Being on the farlins was no easy thing, mind. I would let my eyes shift to the sea and think: She is just over there, just water hours, water miles, away. And Clementina would watch carefully, giving me a minute before prodding my elbow with a gruff Hash, hash, quinie! They’d buried her at the Broch, my Kitta, beyond the sacred churchyard, but she wouldn’t care, she would snap her fingers to that, a nothing. The ground had been hard with snow, but an old man shovelling a path to the church door told me kindly there would be bluebells come spring. Kitta would like that, aye. Better than sacred.

The hardest thing would have been having to see Liza again, having to stand beside her at the farlins and listen to her small mind, her blethering on about Roanhaven and the people on whom I had closed my heart. But Clementina turned up that first season with Muckle Lally in tow, a girl from Fitdee. Word was that Liza was not to be allowed to the fish any more.

If ever I’d counted my blessings back then, I would have counted that.

~

I was a gutting girl for just one season more. And then, true to the lady deputy’s prediction, the Lord above made a decision for me. The top half of my left middle finger, down to the second joint, had to be taken after the salty hole poisoning got into the bone. Mrs Leask gave me a note and it was done at Gilbert Bain as part of mission charity. No anaesthetic, just a swig of something hot that took the skin off my throat, and a cup of tea after to calm me down. I did not look while he did it, the doctor, but I remember he wore a white apron, like a butcher I saw in Great Yarmouth once. In that place of screaming, my pain curdled the air, loud and clotted thick and nothing to do with the butcher’s busy work.

Once my finger healed, I got work at the factory where guts from the yards were mixed with seaweed and turned into fertiliser. Guts again, aye, but no salt. The work was not so tough as gutting, I could manage it with my awkward hands, and the hours not so long because fertiliser is just fertiliser, it hasn’t to be kept fresh, no. But the smell—oh, it was worse, you canna imagine.

Gracie wrote me one of her letters, venturing the view that I was lucky. Lucky to be working in the factory now. Best you be off farlins, Meggie Tulloch, before it be more than just one finger what’s taken!