14

Faster than fairies, faster than witches

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches

Charging along like troops in a battle

All through the meadows the horses and cattle …

My first ever train ride made me think of that poem we had recited in school, Mr Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, but it was night and I had to imagine the world rushing past. The lurching carriages rocked us 600 miles from landfall at the Broch to Great Yarmouth, a crush of girls singing and laughing, unable to sleep.

When we arrived, well. Another country, it was, and a shock. If we had thought Lerwegians did not much care for the flood of fishworkers to their town, it was as nought compared to our grudging welcome in The Sooth.

No wee hoosies here. The curers gave us an allowance and a list and we were to find our own lodgings close to the yards on the Denes, three or four girls to a room. Clementina shepherded us straight to Mrs Booth’s. When I looked up at the house, with its flower-box windows upstairs and down, I gulped.

Very grand, I whispered to Kitta.

In the small back garden was a room with a stone laundry trough and a tin bathtub, and right down the back a convenience unheard of: a single wee laavie with a seat and a pan.

But the lodgings, they were not grand, no. We had a tiny windowless room underneath Mrs Booth’s staircase, with brown paper hung loosely over the walls and covering the wooden floorboards. I opened the door and looked around outside, but the hallway walls and floor were not papered the same way.

What’s all this for? I asked, flicking my fingers at the paper.

For us, Clementina barked, laughing, and then continued in a high, prissy voice and her version of an English accent. Guttin’ gels are dirty things, yew know. Greasy, fishy hands an’ oil in their hair. All those nasty scales get over ev–ry–thing.

An’ they stomp in with nasty guts on their boots, yew know, Kitta joined in.

And, Clementina said, brandishing candles in my face, they smell like somethin’ horrid. Like … like fish!

Kitta put a match to a wick and the room was filled with the reek of camphor. More to Mrs Booth’s liking than the smell of four gutting girls.

The fourth was Bella Strahan, whose team was scattered, unable to find a room together. She was not her usual loud self, and lay spread-eagled on the horsehair mattress. All of the girls but me had had a bitter time of it on the St Siniver. But while most were feeling back to rights by the time the train drew in to the Yarmouth station, Bella was grey-faced still. Her travelling pinafore sour with flecks of vomit.