In the Days of Rain: WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD - Rebecca Stott

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as domestic servants. James, the eldest boy, had joined an Eyemouth fishing crew. Agnes, eighteen, had married a sailmaker called John Wilson, and had a baby son. The couple were living in their own house down near Eyemouth marketplace. Annie and David Fairbairn, the two youngest surviving members of the first brood of Stotts, had stayed on down in Grimsby with their father and stepmother and two new siblings. They were both attending school.

      Might those older Stott children, I wondered, have finally found refuge after all those years of poverty, migration and loss? But I’d forgotten about the storm.

      When the hurricane, one of the most violent in British history, hit the east coast six months later, Agnes, nineteen and pregnant with her second child, would have been among the crowd of Eyemouth women standing on the harbour wall outside the Whale as the fleet of battered fishing boats tried to make it back into the harbour through the towering waves. One hundred and twenty-nine brothers, uncles, cousins, sons and fathers were killed in a few hours that afternoon in 1881, thrown from boats, drowned, or smashed against the rocks or the harbour wall. Among them were Agnes’s three young Stott cousins and three of her Fairbairn uncles. For weeks afterwards the bodies of those Eyemouth men washed up in coves and on beaches, limbs missing, faces unrecognisable.

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      Eyemouth harbour. The Whale Inn can be seen between the boat and the car

      I do the maths. That’s ten, perhaps eleven, family members Agnes had lost: mother Lizzie, grandmother Margaret, baby brother Robert, sister Eliza, baby half-sister Mary, three Stott cousins, three Fairbairn uncles. And she was still only nineteen.

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      Agnes must have considered herself lucky to have married a sailmaker and not a sailor, lucky that her sisters hadn’t married sailors, that they’d been spared the fate of the eighty-two widows of Eyemouth. According to the records I’d found in the Eyemouth fishing museum, many of those women were, like Agnes, pregnant when they buried their husbands. They named their newborn babies after their dead fathers. Now I understood why Robert had named his new daughter, born two years after the disaster, Adelina Purves Spouse Stott. It had always struck me as such an odd name. James Purves and Thomas Spouse had been Robert’s childhood friends, and they’d died in the storm. Adelina Purves Spouse Stott was Robert’s twelfth child.

      Few Eyemouth families escaped the long aftermath of the storm. With the fishing fleet largely destroyed, John Wilson’s sailmaking business, like all the businesses in the town, was soon on a knife edge. Within four years he’d been listed in the Glasgow Herald as a ‘Scotch Bankrupt’.7 He was one of many from the town. If they’d built a new harbour instead of having to fight the Kirk all those years, historians say, those fishermen would probably still be alive. They’d only gone out in that storm because they had to, because they had children to feed and the Kirk tithe to pay.

      John and Agnes moved forty miles east along the coast to start up a new sailmaking business in Port Seton, a small fishing village outside Edinburgh. Since its new harbour had opened in 1880, thirty-five boats had been registered there. The population had tripled in twenty years. It was an industrious town, the history books claim, and, compared to Eyemouth, a Godfearing town. New churches were going up everywhere.

      But things just kept getting worse for Agnes and John. They and their two small children had only been in Port Seton for four years when news came from Agnes’s younger sister Annie down in Grimsby that their father had died, at only forty-six years old. Robert Stott died, his son David always told people, a drinker’s death. Five months later, his widow Elizabeth died in childbirth, leaving seven orphaned children in the Grimsby terrace.

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      Within weeks all seven had been taken in – adopted by their older brothers or sisters, or put to work. Agnes took her fourteen-year-old brother David and her four-year-old half-brother Joseph to live with her in Port Seton. Her husband would take David on as apprentice in the Wilson sail sheds.

      Could any of these Stott children read? If the older ones had been taught their letters it would have been at one of the many Grimsby Sunday schools, like the one the Primitive Methodists had opened in 1867, just a few streets away from the Stott house. The younger children were luckier. Annie and David had just enough time between their mother’s death in 1876 and their father and stepmother’s death in 1889 to attend the new public-funded school. They had learned to read, write, and do sums.

      I was the oldest girl in a family of five children, with an absent father and a hardworking, sleep-deprived mother. I knew that Agnes and her young sisters would have been carrying those babies around in Grimsby, mashing up food, wiping noses, cleaning up cuts, singing songs, telling stories, just as I did. I helped my mother feed my adored twin brother and sister, born when I was nearly six, and I read to them and listened to them read when they were old enough.

      But there were older Brethren ‘sisters’ who helped my mother – shadowy, kind women who baked and stitched, who took us out for picnics or to the beach. My mother had electricity, a washing machine, a sewing machine and a food mixer; she had powdered mashed-potato mix, tins of Spam and sliced pineapples in her kitchen cupboards, and her own car parked outside. She taught me to read long before I went to school. I’d like to think that at least some of those Grimsby Stott children had books stowed under their pillows as I did.

      But though they’d suffered through those early years, Agnes and David must have considered themselves on safe and solid ground in their new house in bustling Port Seton, with its brand-new harbour and all those boats out there bringing in trade to the Wilson sailmaking sheds.

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      The disorder of Agnes and David’s early life in Grimsby was due in part to the alcoholism of their father and the worn-down compliance of their mother and stepmother. But now that I’d been to the Eyemouth fishing museum and read the local history books, I was beginning to see a bigger picture. The chaos and bereavement the Stotts had lived through was also caused, at least to some extent, by the Lowland Clearances that propelled so many Scots from their farms into a migrant life in search of work or towards one of the emigration ships sailing to New Zealand, Canada or America. The destiny of the Stotts, like millions of their fellow Scots, had been determined by violent historical forces.

      From the mid-eighteenth century, as part of what historians call the Clearances, the owners of large Scottish estates began to clear the ‘peasants’ off the land and put sheep in their place, to maximise profits. In the Lowlands, near the Borders where my family lived, small tenant or landowning farmers were forced off their farms not by violent eviction, as happened in the later Highland Clearances, but by stealth. Landowners hiked rents, and eventually farms and businesses went bankrupt. Tens of thousands of Lowland cottars moved to newly-built villages or to cities in search of work or to the coast to fish, and thousands emigrated.8

      The Stotts had once been tenant farmers too. I’d found Robert’s grandfather, James Stott, listed as a tenant cattle-farmer living in Gairmuir near Lauder in the Borders in the 1790s, thirty-five miles inland from Eyemouth. He’d been declared bankrupt in 1799, five years after the Earl of Lauderdale’s agents had decided to hike the rents. Like thousands of other bankrupt labourers and tenants, James gave up his farm and went to the city to look for work. He set up as a butcher in Edinburgh, while his three sons later left for Eyemouth to look for work as fishermen or drovers. The family had stayed put until the storm of 1881 forced them to migrate again.

      I stood on the edge of the remote drovers’ road etched into the hills in the rough high moor at Gairmuir, watching it undulate through the heather and gorse and disappear into the mist. This was the road my drover ancestors walked alongside their cattle to the Edinburgh cattle market. They’d called it the Thieves’ Road, a farmer told me. Robbers attacked the drovers at night when they returned from the city carrying the

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