Ma knelt by our closet bed later, and her voice was a gruff whisper. The fishers say it’s unlucky, she told me, her fingers opening and closing as if trying to pluck something from the air. And maybe they be right, quinie, maybe no, but isn’t for us to say when they be the ones the sea plays with, a witch who can give or take at leastest whim.

I listened, aye, and I learned, and from then on I stayed far from the boatie shore on the nights the men left so never again would they be cursed by the redhead crossing their path.

Mind, when it came to the things a Buchan fisherman thought cursed, the list was long. Pigs, rats, cats, hares, rabbits, salmon … Even now it feels reckless to write that list of words, as any child of fisherfolk had it slapped into them, from the time they could point, that pigs were to be called four-fitted beasts or grunters, rats were long-tailed fellers, salmon, the reid fish. Pastors, now, they couldn’t be named, nor seen near the boats, and we called the kirk the bell hoose. Strange, you think, that the work of the Lord should be held in such fear? Well, fishermen didn’t like to take chances when it came to offending gods, the pagan and the Christian both. To show reverence to the Lord, well, that might upset the Witch.

I don’t know, lambsie, just what it was about red hair that threatened the fishermen’s pact with the sea. But I remember a day when our Archie was sending me dark looks as he dumped by the door a ruined twine of lines shredded by dogfish. Like the fault was mine. Ma took my chin in her hands and knelt down to whisper. Don’t ye fret, quinie, for if we end our days with hair at all, it all be the same colour. But look, lambsie, see how wrong she was. Dulled with age it might be, but my hair has never gone the usual white or grey.

She could be soft at times, Ma could, when it came to me and Kitta, glancing around first to check there was none watching to mistake soft for weak. But she was a tough woman, aye, like all the fishwives of those parts, because tough they had to be.