Author’s powerful tale of grief and forgiveness
Tomorrow, we start a new book serialisation for our regular Morning Serial feature. The Herring Man, by Cyril James Morris, is awash with the romance and danger of the sea – and it will haunt you long after you have turned the last page, writes Jenny Whit
AHAUNTING tale about the friendship between a fisherman who has been rendered almost mute by loss, and the fatherless boy who befriends him, The Herring Man is a small but beautiful book that will linger long in your memory.
Its author, Cyril James Morris, has a deep affinity with the sea – he joined the Royal Navy as an apprentice at 16 and served 22 years as a marine and nautical engineer, after which he trained as an anti-submarine helicopter pilot and later became a helicopter maintenance test pilot.
After his retirement he became a lobster fisherman in Saundersfoot before taking up a position in the US as an aerostat flight director.
He returned to Saundersfoot in 2014 and became a writer – his previous books are Morgi, about a Welshman who saves his local pub from bankruptcy, and The Mandore Rose, about a girl from a Romany family on a quest to find two castles that recur in her dreams. Both books are set in Pembrokeshire.
The inspiration for his latest book comes from personal experience – especially his memories of catching the “silver tube” – an almost mythical shoal of herring that is a fisherman’s dream.
“When I left the Royal Navy in the late 1970s it was a challenging adjustment as I had known nothing else since the age of 16,” he says. “I could find no new employment in Pembrokeshire at that time, but wanted to live where I was brought up, by the sea. At that time all I wanted to be was a fisherman and my prize possession was a 14ft clinker rowing boat with a Seagull outboard motor.
“My cousin and I fished for herrings s at night in the middle of winter in the Cleddau Estuary upstream from Milford Haven.
“The experience was magical. No profit for months on end, just a few fish to feed the cat, until one night we caught the ‘silver tube.’ So many herrings that it almost sank the boat.
“Two days later a terrible storm did sink the boat and we could fish no more – success and tragedy just like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Coleridge. I stored the memories along with the ones featured in my
other novels and knew that one day I would be a writer.”
The quest to fish the silver tube leads to a pivotal event in The Herring Man – one that holds the key to the old fisherman’s mute grief.
Morris says that empathy for his characters is his main motivation as a writer – and this shines through in The Herring Man; the boy and the fisherman have each suffered loss, and they have the ability to heal each other. The themes of accidental guilt and redemption loom large. Morris’ writing style is deceptively simple and powerfully evocative of life at sea. It’s illustrated by pictures painted by Morris himself.
“I took the advice of my publisher, Parthian Books, to illustrate the book,” he says. “The type of illustration was my idea. It was to be minimalistic just to trigger the imagination of the reader. “I am not really an artist. I paint pictures of Pembrokeshire fish that are sold in a local shop in Saundersfoot. “I wanted it to be somewhat of a simple work of art encompassing poetry, art and storytelling.”
The Herring Man is out now, published by Parthian.