A Shilling a Barrel

About this book

Great Yarmouth, autumn 1936. Ciorstaidh Morrison, nineteen, has never left the Isle of Lewis until the special train brings her south with three thousand Scottish women to gut the herring for tenpence a barrel. Her careful school English marks her as a stranger; her aunt Peigi expects her home in December unchanged. Nat Thurlow, twenty-one, poses holidaymakers against a painted ocean in his aunt's studio and dreams of Fleet Street. He wants pictures of the Scotch girls on the quay. She wants to know if he ever asked. Between the gutting yards and the darkroom, a first love begins that neither of their worlds has room for, just as the women start talking about a shilling a barrel. When the yards erupt, Nat has his camera ready, and one photograph could make his name or cost Ciorstaidh everything she came south to earn.