LITMIR.BIZ

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along the coast, but none in Eyemouth. Perhaps if I went to the town it would give me something to go on.

      I followed the road east to Eyemouth from Edinburgh through the border towns and villages where I’d found Stotts in the library records: Haddington, East Linton, Dunbar, Dunglass, Cockburnspath and Coldingham. The road wound through high moorland and wooded dells, past the high walls and gatehouses of great estates, down to sandy coves and inlets where fishing villages huddled against the sides of black cliffs studded with nesting seabirds, and back up again to high moor and big sky. The sea came in and out of view as I drove, the low sun gilding mudflats, white sand dunes or black rocks down below.

      On the outskirts of Eyemouth the road passed through grey pebbledash suburbs and caravan parks. Along the harbour road the fishing sheds and warehouses gave way to a row of old pubs and inns facing the sea. Among them was the Whale, its windows and doors boarded up, one of three semi-derelict public houses still standing on the harbourfront.

      I parked the car, and stepped out into a cold sea wind laced with the harbour smells of engine oil, petrol and fish from the fish yards. I walked around the perimeter of the inn, looking for gaps in the boarding, wading through the rubbish piled up around its walls, under the gaze of a group of fishermen smoking outside the adjacent pub. How had a forty-year-old widow, my ancestor, raised five children, managed the drunken sailors and the brawls and run a ten-bedroom inn here singlehandedly?

      I ordered a glass of beer from the landlord in the pub next door. Inside, half a dozen local fishermen and construction workers sat hunched over crosswords or watched football on a television screen. The Whale had been closed for twenty years or more, the landlord told me. A developer from Hull owned the building now. It was a listed building, he said, protected by law, so the owner was probably waiting for it to become derelict enough for the council to allow him to knock it down. Then he’d build something that would make him some real money. He laughed.

      When I asked for the name of this Hull developer, four or five men lifted their heads from their newspapers and looked in my direction. Was I a journalist, the landlord asked, looking away. I had planned to tell him how Margaret Stott, my great-great-grandmother, had run the Whale in the 1850s, but now I thought better of it. I was just doing some family-history research, I said, and changed the subject.

      Eyemouth would have been packed with people at the height of the herring season, I reminded myself as I took pictures of the now almost empty harbour outside; there would have been carts coming and going, clusters of young women working against the clock to gut the fish and get them barrelled up and onto the backs of the waiting carts. During the 1850s, David Fairbairn’s future father, the teenaged Robert Stott, an apprentice barrelmaker, would have presided over those herring packing girls, the ones with the cut and salted hands.

      It was difficult to imagine this sleepy town as a once dangerous and violent place, the site of political protests and demonstrations. In the 1850s and sixties, after years of struggle, the Eyemouth fishermen and fisherwomen had finally refused to pay the tithe the Kirk demanded from them. Robert Stott, the apprentice cooper, and his fishing cousins had marched with the two thousand protesters along this harbourfront behind an enormous green banner embroidered with the words ‘Pay No Tithe’. Robert would have been just fifteen when the local men stoned the police who came to arrest the charismatic leader of the protest, William ‘The Kingfisher’ Stearnes.

      At the age of nineteen, when the police standoffs, protests and demonstrations were still playing out in Eyemouth, Robert had been courting one of the girls of the gutting yards, Lizzie Fairbairn, the eldest daughter of one of the largest fishing families in town. She was eighteen, and seven months pregnant, when they married. Her own mother was also pregnant with her twelfth child, so, with no room left at home, Lizzie moved into the Whale with her husband’s mother and his three siblings. She gave birth to Agnes there in 1862, behind one of those boarded-up windows I stood beneath. I could see her now, walking out from the inn with her baby strapped to her back, swaddled against the wind, her much younger siblings running from all directions to cluster around her skirts.

      I reached for the phone to call my father and tell him about Agnes and David, before I remembered: I couldn’t call my father any more. He was dead. I couldn’t tell him about the Whale Inn or his great-grandfather’s run-ins with the Kirk, or how – when I’d seen that old inn all boarded up like that – I’d wanted to find a way to buy it and rescue it from the Hull developer, get the windows mended and the roof fixed. I couldn’t tell him that for a moment I’d thought I’d seen Lizzie as if she were still alive, striding along the harbour wall.

      My father had always been very proud of this Scottish ship-chandler inheritance of ours. When he and I had bought the little cabin boat together, and moored it on the river a few yards from the Mill door, he’d driven me across the fens to the ships’ chandlers in Ely. We needed stocking up, he told my stepmother. He was in one of his extreme spending moods; she and I both knew there was no reasoning with him when he was like that. I followed him through the narrow aisles of the Ely ship chandlers as he selected objects that interested him, regardless of price or usefulness: a stove, a ladder, spare buoys, a captain’s hat, an extra-large waterproof coat.

      ‘Stott and Sons,’ he said when the shop owner took his credit card. ‘Scottish ships’ chandlers,’ he added, as if he expected the shopkeeper to doff his cap or give him a discount. I winced, but the shopkeeper was charmed. They had already begun to exchange stories.

      What would my father have thought of this messy and scattered older family history I’d now found in Eyemouth? What would he have made of the riots and his intemperate great-grandfather Robert? Would he have seen himself in Robert’s reflection, as I was beginning to do?

      At twenty-one years old, Robert, most likely in trouble with the police for his part in the anti-Kirk protests and stonings, or in debt to the local moneylender, decided it was time to leave town. According to the census returns he moved Lizzie and baby Agnes into one of the upper floors of a tenement in Edinburgh, where he’d taken a job as a cooper in a large brewery. By the time Lizzie was twenty-nine she was managing six children under the age of eight, carrying water and small infants up and down the steep stairs of the tenement and sharing an outside toilet with several neighbouring families.

      After nine years in Edinburgh, Robert moved his family three hundred miles south to Grimsby, one of the biggest new dockyards in the world. The Stotts moved into one of the hundreds of small terraces newly built to house the 2,000 workers needed by the dockyards. Lizzie gave birth to two more boys here, Robert and David Fairbairn Stott. Then in January 1876, at the age of thirty-four, she died in the Grimsby terrace while giving birth to her ninth child. The baby did not survive.

      For a year, Agnes, now thirteen, and her sisters, eleven-year-old Margaret and nine-year-old Isabella, must have cleaned and fed and cared for their younger brothers and sisters in that overcrowded terrace in Grimsby, doing laundry, keeping house, making ends meet as best they could while their father made barrels down in the dockyard. Their grandmother Margaret died that summer back in Eyemouth. Unmarried Aunt Isabella had taken over the management of the Whale from her mother, but running the inn on her own, she would not have been in a position to take in any of her older brother’s city-born children.

      Back in the Grimsby terrace, baby Robert died that winter, only three years old. Eight-year-old Elizabeth slips off the records around this time, probably a victim of one of the epidemics that swept the town. Remarkably, David Fairbairn Stott, the youngest, survived. Having buried two of their siblings that winter, and their mother only a year before that, Agnes and her sisters must have been tending their baby brother with special care. What would they have made of the heavily pregnant stepmother their father brought home to live with them, another Elizabeth, a twenty-nine-year-old Lincolnshire woman who’d been working as a scullery maid since she was fourteen? Her first baby, born in December 1877 and christened Mary, did not survive the winter.

      Now Aunt Isabella sent for her brother’s four oldest children – Agnes, James, Margaret and Isabella. The next census, taken in April 1881, looks better for all of

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