MORNING SERIAL
CHAPTER 1
It never ceased to amaze him how in the summertime the early rising sun over Carmarthen Bay streamed through the small window and accurately framed the shadow of two of the four window frames surrounding the glass panes on to the far wall, highlighting his ancestors.
On the right was his father. A black and white image, shoulders bent over the gunnels of a boat, spokeshave in hand, smoothing the fine ash topside.
He had been a boat-builder and the one in his picture, a substantial, open-topped clinker rowing boat, was the last one he built. Determined to finish it before he passed on.
The boat was still there, completed with a fine pair of oars resting in galvanised rowlocks, but now unused, paint fading, resting in the garden outside that overlooked the beach. The bow of the boat attached by a clip to a rusty steel cable leading to an even rustier hand-winch.
To the left of his father’s picture was a faded sepia photograph of his grandfather, just as he remembered him in his old fishing smock and sailor’s cap.
Weathered, people would probably say, and they would be right, but he remembered the crinkly eyes and, best of all, the stories he told him when he was a boy as he taught him how to mend his nets with one of the two ivory needles that still hung either side of a brass key on the bottom of the picture frame. Those were the good days.
Perhaps it was now his turn. He’d thought about it for a long time, but the pain never went away. He lived on his own since his wife died. No son or daughter to pass them on to, but the stories should not die. They were part of a family’s heritage. They ought to be remembered by someone, somewhere, somehow.
No-one else could do it, he was the only one left and he wasn’t sure how many more years he had before the stories would be lost forever.
He shifted to make himself more comfortable in his grandfather’s kitchen chair alongside the oak table next to the old range.
The Herring Man by Cyril James Morris is published by Parthian at £7.99
www.parthianbooks.com