Gorleston is perhaps not altogether so cheerful as I thought.
Unsneck the door to Care and you might as well take it off its hinges.
Late the same night, I was talking to the watchman at the end of the pier. A Yarmouth fishing-smack sailed out into the gloom.
"Rough night," the watchman cried to the skipper.
"Ay, ay," replied a gruff voice from below; and a moment later the smack was gone.
"Better here than on that boat to-night," I observed, as the black sail faded and merged in the black cloud.
"Ay," the watchman answered; "but they'll see worse before they see home again. There's queer weather to be found on the Dogger Bank in an eight weeks' trawling. I mind me of three hundred and sixty drowned in one March gale, and upwards of two hundred lost two or three years ago one Christmas night. Then there's always the risk of collisions in the fog, men washed overboard in a gale, or crippled in the small boat when they put out, as they must whatever the weather, when the Billingsgate steamer comes round in the night for the fish."
"H'm! And what pay sends willing men to face these risks?"
"Penny an hour, from time they start till they get back. That's fourteen shilling a week."