Read Online Even on Days when it Rains by Julia O'Donnell - Free Book Online Page A

brother, Owenie, were the only ones left behind. And Maggie would soon be going off to work in a Scottish hotel.
    Emigration, no matter for how short a time, always brought pain to families. It tore loved ones apart in the struggle to survive and put food on the table. After my first experience away in Derry with Mr and Mrs Foley, I thought it wouldn’t be such a wrench. But it was much worse. I was now nearly 16 and a new job awaited me at Lerwick, one of the Shetland Islands off Scotland. This time it wasn’t housekeeping at the other end of the journey but the daily grind of fish gutting. It was a lovely summer’s day in June as I set off, but there was no sunshine in my heart. I was filled with foreboding as I had no notion of what lay in store for me, other than being guaranteed hard work and lots of it.
    As the boat journey neared an end, the outline of the houses and the church spire around Lerwick harbour came into view. Lerwick, Shetland’s only town and Britain’s most northerly one, was a hive of industry at the time thanks to the wealth the herring fishing brought to the local community. One of the community’s most notable features was its fine town hall.
    I didn’t have time to take full stock of my surroundings because I was immediately introduced to my new ‘family’ – the ‘herring girls’, as we were known – and given a demonstration of the work that was required. Growing up on an island, I was no stranger to fish gutting, but doing it as part of a team of girls who came from Scotland and many parts of Ireland was a strange, new experience and a lot more demanding. I set about working in a crew of three people, with two of us frantically gutting the fish and the third girl packing them into barrels between layers of coarse salt. As it is an oily fish, herring deteriorates quickly, so it was essential that we swiftly removed the insides with a razor-sharp knife and preserved the fish in the salt. The target was to gut and pack a minimum of 30 barrels a day. Each barrel contained 80 to 100 herring, depending on their size, so you really had to concentrate on getting the job done and there was no slacking off.
    As we diligently sliced open the fish and scooped out their insides, we wore oilskin skirts with bibs over our own clothing to save our bodies from the mess of the entrails, the water and the salt. The protective layers of clothes had to be long enough to cover the tops of our boots so as to prevent fish scales and raw pieces of gutted fish slipping down inside our footwear. Our tall rubber boots had wooden soles to cope with greasy surfaces and the corrosive effects of the salt.
    Unbleached cotton which came from empty flour sacks was cut into strips, wound round our fingers and fastened with cotton thread in a desperate and mostly useless attempt to protect our hands from the sharp knives and stinging salt. During our dinner break we’d replace the strips, but they were a poor source of protection, and I regularly got excruciating cuts as I went about my business. After a couple of months, my hands looked like they’d been through a bloody battle. The marks of the knife carved out a pattern. Raw wounds were a torture when the coarse salt got into them. I had no choice but to endure the stinging pain and get on with the job. Otherwise I wouldn’t get paid.
    We did our work out in the open on the quayside in all kinds of weather. The stench from the innards of the fish was often overpowering. This was one of the fishing industry’s most gruelling jobs. Our contracts committed us to begin work when required and to continue as long as we wanted; if you put in the extra hours you’d get more pay. We’d normally start at 7 a.m. and finish at 6 p.m., with just a one-hour break for our dinner. In the busiest time you could end up doing 14 or 15 hours and working by lamplight until all the fresh fish had been processed. Standing in the