day?”
“We always catch more fish when there’s the two of us.”
“And anyway, out in an open boat it’s always safer with two – I heard you say so.”
“And I hate Beastly Beagley at school. Everyone knows he can’t teach for toffee. He’s a waste of space, and school’s nothing but a waste of time.”
“You let me stay home, Mother, and, after I’ve been fishing with Father, I’ll come back and clean out the henhouse for you, and fetch back a cartload of seaweed to fertilise the lower field, whatever you want.”
“What I want, Alfie, is for you to go to school,” Mary said firmly. It was quite futile. She wasn’t going to give in. There was nothing more to be said, nothing more to be done. So Alfie had trudged off reluctantly to school with Mary’s words ringing in his ears. “There’s more to life than boats and fishing, Alfie! Never heard of a fish teaching anyone to read or write! And your writing ain’t nothing to write home about neither, if you ask me!”
When he’d gone, she’d turned to Jim. “I’ll need nine good mackerel for tea, Jimbo, don’t forget,” she said. “And wrap up warm. Spring it may be, but there was a keen wind out there when I went to feed the hens. That boy of yours forgot to do it again.”
“He’s always my boy when he forgets,” said Jim, shrugging on his coat, and stepping into his boots.
“Where else do you think he gets it from?” she replied, buttoning up Jim’s coat. She gave him his peck on the cheek and patted his shoulders as she always did, as he always liked her to do. “And by the way, Jimbo, I promised Uncle Billy a crab for tomorrow – you know how much he loves his crab. Nice one, mind. Not too big. Not too small. He don’t like a crab all chewy and tough. He’s very particular. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t forget,” Jim muttered under his breath as he went out of the door. “Nothing’s good enough for big brother Billy, eh? You spoil that old pirate rotten, that’s the truth of it.”
“No more’n I spoil you, Jim Wheatcroft,” she retorted.
“Anyway,” Jim went on, “I’d have thought old and tough and chewy would have suited an old pirate like Long John Silver just perfect.”
When it came to Uncle Billy, it was always this kind of good-natured banter between them. They had sometimes to share the humorous side of it. The truth of what had happened to Uncle Billy in his life was often too painful.
“Jim Wheatcroft!” she called after him. “That’s my brother you’re talking about, and don’t you forget it. He ain’t neither old nor chewy, just in a world of his own. He’s not like the rest of us, and that’s fine by me.”
“Whatever you say, Marymoo, whatever you say,” he replied, and, with a cheery flourish of his cap, went off down the field towards Green Bay, mimicking Uncle Billy’s favourite ditty just loudly enough for her to hear: “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
“Jim Wheatcroft, I heard that!” In response, Jim gave her another wave of his cap. “And you take care out there, Jimbo, you hear!” she shouted after him.
As he went down to the boat, Jim was marvelling at Mary’s endless patience and constant devotion to her brother, but at the same time he felt more than a little vexed, as he always did, at how oblivious Uncle Billy seemed to be to all Mary had done for him, and was doing for him every day of her life. He could hear him now, singing away out on his boat in Green Bay, “the good ship Hispaniola”, as Uncle Billy called it.
It hadn’t been a ‘good ship’ at all, not to start with, just the remnants, the rotting hulk, of an old Cornish lugger, abandoned long ago on the beach on Green Bay. It was five years now since Mary had brought Uncle Billy home from the hospital and installed him in the boat shed. She had made a home for him up in the sail loft, and he’d been out there on Green Bay, just about every day since, whatever the weather, restoring that old lugger. It was she who had told him about the ship in the hospital, and, as soon as she got him home, encouraged him to get back to boatbuilding, which he’d loved so much as a young man. She was convinced that what he needed above all, she’d told Jim, was to keep busy, use his hands, be the craftsman he once was again.
Everyone, including Jim, had thought it was an impossible task, that out there in all weathers the lugger had deteriorated too much, was too far gone, and that anyway ‘Silly Billy’, as they called him all over the island, couldn’t possibly do it. Only Mary insisted he could. And soon enough everyone could see that she had been right. When it came to boatbuilding, Silly Billy – whatever you thought of him – knew well enough what he was doing. Day by day over the years, the old lugger in Green Bay was becoming young again, and sleek and beautiful.
She lay there at anchor as Jim walked to the fishing boat that morning, resplendent in green paint, ‘Hispaniola’ painted black on her side. She may not yet be finished, but the fine and elegant lines of her hull were evident now to anyone walking along Green Bay. And now with the main mast up, that Uncle Billy had raised only a few weeks before, she was looking almost complete. With no help from anyone – Uncle Billy liked to be on his own, work on his own – he had brought her back to life. Uncle Billy may be odd – that was the general view; a bit “mazed in the head”, they usually called him – but with the work he had done on that old lugger over the years, plain now for everyone to see, he had gained the respect of the whole island. He was still ‘Silly Billy’ though, because they all knew where he’d been, where he’d come from, because of how he was.
Walking across the sand on Green Bay, Jim could see Uncle Billy up on deck. He was running the black and white skull and crossbones flag up the mast, as he always had done every morning since the mast had gone up. He had on the Long John Silver hat that Mary had made for him, and he was singing. Uncle Billy had his ups and downs, his good days and his bad days. This morning he had the hat on and he was singing, so this must be a good day, which, Jim knew, would make life much easier for Mary. Uncle Billy could be a cantankerous old goat when he was in one of his black moods. And for some reason Jim had never understood, when he was like that, he was always nastier to Mary than anyone. Yet she was the one who had saved him, brought him home, and the person he loved most in the world.
It was because Jim was so busy admiring the Hispaniola, so preoccupied thinking about Uncle Billy, that he had not noticed until now that Alfie was out there, clambering about on Penguin, the family’s fishing boat, making her ready. He was untying her from the buoy, then rowing her in towards him over the shallows.
“What d’you think you’re up to, Alfie?” Jim protested, looking over his shoulder nervously. “If your mother sees you—”
“I know, Father, she’ll have my guts for garters – whatever that means,” Alfie said, with a smile and a shrug. “I missed the school boat. Real shame. You were there, you saw it go without me. Right, Father?”
Jim was unable to conceal his delight. “You are a very wicked boy, Alfie Wheatcroft,” he said, climbing into the boat. “Don’t know where you get it from. We’d better come back with plenty of good fish then, hadn’t we? Or my life, and yours, won’t be worth living.”
Out at sea, an hour or so later, they were fishing off Foreman’s Island. It had been a hard row for Alfie against the current all the way along Pentle Bay, and Jim could see he needed a rest. He took the oars from him and rowed over to check his lobster pots. Between them, they hauled up three good-sized crabs from the pots off Foreman’s Island – so, a crab for Uncle Billy, and two to sell – and
