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.