I was also getting used to another something new. The coopers were kings of the yards, and what they said was what we did for the hours at the farlins, but there was no-one fussing around with a list of what I must think or do. No men to cook for when we left at night, with boots to be cleaned and clothes to be washed. Sitting there, waiting for pots of tea. No work to get through one day so that men could do theirs the next. No fires to be lit and chairs brushed down to put others at ease. I looked around at the girls at the farlins and could not imagine any one of them carrying a fisherman on her back, although some of them probably had before they ran away to the fish.

When I heard that the drifters that Da, Sailor Wattie and the boys were signed to had been sent north to Baltasound for the Shetlands season, I could have danced a jig right there on the spot. They wouldn’t be nearby in Lerwick, or joining us at Gremista. Oh, shameful, aye, to be wishing your family far away, but I’d had a taste of my own mind and I didn’t want to be giving it up. I’d grown to like the idea that I was free to sing Sankey’s hymns with the other girls as I fried our herrings for tea and our tatties for next day’s dinner. No-one to watch me with a sour face. No-one to spoil the joy or thunder at me that silence is godly.

I could push Roanhaven away, even pretend it never was.

Isobel, Jeannie and Mary didn’t seem to mind at all that their fathers and brothers were sometimes in port come Saturday night, but it looked to me a blighted blessing. After we’d finished on these Saturdays, off they would go, those girls, walking in to Lerwick for shop-bought cake, and then back to make tattie pie and egg custard—treats for their men. And when Old Boy Jackie and the other coopers and crew from the fisher boats got out their melodians and fiddles and played long past dark, the little knot from Cruden Bay would stick together, the girls dancing with their brothers and serving their fathers tea.