Freya shook her head and added, “My sister, Anne Marie, and I felt sorry for her. She was always making up stories like that, and then she met your dad at the high school, and they got married so young. I know she hoped her long-lost father would turn up at her wedding, and there would be a big emotional reunion, which of course wasn’t to be, but after that I don’t remember her talking about him ever again.”
“Did granny Sheila ever say anything about him?” asked Evie.
“Not to me, but I vaguely remember someone once saying he worked on the fishing boats during the war and from what I could gather it was a one-night stand and he didn’t want anything to do with the baby. But I know he sent money to your granny. So, he wasn’t a total arsehole I suppose.”
Evie sighed. “My poor mum, growing up without ever knowing her father. I wonder if that was part of the reason she was so unhappy. I know it broke my dad’s heart that he felt he wasn’t enough for her, and I always thought it was my fault she was so on edge all the time.”
“You and your dad tried your best,” said Freya, “and you should never feel guilty. Your mum pushed happiness away all her life. I could never understand it.”
She squeezed Evie’s hand lightly. “Don’t you ever forget your dad adored the bones of your mum and that fine man almost killed himself trying to please her. But he never could.
It wasn’t easy for him, but you made up for it. You were the light of his life. You were his ‘Teenie’.”
Evie’s eyes filled with tears. She whispered, “And I didn’t get the chance to stay goodbye.”
The memories were still so painful.
After a tragic accident, Evie had fled Orkney aged eighteen, cutting all ties with her friends and family, and only rarely keeping in touch with Freya. It had taken all her courage to come back when Freya had contacted her to say her father was gravely ill – but she hadn’t arrived in time. The guilt still haunted her, as well as the sorrow of all the time they’d missed together.
“Oh, Evie love. You must stop beating yourself up. The past is the past and we can’t change it, but you can remember the happy times with your dad when you were young. How many times do I have to tell you to hold on to that?”
“I know. I do try. Honest I do. But look, what do you think I should do about this Amelia woman. If she’s my grandfather’s daughter, won’t she be ancient?”
“Well thanks a bunch,” said Freya, pretending to be outraged. Evie laughed and said, “You are timeless and ageless as wellyou know. I just meant this woman might need to find out about her family before it’s too late.”
Freya nodded. “Maybe. People do get to a certain age and decide they want to find out more about their past.”
“And he’d have been my granddad,” said Evie thoughtfully. “This James McLean.” She picked nervously at her fingernails, and Freya put a hand on her arm to steady her nerves.
“What do you think, Evie? It’s your decision. You need to ask yourself if this is really a box you want to open and peer inside?”
Chapter Two
Alaska, 1965
James McLean sat in the almost deserted bar in Fairbanks nursing a pint in his giant paw and, for the first time in his life, realised he was pondering his future. James had come to this frozen land twenty years ago after a one-night stand with a barmaid in Stromness had given him a hell of a shock.
Orkney’s Stromness may have been a dry town in 1945 but – due to the vital naval base at Scapa Flow – it was filled with thousands of sailors and soldiers looking for a good time. Underground drinking parlours popped up in every military hotel and outpost. It was the perfect spot for a drunken stag do of fishermen looking to escape their naval reserve duties for the night. In one of these hidden speakeasys, Sheila had given James the glad eye and had become more attractive to him with every beer he sank.
When the customers were finally turfed out, the two of them went to her freezing flat down the road and tore the clothes off each other.
James had gone back to his home in the bombed-out town of Fraserburgh the following morning with a desperate hangover. The deep scratches on his back and arse reduced the rest of the stag do to howls of belly laughter and led to him henceforth being renamed ‘Casanova’.
The nickname stuck but James didn’t give Sheila a second thought. He was too busy freezing, throwing up and working like a dog on the fishing trawlers in some of the worst seas in the world. The arrival of the war when he was just nineteen meant fishermen were expected to support the navy: clearing mines, dropping nets and protecting the coast from deadly German U-boats.
James was horrified when, on his next night out in Stromness, Sheila hunted him down and told him she was pregnant. James was not a man who wanted to get married, and children had never figured in his plans. He had been dragged up in Aberdeen by a feckless drunken father and a worn-out mother who seemed to be forever pregnant. (She died giving birth to her eighth child, a tiny scrap who didn’t even have the strength to take a gasp of air and left the world at the same time as his mother, never uttering so much as a whimper.)
Sheila had thought James might feel shamed into proposing but was secretly relieved when he didn’t grudgingly say they might as well get married. She’d seen too many of her friends settle for loveless marriages and they had regretted it ever since; Sheila didn’t want to grow bitter and sour like them. She found herself looking forward to being a mother without having a virtual stranger of a man under her feet, demanding meals and attention and getting in the way whenever he was back home from the sea. So, when James said he wanted nothing to do with the baby, but would send her money every month, she nodded curtly and said that would do very well.
She wasn’t going to refuse his offer of cash. She reckoned he made a good enough wage and anyway she shouldn’t have to be the one to bear all the responsibility on her own while surviving on rations. She might not want him, but she’d take his money to give her child a proper start in life.
Sheila continued to work in the pop-up drinking dens serving the thirsty sailors until her swollen belly prevented her from reaching the beer pumps. A fortnight later she gave birth to her daughter in the cottage hospital in Kirkwall and named her Cara.
As soon as she was able, the pair took the ferry to the island of Hrossey where Sheila was enfolded into the embrace of her large extended family of fierce red-headed women. They stared down any of the old biddies tut-tutting that Sheila ‘was no better than she should be’ and helped her with baby clothes and cots handed down from their own mothers and grandmothers.
By this time, James was long gone to the other side of the world, with no idea that his child had been born and was a baby girl. A fisherman in Fraserburgh had told him they were looking for experienced hands to join the whaling fleet in Alaska. James saw it as an escape route and applied immediately. He quickly jumped on a ship sailing across the cold Atlantic, followed by a long sea voyage to Juneau in Alaska. He fitted in easily with the horny-handed, tight-mouthed whalers, but it was a brutally tough life, even for a man used to the rough grey North Sea.
On his first voyage one man disappeared overboard and another was trapped by the harpoon ropes on the side of the boat and crippled forever. Worn down by the conditions and increasingly sickened by the smell of slaughter and the blood-red waters, James saw the writing on the wall for the whole whaling industry and tried his hand at working in the oil industry in the Alaskan north slope.
