Inside the Limit, by Ralph Gisburn

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Tom Robson knew before he reached the first marker that something was wrong. The buoy was there, bobbing in the grey swell off the point, but it was riding too high, too light, and when he hauled on the line it came up far too easily, hand over hand, and ended in a frayed brush of rope where his pots should have been.

He hauled the second line, and the third. Each time the same thing. Thirty-six pots, his whole summer’s weaving of willow and tarred twine, gone in a night. He did not need to ask how. He had seen her lights at two in the morning from the cottage window, the steam trawler out of Shields, working inside the limit where no trawler had a right to be, dragging her great net across the ground his father and his grandfather had fished before him.

His boy Matty, who was eleven, said, ‘Will they pay, Da?’

Tom laughed, and the sound was so ugly that the boy flinched. Pay. The trawler company had offices in Newcastle with brass plates on the doors, and lawyers, and friends on the Bench. A man who went to them with his hat in his hand would be shown the street before he had finished his first sentence. Everybody on this coast knew that.

He sat down on the thwart. His hands, he noticed, were shaking, and he pressed them hard between his knees to stop them, because Matty was watching. Inside him the anger was not hot, as he had always imagined anger would be. It was cold and heavy, a stone dropped into deep water, going down and down and never reaching the bottom.

Far out on the horizon a smudge of smoke was moving north. He watched it for a long time. He imagined climbing her side in the dark, finding the skipper asleep in his bunk, and he imagined what he would do then, in great and careful detail, until he frightened himself.

‘Get the oars, Matty,’ he said at last, in an ordinary voice. ‘We’ll need willow. Your mother knows where the best of it grows.’

But all the way back to the slipway he kept his eyes on that far smudge of smoke, and he did not once look at the shore.

How does the writer show Tom’s thoughts and feelings about the loss of his crab pots?

You should consider:

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

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