Personally, while I shall probably try to ease my way out, I really don’t want to give up. It’s fascinating and there is always something more to learn.”Miles Tea mail order: 01643-703993. Candia McWilliam has written three novels: A Case of Knives, A Little Stranger and Debatable Land, all published by Bloomsbury. She has three children

The hot days when the wasps came and trudged all over the scallops with their legs and feelers and the Fantas sold faster than the teas at the seafood stall; on such days I used to see these types congregating and I would ask myself where will the human race end? Looks like a contest between in the gutter singing glory and so neat you’d need to wear a headsquare to procreate.
I would think: Where did these different kinds of souls get born and how do they hatch? Do they take one another in as they dither about, or do they walk right the way through each other like ghosts? It was my job to hand out the sustenance to these tribes, so that meant I was implicated, just like a keeper in the zoo handing over the bucket of sprats or peelings. It was my doing these folk got the energy to stand up, stick around, walk about the town, pull out their wallets in exchange for a few more items to lose, and struggle onto the boats without fainting from hunger on account of not having had a snack between after lunch coffee and early afternoon tea, or between that one last drink and the first of the evening.These hot days were when the body paid for carrying on as if your skin could be forever hidden under wool.

In this context, Scottish people come off particularly poorly. Unpeeled, we have a selection of looks, unless there’s been a genetic accident and the body’s holding up against the punishment. We’re spare and sandy, or red and beety, or sweaty and soft with burning cheeks and meeting eyebrows, or blue-skinned blondes with the junkie posture who go old overnight at 28 or the second baby. The men are redhaired or blackhaired and mostly wronghaired, sprouting at the shoulder blade or tail end or inner arm I’m not complaining though Duncan is a freak of nature and the kids take after him. They’ve all got his sweatless skin and black eyes, his white teeth and tidy form They look like kids in a film made for childless adults I look like a mother. What people have aye said about me is, ‘It’s a mercy she’s nice eyes. Her eyes are nice.’They’re nothing like me at all, to look at, the kids.

The wonder is that he took me and the answer is the usual one He was tired of the success and the freedom. He never understood why he had been given them, did not know how to use them, and was relieved when they weren’t there any more and I was there instead, keeping them off, success, freedom and the women, all the three.We run the stall together and Joanne and Ian and Dougie help in the school holidays. Joanne’s gone veg so she does not do cockles or whelks but she is neater at garnish than the boys and she washes up the crocks with the water out the tea urn faster than any of us.In the cold, we keep a brazier outside the stall, and we’ve a plastic tent with stripes like a seaside one, where we get a bit of shelter from the wind We tried selling the snacks right indoors, but it slumped. There was no spirit of adventure for the customers eating prawns in Marie Rose sauce off a clamshell in a shelter.It’s more of a sport, more of a holiday, to do it outside in the biting wind or salty rain.