I remember being at school in second year and being told "write a story on the theme your teacher gives you". I got science fiction, my mate Jamie got sport...and this weird kid called Simon Cutsforth - Cuttsy - was given horror. He wrote about our little stretch of beach and how monsters from the deep would crawl ashore and kill babies in their sleep. Yes, it was 25 or something years ago but I still remember that. And I remember our English teacher picking up Cuttsy's story, reading it, looking at him down the length of his nose and drawling, "I said write a story, not a documentary". 

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The boat was not just a professional convenience. It was the ark of life, and the thing on which all else depended.

Boats and boat-building were bred into her father on both sides of his family. He had gone to sea at fourteen. In the Second World War he had risked his life over and over again, using his own boat to explode enemy mines not far from home. Later, he built boats himself, and he also built model boats that were small marvels of accuracy.

 

Every last timber of the fishing boats, every last superstition among the crew, every last puritanical Sunday on shore in adolescence was a part of her roots. So were the murderous tantrums of the sea, the gutting and smoking of the catch, the sacramental importance of everything that had to do with the job, and the love of home. Hers was on every level an immense inheritance.

 

They believed in God and trusted in luck, which made them deeply superstitious; and because they believed in God they also believed in hell.

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