Silver Darling by Katya Johnson

September 1876, Borth Morfa

The first time I saw him he was leaning against the keel of his boat Ruth, wearing a dusty suit, with his hat cocked at a slant on his head, gazing out to sea. He caught me looking and called out ‘Hey you! Boy!’ but I was afraid and ran away as fast as my legs could carry me, down along the shingle spit. That was in spring before the arrival of the herring harvest in autumn. I could tell because suddenly the grey beach was awash with small boats, sloops and fishing smacks. This time he was not alone but with a friend. I heard him whisper to him: ‘Look ‘e, over there, that’s the one I was talking about,’ and saw that both men had paused to watch me stumble awkwardly out of view towards my boarding house. The next time was by the Soar Chapel door after the Sunday service. He caught me descending from the balcony on a ladder, my surplice robes billowing about my ankles.

‘Better watch or you’ll trip up,’ he said, beckoning me towards him with a quick sidewards movement of his head. ‘God only knows how a little fella like you could move your fingers that fast.’ He glanced up to the organ balcony.

‘It comes easily, with practice.’

As Uppingham School’s only organ scholar, I was obliged to attend both the local Welsh service that our headmaster delivered to the local Methodist congregation, and our own Anglican service. That week I accompanied ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ and ‘All People That on Earth Do Dwell’.

‘I’ve had my eye on you,’ he said, after a pause.

‘Why sir?’

‘Because you’re always on your own.’

My cheeks flushed. The old man noticed.

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m always on my own too. Almost always,’ he self-corrected with a grin.

I looked up at the old man talking to me in his close-fitting navy sweater and creased Sunday best. A curtain of white eyebrow hair swooped down across his pale blue eyes, which peered at me with interest.

‘What’s your name if you don’t mind my asking?’ I ventured coyly.

‘People round here call me Spooner. And you?’

‘Robert.’

‘Master Robert, that’s a promising name.’ He paused for a moment or two before continuing: ‘Say Robert, do you have any time off?’

‘Sometimes on Saturday afternoon before prep.’

‘Well come and pay me a visit at my cottage then. It’s opposite the slip they use for launching the herring boats. Got the name Y Wern.’

The conversation was cut off by the sudden appearance of Evans, my schoolmaster, who peered down his glasses disapprovingly at Spooner and with a pastoral nudge on my shoulder guided me gently back inside.

‘And don’t forget!” called Spooner back to me, trudging down the mud track that led back to the village through the mire.

Spooner’s cottage was small and white on the outside, and cramped and dark on the inside. When I entered, my nose was immediately assaulted by the fetid stench of drying tobacco leaves and the smell of curing meat. Yellowing haunches rotated silently from the crossbeams of the room. Willow baskets of all imaginable dimensions were strung up on the beach stone walls and stacked up in corners along with lobster pots, discarded ropes, drying hops, trays of salted fish and all other imaginable kinds of fishing paraphernalia. Spooner himself was squatting by the peat fire in the inglenook hearth and stoking it with short, incisive jabs.

‘So you made it,’ he remarked drily. He had removed his hat and I could see that his hair was as white and fleecy as his mariner’s beard.

‘I’m sorry I’m late.’

‘Bah,’ he returned with contempt. ‘No clocks here.’

I looked around the room and saw he was quite right.

‘Bloody clocks and bloody railway,’ he continued, clearly irritated by the very thought of them. ‘Had no peace in Borth since that railway was built.’

He gestured gruffly to a small three legged stool and a glass of milk prepared for me in front of the fire. I sat down beside him.

‘Does anyone know you’re here?’

My silence was all the answer he needed.

‘Thought as much,’ he said with a short laugh and drew a smoking pipe from the breast-pocket of his tunic.

‘Did anyone see ya on your way over?’

‘None but a group of women dressed in black down by the slip.’

‘Know who they are?’

I shook my head.

‘In Aberystwyth and other villages in these parts they call them the Brain y Borth. The Borth Crows. They’re widows whose husbands have perished at sea. Some of them own boats. Some shell cockles, shrimp, even dragnet. Women do all manner of things in Borth. Independent as you like.’

I thought for a moment before asking Spooner a question that had been bothering me for some time.

‘How is it you come to speak such good English?’

He coughed, a rasping, racking cough. ‘Married an Englishwoman, for my sins.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Ruth.’

‘Did she die?’ I asked nervously, following the definitive way he had said it.

‘Lord no!’ he laughed ruefully. ‘Though sometimes I wish she had. She ran away with a railway porter. Don’t see much of her anymore. They’ve gone inland.’ Spooner grimaced, his pipe was finished. He cast the remains into the small, orange fire before us. It smelt of moss and cow dung. The old tobacco residue sizzled.

‘Weren’t you afraid to come today?’ he asked, looking at me squarely.

I looked down at my feet. ‘I can’t deny it.’

‘They why did you?’

The old man bent his gaze upon me. His eyebrows bunched together, creating a river of wrinkles on his forehead. The words stuck in my mouth as I struggled to articulate what I had never once admitted to a single of my classmates at Uppingham.

‘It’s because I saw your boat and because of your occupation. You see, my father, who I never knew, was a fisherman. And his father before that.’

My whole being felt lighter. Spooner clapped his knees at once with satisfaction.

‘I knew there was something. I knew it. So the organ scholar is a fisherman’s son! Well I never... But you got one thing wrong.’

For the first time that I had known them to, those strange sucking lips of his metamorphosed into a smile. ‘I’m not a fisherman.’

‘Oh?’

As it turned out, Spooner, or Captain John Hughes as he later introduced himself to me, was a retired sea captain. He had been on sea voyages to Peru, the Horn of Africa and to the spice islands of the Caribbean. He spent the next hour regaling me with stories of Moroccan pirates (who had once come to Borth), of press gangs and mutinees – and nothing could have fired my thirteen-year-old imagination more than the seafaring stories of this old scurvy sea captain which he recited slowly and musically, in his lilting Welsh accent. Seeing my interest piqued and my shyness melting away, he hunched a little closer.

‘Would you like to go out with me one day? Nothing tells you who you are like the sea you know.’

I shook my head. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m afraid of water. I can’t swim.’

‘Afraid of water!’ The old man laughed. ‘What kind of world am I leaving behind to stand watch o’er my earthly remains?’

But he didn’t press the point. Instead he got up and led me towards the dingiest corner of the cottage where a large object was covered in rumpled sack cloth.

‘Got it off one of the ships. Gave it to Ruth as a wedding present,’ he explained, drawing back the sacking to reveal a little white spinet beneath it. ‘I like the sound of the thing, but can’t make sense of it myself. Would you play something for me?’

At last I knew why Spooner had asked me over to see him. I played ‘Abide with Me’, since he said he liked it, and other songs from the hymnal. Spooner sat in an old chair beside me, puffing away ponderously at his pipe in such a steady and contented manner that I worried for a moment he would never let me leave.

The next Saturday I saw Spooner on the beach among a general crowd and walked over to join them.

‘Good mornin’ skipper! How’s the piano practice coming on?’

‘Very well, thank you Spooner,’ I replied, secretly pleased that he had called me ‘skipper.’

‘D’ya wanna lend a pair o’ hands to bringin’ in the catch? Other young ‘uns are here to help…’ asked Spooner’s friend. He had widely-spaced wandering eyes and a sock-shaped hat flopped over one side of his head.

I peered round the hull of the tri-masted fishing boat and saw a number of other young boys my age, gathered barefoot in a small cluster by the surf.

‘Go onnn!’ cajouled an old woman carrying a full basket of flounders on her back.

‘It’s something of a local tradition for the youngsters to help bring in the haul – its called sgadan bys,’ explained Spooner.

I could see a little fishing smack bobbing in the surf. It was drawing closer, the mizzen mast was down and a number of dark figures clustered on the prow, looked out towards the beach.

‘Very well.’

I put down my books, rolled up my sleeves, slipped off my shoes and socks and let Spooner introduce me to the other boys in Welsh, after giving me instructions in English.

That afternoon was a revelation to me. The work was harder than I expected: the nets were heavy and wet, the fisherman tired from their long day at sea. The other boys could not speak to me and I could not speak to them. Yet, together, young hands conspired to tug the mighty catch up the beach and towards the fish gutting station where the young women had gathered, ready to gut the herring and load them into carts. Afterwards, trudging back along the beach, my feet pinching with cold and the pockets of my school jacket crammed with slick, slimy herring fish, I realised that I was the happiest I’d been in months. Then and there I resolved to return every Saturday to help the villagers with their work.

Things started to change at school too. Two of the other boys in my form group: Freddy and Thomas, had taken an interest in my Saturday afternoon outings. Under an oath of secrecy, I had taken them out with me to help bring in the haul. When we returned to the boarding house with fistfuls of herring the next day, they were exultant. We found a secret hiding place for them in an old garden shed and cooked them over a beach fire after the Sunday service. It became a ritual of ours, and on Sundays I began to wish the hours at chapel services would hurry on faster so I could meet with Freddy and Thomas and go on our clandestine expedition together. I introduced them to Spooner, who was belligerent and unresponsive, and delighted them both. Then, at long last, just before the end of the herring season, I decided to grant Spooner’s long-asked request of me.

We went out alone. I decided not to tell Freddy and Thomas about the plan, feeling instinctively that this was something that needed to happen solely between myself and Spooner. Instead I pleaded sickness with the school matron and then disappeared out through the infirmary window so that we could cast off at the beach in the early morning. Spooner was unusually taciturn with me. His silence felt the more oppressive because though my net-hauling with the other boys had helped deplete my fear of the sea, the reality of being adrift on the unremitting expanse still struck me with panic. I made Spooner promise that we would only go out for an hour and not too far from shore.

He set out the nets and we waited.

‘There was a time when you could fish for herring on the beach. They were so bountiful that they would just flow into the nets.’ Spooner set his jaw grimly and pulled the low brimmed fishing hat down over his eyes.

Half an hour later and still we had caught nothing in the drift. Every minute seemed to increase Spooner’s despondency.

‘In this spot, five years ago, the very edges of the boat would be brimming with herring, teeming with herring!’

Sensing his disappointment, I decided to keep quiet.

‘The motion making you sick boy?’

He must have seen my nauseous complexion. Unused to being at sea, I felt I could be sick at any moment in the tiny boat.

‘Release it boy. That’s the best thing to do.’

So I did, from the vessel’s starboard.

‘Are you afraid?’ he asked when I crawled back.

‘Yes.’ It was an unusually windless day. We were being carried along to Spooner’s favourite fishing spot ‘The Patches’, purely on account of the south-westerly ebbing tide. A dark cloud bank was forming in the North.

‘But you came anyway.’ He nodded sagely and looked down into the glittering ocean. ‘Well done Robert. You’ve done good.’

Suddenly a shadow passed beneath the boat and a great weight pulled down on my arm.

‘Spooner! We’ve caught something.’

He peered over the edge of the boat.

‘By God you’re right,’ he muttered. ‘Could even be a long hundred.’

That was the last time I ever saw Spooner. The school matron soon discovered my disappearance and raised the alarm. One of the boys in the year below who’d caught wind of our activities explained everything. All of the school masters were waiting for me when I got back and I was gated for the remainder of Uppingham school’s residence in Borth. Terrible to say, but despite this severe punishment, I almost felt pleased that the Tuberculosis epidemic had visited the school premises in Rutland and we’d been forced to evacuate to the countryside. Because of the evacuation I’d met Spooner – one of the greatest and most luminous personalities of my young years – and gone out to sea for the first time. I did go back to Borth again, many years later, when I was working as the chief organist to York Minster. I enquired after Spooner everywhere, but could find no sign of him. Y Wern was derelict and boarded up, there were only a dozen fishing smacks left on the spit. In the end one of the old crows told me what happened to him. He had gone out to the Patches last September hunting for herring and was late coming home. The villagers kept a vigil for him on the cliff and lit bonfires on the beach, but he never came back.