Heather

(So, we now move to Wednesday in Port Brokeferry. If you have been following this project you will know that each new day starts with a document, official or historical. This gives texture to the place for the reader and helps establish where and what Port Brokeferry is. At the start of Wednesday we have an old letter from a visitor to PB who found the charms of the place difficult to resist.)

Port Brokeferry, September 3^rd, 1896

Dear Eloise

Forgive me if the words do not sit neatly on the page. I am brought low this night with some fit of coughing and have taken to my bed. Today we walked the several miles from the station in the rain to a small place called Port Brokeferry. I fear that I have caught a chill from the journey and may have to keep to my bed for some days. I imagine I hear your voice prescribing hot soup and a seaweed poultice for my chest. Then I hear you laughing.

Port Brokeferry is a fishing village of some twenty or so grey stone houses and a one-room school that wants for a bell to bring the unwilling children in from their play. The teacher there is a Mr Boyce, a man of stern countenance and gruff of voice. Indeed, many of the people here are short and mean looking. Misshapen perhaps, like trees that stand too close to the sea and are ever beaten down by the salt singing wind coming off the water.

Brewer sits with me tonight. The candlelight on his face makes him look almost handsome. He would laugh if he knew what I have here written. He does not have the same cough. He is reading as I write. Something from a newspaper that is at least three weeks out of date. He interrupts me with his exclamations of disbelief in what he is reading.

The lady of the house, one Mrs McAllister, is a widow. Her husband is wed to the sea now, she says, for there came a morning some years before when he did not return home, though the rest on his boat did. Mrs McAllister has a daughter who is fair of hair with skin like porcelain. Her name is Heather, which is also the name of a low-growing plant that is found clinging everywhere to the hills that are set back from Port Brokeferry. The plant has a twisted stem that is thick and pliable like stiffened rope, but the flowers are arranged like tiny bells on the plant and coloured pink or purple or any colour in between. Brewer has made a sketch of the same in his journal and I would show it to you on our return. Heather is maybe thirteen years of age and calls me ‘sir’ and curtseys before she leaves the room where we are.

Dear sister Eloise, I miss you. I wish the days here gone and the nights too. I wish my business completed so that I could in the utmost haste return to you and to the comforts of the city. Bid my father well and keep a place in your heart for me. I close this letter now and send it with God’s speed to your hand.

I am always in truth

Your Brother

Edward Balfour

(A copy of a letter sent from Mr Edward Balfour to his sister Eloise, 1896. Mr Balfour, later the very Reverend Balfour, married a young woman from Port Brokeferry. He settled in the town and preached the virtues of education and hard work. He donated money to the school for the purchase of a bell the expressed purpose of which was to bring the children into their lessons. He also gave a sum of money to be awarded each year to the best student in Port Brokeferry’s school and a silver cup that is still known as the Heather Balfour Trophy after his wife who died in childbirth at a young age. From ‘The Collected Sermons and Letters of the Reverend Edward Balfour,’ Vol. 1., 1921.)