Читать книгу In the Days of Rain: WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD - Rebecca Stott - Страница 15

Agnes must have considered herself lucky to have married a sailmaker and not a sailor, lucky that her sisters hadn’t married sailors, that they’d been spared the fate of the eighty-two widows of Eyemouth. According to the records I’d found in the Eyemouth fishing museum, many of those women were, like Agnes, pregnant when they buried their husbands. They named their newborn babies after their dead fathers. Now I understood why Robert had named his new daughter, born two years after the disaster, Adelina Purves Spouse Stott. It had always struck me as such an odd name. James Purves and Thomas Spouse had been Robert’s childhood friends, and they’d died in the storm. Adelina Purves Spouse Stott was Robert’s twelfth child.

Few Eyemouth families escaped the long aftermath of the storm. With the fishing fleet largely destroyed, John Wilson’s sailmaking business, like all the businesses in the town, was soon on a knife edge. Within four years he’d been listed in the Glasgow Herald as a ‘Scotch Bankrupt’.7 He was one of many from the town. If they’d built a new harbour instead of having to fight the Kirk all those years, historians say, those fishermen would probably still be alive. They’d only gone out in that storm because they had to, because they had children to feed and the Kirk tithe to pay.

John and Agnes moved forty miles east along the coast to start up a new sailmaking business in Port Seton, a small fishing village outside Edinburgh. Since its new harbour had opened in 1880, thirty-five boats had been registered there. The population had tripled in twenty years. It was an industrious town, the history books claim, and, compared to Eyemouth, a Godfearing town. New churches were going up everywhere.

But things just kept getting worse for Agnes and John. They and their two small children had only been in Port Seton for four years when news came from Agnes’s younger sister Annie down in Grimsby that their father had died, at only forty-six years old. Robert Stott died, his son David always told people, a drinker’s death. Five months later, his widow Elizabeth died in childbirth, leaving seven orphaned children in the Grimsby terrace.

Within weeks all seven had been taken in – adopted by their older brothers or sisters, or put to work. Agnes took her fourteen-year-old brother David and her four-year-old half-brother Joseph to live with her in Port Seton. Her husband would take David on as apprentice in the Wilson sail sheds.

Could any of these Stott children read? If the older ones had been taught their letters it would have been at one of the many Grimsby Sunday schools, like the one the Primitive Methodists had opened in 1867, just a few streets away from the Stott house. The younger children were luckier. Annie and David had just enough time between their mother’s death in 1876 and their father and stepmother’s death in 1889 to attend the new public-funded school. They had learned to read, write, and do sums.

I was the oldest girl in a family of five children, with an absent father and a hardworking, sleep-deprived mother. I knew that Agnes and her young sisters would have been carrying those babies around in Grimsby, mashing up food, wiping noses, cleaning up cuts, singing songs, telling stories, just as I did. I helped my mother feed my adored twin brother and sister, born when I was nearly six, and I read to them and listened to them read when they were old enough.

But there were older Brethren ‘sisters’ who helped my mother – shadowy, kind women who baked and stitched, who took us out for picnics or to the beach. My mother had electricity, a washing machine, a sewing machine and a food mixer; she had powdered mashed-potato mix, tins of Spam and sliced pineapples in her kitchen cupboards, and her own car parked outside. She taught me to read long before I went to school. I’d like to think that at least some of those Grimsby Stott children had books stowed under their pillows as I did.

But though they’d suffered through those early years, Agnes and David must have considered themselves on safe and solid ground in their new house in bustling Port Seton, with its brand-new harbour and all those boats out there bringing in trade to the Wilson sailmaking sheds.