During the early part of the twentieth century, fishing still formed one of the main industries in this famous corner of Fife. Belle Patrick spent her first thirty years in and around Anstruther, and in the mid 1960s wrote this memoir in order to put on record the fishing way of life, believing it was ‘so individual, so independent, so different from the present-day standardised pattern of life that it deserve[d] to be put on record’. She describes how the fishing year began shortly after the New Year, as soon as the men had sobered up after Hogmanay, with the ‘winter herring’, and goes on to recount the arrival of the fish-buyers from all over the country.
Like a succession of vivid snapshots, this book is a charming yet insightful memoir of a way of life now gone forever. From it emerges a detailed picture of fisherfolk and fishing: their boats, methods of fishing, life and customs. The result is a valuable record of what was a central part of Scotland’s fishing industry.
It is enhanced with a number of photographs of fishing life in the east Neuk of Fife in the early part of the twentieth century.
This is no work of scholarship. I have no time, opportunity or ability to make researches; all I can do is to put on paper the memories of my childhood and youth. I was born and lived among the fisher folk, but I was not of them, and that, I think, was an advantage. I saw things as an onlooker and, even as a child, could note how different life was to a fisher laddie or lassie from the life of the country folk or the townspeople. At school, in church and Sunday school, at play and, most of all, in the home, the three sections of our small society were as separate as African tribes. We necessarily mingled, but we never mixed. |
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