Lucy

In the museum I chose a book. Not one I could touch. Written by the ‘Eminent Physician’ Richard Russell MD. Displayed open on an illustrated page. Locked up tight in a Perspex box, beach pebbles, glazed and whimsically scattered round. Faded paper, over touched, brown with time. Hardbacked in pale blue. Words in dated script sprawl across one page and opposite, a fine line print of botanical sketches showing deep-sea life, weeds and waves stetching down into the depths and tangled around classical imaginings of a male and female bodies. 

A fantastical image that speaks of Selkies and Mer-folk which jars with the blunt words opposite “A dissertation on the use of sea-water”. A book promising healing and hope. 

I imagine it forgotten for years, half buried at the back of a dusty cupboard, perhaps only a pale blue spine poking out between mounds of bills and tax returns gathering dust in an office. The title faded.

Gathering dust for years, speaking to the saltwater in this island nations blood. Wise women’s knowledge twisted and stolen, repackaged for the male industrial revolution, replacing awe with productivity.

I wonder what this ‘Eminent Physician’s’ wife made of her husbands’ book? Could she read it? Had she made some contributions? Did they discuss it over dinner? Did she share with him what she had learnt of saltwater? What did she make of its fancy words and high claims? I wonder if she had grown on this shore. Had she stood on the beach, small hands wringing her mothers skirts looking out to the horizon willing her father’s boat to appear? Belly empty, fear clutching at her throat. Had she watched other girls go hungry when their fathers failed to return, seen shipwrecks wash up and watched their mothers collecting lumps of sea coal on Brighthelm beach, bent double on treacherous shingle banks. Had she been burnt by those spitting fires? 

Perhaps she grew up with tales of Selkie and watched, from the corner of her eye, that woman. The one who kept to herself, whose real name no one knew or at least, said they didn’t, but all called ‘Old Mother Mae’, although she wasn’t really that old.  The one with the barren womb, or so it seemed. The one whose husband she was still waiting for, although some whispered, she cared not. Who lived perhaps in that far hut. Who worked gathering seaweed and cleaning shells, who you’d see on the beach on moonlit nights. Yet, for all the gossping about her, she was the one who all the women turned to if they ever needed help. She’d be called in the middle of the night when a baby was making its way earthside, and when one might be leaving too. 

And I wonder if she looked upon this book of her husbands, so smart and formal, if she remembered those same seaweeds, held up in Old Mae’s hands. If she ever saw weeds made into medicine, without instructions from books. Perhaps she could hear the women’s giggles as she cleaned fishbones and pocketed shells. Maybe they even used to find Hag stones where Old Mother Mae had sat. Perhaps Mae shucked oysters with the children, and did the hard jobs no one else wanted, but yet, everyone knew when you needed help it was Mother Mae you went to.

And I wonder, years later as she finally cleared her husband’s office and found this book, if she thought of Old Mother Mae on the shore at Brighthelm and remembered what she’s told her of saltwater back then and if anything in her husband’s fancy book credited her at all.