Salt

By Catrin Kean

Cardiff in 1878 is grimy, crowded and grey, and Ellen dreams of escaping her dreary life as a domestic for the sea. But when she falls in love with Samuel she is able to fulfil her destiny by running away with him. Life at sea is brutal and dangerous, and when circumstances bring her home the hardships of working class life and racism begin to poison their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gomer
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785623332

Book preview

llun clawrCatrin KeanSaltGomer logo

First published in 2020 by Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion SA44 4JL

ISBN 978-1-78562-333-2

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

© Catrin Kean, 2020

Catrin Kean asserts her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without permission in writing from the above publishers.

All characters involved in the action of this story are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is published with the financial support of The Books Council of Wales.

E-book conversion by Almon.

For my dad, Peter: thank you for the stories

And for Ellen and Samuel, wherever you may be

‘Someone, in another time, will remember us.’

Sappho

Chapter 1

Smoke

1941

It is ice-bright, the night of the bomber’s moon.

In the front room of a terraced house next to the graveyard Ellen Jordan lies in bed. Her fingers worry rosary beads and she spits curses at the devils who head over the sea towards them, intent on harming her family who huddle, blanket-wrapped, in the gaslit Anderson shelter in the back garden.

In the shelter Ellen’s son Louis, an unlit cigarette between his lips, fiddles with the wireless knobs to try and find the World Service. Strange voices from across the sea fade in and out as he twiddles, thumping it with his fist every now and again as though that might help.

‘Do we really want to know?’ asks Mary. Her Irish voice, her Irish prayers, spoken silently as she knits with fingers swift as spiders. The small boy Sam listens, impatient, for the bombing to start. As soon as the all clear is sounded he will be out in the alleyways searching for shrapnel treasure until the sirens howl and everyone skitters for shelter again.

His sister, Ellen’s blackberry-haired girl Teresa, reads Nelson’s Jolly Book for Girls with a frown of concentration, Reggie the corgi on her lap, his legs running in a dog-dream. Louis finds the BBC news bulletin at last, holds a match to his cigarette and sits back to hear what their fate might hold.

On the other side of the city a Caribbean man, Noah Best, patrols the silent streets, his steel helmet heavy on his head, his woollen coat buttoned up to his chin. His legs are bowed, sculpted by the sea that has rolled beneath him for most of his life, and the icy air stabs his bones. He is looking for splinters of light in windows, light that will offer them all to their enemies, though the moon, big and fat as a peach, is doing that job very well.

‘Turn that light out,’ he shouts, seeing a faint glow behind a window. His voice echoes in the silver night. The light dies and he walks on. He is looking not only for lights but also for people who are lost, who need taking to safety, but there is no one. He is alone in the petrified streets.

The city is pewter in the moonlight, waiting, holding its frozen breath. Families huddle in home-built shelters or in cellars and tunnels under the city. He thinks of Ellen, who is not in a shelter. Tonight he is breaking a promise he made many years before, to keep her safe.

Tonight he can’t help her. The bombers are coming. They fly in over the sea in a swarm, hunched and hellish. Panicked seabirds rise up out of the quiet dark and are slivered by the propellers. And on they come, and on.

And then the city explodes.

‘You fucking devils,’ screams Ellen as the first bomb hits. But after that she can’t hear her own voice. She has seen the rage of the planet before but not like this, nothing like this. The explosions pull pictures from walls, hands from clocks and crockery from shelves. The statue of Our Lady lies with her blush-pink face in pieces and rosary beads rend and fly. Ellen closes her eyes and sees trees ripped from the ground, mountains set alight, the dead spat from their graves.

Then, the biggest blast of all and the heavens fall in. The blackout curtain rips from the window and glass rains around her head and the midnight sky is bright as day. She hangs onto the bars of the bed, her hands blue and translucent in the awful light, as she wills herself to another place and time, rocking on a man’s heartbeat.

Then there is silence, apart from a sound like a tide washing in.

‘No need to make such a fuss,’ a man’s voice says in a Caribbean drawl. A sea-shanty voice. She opens her eyes and sees a black man standing outside the window, his hair a silver halo in the bright night. He is smoking a Woodbine, calm as anything. The smoke curled in the frozen air. It’s Samuel.

‘Why they leave you here on your own?’ he asks.

‘I’m a silly old woman,’ she says. ‘I tripped on the stairs and broke my hip. It’s in as many pieces as those plates in the kitchen. I can’t even pee by myself now.’

She remembers his handsome face. A thoughtful face, she thinks.

‘You need a barber,’ she says, and he laughs. ‘Wanderers have no need for barbers.’

A wanderer. That was what she was, once, and in a way she still is now. They say she is losing her mind but in truth she is letting it go, a kite in the wind. She has a thought, to get up and go with him, but then she remembers her broken old body.

‘You seen Bright?’ she asks. Another wanderer, Bright was. ‘He’s been around.’

‘Expect he needs a barber too.’ He always needed a barber, did Bright. He could have had a whole family of birds living in his beard and nobody’d ever have known.

Fingers of iced air have slipped into the room and the sky flashes behind Samuel like God’s own firework display, making a silhouette of him. She can see her own breath, but not his. Only the curling wisp of smoke from his cigarette. Reminds her of something.

‘It’s the end of the world,’ she tells him.

He shakes his head. ‘Even those bastards aren’t bad enough to end the world.’

She believes him, and she is pleased. Not for herself, as she is tired and ready to go, but for the children.

‘They’re in the shelter,’ she says. ‘Louis built it. He’s a good boy; you’d be proud of him.’

He nods, but he seems to be thinking of something else. He isn’t looking at her any more. She looks at his face, still lovely in old age, and an ache passes through her.

‘Come in out of the cold,’ she says.

‘I can’t do that,’ he says. ‘You know I can’t.’

She closes her eyes and she knows he has gone. Two tears slip down her cheeks, warm against her china-cold skin. She is alone again, and as sound bleeds back into the room she becomes the exploding world itself, the white-hot pain in her bones the pain of the murdered earth. She can’t pray because she has no words left and she can’t cry as her tears have burned away.

She waits to be turned to dust.

It is a long time later, another lifetime, that there is a siren, footsteps, voices. There is a clammy hand in hers and the scent of a child who smells sweet, of earth, of under the ground.

‘You’re like an angel, Granny. Covered in stars.’

‘It’s not stars, it’s glass.’ Mary, pulling Teresa away. ‘Oh good god, she’s frozen.’

Ellen no longer feels cold but she is aware of the trembling of her body. She feels blankets being wrapped around her, hears a coal scuttle being dragged across the floor. Further away she can hear the sirens and bells of the shocked city.

Then another voice. ‘I came as soon as I could.’ She recognises Noah’s voice, sees his shadow in the doorway taking off his hat. He sits by her bed.

‘It’s over now,’ he says. His lovely island voice. She was on that island once, a long time ago. She remembers the sound of the wind in the tall sugar cane and the strange birdsong. And then she remembers running along a dust track, salt sweat in her eyes, running after a man whose heart had been broken.

She thinks to mention Samuel’s visit last night but then decides against it. She closes her eyes as Noah rubs warmth back into her hands. The voices dance around her. Whole streets gone, they say. She can’t imagine it, how a street can be there and then not. How is the world so frail?

And then Teresa’s voice, anguished. ‘Oh no, look.’

Teresa holds the pieces of a blue sea-washed bottle. And in the palm of her hand a small ship made of driftwood and toothpicks, broken in the storm. Ellen reaches for the ship, picks apart the pieces.

‘We can fix that,’ says Noah but around them Mary is sweeping, sweeping glass and small smashed treasures, sweeping it all away, and it is too late because something has gone that cannot be fixed or replaced.

The small curl of smoke from the ship’s chimney.

Chapter 2

A Wish

1883

Two men walked up from the dock, canvas bags slung over their shoulders. The town was hot with a strange wind, foundry smoke and ash shimmying against a hidden sun, gulls riding on winds that moved in from faraway places. The wind shivered the mud flats, rippling the black water that gullied the town: the docks, canals, timber ponds and rivers. The men walked past the staiths and warehouses, past the boarding houses and seamen’s missions, unsteady, as though the ground under their feet was not solid, and they laughed about it, feeling easy.

In the small back kitchen of a terraced house in Grange Street, Ellen hauled steaming sheets from a pot and carried them outside, hot breath rising from them. She hung them and pulled the washing line rope to let them fly. Beyond the high wall of the garden she could hear the chug and grind of the port.

A child had followed her outside, was crouching, digging in the dusty flowerbed. She yanked his arm, pulled him inside, scrubbed at his hands and knees as he wailed in protest.

‘Your Mammy said you have to stay clean today.’

Flies whined and slapped against the window as she pulled fat bread out of the oven and set it to cool, swatting another child’s hand away from it. She scooped the baby up from the floor and settled him on her bony hip, smelling his milk-stench, and looked out of the grime window to the white sheets twisting and clasping each other in the wind, and she wished, and she wished. Her brother Bright was expected home today, bringing gifts and stories. Bright had seen the whole world. She loved him and she also hated him because he had been born a boy and she hadn’t. His world was everywhere and hers was here.

But there were plenty of others who would take this job: the scrubbing and steaming, helping Mrs Watkins keep body and soul together with her sea captain husband away.