The Sea Inside

their brother William, who followed them to America, would lead quieter lives, settling in small towns on the shores of Lake Erie, south of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Yet for them too, leaving England was an adventure: Mary Ann would recall that on the voyage out from Liverpool, the ship on which she was sailing passed another vessel on fire, but their captain did not stop, although the law of the sea demanded that they should.
    Back in Gloucestershire, Sophia went on to marry twice, each time to men from her own parish. A single image of her survives: a tintype photograph, corrupted with age, showing her in a patterned dress. Her face is strong, her cheekbones high, her stance determined. She looks like my mother, who had the same Titian red hair; it is not hard to read in her eyes what she had lived through. Sophia brought up her daughter, assisted by the Ninds, who acknowledged her as one of their own. In her teens, Rosa became a nursemaid to a naval family in Plymouth, before marrying and having her own family, among them my grandmother. She looks quite proper in her crinoline. But in every census record in which she appears, until her death in 1920, one year before my mother was born, she continued to state that she was born at sea, as if to obscure the shame of her illegitimacy.

    My father’s family also crossed the sea; like my maternal ancestors, they too were caught up in an age of mass migration. My great-grandfather Patrick, named after the saint who had converted Ireland and driven the snakes from its shores, was born in Blanchardstown, a village outside Dublin, in 1856. The island was still suffering the after-effects of the Great Famine, a good enough reason for his departure for Liverpool sometime in the 1870s. Settling in Lichfield, he married an English girl, a servant in the same household in which he worked as a coachman. The pair then moved to the former whaling port of Whitby, where my grandfather was born in 1885, on a street at the end of which, in the previous century, James Cook’s
Endeavour
had been built.
    His eldest son, my father, a dark-haired, good-looking young man, left the depressed streets of the north for a new life in Southampton in the 1930s. He had been born in the model mill town of Saltaire in 1915, but was brought up in Bradford. His journey south was the equivalent of the Ninds’ voyages, the result of greater events, of disaster and opportunity. Later he’d speak of the deprivation he had witnessed in his home town, of starving families fighting over food, of rats running down the street, and of a man found hanging in an outhouse on nearby wasteland.
    Perhaps that’s why the rest of my father’s life was so resolutely ordinary and ordered. He worked for the same cable company for forty years in a redbrick factory built on reclaimed land between the docks and the walls of the old town, a hundred yards from the station where he had first arrived. Every day, at the same time, my mother waved him off. Every day, at the same time, he came back for tea. He might as well have been clocking in and out of his own home. What he did between his punctual departure and his prompt return was a mystery. He seldom spoke about his work, nor did we ask him about it.
    In the summer after leaving school, I went to work in the same factory. I was a fitter’s mate, a position which required me to wear grey overalls and accompany my designated fitter on various jobs, in none of which did I perform any kind of useful function. As we set out for the day or came back to the workshop before going home, having smeared our clothes with grime to make it look as though we’d been busy, I’d look up into the glass box where my father worked above the factory floor and see him there with his colleagues. They wore bright white coats to distinguish themselves from us in our oily overalls, and they all seemed to wear spectacles, of a National Health design; anything else would have been an unwonted vanity.
    Lit by the luminous shed over our heads, for a few, tantalising glimpses I saw my father as he was seen by others: as a person, rather than a dad, up there in the Test Department, with its graphs and dials and meters of resistance, dedicated to certifying six-inch cables which would be wound onto elephantine wooden drums, stencilled with yellow paint and unrolled under the ocean, anchoring England to America.
    Now I see my father through the framed photographs that still stand in my mother’s