In the two years after Clementina left, things happened that could have made her bitter. They worked hard, the fisherman and the gutting girl did, they cleared and fenced, they ploughed and planted. But there were so many problems, unsolvable, one and then the next. Too little land for the farm to pay. Too far from the pipeline for water. Too little money to turn poor soil into rich. Much too little for a family and two wee children in a sheddie on a lonely block.

Clementina told me all this but wrote, too, of cheerful things, and maybe she did it to cheer herself, I don’t know. What did she love most about her struggling little farm? Of all things, chickens! All of them named for gutting girls. And which of my girls do you think is the best layer of all, quinie? Bella, that’s who! And a muckle brown beauty she is! And she would send me eggs by Paulie Garrioch’s cart, carefully packed in straw, and always with a bag of brown and white feathers Jessie had collected for Unty Meggie.

In spite of the stubborn jolliness pasted onto the page, maybe even because of it, Clementina’s letters were hard to read. But they reminded me of where we had come from, she and I. I would read them and think of my mother, of Unty Jinna and Unty Leebie, of all those strong women who bore and endured. Where did I fit in? They were all so much stronger than me.

But when I look at you, lambsie, there it is—a glimmer of something from that same stuff, the muscle from which spirit grows. You just don’t know it yet.

~

For Clementina, for Stivvy, it all came to a head in 1914. As it did for the world. Anxiety stole over us like mist from the North Sea, and it stayed.

5

We Mills & Ware girls would often walk down to South Beach to eat our bread and apples. I would stand barefoot on the sand, my skirt hiked up in my hands, the cool green water rushing up to my toes, all fizzy with bubbles. How soft the sand, fine and white like baker’s flour. How light the bleached shells that the sea threw up each night to dry in the sun next day. I had been born a sea child, spent all my early years with my feet wet or salted dry, but the Indian Ocean reminded me every day it was not the same sea.

One day I stood squinting into the horizon, the green of that crease between sea and sky, trying to fathom how many miles to land, and what land, whose land. Enzia ran past me into the shallows, where I never liked to go, and lost her footing. She landed on her bottom with a squelchy splash.

Ooowwww!

Lois helped her up and she twisted round to see the back of her dress.