Mollie On The Shore

by Elizabeth Jeffrey

Genres: General Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

After the death of her mother, Mollie Barnes is sent to live in her aunt and uncle's house and forced to endure her aunt's simmering resentment. One day, the tension explodes, leading to a shocking revelation about Mollie's parentage. Every day, Mollie had been working by the shore, under the shadow of a large and imposing house. Now she knows that the master of the house, James Grainger, is her real father, she vows that one day she will sit at his table. But her dreams of finding acceptance are shattered as she finds herself the unwilling object of her half-brother's affections . . .

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Piatkus

Print pages: 369

Sample

‘Ain’t you got no ’ome to go to?’ Old Sol said grumpily as Mollie tipped the last basket of ‘mine’ into his tumbrel and marked it off on her tally stick. He rummaged in his voluminous pocket, brought out a dull-looking token and handed it to her. ‘The rest o’ the pickers left hours ago.’

‘Ten minutes, more like.’ Mollie spat on the token and put it in her pocket.

‘Well, you’re the last one.’ He gave his old donkey a nudge and began to trudge up the beach for the last time that day, back to the yard known as the Copperas House at the other end of the village, to empty the cart of the copperas ‘stones’ or ‘mine’ that the pickers had gathered.

Mollie watched him go, then turned, kicked off her shoes and went down to the water’s edge. This was the time she liked best, when the rest of the pickers were gone, having cleaned the beach of the twig-like lumps of copperas that were washed up out of the sea or out of the London clay of the cliffs every day.

The water was warm as it lapped her ankles. She bent and splashed her arms and face, reviving herself after the last four hours spent bent almost double picking up pieces of the dull-brown mineral. The last day of June in the year 1801 had been scorching hot, with a heat haze shimmering over the sand. The picking, which always had to be done between tides, had been when the sun was at its hottest. Mollie had been glad of her faded bonnet with its deep frill at the back to keep the sun off her neck. Her arms were already burned brown.

She lifted the skirt of her old cotton dress higher and sloshed a little deeper into the water, savouring the luxury of five minutes absolute peace. There was not a soul to be seen. Even the Grainger girl from the big house on the cliff, who sometimes wandered about at the very far end of the beach, hunting no doubt for pretty shells, was not there today. She lifted her face to the gentle, cooling breeze that had recently sprung up and closed her eyes blissfully.

Suddenly, a wave higher than the rest rolled in, covering her knees and the hem of her bunched skirt, a reminder that the tide was now rising quite fast. Reluctantly, she turned from the water and made her way up the beach to where she had left her shoes. She wiped the sand off her feet with the hem of her skirt and slipped her feet into them. She was quite proud of her shoes. They had only cost sixpence from the second-hand clothes shop and they almost fitted. She straightened up with a resigned sigh. Time to go home to the cottage beside the Copperas House and Aunt Rose’s perpetual nagging and complaining.

Mollie had lived with Aunt Rose, Uncle Sam and cousin Richard ever since she could remember but she had always known that she was not their child. It was no secret that she had been born in Frinton and that when her mother, Jane, who was Uncle Sam’s sister, died, not many days after Mollie was born, Uncle Sam had fetched her and brought her to Nazecliffe to live with him and Aunt Rose. Mollie had the distinct impression that Aunt Rose hadn’t been consulted over this and had not been well pleased to have an orphaned baby foisted on her, particularly as the child’s father had immediately gone away and joined the Navy. Mollie often wondered about her father; what he was like and where he might be on the high seas. Ever since her earliest years she had dreamed of him returning with untold riches and whisking her off to live in some beautiful foreign city with him. It was a dream that hadn’t changed in all her sixteen years. Neither had it materialised, for he had never come back, even for a visit.

She took her time walking home from the beach, but as she turned into the narrow, rutted, shop-lined High Street, she felt an arm draped round her shoulders and a familiar voice said, ‘Ma says she hopes you’ve earned enough tokens to buy four hot pies from the pie shop for supper.’

She twisted round and looked up into her cousin Richard’s affectionately grinning face. ‘An’ if I haven’t, I’ll give you three guesses who’ll have to go without,’ she said resignedly, rummaging in her pocket and bringing out three tokens with the letters J G stamped on one side and NAZECLIFFE on the other. ‘I on’y picked six bushels today,’ she explained. ‘It was so hot on the beach…’

‘You reckon you were hot! You shoulda bin shovellin’ coal all day in the boiler house, like I have,’ Richard said, ‘Nearly killed me, it did. Beats me how me Dad manages, workin’ in that heat all the time. As soon as I finished work I went down and took a dip in the sea to cool off.’

‘I didn’t see you,’ Mollie said in surprise.

‘No, I was up by the old church, well outa sight. Well, come on, are you gonna get these pies? You don’t want to be in trouble with Ma again, do you.’

‘No. I’ll be in trouble enough because I on’y picked six bushels. She don’t like it if I don’t pick at least eight. I’d like to see her pick eight bushels on a tide. Specially in this heat.’ Mollie rubbed her aching back.

‘I’d like to see her pick one bushel!’ Richard laughed. ‘Poor old dear, she’s getting so fat she has a job to get out of her chair these days.’

Mollie darted into the pie shop and bought the pies in exchange for two tokens. These the shopkeeper could redeem from the office at the Copperas House at the rate of tuppence a token.

‘She doesn’t need to,’ she said, resuming the conversation where it had left off. ‘She jest orders me around to do everything. I even have to tie her boot laces for her. She’s lazy, thass her trouble.’

Richard was silent. He didn’t like to be too disloyal to his mother but he couldn’t deny that what Mollie said was true. He was aware that his mother disliked Mollie, a dislike that seemed to be growing rather than lessening as the years went by. She had resented having Mollie thrust on her after Aunt Jane had died and she had often been cruel to her. Richard couldn’t count the number of times he had rescued the poor shivering little girl from the coal shed where she’d been banished for some trifling misdemeanour and cleaned her up before she could be sent back again for getting herself dirty. He had never forgotten and neither had Mollie. Any more than either of them could forget the beatings. Richard never got beaten, it was always Mollie who bore the brunt of Rose’s temper, which could be sudden and vicious. When he was little Richard had cried with her, shouting out to his mother to stop hurting Mollie, feeling the pain as keenly as if the stick had beaten his own back. Afterwards he would cuddle her, holding her quaking little body close and wiping away her tears. These experiences had forged a bond between the cousins as close as that of any brother and sister.

Mollie thrust a pie into Richard’s hand. ‘Thass yours,’ she said firmly.

‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’ he asked, turning it over.

‘Nothin’. It’s the biggest.’ She grinned and winked up at him. At eighteen, two years older than Mollie, he was already a head taller. ‘You’re a growin’ lad. Go on, take a bite, then she can’t pinch it for herself.’ Mollie had learned ways to get the better of her aunt. ‘Half a minute. I’d better get a loaf as well.’ She disappeared into the baker’s.

The purchases made they turned right out of the High Street into Copperas Lane. This was even narrower than the High Street, little more than a rough cart track between two rows of drunk-looking wooden cottages. As they went along a vile, pungent smell, sulphurous and choking, began to fill the air. It came from the Copperas House, a huddle of large black buildings in a yard at the end of the lane, over which a pall of thick smoke hung to add to the stink. The boiler house stood in the middle of the yard and to one side of it was a huge heap of sea coal. A block of wooden stables adjoined a brick-built counting house and there were several long, low sheds beyond which were the pits where the copperas was left to dissolve. Outside the yard on the leeward side, although this really didn’t make much difference as far as the stench was concerned, stood a small brick house. This was the house where the ‘copperas boiler’, the man responsible for every stage of processing the copperas, lived, rent-free.

Mollie was very proud that Uncle Sam was the copperas boiler at Grainger’s Copperas House. It was an important job. She idolised her Uncle Sam. He was everything Aunt Rose wasn’t, even in appearance. Whereas Aunt Rose had been quite a big woman, even before she ran to fat, he was a small, wiry man yet with the strength of an ox. Where Aunt Rose was bad tempered and intolerant he was mild mannered and peace loving. He was always kind and gentle with Mollie and when he was at home Aunt Rose somehow managed to curb her tongue; if she wasn’t exactly friendly she hardly ever shouted at Mollie and never, ever hit her. Mollie had often wished Uncle Sam could stay at home all the time.

They reached the house and went up the three steps to the door, which was standing open. Aunt Rose was sitting just inside, fanning herself.

‘Did ye get the pies?’ she greeted Mollie.

‘Yes. They’re still hot.’ Mollie opened the bag and showed her.

‘On’y three?’ Rose’s lip curled. ‘Lazy little bitch, ye didn’t pick enough mine to get four, did ye. Well, ye know who’ll go ’ithout, don’t ye.’

‘I’ve got the other one, Ma,’ Richard said, taking another bite of the pie in his hand. ‘I was fair starved so I made Mollie gimme mine straight away.’

‘Well, you’re a growin’ lad.’ His mother smiled on him fondly. Then her smile died as she turned to Mollie. ‘I don’t s’pose you thought to bring a loaf as well, did yer?’

‘Yes, I did.’ Mollie put it on the table.

‘Hmph.’ Mildly disappointed, Rose shrugged. ‘Go an’ find yer uncle. Tell him there’s a pie here waitin’ for ’im.’

‘I can do that, Ma,’ Richard said.

‘No. You’ve jest done a hard day’s work, boy. She can go.’

‘Yes. I don’t mind.’ Mollie took off her bonnet and laid it on the bench beside the door, then she ran her fingers through her thick, dark hair to free it from the constraints of the bonnet and went across the practically deserted yard to find her uncle. She was quite a tall girl and walked with an easy stride, her head held high. Her looks were striking rather than pretty; her mouth a little too wide, her nose a little too long. But her eyes were quite beautiful; they were large and an unusual tawny brown, fringed by long, dark, curling lashes under finely arched brows. She was looking eagerly for sight of Sam because she savoured what little time she could spend with him out of earshot of Aunt Rose. She passed the shed that held the furnace and the big lead-lined boiler. She had never, ever been allowed in there; it had always been impressed on her that it was far too dangerous. The men who worked in there wore special thick leather aprons and breeches, with gauntlets up to their elbows because of the risk of being splashed by the boiling liquid as they stirred the vats with huge paddles. Sam was at the far end of the yard where it reached almost down to the quayside, standing beside the long, shallow, sloping, chalk-lined pit into which the copperas, collected every day from the beach, was tipped. Two men were raking over the ‘stones’, while another man poured water on to them.

‘That’ll do for ternight,’ he called to the men as he turned away and went to the shallowest end of a second pit, where he stood looking at the dark, evil-smelling, sulphurous liquid that was forming from stones that over time had begun to dissolve. This liquid drained through a wooden trough into a holding cistern. He nodded to himself and then glanced up and smiled as he saw Mollie.

She came over and linked her arm through his, heedless of the filthy leather apron he was wearing. ‘There’s a pie for you in the house, Uncle,’ she said. ‘All hot and steamy. I’ve jest brought ’em home from the pie shop.’

‘You’re a good gal, Mollie,’ he smiled at her affectionately. His gaze softened even further. ‘An’ with them big brown eyes you’re gettin’ to be the very image of yer mother. She was a beauty, too.’ His tone changed abruptly and he turned away, untying the thick leather apron. ‘I’ll jest go an’ take this clobber off and clean meself up a bit or I shall get it in the neck from yer aunt. Tell ’er I’ll be there as soon as I’ve had a word with Mr Mark. I wanta check the scrap iron’s been delivered to put in with termorrer’s boil.’

Mollie knew what he was talking about. Scrap iron was added to the liquid from the cistern when it was boiled in the great lead-lined boiler. The boiling could take several days, during which more scrap was added as needed and more ‘liquor’ as it evaporated. When the boiling was done the resulting liquid would be poured into tanks and left to crystalise. It was a lengthy, time-consuming, dirty, evil-smelling business, but Sam was a conscientious man and loved his work.

Mollie waited a few minutes after he had gone into the counting house, hoping that perhaps Mr Mark would come out with him. Mark Hamilton, or Mr Mark as he was always known, was manager at the Copperas House. He was tall and rangy, with a pleasant, open face, a ready smile and fair hair that he had a habit of running his hands through when he was thinking. Unlike most of the men, he rarely wore a hat. He was related to the Graingers – James Grainger owned the Copperas House although he didn’t visit it much – and according to Uncle Sam knew more about running the place than anybody. Sam had great respect for Mr Mark. So had Mollie, because he knew who she was and sometimes smiled at her if he saw her in the yard.

She waited a little longer but when it was apparent that Mr Mark wasn’t coming out she went back to the house. Eventually, Sam appeared and the four of them took their places at the table, Richard and Mollie on stools, Sam and Rose at either end in Windsor elbow chairs. Mollie had already cut slices from the loaf and she was about to take a bite of her pie when Rose said in the wheedling tone she used on Mollie when Sam was around, ‘I could do with a cuppa tea now, Mollie, love. I’m fair parched.’

Immediately, Mollie got up and poured her a cup. There was never any shortage of tea in the house; Richard saw to that. He and three friends had a small boat that they took fishing. Most of the ‘fish’ they caught were in the form of tea and tobacco, wrapped in waterproof packets, which had been dropped into the shallows off the coast over the side of boats coming into Harwich from the continent. Not only tea and tobacco but all manner of contraband might find its way to the shore on a good haul, provided the Revenue Cutter and the Riding Officer were busy patrolling another part of the coast.

Richard’s somewhat risky method of supplementing his income was accepted with pride by his mother and with reluctance by his father, their silence bought with some of the little luxuries the upper classes took for granted. Rose was fond of a tot of genever and Sam was not averse to a pipe of tobacco or a tot of rum on a cold night.

Mollie worried about Richard’s activities but not for the world would she have betrayed him.

She sat down again to her now lukewarm pie but before she could take a bite Rose wanted more bread; then she wanted jam; then another cup of tea, all requested in the same wheedling, apologetic voice. But whatever her tone the result was the same – by the time Mollie ate her pie it was cold and everyone else had finished. It was always like that and if Sam offered even a word of protest Rose would round on him.

‘Thass right, man, take her part. You always side with her. She’s your little pet. Never mind me. Never mind my sufferin’. You know the pain I’m in all the time; you know what a job I have to walk; yet you expect me to get up and wait on everybody hand and foot while she sits on her backside and does nothin’.’

‘It’s all right, Uncle. I don’t mind,’ Mollie said now, as she saw Sam about to argue. ‘I’m a lot younger than Aunt Rose.’

‘An’ not so fat,’ Richard murmured under his breath as he got up from the table.

‘What did you say?’ His mother glared at him.

‘Nothin’. I’m off out now.’

‘Where to?’

‘If you don’t ask questions you won’t get no lies told you.’ He tapped the side of his nose.

A smile spread over Rose’s face. ‘Yes, boy, we’re runnin’ a bit short o’ tea.’

‘Then you’ll hev to eke it out. I’m off down the pub.’ He picked up his cap and went out. Sam followed him, but only as far as the step, where he sat down and filled his pipe with illicit tobacco. The searing heat of the day had gone but the air was still oppressive and filled with sulphurous fumes and smoke. Sam was so used to the stink that he didn’t even notice it and neither did his wife, sitting in her chair in the doorway. Only Mollie, who spent hours every day in the clean, salty atmosphere of the beach, felt stifled by the perpetual stench even though she had lived with it all her life.

She gathered the platters from the table and took them to the shelf under the window where a tin bowl stood. She poured hot water from the kettle on the hearth and a ladle of cold rainwater from the tub under the shelf to wash them up. Then she put them in the cupboard next to the chimney breast. When she had tipped the water out into the yard and made sure that everything in the room was neat and tidy she said goodnight to her aunt and uncle and went up to her room.

Because it was up under the eaves it was quite a large room, covering the space of the two bedrooms below, but the slope of the roof meant that there was only a small area in the middle where she could stand upright. Nevertheless, it was her room, her refuge, where neither Richard nor her uncle would wish to come and invade her privacy and her aunt wasn’t able to because the stairs were too steep and narrow. It had always been the one place where she could escape to avoid her aunt’s wrath and the stick with which she vented it.

Mollie loved her little room. She had made a patchwork cover for the bed and a rag rug for the floor. There was a chest of drawers under the window and on this were arrayed pretty shells that she had found on the beach when she was picking mine. In pride of place was a piece of greyish stone that was shaped rather like a snail that she had found in the cliff one day. She had sometimes searched for another one but she had never found one. She had an old wicker chair in the corner opposite the stairs and she had made a patchwork cushion for it so the hole in the seat was covered.

She opened the window to let a little air in and leaned her elbows on the sill. Beyond the Copperas House she could see the busy quayside where the sea coal for the furnace and the scrap iron for the boiler was unloaded from barges before the river snaked off into the distance between green fields and hedges. She often marvelled how the river came in from the sea and curled round on itself, turning the tall cliffs at the far end of the town into a peninsular with the sea on one side and the river on the other. She sighed. It must be wonderful to live high up on top of those cliffs, like the Graingers did, far away from the smoke and stink that was making their fortune for them.

The hot days of summer cooled into autumn and autumn froze into winter. Nothing else changed. Every day except Sunday the women, mostly from the cottages in Copperas Lane, were out gathering the stones that had been washed up on the shore or out of the cliff. After a high, stormy tide the pickings were good, especially if the sea had lashed the cliff, undermining it and bringing chunks of it sliding down on to the beach. But that didn’t happen often.

Mollie was out each day between tides with the rest of the pickers, most of them, like her, wearing red, hooded cloaks – in varying states of disrepair – as protection against the biting wind or driving rain. When the picking was finished for the day she would hurry home to soak her chilblain-swollen hands in warm water to get some life back into them. But even Aunt Rose agreed, albeit grudgingly, that sometimes the weather was too bad for working on the beach.

There was one thing to be said for Aunt Rose, she kept a good fire. In fact, the living room was often warm to the point of stifling, because there was no shortage of sea coal to keep it going. Sam Barnes, being the all-important boiler man, was allowed to take as much as he needed from the great heap beside the boiler house for his own use.

Compared with the amount the great furnace under the boiler took this was very little. Richard filled the box on wheels that served as a coal scuttle every morning but on a really cold day Mollie would be sent to replenish it at least once. She hated this. She felt humiliated walking through the yard pulling the coal box and shovelling coal into it while the men were at work, and more than anything she dreaded that Mr Mark might see her, although she wasn’t quite sure why it mattered. For the most part the men ignored her because they didn’t quite know how to treat her. She belonged to Sam Barnes and he was in a class of his own, neither one of the labourers nor part of the management. Yet it didn’t seem right that a young girl like her should be heaving coal and now and again one of them would say sheepishly as he passed her, ‘Here, give us the shovel. I’ll do that for yer,’ and be rewarded with a grateful smile.

One of the reasons Rose Barnes enjoyed a good fire was that when nobody was about – except Mollie, of course and she didn’t count – she would lift her ample skirts to warm her knees, with the result that her shins, which nobody saw so it didn’t matter, were mottled purple. Most of her day was spent warming her knees and drinking tea and woe betide Mollie if she didn’t keep the kettle filled from the tap in the yard.

Now that she was older and Aunt Rose less mobile Mollie received the lashings from Aunt Rose’s tongue rather than her stick. Rose had given up the stick when her niece’s agility began to exceed her own, but whereas lashings from the stick were only painful for a short while, the continual carping and complaining went on and on until sometimes Mollie was ready to scream.

‘When did you last polish my brass? You know I like my brass to look nice. When I could do it myself I could see my face in it all the time. Look at it now! I’d be ashamed for anybody to walk in the door and see it.’

‘I’ll do it when I’ve finished the ironing, Aunt Rose.’ Mollie picked up the second flat iron from the hearth, spat on it to make sure it was hot enough and went back to the heap of ironing on the table. Privately, she thought it wouldn’t hurt Aunt Rose to polish her own brass. She could do it sitting in the chair. But wisely she said nothing as she ran the iron expertly over her uncle’s shirt.

‘No, you won’t. You know very well you’ve got to go and get meat from the butcher’s for tonight’s stew. An’ then it’ll be time to go pickin’ and you hevn’t even got the vegetables ready. High tide was an hour ago and there’ll be good pickins today after last night’s storm.’ Rose lifted her skirts a bit higher and rubbed her knees. ‘Oh, I know you, missy. You’ll dawdle about and dawdle about till it’s too late to find anything on the beach, you lazy little toad.’

Mollie bit her tongue against a sharp rejoinder. She was tired because last night the howling gale and the rain beating on the roof of her attic room had kept her awake, but she managed with difficulty to keep her voice level as she asked, ‘Which shall I do first, finish the ironing, prepare the vegetables or fetch the meat, Aunt?’

‘Finish that shirt, then go and get the meat. And mind and make sure he doesn’t fob you off with gristle. You’ll hev to take it back if he does. I’m not payin’ for rubbish.’

An hour later, with the stew bubbling over the fire, the coal box replenished and dumplings all ready for Aunt Rose to drop into the pan, Mollie shrugged on her red cloak and thick shoes and headed thankfully for the beach.

High tide had been at midday and it was now just past two o’clock. As she left behind the stink that hung perpetually over Copperas Lane and hurried down the High Street towards the beach Mollie sniffed the air, which was clear and sharp and sweet smelling. She lifted her head towards the sun, shining now in a brilliant blue sky as if to make amends for the gales and rain of the previous night. She took a deep breath. It was the last day of March and even though it was still bitingly cold, it was good to be alive. It was also her birthday, although of course nobody had thought to mention the fact. Nobody ever did, in case it set Aunt Rose off on one of her hard-done-by monologues, aimed partially at her husband; how she’d been forced into bringing up his sister’s child, as if she hadn’t enough to do bringing up her own. Mollie sighed. She’d heard it so many times she could recite it off by heart.

The fact that her birthday was never recognised hadn’t stopped Mollie keeping a careful tally over the years and she knew that today, 31 March 1802, she was seventeen years old. Seventeen and quite ready to fall in love. If only she could find someone to fall in love with. Preferably someone whose life didn’t revolve round that stinking hole of a Copperas House, she thought bitterly, pulling her cloak more closely round her.

She could hear the waves pounding long before she reached the beach. It always took a long time for the sea to settle down after a gale had whipped it into a heaving, frothing frenzy. After last night’s lashing the sand on the beach was flattened and littered with great mounds of brown seaweed and piles of shingle that had been hurled up from the sea bed. Copperas in all shapes was plentiful and the pickers were already out, calling to each other and complaining about the cold. Most of them Mollie recognised from the cottages and they gave her a smile and a nod of recognition. At the gap in the cliff at the end of the beach Old Sol and his donkey were waiting patiently for the full baskets to be emptied into his tumbrel, Old Sol stamping his feet and flapping his arms across his chest in an effort to keep the worst of the cold out.

Mollie took up her basket and began picking up lumps of the brownish-coloured mineral. It was generously strewn along the beach so it wasn’t long before she had a basketful and she began to drag it back to where Old Sol was waiting.

‘Thass a bit heavy for you. I’ll carry it for you, if you like,’ a man’s voice said from behind her.

She straightened up and turned to see a pleasant-looking young man of about Richard’s age in a thick fisherman’s guernsey and a battered sou’wester coming across the beach towards her.

Seeing her surprise he grinned, his teeth showing white in his weatherbeaten face. ‘Well, I know how heavy a full basket of this stuff is,’ he said, picking it up as if it was no weight at all. ‘I used to come and help my ma to pick mine when I was a young shaver. That was afore I started fishin’ with me dad.’ He nodded towards the dark, angry-looking sea, where white horses could be seen on the tops of the waves almost to the horizon. ‘Too rough to take the smack out in this weather. Dad an’ me always say, if you’re caught out in it you hev to make the best of it but there’s no sense in askin’ for trouble.’

He emptied the basket into Sol’s cart and waited while Mollie made the mark on her tally stick, then he walked back along the beach with her.

‘Hev I seen you afore?’ he said as they began filling the basket again.

She shrugged. ‘Dunno. I don’t reckernise you.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t come this way as a rule. I live further along the coast road towards Frinton.’ He stole a glance at her and his face cleared. ‘I know who you are,’ he said with a note of triumph, ‘You live with my mate, Dick Barnes. You’re his sister.’

‘No, I’m not Richard’s sister, I’m his cousin,’ Mollie corrected him, faintly irritated. ‘But you’re right, I live with him and my uncle and aunt.’

‘Well, thass near enough for me. I knew you was suthin’ to do with Dick. I seen you with him a time or two. My name’s Joe Trayler.’

Her face cleared. ‘Ah, yes. I seem to recall him mentionin’ your name. Mine’s Mollie. Mollie Barnes.’

He grinned at her. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mollie Barnes.’

As they talked he helped her to fill the basket again and again. Soon she had eight tokens in her pocket.

‘I’d better not collect any more today,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Aunt Rose’ll expect me to work at this rate all the time.’

‘Well, we’ll do a bit more, then you can keep a couple o’ tokens in your pocket ready for when you don’t hev such a good day,’ he advised, smiling at her.

‘I never thought of that,’ she admitted as they began to fill the old basket again.

‘Did you know there was another cliff fall round by the old church last night?’ he said as they worked. ‘It’s right on the edge now. Look, you can see it from here.’

She straightened up and shaded her eyes with her hand. ‘Good heavens! It looks as if it’ll topple in the water any minute.’

‘When we’ve finished here we’ll go an’ take a closer look.’

‘I d