How I loved that little schoolroom at the end of Hailness Street, with its long brown tables and wooden benches. It was there that I could read Real Books. I read them all, aye, every one the school had. Kidnapped, The Dog Crusoe, Rob Roy, The Jungle Book, Romeo and Juliet, The Class Book of Physical Geography (New and Enlarged Edition), all seven volumes of A Scottish Keepsake and six of The Willow Compendium of Prose and Verse. What precious things, no matter their flaky spines and oily smudges smelling of fish. What exhilaration to open a book and disappear! My first notion, it was, that there were people in the world who didn’t live like us nor think like us, who gave no heed to the will of the sea. I didn’t care much for Miss Birnie reading aloud to the class. No, it was words printed on the page I wanted, the feeling there was a voice speaking just to me as if I was someone who might understand, a person with Real Thoughts in her head.

I read anything that passed my eyes within the small world of Roanhaven: labels on boxes of matches, on packets of tea, on all manner of things. The amber bottle of Lifegiving Balm kept at the back of Ma’s dresser that promised to gently infuse its Kindly Influence into those Parts in the most perilous Disorder. I had my eye always on the hymn books at church, out of bounds to the young, and I swear I’d have risked a strapping to lay my hands on the family Bible in Ma’s kist, wrapped in calico and shavings of camphorwood and not to be touched, not ever. Only school gave me the gift of the page, and for that I tried hard to prove myself worthy.

Miss Birnie told Ma I was a Clever Lass, clever enough maybe for the big school in Aberdeen, though Da would never have given me leave to go if ever he’d been asked. It didn’t come to that anyway because of what happened. Still, for all the praise heaped on my head for reading, for penmanship, even for sums, I was found wanting when it came to the business of learning housewifery and practising needlework. That, lambsie, was the part of school I didn’t like. It would wash over me, leaving no more lasting impression than the tracks of a crab across the sand at low tide. Instead of paying mind to my needles, I’d be listening to Mr McCrindle on the other side of the room, teaching the laddies. How could heel-darning and the barleycorn stitch compare to Astronomy? But the tracking of the moon and the constellations was the work of men-to-be who must know the way to the shoals and back. Girls? Pah. Girls were to keep their eyes down.