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Katrina Porteous

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Cathy

‘See yon heuk?’ says Cathy.
‘Yon’s ma life.’
Three-quarters of an inch of steel,

Barbed at the hyeutter, bent,
It glitters
Like a jewel.

Tiny. Cathy, six stone, volatile as petrol,
Wiry, lean,
Puts on her shawl.

Pleased to see you, kettle on,
Deaf as a sharpening stone
To every sound

Except the wireless static crackle
From the boat,
A little whirlwind,

She pegs the sheets out in the backyard,
Scrubs the step, stirs the pan,
Swabs the floor –

‘When fetther hord it was
Another girl
He slammed the door.

Aye, but
He couldn’t dae wi’oot dowters, ye kna.’

Cathy, bent
Beneath the creel:
Home from the mussel beds, the limpet pool;

Six stone of haddocks haa’ked aroond Reed Raa’,
Husband, in-laws, tugging at her, kin
Needing her care,

Mussels to skeyn,
The boat to launch, lines to bait, claes to poss,
Sons to bear;

Cathy, bent with pains,
Years; busy as a sanderling,
Never still,

Down the harbour with the barrow, eyes
Blue as the Coquet, bright
As steel,

As hard, as sharp, as necessary
As a fish-hook
To the house, the men;

Cathy, without whom
A coble could not go to sea – as vital to it
As diesel, or the wind.

 

Claes: clothes; Coble: traditional Northumbrian inshore fishing boat; Dowters: daughters; Haa’k: to sell from door to door; Heuk: a hook; Hyeutter: the barbed end of the hook; Lines: long lines, which carried up to 1,400 hooks, baited with mussels and limpets by fisher women; Poss: to beat clothes in water with a stick to wash them; Reed Raa’: Red Row, a village near Amble, Northumberland; Skeyn: to shell, as mussels and limpets for bait.

Page(s) 73-4

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