The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt. Mary Russell

       CHAPTER 1 ‘A Most Excellent Reason’

      ‘Then the tall cliff was upon us with a splintering crash. The bowsprit snapped like kindling. The flare was out. The night was dark. We clung to the mainsheets in a pool of light thrown by the lamps in front of the wheelhouse. She began to roll from side to side, rails under with incredible speed as if she would roll right over. A colossal jolt, the shock travelled from stem to stern. The mainmast sagged, came over, seemed to hang suspended. The boom dropped and we leapt from under. Before our horrified eyes the bows of the vessel buried into the very face of the cliff.’

      Husband and wife were thrown into the sea. It was a June night off Portland Bill, but the seas were running fast and cold. They clambered onto their float and watched the flares going up from the cliff. At least they, if not their precious boat, would be saved. Later, miserable and helpless, they watched it break up under the relentless pounding of the waves.

      Clinging to the float they saw, with relief, the beam of the lifeboat shining through the giant waves. Suddenly it disappeared as the float, caught by a wave, rose and turned over, throwing them into the sea yet again. By the time they had climbed back in again, the lifeboat had passed, missing them in the dark. With the realization that they were not going to be saved came the icy fingers of fear, plucking at their minds.

      Again and again they were thrown into the sea, and with their hands rendered numb and clumsy by the cold, the effort of hauling themselves back into the float became increasingly difficult They were both experienced enough to know how remorseless the sea can be, but by now the battering they were getting had numbed even their minds. Then it happened.

      ‘A monster wave rose above the rest. Fury piled upon fury. Curling foaming crest. Sweeping down upon us. Inescapable. I threw an arm around Frank, leant forward. The little float drove into the wall of water and was lost within it. When it broke free, Frank was dead.’

      For her, there was no such release. Instead, flung again from the float, she was hurled through the sea and washed up onto the rocks, a reject of the gods. The float disappeared and with it the body of her husband. She had lost everything.

      In the cold dawn, exhausted and alone, she looked up at the high cliff. Like someone who, having attempted suicide, wakes up to find the nightmare of life still continuing, she was filled with the desperate knowledge that at the top she would have to face again all the problems from which she and her husband had fled when they first set out on their tragic journey. The cliff was sixty feet high. Slowly, she began to claw her way up its crumbling face.

      With nothing to sustain her but her courage and her will of iron, she pulled together the torn threads of her life and over the next years began life anew. Survival, however, was not enough. She

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