Candles in the Storm

by Rita Bradshaw

  Immediately the thought surfaced Daisy found herself apologising for it. It wasn’t them poor folk’s fault the way they had to live, but the smells seemed to stay up your nose for ages after leaving a bad street. Mind, some of the wives kept their houses cleaner than others and saw to it the privies stayed fresh, but that must make it all the more galling for them if they were stuck between two who couldn’t care less.

  Daisy took another great lungful of cold sparkling air, relishing its sharp bite after the stench in some areas of the town she had recently left behind. She hoisted her empty wicker baskets higher on her slender hips and continued to stride on.

  Her da said the townsfolk thought fishermen stank, but the worst of the fish smells - even the guts and offal and such - was nothing compared to what some human beings were capable of. She hated the towns.

  Daisy stopped for a moment, flexing her cold feet encased in heavy black boots with thick cobbled soles. It was a four-mile walk from home into Boldon and hard going in places but she didn’t mind the journey back when the baskets were empty. She could always get a better price for the fish in Boldon, it being inland, than when she tried to sell the contents of her baskets door to door in Whitburn, and every farthing was precious.

  She flicked back her two shining braids of raven-black hair before tilting her head and gazing up into the blue sky. It was a grand day. Not as nice as late spring when bluebells and cow parsley dappled the hedgerows and the heady perfume of wild lilac scented the lanes, but nice nevertheless.

  And to see the sun shine again . . . Everything was better when the sun shone; people were nicer, kinder. There were castles in the clouds today, and even though the ground was still rock hard and frozen solid with the last of the winter snow, you could sense spring was on its way at last. It had been a hard winter, this one. Several times she’d had to clamber and lurch her way into Boldon on the crest of the snow-packed hedgerows, terrified she was going to find herself falling into one of the snow drifts which had been over seven feet or more deep. Her da would have gone mad if he’d known the risks she’d taken, but they’d needed the pennies selling the fish round the doors brought in, especially with one of the nets being lost recently. That’d been a blow. Her da had been like a bear with a sore head for days after that.

  Daisy set her gaze forward again, jingling the coins in the pocket of her thick serge skirt before adjusting her calico cloak more securely on her shoulders. She loved this cloak. It had taken her hours to sew but when she’d finished her da had taken it to the tank and tanned it along with his nets, and it was the only garment she possessed which was a nice warm colour. Alf had said she looked bonny in it. But then Alf always said nice things to her, not like their Tom. Her small nose wrinkled at the thought of her youngest brother, the only one still living at home. Her granny said she and Tom were like cat and dog, and she was right.

  Daisy started walking again, slipping and sliding on the icy ground as one part of her brain appreciated the stark white beauty all around her, and another began to list the multitude of jobs awaiting her on her return to the cottage.

  She had collected a nice lot of driftwood along with nearly a bucketful of coal and coke first thing yesterday morning, and it would all be dried out enough by now. She’d banked the fire as best she could that morning with slack and damp tea leaves, but no doubt that would be her first task on walking through the door again. She had to make sure her granny was kept warm with the old woman’s chest being so bad this winter. She would warm a few drops of the goose grease she’d bought from the farm the week before, and get her granny to rub it on to her chest, before heating a bowl of the broth she had made yesterday.

  Good stuff, that broth was, as it should be considering she had boiled the big marrow bone the farmer’s wife had let her have for hours. Her granny could always stomach a little broth when she couldn’t manage anything else. The rest of them could have a mardy cake with the fat she had skimmed off the bone, and the flour and a few currants she had left in the larder, and she’d salt herrings to go with the cake. That’d do the night. And with what she’d earned today she could go to the mill and get a half-stone of flour tomorrow, and bake some bread. That would tempt her granny to eat, the smell of freshly baked bread. Daisy gave a little skip at the thought of it.

  The lanes were winding, dipping and curving their way towards the coast, but Daisy’s steps were light in spite of the conditions and the weight of her boots. She had sold all the fish, and none at a knockdown price either. It had been a good day. And summer lay in front of them. That meant calmer weather for the boats and all manner of extra food she could gather.

  In the spring she could collect sorrel leaves from the lanes and hedgerows to flavour their food, and hunt out pheasant and partridge eggs and even the smaller guillemot eggs when she could manage to reach them.

  The summer brought crab apples, haws, blackberries and sloes, and she knew just where to collect the best of them as the days shortened again. Farmer Gilbert, whose fields bordered the outskirts of Boldon, always let her have a supply of potatoes, swedes and turnips in return for a few bloaters and fresh cod, and he was always happy for her to go into the gleaning fields too. She liked that, the gleaning, with the scent of hay clinging to the warm breeze and the blue sky above. It might be back-breaking work, going along the stubble and picking up what was left to tie in bunches and sell to people who kept chickens, but she enjoyed it, especially when a bushel could be got together and she would take it to the mill and end up with a bag of fine wholemeal for cooking at home.

  Farmer Gilbert never refused to take the sacks of acorns she collected for his pigs either, and always paid above the odds for them. She got a canny deal with Farmer Gilbert - he liked her, he did. ‘Daisy Flower’ he called her, and always with a twinkle in his eye.

  Daisy smiled to herself at the thought of the stocky little man, her small white teeth gleaming against the honey-tinted skin of her face. Farmer Gilbert wasn’t like Farmer Todd whose farm was much nearer the village. Her smile faded. She had had a run in with him the week before over the price of the goose grease. He had known she needed it quickly and had traded on that. Farmer Todd wouldn’t give you the drips from his nose, and her da always said the milk his farmhand brought to the village every morning in backcans on panniers on the old donkey was watered down. Daisy nodded in agreement, thinking of it now.

  Her mind full of the unfairness of miserly Farmer Todd, she continued to slip and slide her way along, keeping her gaze fixed on the black ice beneath her feet now. Consequently she nearly jumped out of her skin when her name was spoken very loudly just behind her.

  She swung round, in danger of losing her footing on the treacherous ground. As she took in the chunkily built young man in front of her, Daisy’s voice was unusually sharp when she said, ‘Alf! You scared me half to death.’

  ‘Me?’ There was a grin on his tanned, good-looking face. ‘Sorry, lass. I was leanin’ against that tree over yonder waitin’ for you, but you were far away.’

  ‘All the more reason not to creep up on me like that,’ she answered tartly.

  ‘You sold all the fish?’

  ‘No, I gave ’em away to anyone who asked.’ And then, as if realising she wasn’t being very nice, Daisy moderated her tone, adding, ‘What’s the matter anyway? I’m sure you must have better things to do than to wait for me to come back from Boldon.’

  ‘Not really.’

  Alf Hardy was a typical fisherman, barrel-chested with massive forearms and a body that looked as though it was built for endurance and would be capable of seemingly boundless energy, but now he appeared almost bashful.

  Daisy stared at him. She had grown up treating Alf as one of her brothers - he was her youngest brother’s best friend after all and eight years older than herself - but lately she had sensed a subtle shift in their easy relationship. It had been enough to cause her to become aware of him in a way she hadn’t been before, and now, as she gazed into his mild ha
zel eyes, she noticed his perennially red ears were glowing even more brightly than usual. He was embarrassed. Alf was embarrassed. And suddenly she was too, and for the life of her couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘I . . . I wanted a word with you, without all the others around.’ Alf shifted uneasily, and his fingers - spatulate and with the evidence of tar and scar tissue from where they had split when pulling the nets up and down as a young lad - bunched together as he began to wring his hands before suddenly stuffing them into his deep pockets. ‘I’ve bin tryin’ to see you alone for weeks but it’s like attemptin’ to get an audience with the old Queen herself.’

  Daisy forced a smile. He liked her, Alf liked her - in that way. Suddenly everything became crystal clear. But how did she feel about him? She wasn’t sure. He was just . . . Alf. Dependable, kind, funny Alf. He and his old mother, who was a great friend of her grandmother, were almost part of Daisy’s family. She could barely remember her own mam who had died of the fever when she was a little bairn of three, just the misty memory remaining of a warm pair of arms and a soft voice singing her to sleep at night, along with the vague recollection of her father holding her very tight as she had cried and cried on being told her mam had gone to talk to the angels in heaven. It had been Alf’s mother who had stepped into the breach then and kept the household running for some years when it became obvious that the illness which had taken Daisy’s mam had also badly weakened her granny’s chest.

  Daisy couldn’t remember a time when Alf and Mrs Hardy hadn’t been comfortably familiar figures by the fireside on those evenings when the fishing boats weren’t out. The two old women would gossip over Mrs Hardy’s homemade blackberry wine which she always brought with her, and Daisy’s da and brothers and Alf would smoke their pipes and down a pint or two of the bitter beer her da made and served from the old Grey Hen, or stroll along to the public house for a tankard of ale.

  Even now, when all her brothers except Tom were married and spent their evenings by their own firesides, nothing seemed to have changed. But it had, she just hadn’t seen it till now. Tom had his eye on a lass in Whitburn, she’d heard her brother mention something to her da about it only the other day. And Alf liked her . . .

  ‘You must have guessed how I feel about you, lass? Everyone else has.’ Alf rubbed his nose, his voice rueful. ‘I didn’t want to say anythin’ afore but you’ll be sixteen come summer an’ plenty of lasses have bin courtin’ for a year or two by then.’

  Daisy shook her head, blushing as she said, ‘I didn’t know.’

  He wasn’t surprised she hadn’t known despite what he’d said. Hadn’t he argued as much when Tom had urged him to make his feelings plain? ‘She don’t think of me in that way, man. You know she don’t. Looks on me the same as you, as a brother.’

  ‘Then it’s high time you changed the way she thinks.’ Tom had been quite militant. ‘Years you’ve waited to speak, an’ that was right an’ proper with her bein’ so young an’ all, but she’s a grown lass now an’ bin runnin’ a household for years, don’t forget. Me da always said she’d be a beauty an’ he weren’t wrong, there’ll be plenty of lads sniffin’ about our Daisy. I know me an’ her always meet head on but you bring out the best in her, the softer side, an’ marriage’ll be good for her. An’ you, eh?’

  ‘Aye, but there’s more to bein’ wed an’ such than runnin’ a house. What if she don’t like me? You know, as a lad.’

  ‘Aw, man.’ Tom had been irritable with what he saw as his friend’s lack of gumption. ‘You’ve got your own boat an’ there’s only you an’ your mam in your cottage; I know any one of a number of lasses who’d jump at the chance to walk out with you. An’ your face wouldn’t crack no mirrors neither. Talk to her, for cryin’ out loud, you know she thinks a bit of you.’

  Alf looked at Daisy who now had her head lowered as she scuffed the snow with the toe of one boot. Aye, she thought a bit of him, same as she did Tom and the rest of her brothers. But there were many different kinds of love, and never had this truth become so apparent to him as in the weeks and months since Daisy’s fourteenth birthday. He had given her a little wooden box with a seahorse pared on the lid. Six months he’d been working on it in any spare moments he got, whittling away after he’d found a suitable piece of wood until it was all smooth and shiny and as bonny as you’d buy in one of the fancy shops in the towns. And all his work had been worth it for the delight she’d shown. Fair barmy she’d gone.

  And then she’d kissed him on the cheek. Just a bairn’s kiss, nothing more, but suddenly he’d known why he couldn’t work up an interest for long in any of the lasses who made it clear they were willing. He’d sat and looked at her that evening, all the time pretending everything was the same as normal but it wasn’t, not for him. And there was no going back.

  Alf took a deep breath and then said evenly, ‘Well, lass, now you do know, what’s your answer? Can you see yerself learnin’ to look at me as a’ - he had been about to say ‘man’ but changed it to - ‘lad?’

  There was silence for a moment, and then Daisy glanced at him as she said quietly, ‘I don’t know, Alf. I’m sorry, but I don’t know.’

  He nodded. He’d hoped for more but at the bottom of him had been scared it would be less, that she would refuse him outright. ‘Aye, well, that’s all right. We’ve time.’ He raised his eyebrows and smiled weakly at her. ‘If me mam was here she’d add “God willing” to that, wouldn’t she?’

  Daisy smiled back as she nodded, glad he wasn’t upset or angry.

  By, but she was bonny. Alf’s eyes moved over the face in front of him, its texture as smooth as satin and its colour like warm honey with a blush on it. She’d been daintily appealing as a bairn, and as different in build from most of the big-boned fishergirls as chalk from cheese, but now . . . He gazed at her hair, her grey eyes, her small straight nose. Apart from her granny he had never seen anyone with truly grey eyes, but it wasn’t just their colour or their thick fringe of lashes which made them so bonny. They carried a luminescence, as if they were lit from within somehow.

  ‘I . . . I need to get back.’

  ‘Aye, ’course you do.’ Daisy’s voice had been nervous and made Alf belatedly aware he had been staring.

  Had he frightened her? That was the last thing he wanted to do. He turned, beginning to follow the path which led to the village and talking as he did so. ‘I looked in on your granny afore I come up here. Made up the fire an’ left her suppin’ a drop of hot barley me mam sent.’

  Daisy hesitated for a moment before falling into step beside him, acutely aware of the height and breadth of him and the overall maleness of his hard compact body. As Alf continued to talk she remained silent, but her head was whirling.

  He wanted her. Alf wanted her. It made her feel funny. But he’d called in to make sure her granny was all right, and that was nice of him. But he was nice, she’d always known that. In fact, Alf hadn’t got it in him to be anything other than nice. Look how he had always listened to her. He had understood when she was sad because she had to miss so much schooling what with looking after her granny and the house and everything. Her da and brothers had said that learning was no use to a fishergirl, but if Alf had thought that he hadn’t said so. When she had told him she wanted to know things, to understand more about words and numbers and subjects like history and geography, he hadn’t guffawed and tweaked her chin and called her doo-lally like Tom had.

  ‘Don’t worry, lass.’ Alf was looking at her again but now it was the old brotherly Alf, not the young man with hot, hungry eyes. ‘I’m not goin’ to keep on at you, you take all the time you need. But I felt it was right I made me feelin’s plain, that’s all. You understand?’

  Daisy nodded. Yes, she understood, of course she did, and it was only to be expected that a good-looking presentable man like him with his kindness and sense of humour and all the other things which made him Alf, would want to find someone and marry and have a family one day. It was the order of things a
nd right and proper, and if she’d had her head screwed on she would have wondered why he hadn’t made his choice before this. And she wouldn’t have liked it if he had said he was going to wed someone else.

  This moment of self-knowledge came as a shock, so much so that as they turned a corner and Daisy looked across the white fields in front of her and beyond to where the sea - hypnotic, beguiling and lethal - shimmered silver-blue and calm, she didn’t experience the usual rush of pleasure that told her she was nearly home. If she didn’t want Alf to court any other lass - and she didn’t - why hadn’t she agreed to start walking out with him?

  Daisy continued to wrestle with her thoughts as she and Alf followed the path towards the village. Depending on the season this could prove an arduous struggle through thick glutinous mud, or at the height of summer be baked hard and dusty with buttercups and wild thyme at its edges, or yet again - like today - a mass of frozen ridges of black ice and snow.

  It was another five minutes before they reached the sloping sand dunes, an enchanted place in summer when fringed with delicate spiky grasses and tiny bright flowers. Now the cottages were in front of them, looking, Daisy always felt, to be somehow strung together like rows of herrings in the smoke house. They faced the wide expanse of the North Sea, with nothing between to cushion the worst of the elements.