LITMIR.BIZ

      I don’t remember there ever being a time when I weren’t out upon beach. Mam used to say the window was open when I was born, and the first thing I saw when they held me up was the sea. Our house in Cockmoile Square backed onto it next to Gun Cliff, so as soon as I could walk I’d be out there upon the rocks, with my brother Joe but a few years older to look after me and keep me from drowning. Depending on the time of year, there’d be plenty of others about, walking to the Cobb, looking at the boats, or going out in the bathing machines, which looked like privies on wheels to me. Some even went in the water in November. Joe and me laughed at them, for the swimmers would come out wet and cold and miserable, like dunked cats, but pretending it was good for them.

      I had my share of tussles with the sea over the years. Even I, with the tide times as natural in me as the beat of my heart, got caught out from looking for curies and cut off by the sea creeping up, and had to wade through it or climb over the cliffs to get home. I never bathed deliberately, though, not like the London ladies coming to Lyme for their health. I always been one for solid ground, rocks rather than water. I thank the sea for giving me fish to eat, and for releasing fossils from the cliffs, or washing them out of the sea bed. Without the sea the bones stay locked up in their rock tombs forever, and we’d have no money for food and lodging.

      I was always looking for curies, for as long as I can recall. Pa took me out and showed me where to look, said what they were – verteberries, Devil’s toenails, St Hilda’s snakes, bezoars, thunderbolts, sea lilies. Before long I could hunt on my own. Even when you go out with someone hunting, you’re not beside them every step. You can’t be inside their eyes, you have to use your own, look your own way. Two people can look over the same rocks and see different things. One will see a lump of chert, the other a sea urchin. When I was a girl I’d be out with Pa and he’d find verteberries in the spot I’d already turned over. “Look,” he’d say, and reach over to pick one up that was right at my feet. Then he would laugh at me and cry, “You’ll have to look harder than that, girl!” It never bothered me, for he was my father and he was meant to find more than me, and teach me what to do. I wouldn’t have wanted to be better than him.

      To me, looking for curies is like looking for a four-leaf clover: it’s not how hard you look, but how something will appear different. My eyes will brush over a patch of clover, and I’ll see 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3. The four leaves just pop out at me. Same with curies: I’ll wander here and there along the beach, letting my eyes drift over stones without thinking, and out will jump the straight lines of a bellie, or the stripy marks and curve of an ammo, or the grain of bone against the smooth flint. Its pattern stands out when everything else is a jumble.

      Everyone hunts differently. Miss Elizabeth studies the cliff face and the ledges and the loose stones so hard you think her head will burst. She does find things, but it takes her much more effort. She don’t have the eye like me.

      When he hunted, my brother Joe had a different method again, and hated my way. He is three years older than me, but when we were young it felt sometimes like he was years and years older. He was like a little grown up, slow and serious and careful. It was our job to find curies and bring them back to Pa, though sometimes we set about cleaning them too, if Pa were busy with his cabinets. Joe never liked to be outside when it were blowy. He found curies, though. He was good at it even if he didn’t want to do it. He had the eye. His way was to take a patch of beach, divide it into squares, and search each square equally, going back and forth at an even pace, slow and steady. He found more than me, but I found the unusual bits, the crocodile ribs and teeth, the bezoar stones and sea urchins, the things you didn’t expect.

      Pa hunted by using a long pole to poke amongst the rocks so he wouldn’t have to bend over. He learned this from Mr Crookshanks, the friend who first taught Pa about curies. He jumped off Gun Cliff behind our house when I was only three. Pa said he’d had too much debt and even curies couldn’t keep him from the workhouse. Not that Pa learned from Mr Crookshanks’ mistake. Pa was always looking to find what he called the monster that would pay all our debts. Over the years we’d found teeth and verteberries and what looked like ribs, as well as funny little cubes like kernels of corn, and other bones we couldn’t make out but thought must come from a big animal like a crocodile. Miss Elizabeth showed one to me once when I was cleaning curies for her. She had a book full of drawings of all sorts of animals and their skeletons, by a Frenchman called Cuvier.

      Pa didn’t hunt as much as we did, for he had his cabinet making, though he’d come out when he could. He preferred curies to woodwork, which upset Mam, for the money was unpredictable, and hunting took him away from Cockmoile Square and the family. She probably suspected he preferred being alone upon beach to a house full of squally babies – for she did have some squallers. All of them cried but Joe and me. Mam never come upon beach, except to shout at Pa if he went hunting on a Sunday and shamed her at Chapel. Though it didn’t stop him, he agreed not to take Joe and me out on Sundays.

      Other than us there were but one other who sold curies: an ancient hostler called William Lock, who worked at the Queen’s Arms at Charmouth, where coaches between London and Exeter changed horses. William Lock found he could sell fossils to the travellers as they stretched their legs and looked about. As fossils were known as curiosities, or curies, he come to be called Captain Cury. Though he’d been finding and selling fossils for years – longer even than Pa had – he didn’t carry a hammer, but picked up whatever was lying easily to hand, or dug things up with the spade he kept with him. He was a mean old man who looked at me funny. I stayed away from him.

      We would see Captain Cury from time to time upon beach, but until Miss Elizabeth come to Lyme, the shore were deserted of other cury hunters apart from us. Mostly I went looking with Joe or with Pa. Sometimes, though, I went down upon beach with Fanny Miller. She was the same age as me and lived just up the river from Lyme, past the cloth factory, in what we called Jericho. Her father was a wood cutter who sold wood to Pa, her mam worked at the factory, and the Millers were members of the Congregationalist Chapel in Coombe Street like us. Lyme was full of Dissenters, though it had a proper church too, St Michael’s, that was always trying to lure us back. We Annings wouldn’t go, though – we were proud to think differently from the traditional Church of England, even if I couldn’t really say what those differences were.

      Fanny was a pretty thing, small and fair-haired and delicate, with blue eyes I envied. We used to play finger games during Sunday services when it got dull, and would run up and down the river chasing sticks and leaves we’d made into boats, or picking watercress. Though Fanny always preferred the river, sometimes she would go with me upon beach between Lyme and Charmouth, though she would never go as far as Black Ven, for she thought the cliff there looked evil and stones would tumble down on her head. We would build villages from pebbles, or fill in the holes tiny clams called piddocks made in the rock ledges. At the same time I would keep an eye out for curies, so it was never just play for me.

      Fanny had the eye but hated to use it. She loved pretty things: chunks of milky quartz, striped pebbles, knobs of fool’s gold. Her jewels, she called them. She would find these treasures, yet wouldn’t touch good ammos and bellies even when she knew I wanted them. They scared her. “I don’t like them,” she would say with a shiver, but could never explain why, other than to say “They’re ugly,” if I pressed her, or “Mam says they’re from the fairies.” She said a sea urchin was a fairy loaf, which was their bread, and if you kept it on a shelf your milk wouldn’t go sour. I told her what Pa taught me: that ammos were snakes that had lost their heads, that bellies were thunderbolts God had thrown down, that gryphies were the Devil’s own toenails. That scared her even more. I knew they were just stories. If the Devil really shed that many toenails, he would have to have had thousands of feet. And if lightning was

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