In the smallest but-and-ben in Tiller Street were Da’s sister Unty Jinna, and her daughter, Liza. And next to us, Sailor Wattie, who had his own boat and a share in ours, the Lily Maud, Ma’s sister Unty Leebie, and their children, Andrew and Elspet. Liza, Elspet and I were about the same age, so it was like having two more sisters. They could never come close to Kitta in my heart, though. No-one could.

We were sea people. We lived by its moods and rhythms as much as the fish and birds that were part of the order of things. From the time we could stumble along the boatie shore on our own feet, we’d be working—collecting whelks and limpets for bait, pitching stones at gulls pecking at the fish on our mothers’ drying racks. Later, boys were expected to go to sea on the family boat or a neighbour’s, while girls were put to service in the large estates thereabouts, or married young to another fisher family and made useful that way. A fisher canna be in want of a wife—that was the common wisdom and no-one quarrelled with it back then. When we children stood with our bare toes in the icy sand, gazing out to sea, I fancied there was freedom in what Archie, Jamie and Will saw, a ticket to the wide world, beyond the life I would know. To catch a glimpse of my future, I’d to turn in the other direction, to the land. There I would see the labour of the mending sheds, the worn tracks between the peat country and our fireplaces. Tubs of grey, soapy water where woollens were scrubbed on wooden boards. Roadways leading to the farms and estates where my mother and aunties walked to sell fish. For me and Kitta, for Elspet and Liza, the pattern of the years ahead would be plain and safe and all the dreary same.

It didn’t stop me from yearning, mind. Even my earliest memory …