And it was a sin to be caught hand-idle when we could be knitting. We knitted from the time we could master the simplest stitches—knit, purl, stockinette. Everywhere we went, no mind what else we might be doing, there’d be a ball of thick blue yarn and a pair of needles stuffed into our leather knitting belts—wiskers, they were called. And if there was a moment to spare, clean hands or not, we’d knit. Ganseys, drawers, mittens, scarves. Long seaboot stockings knitted in the round so there were no joins to rub the ankles of our fathers and brothers. It was a serious business, this, not just a thing to while away the hours before bed. We had to knit tightly, on fine needles, with never a dropped stitch: a gansey that let in the cold, the bite of that wind, was not a bit of use to a fisherman in a gale or a child gathering bait on the boatie shore or a fishwife tramping farm to farm across the heather moors. Those plain, workaday garments were all we had to keep ourselves warm, and everything we wore—everything, lambsie—we knitted ourselves. Oh, you canna imagine how scratchy they were, those woollen drawers and vests, how the fibres would chafe against your cold, raw skin! It would take years for them to soften, if ever they did, and I would take care to keep my old misshapen underclothes from Ma’s eyes, so she wouldn’t make me knit myself a prickly new set.

We girls were yanked from the classroom from time to time to learn from our mothers. I’d to help Ma on her rounds through villages inland, to farm women, to cooks in the big houses. The burden Ma carried in the creel on her back would change its load as we went, but not its weight. The fish would be replaced with grain and neeps, butter and cheese. Ah, a long time it’s been since I’ve thought of those days—the rhythm of our walking, the swaying of the creel, the way Ma would haggle to get a good trade.

It was just the way life was. Our labour was needed by family, fleet and village, and the children we bore would be the labour for a new generation. Kitta’s vow not to marry, her wish to see the world, was purest foolery.

But I believed her. I’d have believed anything Kitta said. And I understood, oh aye, I did. Sometimes when you catch a glimpse of the everyday, something happens and the view gets skewed, and in that moment the way you look on things is changed forever. That’s what had happened to Kitta and me years ago, when we saw The Beasts that Go Down to the Sea.

Imagine this, lambsie: