The Fisherman's Girl Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Maggie Ford

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Adverts

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Will Pam’s secret tear her family apart?

  After the market crash of 1929, the Bowmaker family in Leigh-on-Sea are struggling to make ends meet. In these harsh times they must support each other or they risk their tight-knit family falling apart.

  But Pamela Bowmaker has a secret. Her sweetheart is George Bryant, whose family has been feuding with the Bowmakers’ since before she was born. With a baby on the way, Pam will need her family’s help more than ever. Can their love heal old wounds for the sake of their baby, or are some grudges too deep to mend?

  A warm-hearted and gripping saga, from the author of The Factory Girl and A Girl in Wartime

  About the Author

  Maggie was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.

  She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.

  Also by Maggie Ford

  The Soldier’s Bride

  A Mother’s Love

  Call Nurse Jenny

  A Woman’s Place

  The Factory Girl

  A Girl in Wartime

  A Soldier’s Girl

  An East End Girl

  Chapter One

  Above the wild Saturday afternoon the deep double boom rolled over the Thames estuary to lose itself amid the creeks and mud flats and marshy islands of Leigh and Hadleigh.

  In Leigh, Peggy Bowmaker looked up from cooking her men’s tea to gaze towards the tiny window of her kitchen.

  ‘That was Southend’s lifeboat maroon.’ Her tone was sharp but there was no need to further voice the vague concern that came to her. Her four daughters, helping lay the table for their father and brother coming home on the tide, shared the same brief thought, swiftly casting it off.

  ‘They’ll be back by now,’ Connie, her oldest daughter, murmured.

  Peggy hoped so. Daniel had promised only to work the one tide. No cockler, as cockle pickers were locally known, reading the weather signs as Dan could, would be foolish enough to stay out on the estuary for two tides. Dan had lifted an eye at it as he’d left.

  ‘Looks like a bit of a blow coming up,’ he’d said. ‘Be back tonight.’ Never changed his mind once he’d said a thing, knowing too that she’d have his tea ready for him. Always kept his word. Stubborn too. Didn’t she know it. That bother with Dick Bryant all those years ago. Nineteen hundred and five, twenty-four years ago. Nineteen twenty-nine now, and the feud still going on …

  Yes, he’d be tying up by the creek wall at this minute. She felt easier.

  Her slow exhalation of momentarily held breath was less audible than felt. She glanced around at her girls, for once all here together: Josie, her youngest and out of work again, Connie the eldest, home from work with a cold, as was Pam. Annie, receptionist at the Cliffs Hotel, would be going in later.

  Josie, coming up to eighteen, was first to cheer up. ‘Can I go out and see if I can see anything?’

  Her mother stopped stirring the casserole she had been getting out of the tiny kitchen range oven as the maroon went off, her full face reddened by the heat. She smiled, but not indulgently. ‘It’s got too windy out there.’

  ‘Oh, Mum …’

  Another detonation reverberated in the air, faint here but a mighty boom a few miles away in Southend-on-Sea itself.

  ‘Someone’s definitely in trouble.’

  ‘A ship?’ Josie was animated by impatience. ‘Oh, Mum, can I go?’

  The wind had got up, suddenly, around dinner time. Dan had been right, as always, reading the overcast sky. He had chuckled, deep in his throat. ‘Anyone working doubles this weather needs his brains tested.’

  Doubles – going out on a falling tide to rake the exposed mud banks for the cockles East Londoners loved; as the tide returned, climbing back on board, as it again ebbed, over the side a second time, coming home with a laden boat on the next high tide. Dan favoured the sands of Shoeburyness beyond Southend, where the tiny bivalves were plentiful, but some way out. High wind could be hazardous to a shallow, forty-foot bawley even under engine.

  It was nearing the end of March. Visitors wouldn’t be coming to the cockle sheds of Leigh to buy the small succulent shellfish until summer – perhaps a few at Easter, but mostly the cockles gathered at this time of year went to Billingsgate fish market in London. Less profit than selling direct to visitors, but still not too bad a living.

  ‘I’ll put a coat on, Mum,’ Josie was begging. ‘I’ll only be a minute, I promise.’

  Josie’s promises were unlike her father’s. She could be half an hour, promise forgotten, her dad home demanding where the hell she was. But how could she ignore the girl’s pleading tone? Josie, unlike her sisters, was between jobs. She was seldom able to hold a job down, because of her volatile nature, and had been stuck in all day. Perhaps this once. ‘All right, but only a minute.’

  In less than a minute she was racing back from the Strand where people had already gathered to watch what was going on.

  ‘Mum, there’s two big ships out there. It looks like one’s rammed the other. There’s tugs out there too. I can’t see very well from this distance but one tug looks in trouble.’

  Her eyes flew straight to Connie, who had gasped. But their mother gave a small laugh for all it held a note of anxiety for her eldest daughter. ‘There’s thousands of tugs working the Thames. It wouldn’t be Ben’s.’

  But Pam had given a disquieting, ‘Oh, Connie,’ as her sister made for the back door and the back gate beyond the tiny yard, coatless, the edges of her brown cardigan flying.

  Annie at the door called after her. ‘I’ll bring Dad’s binoculars.’

  The cockle boats had all wisely come in and were tied up to the sea wall beyond which discarded shells several feet deep lay piled up like small mountains, ready to be crushed to help make roads and garden paths. This provided another small source of income. Lorries came for them regularly. And just as well for they filled the air with a heavy stink of rotten fish.

  Daniel’s smallish haul today had been unloaded into the sheds for boiling. First the men would eat a much-needed evening meal. He, his brothers Reg and Pete, his son Danny and young Tibb Barnard who helped out, had left. Daniel and Danny reached home a quarter of a mile from the sheds, and were on the point of opening the street door when the maroon sounded.
r />   ‘Trouble?’ Daniel, his large hand poised on the half-open door, eyed his son.

  Danny, twenty-six, the eldest of his family, his only son now – his youngest had been knocked down on the railway lines five years ago – gazed back and grinned derisively, quirking his lips slightly to one side. ‘Holidaymaker fell off a jetty? Or some silly rich fool out on his yacht?’ It was all possible. His father did not smile.

  ‘Too early for holidaymakers. And anyone going out there willingly has to be a fool.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ The quip was mild and his father now grinned, a grin much like his son’s, as they pushed into the house.

  The door opened into the tiny front room as did all the doors in this short terrace of fishermen’s cottages dating back fifty years or more. Facing the old High Street and situated halfway between the rickety clusters of cockle sheds, a couple of pubs and Bell Wharf, they backed on to a cobbled alley overlooking the estuary. They’d all been two-up-two-down when first built, but most had been extended into the back yards to give extra room.

  The second maroon sounded as the two men closed the door. Daniel paused. ‘Better take a look.’

  From the kitchen came sounds of consternation, as his wife heard him come in. She called out fretfully, ‘That you, Dan? Did you hear that?’

  She came hurrying from the kitchen, her expression all worked up. ‘Connie’s gone rushing out. Josie says there’s two ships in collision and a tugboat that looks in distress. Connie’s got it into her mind it could be her Ben’s tug.’

  ‘That’s damned stupid,’ Dan said.

  ‘Yes, but you know how she is about him, what with them to be engaged come June. She says things are going too smoothly for them and something’s bound to go wrong – it always does.’

  ‘Where’s she now?’

  ‘I told you, out there on the Strand by now. Josie said there’s a great crowd gathering there.

  ‘Bugger that Josie,’ Dan swore as he followed his wife through to the back, the tall muscular figure of Danny following closely behind. ‘Can’t ever see her thinkin’ on anything but spreading bloody panic wherever place she ’appens to be. Upsettin’ Connie like that.’

  ‘Well, they’ve all gone flying off now,’ Peggy said testily, her meal left.

  On the square called the Strand, and all along the narrow promenade between the shoreline and the main railway line from London’s Fenchurch Street and Southend’s Central Station, local people had gathered, the crowd growing steadily. Adding to it, the Bowmakers gazed out across heaving waves large enough to have been the North Sea itself, the waves breaking right up the sloping sea wall to half drown with each splash those who stood too close. The air had filled with the iodine smell of seaweed.

  Dan grabbed his binoculars from Connie’s trembling hands. She now wore the coat Annie had brought out for her to wear against the March wind. For a moment he trained them on the two cargo vessels still locked together, then on the several tugs bobbing in the white-topped waves like little bugs around the huge hulls.

  ‘I can’t see the names on any of the tugs,’ he announced. ‘Just them of the cargo ships. One’s …’

  ‘I don’t care about the names of the ships,’ Connie shrieked. ‘Can’t you see more than that? They said one of the tugs is in trouble. Which one?’

  ‘I can see it, gel. But I can’t read the name. Not from ’ere.’

  ‘It can’t be anything to do with your Ben,’ Annie ventured. ‘He’s probably a long way up river. Probably has no idea. And it would have to be quite a big coincidence, wouldn’t it, if it was him and his father on that tug? I’m sure it couldn’t be, could it? But you mustn’t worry.’

  Connie didn’t reply. Annie might as well have said, ‘But it could.’ Whatever Annie said, however well intentioned, she managed to sound doleful, always managed to refer to the more awful of two likelihoods. She and her haughty attitude. Annie worked as a receptionist at the big Cliffs Hotel in Westcliff further along towards Southend and assumed herself a cut above everyone else. With unkind thoughts, Connie ignored her gloomy comments. But it was hard not to react to them.

  The lifeboat had appeared from behind the bend in the shoreline. A cheer went up from those around her as it sped its way towards the distant scene, its bows at times almost leaping clear of the waves. The cheer had a note not of relief but of glee. People seemed ever keen to enjoy a spectacle, ignorant of those distant men in danger of drowning, who perhaps had already drowned. They were too removed from the onlookers to possess any significance of suffering and terror – like watching a film at the pictures, where the drama of the silent reel came across only via the accompanying pianist’s skill. They were hateful, these people who came merely to gawp. Connie despised them.

  The lifeboat would take its passengers back to Southend. An hour or two later she might be informed that Ben had been one of them, dead or injured, for she was becoming more and more convinced of him being there. Through the binoculars she could see men being helped off the tugboat, whose stern was already under water. Some of the lifeboat men seemed to be searching the water around it. Someone overboard. Someone drowning; already drowned. They seemed to be pulling someone or something out of the water. Connie’s heart seemed to be up in her throat. The binocular vision picked out a limp form being lifted on to the lifeboat, Ben’s form, she was sure of it. With a small strangled cry, she thrust the binoculars back into her dad’s hands.

  ‘I’ve got to get to Southend. They’ve brought someone out of the water. It looked like Ben.’

  ‘Connie,’ her mother said as she rounded on her. ‘Don’t be so silly, love. You’re getting yourself into a state.’

  The others had gathered about her, the scene out to sea forgotten.

  ‘You can’t go, just like that.’

  ‘It’s not Ben. It can’t be.’

  ‘You can’t go alone, Connie.’

  ‘I have to go, I have to. I have to be sure.’ Her heart pumping in her chest was a heavy stifling pain. She knew her face was chalk white, her eyes staring with the visions she was seeing. Her and Ben, so happy. Too good to be true. ‘I don’t care, I’ve got to go,’ she wept, her voice rising.

  ‘Love, people are looking. If you must, I’ll go with you. The lifeboat will take ages to get back.’

  ‘I’ll go with her,’ Danny said in a commanding way. ‘You stay here, Mum, and get on with the tea.’ He turned back to Connie, who was standing shaking from head to foot with her visions. His voice was soothing. ‘There is nothing to worry about, Connie, but you must go just to be sure, I know. Come on, let’s get goin’, then.’

  Connie returned on his arm, her face still white, her eyes red with weeping. She looked about ready to faint. At her entrance, the family, waiting in virtual silence in the front room for her return, stood up anxiously.

  Her mother came forward, arms outstretched. ‘Oh, love, no.’

  Thus prompted Connie, having held herself together all the way back on the train, burst into a relieved fit of weeping on her mother’s shoulder, her words tumbling out in a gush.

  ‘Oh, Mum. It was so awful. It wasn’t him. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t on that tug. But they asked me if I was related or knew him. I didn’t know who it was. But he looked so dreadful, all cut and bruised and … and dead.’

  Her words cut themselves off in a swallowed sob. But it wasn’t Ben. Oh, thank God, it wasn’t him.

  ‘Then come and sit down, love.’ Her mother guided her, still weeping, to an armchair as the whole room seemed to relax. ‘There’s nothing to cry about any more. Your Ben’s all right. You’ll be seeing him on Sunday. It must have been a terrible experience for you, but now it’s all over. Now you must forget all about it.’

  ‘But someone will be grieving,’ was all she could say. ‘I wish I could take their grief away for them when they’re told.’

  ‘Well, you can’t, love. No matter how much people care and cuddle, those with grief to endure have to do it alone, I’
m afraid.’

  The tone of the remark made Connie’s heart go out to her as her mother went to make the cup of soothing tea. On the loss of little Tony, only ten years old, on the railway line, had she grieved alone despite all their combined grieving? Yes, she had.

  Connie lay back in the armchair, thoroughly worn out by her ordeal, and let herself cry quietly, for her weariness, for the woman who would soon be grieving, and for her mother who had never stopped.

  Chapter Two

  Who would have believed that a few days ago had seen wild winds and heaving waves? Today the estuary held a strange lurking silence, the water out as far as it could go, leaving mile on mile of brown algae-coated ooze soft as melted chocolate.

  The stillness helped calm Josie Bowmaker’s angry breast as she let her feet sink ankle-deep in mud. From here she could see Southend’s mile-long pier. Two and a half miles away, it looked no more than a grey pencil mark against the pale, cloud-streaked horizon on this fresh April afternoon. The holiday season had not yet begun; few people would be walking the pier, and the small open-sided trains that trundled its length were still having maintenance done to them under the pavilion.

  Drawing her cardigan closer about her shoulders against a brief stir of chilly air, she widened her gaze to the distant glint of deep water where cargo ships hardly seeming to move made for or departed from the docks of London. The water’s edge itself was completely out of sight, but the tide had probably begun to turn and she’d have to be getting back home soon.

  Dad and Danny would be home soon too. Several boats had gone out yesterday, each with four men to work the sands, each team working in a tight circle, throwing back the undersized ones to grow on and replenish their numbers. Cocklers could make quite a decent living, but it was hard work. During the winter when the weather grew cold and the salt wind bit hands and cheeks, they would ease off. But with summer coming, they were now stepping up the hours. In summer they wore shorts and shirts. Today, still in winter gear, it was thigh boots, several polo-necked jerseys. With the season just around the corner, holidaymakers and day trippers would come to the Leigh cockle sheds to buy cockles at threepence a pint in small woven bags to eat with pepper and vinegar. They ate shrimps too, and whelks and winkles, jellied eels, mussels and prawns, but cocklers kept to their own trade.