Great-aunt Laura would enjoy a rousing send-off. Afterwards we had a family gathering in her tiny cottage overlooking Stinking Porth Bay. There was tea and crusty brown bread and honey. I took one mouthful and I was a child again. Wanting to be on my own, I went up the narrow stairs to the room that had been mine when I came every summer for my holidays. The same oil lamp was by the bed, the same peeling wallpaper, the same faded curtains with the red sailing boats dipping through the waves.
I sat down on the bed and closed my eyes. I was eight years old again and ahead of me were two weeks of sand and sea and boats and shrimping, and oystercatchers and gannets, and Great-aunt Laura’s stories every night before she drew the curtains against the moon and left me alone in my bed.
Someone called from downstairs and I was back to now.
Everyone was crowded into her sittingroom. There was a cardboard box open in the middle of the floor.
‘Ah, there you are, Michael,’ said Uncle Will. He was a little irritated, I thought.
‘We’ll begin then.’
And a hush fell around the room. He dipped into the box and held up a parcel.
‘It looks as if she’s left us one each,’ said Uncle Will. Every parcel was wrapped in old newspaper and tied with string, and there was a large brown label attached to each one. Uncle Will read out the names. I had to wait some minutes for mine. There was nothing I particularly wanted, except Zanzibar of course, but then everyone wanted Zanzibar. Uncle Will was waving a parcel at me.
‘Michael,’ he said, ‘here’s yours.’
I took it upstairs and unwrapped it sitting on the bed. It felt like a book of some sort, and so it was, but not a printed book. It was handmade, handwritten in pencil, the pages sewn together. The title on the cover read The Diary of Laura Perryman and there was a watercolour painting on the cover of a four-masted ship keeling over in a storm and heading for the rocks. With the book there was an envelope.
I opened it and read.
Dear Michael
When you were little I told you lots and lots of stories about Bryher, about the Isles of Scilly. You know about the ghosts on Samson, about the bell that rings under the sea off St Martin’s, about King Arthur still waiting in his cave under the Eastern Isles.
You remember? Well, here is my story, the story of me and my twin brother Billy whom you never knew. How I wish you had. It is a true story and I did not want it to die with me.
When I was young I kept a diary, not an everyday diary. I didn’t write in it very often, just whenever I felt like it. Most of it isn’t worth the reading and I’ve already thrown it away – I’ve lived an ordinary sort of life. But for a few months a long, long time ago, my life was not ordinary at all. This is the diary of those few months.
Do you remember you always used to ask where Zanzibar came from? (You called him ‘Marzipan’ when you were small.) I never told you, did I? I never told anyone. Well, now you’ll find out at last.
Goodbye, dear Michael, and God bless you.
Your Great-aunt Laura
P.S. I hope you like my little sketches. I’m a better artist than I am a writer, I think. When I come back in my next life – and I shall – I shall be a great artist. I’ve promised myself.
JANUARY 20TH
‘LAURA PERRYMAN, YOU ARE FOURTEEN YEARS old today.’
I said that to the mirror this morning when I wished myself ‘Happy Birthday’. Sometimes, like this morning, I don’t much want to be Laura Perryman, who’s lived on Bryher all her life and milks cows. I want to be Lady Eugenia Fitzherbert with long red hair and green eyes, who wears a big wide hat with a white ostrich feather and who travels the world in steamships with four funnels. But then, I also want to be Billy Perryman so I can row out in the gig and build boats and run fast. Billy’s fourteen too – being my twin brother, he would be. But I’m not Lady Eugenia Fitzherbert, whoever she is, and I’m not Billy; I’m me. I’m Laura Perryman and I’m fourteen years old today.
Everyone is pleased with me, even Father, because I was the one who spotted the ship before they did on St Mary’s. It was just that I was in the right place at the right time, that’s all. I’d been milking the cows with Billy, as usual, and I was coming back with the buckets over Watch Hill when I saw sails on the horizon out beyond White Island. It looked like a schooner, three-masted. We left the buckets and ran all the way home.
The gig was launched in five minutes. I watched the whole thing from the top of Samson Hill with everyone else. We saw the St Mary’s gig clear the harbour wall, the wind and the tide in her favour. The race was on. For some time it looked as if the St Mary’s gig would reach the schooner first, as she so often does, but we found clear water and a fair wind out beyond Samson and we were flying along. I could see the chief holding on to the mast, and Billy and Father pulling side by side in the middle of the boat. How I wanted to be one of them, to be out there rowing with them. I can handle an oar as well as Billy. He knows it, everyone knows it. But the chief won’t hear of it – and he’s the coxswain – and neither will Father. They think that’s an end of it. But it isn’t. One day, one day . . . Anyway today we won the race, so I should be pleased about that, I suppose.
The St Mary’s boat lost an oar. She was left dead in the water and had to turn back. We watched our gig draw alongside the schooner and we all cheered till we were hoarse. Through the telescope I could see the chief climbing up the ladder to pilot the schooner into St Mary’s. I could see them helping him on board, then shaking hands with him. He took off his cap and waved and we all cheered again. It would mean money for everyone, and there’s precious little of that around. When the gig came back into Great Porth we were all there to meet her. We helped haul her up the beach. She’s always lighter when we’ve won. Father hugged me and Billy winked at me. It’s an American ship, he says, the General Lee, bound for New York. She’ll be tied up in St Mary’s for repairs to her mizzenmast and could be there a week, maybe more.
This evening, Billy and I had our birthday cake from Granny May as usual. The chief and crew were all there as well, so the cake didn’t last long. They sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to us and then the chief said we were all a little less poor because Laura Perryman had spotted the General Lee. And I felt good. They were all smiling at me. Now’s the time, I thought, I’ll ask them again.
‘Can I row with Billy in the gig?’
They all laughed and said what they always said, that girls don’t row in gigs. They never had.
I went to the hen-house and cried. It’s the only place I can cry in peace. And then Granny May came in with the last piece of cake and said there are plenty of things that women can do, that men can’t. It doesn’t seem that way to me. I want to row in that gig, and I will. One day I will.
Billy came into my room just now. He’s had another argument with Father – this time the milk buckets weren’t clean enough. There’s always something, and Father will shout at him so. Billy says he wants to go to America and that one day he will. He’s always saying things like that. I wish he wouldn’t. It frightens me. I wish Father would be kinder to him.
FEBRUARY 12TH
The Night of the Storm
A TERRIBLE STORM LAST NIGHT AND THE PINE tree at the bottom of the garden came down, missing the hen-house by a whisker. The wind was so loud we never even heard it fall. I’m sure the hens did. We’ve lost more slates off the roof above Billy’s room. But we were lucky. The end of Granny May’s roof has gone completely. It just lifted off in the night. It’s sitting lopsided across her escallonia hedge. Father’s been up there all day trying to do what he can to keep the rain out. Everyone would be there helping, but there isn’t a building on the island that hasn’t been battered. Granny May just sat down in her kitchen all day and