couple.’

  Connie turned sharply from replacing the lid on the teapot and swept out of the kitchen with the teapot under its cosy, followed by Pam bearing teacups on a wooden tray. Both girls were very quiet.

  The kitchen fell silent. Left alone, Peggy mulled over her daughters as she emptied the water from the boiled potatoes and began mashing them.

  Her son she had no qualms about. Danny at twenty-six, had endless girlfriends but no one steady. However, it was different for a boy. It was her daughters she thought of – Annie mostly. For Pam and Josie there was plenty of time for them to meet a nice boy and settle down. Connie would be married next year. But Annie, there seemed no hope for Annie. Always reaching for the moon, with her sights raised so high, she seemed doomed to disappointment. She’d seen it before, spinsters who’d once had such high hopes. Please God, she prayed as she mashed the potatoes furiously, adding a little milk, a little margarine, Annie would find herself a nice young man soon. Twenty-two and not one in sight. Peggy’s heart almost bled. To be left on the shelf, and Annie so pretty too.’

  Footsteps tripped down the creaky stairs. Josie. From the corner of her eye, Peggy saw her youngest girl’s oval face peep cautiously around the kitchen door.

  Josie’s voice was small. ‘Mum, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Peggy said, putting the mashed potatoes aside to give the sausages a last turn in the pan before dishing up. ‘And about the dress, love …’