I say it was ordinary, but of course there came a time when I realized Ma and Da were part of a gang of criminals, of sorts, but we never seemed to make great monies from it, nor live in a merchant’s house somewhere grand further away from the river; and Ma’s hands stayed red raw, although covered sometimes in a nice pair of gloves, and Da stayed discontent. So I suppose the part they played in the smuggling of tea from the Orient to Great Britain, by way of the Scottish shoreline, was trivial. There’s no customs post at Fisherrow, for it is considered too small a port and the waters too shallow for decent foreign-ship trade. So smugglers can come and go as they please. Up and down the coast of Scotland and England fine and fancy goods are brought ashore on secluded beaches and at quiet ports. Coffee berries, aniseed, snuff; haberdasheries from India. They are hidden in casks and canisters and buried in caves or stored in trusted safe houses. For our part, it was tea, and it was stored under our box-bed for a time, then collected and, according to Ma, sold on the black market.

But whatever Ma and Da earned from their part in it all was pennies and just enough to keep the roof over our heads and put a joint of meat in the pot on occasions, which was a welcome change, and sometimes some nice whisky and fancy goods like kerchiefs and rugs and gloves.

Da also kept a pile of these pennies behind a brick in the wall, in case a press gang came calling and he could bribe them to ignore him. But the press gangs never came as far as our cottage; they merely roamed the alehouses. I often wished they would come for Da, for he was fearsome when he was in full temper, and he was in full temper quite a lot of the time. He was loud when he was being merry with the tea folk and loud when he was angry with us, and would switch between the two in a flash.

Joan is younger than me by two years and spoiled rotten. We all took an ague not long after she was born, and she almost died. Since then Ma has doted on her. I don’t remember the sickness, but Ma tells the story. It was a fever that swept Fisherrow, brought in on a boat full of smuggled tea. I shook it off in a day or so and was taken in by a neighbour, as those three tossed and turned in the bed. Da slept deep, but Ma was fitful and thought Joan would not survive, so poorly she was. She would not suckle and at first she mewled like a kitten, then even the mewling stopped.