Well, good, that’s all right, then, that’s just grand, she said, her cheeks pink like apples. We’ll work it out, quinie. It will all be grand.

~

Magnus Tulloch would shake silent noises from his head as he rocked the cradle that Mr Brescianini had made for us out of sheoak from his vineyard at Wanneroo. He was wary of holding Steven, Magnus was, in awe of his small body, afraid it would break.

But there isn’t any doubt he loved him.

Did he love me still? I didn’t know that. The boy would have loved me forever, no matter what, but the boy had gone.

~

When Steven was a few months old, a letter arrived, a few sheets of paper that made all three of us silent.

I had written to Gracie after the war, to put her mind at rest that her brother was safe. We’d had no reply, but that was often the way then. Things went astray, mail went missing. When I wrote again to tell her of the child, her nephew, that she had always believed would come, a letter came back to us soon after. Full of happy wishes, Gracie was, though wistful that she would never meet our little boy. And she wrote of how things were on the island.

The herring trade had shrunk almost to nought during the war. We’d known of this from Paulie Garrioch, who Magnus saw sometimes on his way home from the brewery. The government had taken most of the drifters, Gracie said, just a tiny fleet left at home, and Shetland boys had been as quick to sign up as those everywhere else. Karl came home safe, and the Lord be praised for that, but so many others …

Magnus Tulloch put his head in his hands. The names Gracie listed on the page were the names of boys he had grown up with, boys who had become fishers or sailors, or coopers like him.

Some boats are back to sea, but most are idle now, Gracie wrote. And what did they expect? is what I said to Karl. Look at who it was who bought our fine Shetland herring! Who was our biggest customer all them years? Germany, of course, and Germany has its shameful hands full now, too full to be buying fancy things like pickled herring.

I could imagine Gracie waving her finger in Karl’s face, just a little shy of smug. She’d always been suspicious of the herring trade, the way it lured people away from villages.

Aye, she wrote, it’s plain bread that Germany will be wanting now, and all they deserve too.