Hardacre's Luck (The Hardacre Family Saga Book 2)

by CL Skelton

  Sam’s working hours did not begin until four in the afternoon, so he had a considerable length of day free to fill as he might choose. As he had made a custom, then, he walked from the church down Wellington and Trinity Roads, along Sewerby Terrace beside the Holy Trinity Church, coming out on the Alexandra Promenade overlooking North Sands. Then he turned and walked, as he had done on the day of his arrival, along the sea front, by way of Beaconsfield Promenade to the Victoria Terrace, from which he descended to the sands and walked out to the edge of the wildly angry sea, where a few early dog-walkers were his only companions. He tried with little success to summon up a summer-time image of the golden sands crowded with children and plump West Riding matrons enjoying the sun. Turning his back on the sea, which replied by casting spray up over the collar of his army greatcoat, he climbed up the damp, sand-strewn stone steps to the upper level of the Terrace and continued southwards past the Floral Pavilion, snow-swept and deserted, on Royal Princes Parade, to the North Pier of the Harbour. He walked out to the end of the pier and stood for a while looking out over the sea, churned to a sandy brown colour by its own fury. Snow blew into his eyes and he narrowed them until he was peering through a haze of lashes, and eventually, admitting defeat, he turned and faced the gentler waters of the Harbour instead. The fishing fleet was still in, storm-bound, and there was little activity about the Harbour, where the yachts tossed restlessly in their sheltered moorings like bored thoroughbreds, awaiting summer.

  ‘Aye, there, Sam,’ a voice, rough and croaky in the wind, called over his shoulder. He turned quickly, having, in the stormy air, heard no approach. He recognized at once the unmistakable lopsided outline of Mick Raddley, the one-armed fisherman who had first befriended him on the day of his arrival. Mick crossed the windy pier with his rolling seaman’s gait, his good arm across his chest, holding the collar of his navy jacket closed, the hook of his artificial arm hanging down from his cuff at his side.

  ‘Cold day, Mick.’

  ‘Freeze the balls off an Eskimo.’

  Sam laughed softly. ‘Cup of tea, Mick?’

  ‘Aye, lad. I’ll pay.’

  ‘No you won’t. You paid last week,’ Sam said, and Mick, considering for a moment, agreed. Sam knew he was hard pushed for money but knew, too, he would insist on pulling his own weight or do without companionship. Mick was unemployed. He had been unemployed for four years, apart from occasional stints filling in on someone’s baiting crew. It was a condition hard enough for any fishing man to bear, but harder for Mick, who had once skippered his own boat. She was the family boat, a Whitby coble that had been his father’s before him. Mick, his brother and his son all had shares in her, and two young nephews were their baiting crew. She gave a harsh, limited livelihood, but one he would have exchanged for nothing. They were line fishers, not yet faced with the competition of the newer net trawlers, and Mick was an expert at winding on and running out the long, many-hooked lines. But even an expert can make a mistake.

  Mick’s mistake was a fraction of a second’s inattention as they winched in their long line. A frayed sleeve snagged on a flying hook, and in an instant he was dragged into the winch. His brother lunged to cut the line and stop the machinery. It was over in moments. Mick stood dazed on the bloody deck of his coble, his arm wrenched off at the elbow. ‘Happen we’d best go in,’ he’d said and his brother nodded and agreed. Together they brought the boat in, Mick’s stump wrapped in a scrap of hessian sacking.

  Some nimble-fingered surgeon, no doubt fresh from wartime casualties, patched up the stump, and in time fitted a mechanical substitute. It was six months before he was more or less normal again, though with a new one-handed normality, schooling his metal hook with surprising agility. By then, his coble, skipperless, idle and needing extensive work on her engine, was more or less in hock to the bank. They struggled on, Mick one-armed but efficient enough, for another year, but never recovered from their six months of debt. In the end Mick himself decided the boat must go. His brother hadn’t talked to him since; as if the debt and the accident were things he’d chosen.

  It was a bitterness that Sam Hardacre found hard to understand and Mick was unable to explain beyond saying, ‘She were our Dad’s ’afore she were ourn. Happen he thought I’d failed t’ old man.’ He would shrug and puff on his pipe. His brother had found work, grudgingly, with another boat. His son and nephews had gone their own ways.

  ‘There’s nobody wanting a one-armed skipper, lad,’ said Mick, ‘no matter if’n I can sail circles round t’ lot. Who’ll hire a cripple when he can have a sound man?’

  Sam had known Mick for months before he had confided this story; it was not in the nature of the man nor his kind to speak over-freely with strangers. Sam had recognized this and respected it. They, the fishing men of the Harbour, were not unlike the Yorkshire farmers he had known as a child at Hardacres. They could be friendly enough, in their own gruff way, but they didn’t like to be rushed about it. Sam left the approaches to Mick, meeting him from time to time by accident as both frequented the Harbour Top in the early morning, and over the months they had become, despite the gaps between them of both age and class, good friends.

  They walked now, side by side, heads down and backs to the salty wind, to the Harbour Café; a small, waterside establishment long frequented by Mick and his compatriots. Inside, they sat in the steamy air amongst others also sheltering from the blustery day and the inactivity it obliged, sipping hot, sweet tea, with fingers wrapped around their mugs for warmth, while the February gale battered and shook the salt-crusted windows. They didn’t talk much but savoured a shared, rather than a solitary silence.

  A muffled boom suddenly broke the silence and, though Sam barely heard it over the roar of the wind outside, every other head in the café came up.

  ‘That’s the maroon,’ someone said.

  As Sam’s eyebrows raised in question, Mick said, ‘Lifeboat.’ He was still listening, and the boom was followed by a second. ‘That’s stand by,’ he said, and a young man in a blue fisherman’s smock, who had risen at the first sound, now grabbed his oilskin jacket from a hook at the door and ran out into the storm. There was a third boom, and Mick said, ‘That’s it. Launch.’ He rose too, and so did Sam, instinctively. They ran out after the young man, gathering coats as they did so, and Mick led the way across the Harbour Top to the South Pier.

  Below, on South Sands, beneath the pale outline of the Royal Spa Theatre and half-hidden by snow squalls, a flurry of activity and running figures concentrated on the lifeboat slip.

  Sam’s eyes travelled to the heavy surf in which they must launch and he said, ‘I don’t envy them that. What will it be, Mick, a fishing boat?’

  ‘Nay, lad. Not if’n he’s his head screwed on reeght. No business out on a day the like of this ’un. Reckon it’ll be a freighter, summat bigger anyroad, run aground on the Smethwick or come in too close looking for shelter, an’ got himself drove up against the cliffs.’ He gestured north-eastwards where, beyond the North Pier, the grey chop of the sea vanished abruptly in a sheet of driving snow. ‘Won’t be the first, either.’

  ‘Can’t see a thing out there,’ Sam said.

  ‘Nor are you like to,’ Mick grunted. He thought a moment, sucking at his unlit pipe. ‘Tell you what, lad,’ he said, ‘bide a while, till we see her launched, and see which road she’s gahin’. Then we’ll lift my brother-in-law’s car and run up the coast, see what we can see. Happen she’s run right up ashore, an’ they’ll need a hand or two pickin’ ’em out of the surf. Feel like a good drenching?’ He grinned, showing tobacco-stained, crooked teeth and Sam nodded, his eyes still on the pounding froth of the surf and wondering just how long a man could survive in it to be picked out by anyone.

  He looked back to the lifeboat slip where yet another man was arriving, running down on to the snow-covered sands from his car, left with one open door. Sam looked away again, down the length of the South Pier, grey and sullen under the storm. He imagined it suddenly a
s it had once been in his great-grandfather’s day, crowded with gutties at their tables, their freezing hands numbly balancing herring and stubby knife, shuffling frozen feet, surrounded always by crying gulls and the salt-tangy stench of fish. A hard life; like any life connected with the sea, he reflected, thinking again of the lost ship out there in the storm awaiting the help frantically gathering itself below on the sands. He wondered if he, witched back in time by a brutal magician, could work and survive in old Sam Hardacre’s world.

  It was gone now, the guttie’s life. The benches were long since cleared, the last itinerant guttie long since shuffled off down some twilight road. Town officials had decreed the whole business untidy. Gutting was done aboard the boats now and the offal tossed into the sea. No doubt, Sam thought, eyeing its grey ferocity, it ate that as greedily as it ate anything; men, ships, Mick Raddley’s arm. He remembered Mick saying over a pint of brown ale, ‘Anyone says he loves the sea’s a fool. The sea’s a whore. A man might use her; he disn’t love her.’

  ‘There she goes,’ Mick said emotionlessly, but Sam saw his jaw tighten on his pipe-stem and an involuntary twitch in his good arm as the lifeboat plunged down her ramp and hit the water within a great wall of thrown spray, plunging through the criss-crossing breakers out towards the open sea. He wondered, as they watched it growing smaller and fainter into the storm, if that tension were Mick’s concern for the men aboard, akin to the Ave he silently offered or, rather, a restless desire to be among them.

  The lifeboat cleared the end of South Pier and veered off northwards, abruptly vanishing into the storm.

  ‘Flamborough,’ said Mick. ‘Come on, lad.’

  Mick’s home was up in the Old Town and his brother-in-law lived only a street away. Mick set off at a jogging run, a pace that, after they had left the waterfront and were climbing winding streets up into that higher district, Sam was surprised to see him vigorously maintaining. Mick had clearly not let his enforced idleness encroach on his fitness in the past years.

  ‘Hey, slow down for an old man,’ Sam panted, only half-joking, as he jogged at the old fisherman’s side. Mick grinned and, if anything, speeded up.

  They stopped in front of his brother-in-law’s house, a small cottage that, were it not quite so battered and run-down, would be attractively quaint. But the doorstep was scrubbed and the brass knocker shining. Not that Mick used it. In time-honoured tradition he went instead up the narrow alleyway beside the house, leading to the back court and kitchen door, and disappeared around a corner, leaving Sam waiting in the street. In moments he was back, car keys in hand, making for a battered Austin mouldering at the kerb. Behind, a voice shouted, ‘If’n ye bluidy prang her, ye bluidy well don’t show up here agin.’

  Mick grinned, pulling the peak of his flat cap down over his eyes, and clambered in, gesturing to Sam to do likewise. The car spluttered and grumbled and Mick slammed it, protesting still, into gear with the round base of his hook, and clattered away up the road. Sam hung on, wondering if he’d skippered his boat the way he drove. They went out of town by Sewerby Road and Sewerby Lane, running along the cliff tops from which Sam and, to his unease, Mick too, peered out to sea for a glimpse either of the lifeboat on its journey or the ship it sought. But not until they reached Flamborough Head itself did they catch sight of either.

  Mick left the car, with motor idling, below the lighthouse and ran out, with Sam close behind, to the edge of the northern-most cliffs, an eerie experience, Sam found, with the blustering snow almost concealing the ragged edge of the chalky outcrop and whirling gusts of wind threatening to pluck them bodily from land and hurl them to the foaming sea below.

  ‘There she is,’ Mick shouted, having to cup his hands and direct his words almost against Sam’s ear to be heard. Sam stared to where he pointed and saw nothing. Then, as a sheet of snow slipped past and momentarily thinned, he thought he glimpsed a dark shape, a thickening of water and air into an outline that he alone would never have recognized as a ship.

  ‘You sure?’ he asked.

  Mick still peered north at the distant hulk. ‘Aye. She’ll be a freighter. Caught her belly on t’ sandbar. Not close enough in for anyone to make it ashore either, from the looks of her. Lifeboat’s got her work cut out.’ He peered a few minutes longer and then abruptly turned and strode back to the car. Sam followed, his coat flattened against his back by the wind. He assumed Mick was abandoning his pursuit of the wrecked ship but when he climbed back into the car and shut the door against the storm, Mick said, ‘We’ll try the coast road. See how close we can get. She looks about half-way to Filey.’ And he took off again, careening through the slush.

  Midway between Scarborough and Filey they left the car and struggled across the snowy clifftops to the edge; and there, looking out due east, they saw her. Sam thought of that first sight, years later, like the first sight of a woman with whom one is destined to be in love and, even unaware, one feels yet something. Something tugged at him, part horror and part pity, at the sight of the wounded ship wallowing and rolling in heavy seas, but something else too, a sheer intuition that told him even then that his fate and hers were linked.

  She was well aground, her bow down, grinding into the line of surf that marked the bar, her stern tilted unnaturally high and swinging back and forth like an awesome pendulum. She was listed heavily to port and the north-easterly gale battered against her partly-exposed hull while waves broke over her, cascading down her sloping decks. The distance was too great to make out any sign of life, but Sam assumed her crew were clinging to the raised stern, awaiting rescue, and hidden from view by the superstructure of the ship.

  ‘She’s finished,’ Mick said, with the same dry dullness with which he’d spoken of the lifeboat launch. ‘If she’d bury down a bit deeper she might have a chance but grinding like that she’ll break up in half a day. Reckon her back’s broken already.’

  The words struck painfully at something in Sam that saw her as a living thing in misery. Then in the distance he saw a white splash of thrown water, repeated at intervals, that marked the approach of rescue through heavy seas.

  Abruptly, Mick turned away. ‘No use gawking about here,’ he said gruffly. ‘Might as well go home an’ do summat useful.’ He stomped off and Sam, with a last glance down at the distant stricken freighter, turned and followed him to the car. He understood then. The lifeboat crew were all Mick’s friends and they were about to risk their lives against the sea and he was utterly powerless to help. Sam thought that, in his place, he would choose also not to watch. He was glad, anyhow. The slow destruction of the ship was something he wished not to see.

  Mick dropped him at the top of St Hilda Street after a drive in which neither had spoken much. Sam knew better than to press the old fisherman in his present morose mood. Whatever was to be learned about the shipwreck would have to come later, or from someone else. He returned to his lodgings and sat at the window of his room overlooking the slushy grey courtyard and wrote a letter to his brother Terry at Ampleforth.

  Later he went out to work. The chip shop, like everywhere else probably, was full of talk of the wreck, and rumours flew vacuously about. Some said that the lifeboat had saved everyone. Some said only two were saved, the rest lost to the surf. Someone arrived late in the evening to announce the ship had broken in two and one half had capsized. Sam concentrated on his work, battering cold slices of haddock and dropping them into the spitting oil, and deciding he would find Mick after the shop closed, if he could, and learn the truth.

  The proprietor, a short squat West Riding man called Ormsley, who transferred his resentment for the daughter who had married and left him short-handed to the man who had replaced her, grudgingly agreed to close down at nine-thirty. There hadn’t been a customer for the last half-hour, and as the gale had not relented but grown, if anything, worse with nightfall, it was hardly likely there would be any more. Sam scrubbed the counter, tidied the stacks of newspaper and swept the stone floor in the back room where the pota
to sacks were stored, and when Ormsley, who was ostentatiously mopping the black and white tiles of the shop floor, ran out of ways to squeeze his money’s worth from his employee, he got his coat from the storeroom and went out into the night. Through the half-lit window he glimpsed Ormsley, back bent, short black moustache aquiver with muttered resentments, bearing his work like a grudge.

  God, don’t let me ever get like that, Sam thought, no matter how hard life gets. He turned and faced the easterly wind, impatient for its salty tang to get the stench of cooking from his face and hair, wondering how long before tedium and routine reduced him, like Ormsley, to sour pettiness. Still, losing an arm and his livelihood hadn’t made Mick Raddley less of a man, he considered and, thinking that, decided to find Mick as an antidote to Ormsley and his chip shop.

  He found him in the third pub he tried, one of his less-often-frequented haunts, a big establishment in the Old Town whose customers were less exclusively maritime men than in the others. Mick had cheered considerably since he parted with Sam in the afternoon and was now deep in conversation with a cluster of cronies. Sam recognized one as his brother-in-law and another, grey-bearded and wizened, as an ex-Navy man called Haines he’d met once before. They were seated in a little booth, crowded round a table laden with pint glasses in various states of replenishment. As soon as Mick saw Sam he signalled that he should join them, and a place was made by a hurried shifting of bottoms at the end of a bench.