Forget the fabled racial tolerance of Tiger Bay, this is a Cardiff of low-level racial bigotry and prejudice. Theirs is a family bound by love, but outside the walls of their home her son and grandchildren face a world of racist taunts and threats of violence. In desperation he eventually signs on as ship’s cook again, and from this point he and Ellen are together only when his ship docks back in south Wales.Įllen’s struggles in the 1880s and ’90s are interwoven with her old age in 1941, when her son is a grown man with children of his own. Ellen now has a baby son, Louis, as well as her mother to look after, and Samuel comes up against a wall of racist exclusion as he tramps from place to place looking for work.

She insists on their returning to Cardiff so that she can look after her. The dream is shattered however when Ellen gets news that her mother, who was always unstable, has been committed to an asylum. First, though, they take a ship to Barbados to see his mother, only to find that she has died.īack in San Francisco Samuel sets about repairing a shack where they will live and establish their café. They both like it there and Samuel dreams of setting up a little café selling good food and beer. Descriptions, too, of Valparaiso where the ship puts in, and of a San Francisco which in the 1880s is still a vibrant, bustling frontier town. There follows a vivid description of the voyage – the savage storms encountered rounding Cape Horn, the conditions onboard, in the galley, in steerage.

There is mutual attraction and after a brief courtship they marry and Ellen persuades her husband to take her with him on his next voyage from Cardiff to San Francisco. Ellen knows there must be more to life than this, and she finds it when she meets Samuel, a young seaman from Barbados who works as a ship’s cook. This is the story of Ellen and her unconventional life, with Chapter 2 going back to 1883 when she was a young girl working in a dead-end job as a housemaid.

The blast from one bomb, a near miss, shatters windows, smashes crockery, and breaks her most prized possession, a ship in a bottle made by her long-dead husband, Samuel. It is 1941, and Ellen, bedridden with a broken hip, listens as German bombs rain down on the city.

Catrin kean salt