The House by the Harbour

We lived in a narrow house above the harbour, the kind that shares its walls with the houses on either side so you always knew your neighbours were close. From my bedroom window I could see the boats, and I learned to tell the weather by how they sat in the water before I ever learned it from a clock. My father fished. He was gone before light most mornings and home by the middle of the afternoon, smelling of salt and diesel and something colder that I could never name. My mother kept the house and took in mending, and there was always a basket of someone else's clothes by the door waiting for her needle. We were not poor exactly, but nothing was wasted. A jumper became a smaller jumper, then a scarf, then a square in a blanket. The sound I remember most is the gulls. They started before the boats and they never really stopped, and to this day if I hear gulls I am seven years old again, standing on the cold tiles of the kitchen in my nightdress, waiting for the kettle. My mother would give me the top of her egg and a soldier of bread, and we would watch the light come up over the water together without saying much. She was not a talker, my mother, but she was a great one for sitting with you. In summer the town filled up with visitors and we children made our pocket money carrying their cases up from the station. In winter it emptied out again and the wind came straight off the sea and found every gap in every window. I liked the winters better. The town felt like ours again. I have lived in bigger places since, with central heating and double glazing and not a gull in earshot. But when people ask me where I am from, I do not give them the name of the town. I tell them I am from a house by the harbour, and I leave it at that, because that is the truer answer.

I trained as a nurse the year I turned eighteen, on a ward where the floors were always cold and the tea was always weak. I had wanted to do it since I was small, though if you had asked me why I could not have told you. I think I liked the idea of being useful in a way that could not be argued with. The training was hard in a way they do not allow anymore. The matron could stop you in a corridor and inspect your shoes, and a crooked seam was a moral failing. We made beds with corners you could bounce a coin off, and we did it again if it was not right. I grumbled like everyone else, but I will tell you a secret: I was proud of those corners. There is a satisfaction in a thing done properly that has stayed with me my whole life. People think nursing is about medicine. Most of it is about staying calm in front of someone who is frightened, and holding a hand long enough that they believe you. I learned to read a room before I read a chart. You can tell a great deal from how a family stands around a bed, who does the talking and who does the worrying, who has not eaten. The night shift was its own country. The hospital went quiet and the work went slow and strange. You sat with people in the small hours when everything feels worse, and you learned that the kindest thing is often just to be there and not to rush. I sat with a good many people at the very end, more than I could count now, and I came to think of it as a privilege, though I would not have used that word at the time. To be the one who is there. To make sure no one goes out into the dark on their own. I nursed for nearly forty years, in one form or another. I delivered babies and I closed eyes and I did everything in between. If a life can be measured in the hands it has held, then mine has been a full one.