The sheep grazing the saltings were also yielding ground to the rising tide, retreating towards the fence-line of up-ended railway sleepers linked by woven rushes, that gave some shelter from the bite of the wind.
Hares lying in the sea-grass waited until the last possible moment, when the tide had almost cut them off, before turning and running in zigzag lines, ears pressed flat against their heads, their feet throwing up webs of spray as they sped inland.
Two men were standing on a plank resting on the marsh, clearing one of the deep drainage ditches running inland from the sea wall. One sliced at the bank with a long-handled sedge-knife, the other followed behind him, lifting the cut squares from the ditch with a crome and dumping them on the bank.
Grey smoke was belching from the lime kiln at Old Hall, and Tom could see the barges tied up at the jetty, unloading the downland chalk for burning. He had once worked there, carrying the wicker baskets of ‘blue billy’ — unslaked lime — from the kiln to the waiting carts and waggons. The lime that seeped through the wicker and the coarse weave of his shirt had burned his back red raw.
Tom was thirty-one, the youngest of three sons of George Dudley, a local exciseman turned professional yachtsman. His mother had died when he was only six, and since his elder brothers were already at sea, like their father, he and his younger sister had been taken in by relatives.
He grew up a solitary, introspective child. His lack of inches, pale, freckled face and mop of red hair made him conspicuous among the village children, but he was brave and strong enough to face down or fight those who tried to bully him. From an early age he showed a dogged determination: when set a task he would always achieve it.
Like most Tollesbury families, life for the Dudleys was a hard yearlong grind for adults and children alike. Few could afford the twopence a week school fees, and Tom was sent out to work instead whenever there was money to be earned.
Whole families decamped inland for the fruit-picking, pea and bean harvests, leaving the village deserted. The school boards eventually bowed to the inevitable and created an annual pea-picking holiday. The work was back-breaking but Tom earned a few pence a day, and when the harvest was gathered in, the farmers would allow him to collect the spent stalks, to be dried and used as winter kindling.
If at all, the children were back at school only for a few weeks before there was another mass exodus for the grain harvest. After that, there was winkling, eeling, turnip-pulling and a score of other seasonal tasks.
The school attendance officer grew weary of making fruitless calls on the cottage in Head Street, and beyond the Bible instruction at his Sunday school, Tom received almost no education at all, but when he went to sea, he took books with him, and over years of slow, painstaking effort, he taught himself to read and write.
The only real holidays in the year were two one-day fairs: Gooseberry Fair, at the end of the fruit-and pea-picking season, and the feast held in late September to celebrate the return of the many village men who had spent the summer working as crewmen on racing yachts. It was the one time in the year when money flowed freely across the bar of the Plough and Sail and the King’s Head.
Tollesbury men were much in demand from the skippers of racing yachts. The bleak, marshy Essex coast and the prevailing cold, offshore winds were reckoned to produce tougher, more skilful seamen than the sheltered ports of the Channel coast. Yachting had boomed since the end of the Napoleonic wars. For the first time, offshore waters were safe for pleasurecraft and the rising prosperity of the middle and upper classes, fuelled by the Industrial Revolution, led to a rapid expansion in the rich men’s pastimes of cruising and yacht-racing.
Many owners were as ruthlessly competitive in their sailing as in their business dealings. Having bought or commissioned the best available boats, they were also willing to pay good wages for the best hands, including a share of the prize money. Crews were attired at the owner’s expense, with shoes, oilskins, trousers and jerseys embroidered with the name of their yacht.
The racing season began at Harwich at the start of May and the yachts then sailed clockwise around the coast, calling at the regattas at Southend, Dover and Bangor, before spending a fortnight racing on the Clyde. They then returned to the south coast for Cowes Week and the Ryde Regatta, and the season ended in September, with a regatta and quayside fair at Dartmouth. Most of the yachts were then laid up for the winter. Their crews found employment on merchant ships and fishing smacks, or worked in boatbuilders’ and repairers’ yards until the following spring.
Tollesbury was just beginning to establish itself as a yachting centre in its own right, with its own small regatta in the last week of September, to mark the homecoming of the village’s men. The returning crewmen sometimes earned an illicit bonus by bringing back rum, brandy or tobacco from across the Channel. Excisemen occasionally searched the yachts, but they made no more than a token effort to curb the smuggling; they had, after all, to live among the communities they tried to police.
Like his brothers before him, Tom went to sea, still a child, three months before his tenth birthday. He rowed out with the crew in the grey light of pre-dawn, the fading stars still reflecting in the water and the mournful cries of seabirds filling the air. His boat joined eighty or ninety other smacks crowding the fishing grounds, netting eels in their season, or fishing offshore for skate, sole, plaice, cod, whiting, mackerel, herring and sprats. The sprats were salted down in barrels for shipping to Russia, but most of the other fish was sold locally, hawked from door to door in wicker baskets.
In winter Tom caught eels in the deep mudholes in the saltings, pulled turnips from the frozen fields or joined the ships fishing for ‘five-fingers’ — the starfish that preyed on the oyster beds. They were sold to the farmers for manure. Other oyster predators like whelks and slipper limpets were killed and thrown overboard.
The first smacks in at the end of the day would line the shore of Woodrolfe creek and later arrivals had to unload across their decks. The starfish were piled in baskets and driven away in tumbrils to the farms around Tollesbury.
Tom would arrive home at night heavy with the stench of rotting starfish. It was filthy work, disliked by all the men, but there were few alternatives. When storms kept the fishing smacks at home there was no money at all and in some bleak winters the Dudleys were forced to join the forty other village families claiming poor relief from the parish.
Tom also worked on the oyster dredges. The crew sweated over the windlasses, hauling in dredges full of culch — the pieces of dead shell to which the oysters attached themselves. They were then sorted by size into brood, half-ware and ware. The ware — the adult, full-grown oysters — were packed into barrels for sale; the brood and half-ware were returned to the seabed or moved to private dredging grounds.
‘The most valuable native oyster breeding ground in the world, or at least, the Kingdom,’ was now only a memory, however, wrecked by overfishing and the sale of oyster brood to other fisheries. A few years before, over five million tons had been shipped to Whitstable alone in a single three-month period. Every Tollesbury man knew it could not be sustained, but none would step back while others continued to plunder the Blackwater. The dredgers continued to operate, but each year the catch diminished.
Tom’s fingers tightened on the helm, but before giving the order to cast off, he turned to cast a last glance behind him. Beyond the marshes, a group of low cottages huddled around the squat church tower like children sheltering behind their mother’s skirts. He picked out first the school and then the reed-thatch of the nearby cottage in Head Street.