Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein

Author:Rachel Lichtenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141911533
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

Jane spoke at length about the fishing community, the neighbours and the church, who pulled together and rallied around her. ‘They were everything that you could want a community to be. I had people that I didn’t know putting Sainsbury’s vouchers through my door.’ One friend, Michael Bates, organized a collection and Jane used the money to learn to drive and buy a car.

She said she would not have coped without the Fishermen’s Mission, a charity that arrange emergency living grants and food parcels for people like Jane. Tim Jenkins from the Fishermen’s Mission was somebody she could ring when she felt like she absolutely could not go on; they even arranged a holiday for her and the children. ‘They were my heroes. I always promised Tim that if I got back on my feet I would do some fundraising for them.’

Jane’s background was in music, so she had the idea to do a karaoke-style recording in memory of Colin and raise funds for the mission. She put a notice on Facebook, looking for women to sign up to the Fishwives Choir, which would be made up of the wives and widows of fishermen. Within forty-eight hours, she had messages from a hundred women from all over the UK: ‘I lost my husband’; ‘I lost my father’; ‘My uncle’s a fisherman’; ‘I can’t sing, but I’m married to a fisherman, can I join?’ One of the women called her from Scotland and told her the story of how her father had gone to sea when she was five and she had never seen him again. She also had ladies from Northern Ireland, Wales and most of the other fishing-fleet regions in England. They all met for the first time in Hastings a few weeks later and recorded a single together, ‘When the Boat Comes in’ / ‘Eternal Father’. It was a huge success and even came close to the Christmas number-one slot. A book deal soon followed and, since then, the Fishwives Choir has performed at the Maritime Museum and many other places, as well as making multiple media appearances on BBC Breakfast and other shows. I was fortunate enough to witness their first live performance, at Shorelines Literary Festival of the Sea in Leigh, where, on stage, I introduced a nervous Jane to a roomful of people from the local fishing community. When she sang ‘My Love was Ocean-bound’, there was not a dry eye in the house.

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