In the mornings of my first year or so in Hastings, I would walk to a bus stop down the road at the old market cross in front of The Old Rectory where I would catch a bus to the station. Each school morning, an elderly woman would be sitting at the stop wearing a long blue padded coat. She was often toothless, her wispy hair spiky, and her pockets stuffed with sweets she handed out to the school children making their way up the hill towards the nursery and elementary schools that surrounded the house where I lived. ‘The nice lady’ as I came to call her in my mind was a familiar figure to the children, who would pause each day with their hands extended to receive the bounty contained in pockets.
We would often strike up a conversation during my wait and I felt it was a test of my linguistic abilities to understand her speech, especially when she occasionally left her teeth at home. We would talk about the about the Old Town and Hastings generally. She was a daughter of a Hastings’ fishing family, the traditional occupants of the Old Town, who were being pushed out of their homes through the gentrification processes that, in my years there, had happened and was happening along the Southeast coast. The plague of bohemian, low-rent seekers were rolling into Hastings like a full moon’s tide.
By the time I met ‘the nice lady,’ I had learned that it was socially acceptable to comment about the weather whilst awaiting various modes of public transportation. One morning early in our acquaintance, as we waited in companionable silence staring at the sky, I said, ‘My goodness, aren’t the clouds beautiful this morning?’ She replied, ‘Tha’s a mackerel sky, that is.’
‘A mackeral sky? I did not grow up near the sea. What’s a mackerel sky?’
‘The clouds look like a mackerel’s scales. It’s a sure sign of a weather change comin’. The glass will be on the move and the weather will change. Storm’s comin’. We’ll have rain before morning.’
The nice lady wasn’t wrong.
(image source:https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/entertainment/mackerel-sunrise-glorious-sunrise-caught-mackerel-sky-yorkshire/27/07/. Date accessed: 20 January 2020)
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