The Harbour Girl Read Online Free PDF

messing about down by the slipway. If a boat should escape its moorings and drift out to sea, what would you do?’
    He hung his head. ‘Don’t know, Ma.’
    ‘When you reach ten I’ll ask about and maybe some of the men will show you the rudiments of sailing and rowing, just to give you a taste of what it’s like.’ She kissed his cheek and said softly, ‘If your da hadn’t been lost he would have taught you, just like Josh Wharton’s taught his sons.’
    ‘He’s still lost one, though, hasn’t he? Mark’s lost at sea.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But none of us can escape danger no matter what we do, Tom. And there are old men who’ve been going to sea all of their lives and have come to no harm.’ She smiled at him. ‘You might become one of those.’
    ‘You mean like Josh Wharton?’
    Mary laughed. ‘I don’t think he’d want to be called old, Tom, but yes, just like him.’
    After Tom had left, Mary thought back over their conversation. She’d always thought that Josh Wharton was perhaps a few years older than her, maybe about thirty, but then she remembered that Mark had been nineteen and reasoned that he must be older, unless of course Mark wasn’t his son and Lizzie Wharton had been wed before. She thought again about the age gap between Mark and his siblings: seven years between him and Ethan, the oldest of the five.
    She shrugged and got on with cleaning their room and preparing food for midday. There would be no mending of nets today as the weather was too wild, but tomorrow, if the gale eased, there would be plenty of work on the damaged nets, and soon the Scottish herring girls would be coming down to Scarborough. Her mother Fiona and two others would stay with her; she’d give her mother her own place in bed with the children and she and her friends would bed down on the floor and she’d listen to the news from home.

CHAPTER FOUR
    THE RESIDENTS AT the bottom end of Sandside remarked to each other that it was the worst storm they could remember, and the following week several families were still waiting for news of their menfolk. Numerous ships had been wrecked, but many lives had been saved and the lifeboat crew, who had risked their own lives during the rescue, had saved more than twenty-five seamen. Seven from the brig Mary ; five from the Black-Eyed Susan ; five more from a Plymouth sloop and several others. Some bodies were washed up on the shores of the North Bay, Cloughton and Scalby, but some were never seen again, like Josh’s son, Mark Wharton.
    Mary had gone to see her mother-in-law, who was fretting that she couldn’t get down to the shoreline to see what was happening.
    ‘You don’t need to go down,’ Mary told her. ‘It’s enough that you know how it is. No sense in bringing back sad old memories.’
    ‘Aye,’ Aggie sighed. ‘You’re right. Fifteen years since Herbert was lost, four since Bob, and two since our Jack. It’s not summat you ever forget. I don’t need another great storm to remind me.’
    Jeannie, watching and listening, noticed that her grandmother’s tongue was never sharp with her mother in the way it was with her. It seemed that she held back her caustic opinions when speaking to Mary.
    On the way back down the Bolts, one of the narrow sets of steps which led to Sandside, she questioned her mother on this issue.
    ‘Gran doesn’t shout at you the same as she does at me,’ she said, clip-clopping down. ‘I’ve heard her telling off other grown-up folk, but never you. Why’s that?’
    Mary hid a wry smile. ‘Once she did,’ she told her daughter, ‘when I first came to Scarborough and met your da. But I told her straight that I was going to marry her son and if she was going to cause trouble I’d persuade him to leave town and come back to Scotland wi’ me.’ She laughed. ‘That did it. She’d lost one son already and didn’t want to lose another, although of course’ – her voice dropped – ‘she did eventually. But you’re onny