Slowly she mounted the stairs to the small square landing and glanced into her parents’ bedroom, which looked exactly as it had always done and had the same stale odour. She then took the three steps up and bent her head as she pushed open the low door to the loft which had eventually become her bedroom. It had been draughty and freezing cold in the winter, but this place had felt like her private abode. Here she’d kept a sparrow with a broken wing, making it a box filled with straw and bringing breadcrumbs every day until one morning she found it dead, when she had cried and buried it under a hedge.
Her mother sometimes came up here when she was at school; she always knew when she had been for things had been moved. A rickety cane chair which sat against the wall was shifted mere inches, but Delia always knew. There were two small cupboards built into the base of the wall; one of them was crammed with old curtains and sheets, the other was empty apart from a wooden button box filled with all kinds of paraphernalia: string, bobbins of strong thread, pieces of frayed ribbon and unfinished tatting, but no buttons. But this cupboard was the one blocked by the chair and therefore, Delia had reasoned, the one her mother had always looked in, but she had never fathomed out why.
She shifted the chair away now and took a curtain from the other cupboard, spreading it on the dusty floor to sit on; it seemed as if there hadn’t been a duster or brush up here since she had left. She opened the cupboard door and took out the button box and gazed at the empty space. Then she noticed for the first time that the flooring in this cupboard was higher than in the other, as deep as a step and made from a different kind of wood, thinner and more pliable, with a narrower plank and a gap at the back just wide enough to fit in a screwdriver or a chisel.
Delia pulled the button box towards her and opened it again, rummaging in it until she found what she was looking for. A small thin chisel lay at the bottom of the box as it always had, and she took it out, leaned inside to the back of the cupboard and slotted the chisel into the gap. Perfect!
She got on to her knees and prised the tool towards her, jiggling it about to get purchase, and although it was a tight fit she drew up the plank, put her hand inside the gap and brought out a parcel of some kind, wrapped in a cloth that might once have been part of a curtain.
‘So, Ma,’ she murmured. ‘What fine thing have we here?’
She carefully unwrapped the cloth and drew out a roll of documents fastened with a ribbon; she unfastened it and smoothed out the parchment. These, she thought, and confirmed as she scanned them, were the property documents. Davis Deakin’s name was on them and they were copies of those held by a Hedon lawyer. Her eyes widened when she saw the amount the farm cottage and buildings were bought for and paid in full.
‘So it was true, he did pay in cash!’ she muttered. ‘Money from smuggled goods?’ But not from round here, she considered. He must have brought the money with him from his former fishing ground; perhaps he had the Customs men looking for him down Devon way and decided to come to fresh waters, and Ma came with him.
She carefully rolled up the documents again, laid them to one side and put her hand inside the aperture again; she searched about with her fingers and brought out a large envelope. Inside were letters and some early grainy and faded photographs. One showed a group of young people near a harbour wall, and in the middle of them a tall handsome fisherman with a dark beard and hair and a big smile on his face holding a huge tunny fish within both arms. Above him someone had marked in pencil a small x. A dark-haired girl dressed in a man’s fishing smock stood smiling to one side of him and it looked as if she had her arm round him; on his other side stood a fair-haired pretty girl in a summer dress. Other young men were holding fishing rods, and an older man had turned his head and hidden his face from the camera; all wore long fishermen boots.
Delia turned the photograph over. Written in pencil, so faded she could barely make it out, she read, Me with x – my sweetheart Tom Evans, and the other fisher lads, and his soon to be wife Sally Morris. Deakin hiding his face as usual.
Then there was a studio photograph, clearer than the other, with just the dark-haired girl wearing a long dark skirt and white blouse and the handsome fisherman with their arms around each other’s waist and a message on the back reading, Saying goodbye to my lovely Tom. I think my heart will break.
She looked closely at both photographs. So who were they? She had never heard of Tom Evans or Sally Morris, but the man who had covered his face could well have been her father; she recognized a similarity in his bearing. But the dark-haired girl? Was it her mother?
She tipped out all the contents on to her lap and at
