The following is an excerpt from Leo Walmsley’s novel ‘Three Fevers’. It tells of one year in the interdependent working lives of two families engaged in fishing an isolated rocky shore, as narrated by the author. It is based on the author’s knowledge of the Yorkshire village of Robin Hood’s Bay, which in the book is called Bramblewick. The Lunns and the Fosdycks are the only remaining families of what had once been a prosperous village engaged in an ancient hunter gathering activity. Their very survival was seasonally tied to the ecological cycles of cod, lobsters and salmon, which had to be fished in small boats launched directly from a trecherous rocky shore. This episode begins with a conversation between two male generations of the Lunns who are contemplating the dawn sea at the foot of the cliffs where ‘……..the crests of the breakers gleamed like bared teeth through the paling dusk which still obscured the seaward horizon’. In the interactions between these two families are seen principles behind the evolution of cultural markers denoting the aquisition of adaptive traits to exploit the local environment.
"John was the first to give his thoughts utterance. He spoke slowly, ponderously, almost with a growl.
'Sea's growing.'
'What if it is ?' was Marney's quick comment. 'It's a long way from breaking across the landing mouth.'
'It'll be breaking there before the tide turns.'
'Garni' was Marney's scornful rejoinder. 'We're going off, so you can stop your croaking, brother John. You're getting as bad as old Isaac (a Fosdyck)with your croaking.'
'I'm not so bad I haven't a pair of eyes in my head, and some sense behind them,' was John's surprisingly quick retort. But he as quickly lapsed into his customary gloom. 'It's been blowing like hell outside. Sea's grown while we've stood watching. I bet the Fosdycks won't like it. I bet they'll not want to go.'
'Hold your jaws, both of you,' Henry (their father) put in quietly. 'You're like a couple of pups yapping. Have they been down yet ?'
'They're coming,' said Marney.
A silence fell upon the Lunns. They did not turn until Luke and Tindal Fosdyck were abreast, and then Henry spoke very quietly and very courteously to the elder brother.
'Now, Luke.'
'Now, Henry,' the elder Fosdyck answered; and after a slight pause, 'Looks as though it's going to blow again.'
To which Henry answered non-committally, 'It doesn't look too good.'
There was a lengthier pause while all five men continued to look at the sea. But I knew this seeming intentness on the weather was a blind to what was really moving in their minds. The air had become electric with repressed antagonism.
My sympathies in this enduring antagonism between the Lunns and Fosdycks were not altogether one-sided. The Fosdycks were the oldest Bramblewick family, parish records of them going back for certain to the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was not unnatural that they should have come to regard that broad sweep of sea stretching between the two Batts (headlands which defined the bay) as the reserve at least of the Bramblewick fishermen: and that they should have bitterly resented the immigration and settlement in the village of Henry Lunn's father and two other 'foreign' families.
Yet what must have rankled deeper was that these 'foreigners' used different gear, employed a different fishing technique, worked longer hours and caught more fish from the bay than they did themselves. And the feeling was not less bitter now that Luke and Tindal were growing old; that their family, of which the sea had taken such heavy toll, threatened to end at Avery's (Luke's son) generation; while the Lunns, following the war (when the rest of the 'foreigners,' including old Marney Lunn (Henry's father), returned to their native village, while Henry fished in a deep-sea boat, and John and young Marney were sailors in the Mercantile Marine) had started fishing again, with a motor-coble to give them a greater advantage still. Nor again was it less bitter because in winter there was no one else fishing, which meant that they were dependent upon the Lunns, as the Lunns were dependent upon them, for co-operation in the very heavy labour of hauling the boats up when fishing was done.
Yet Henry, broadminded and good-natured, was capable of understanding, even of sympathising with their resentment. He did not hate the Fosdycks. But he hated inactivity. He hated the restraint imposed upon him by this mutually understood if unspoken agreement that if either family wished to stay the other would also stay: for there never could be a time when this decision could be made by him: the 'say' was always Luke Fosdyck's".