The Kittiwake, by Elsie Charlton

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

The buyer was a young man from Amble with clean hands, and Bella Robson disliked him on sight, which she knew was not fair. He walked round the Kittiwake twice where she lay on the slipway, kicked one of her timbers in a friendly sort of way, and said she was in fair condition for her age. Bella thought that might be said of herself.

Jack had built the coble with his brother in the winter of 1924, the year they married. She had held the lamp for them in the shed while the snow came down outside, and she could still remember the curl of the planks as they steamed them, and the way Jack sang under his breath, always the same hymn, always out of tune. Thirty-one years he had taken the Kittiwake out past the point. Thirty-one years she had stood at the window of the cottage at first light and counted the cobles home.

Since March she had not been able to look at the sea at all.

‘Forty pounds,’ said the young man. ‘That’s my best, Mrs Robson.’

It was a fair price. Her son-in-law had told her it was a fair price, and that a boat sitting idle on the slip was only a boat rotting, and that Jack would have said the same. All of which was true. She nodded, and the young man looked relieved, and shook her hand rather too hard.

When he had gone to fetch his trailer she went and stood by the bow. Somebody had to say something, she felt, and there was nobody else. She put her hand on the paintwork, blue and white, the colours of the chapel, and found the little nick in the gunwale where Jack had once dropped an anchor and sworn so badly that the minister heard him from the shore.

‘Now then,’ she said. That was all. It was what Jack said to the boat every morning, and it was what she said now, and the wind took it away up the beach. Then she went back to the cottage and put the kettle on, and did not go to the window when the trailer passed.

How does the writer show Bella Robson’s thoughts and feelings about selling her husband’s boat?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Bella
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.