Listening to a potboiler beside the cruel sea

'The only category of female less appealing than a horsey woman is a sea-faring woman'

Everyone but me went for a ride in the boat. I don't pretend to be nautical. Besides, I've been round the island many times and while it would be gratifying to show off my knowledge of the local flora and fauna to our guests and casually pass-off Gaelic names of the distant snow-copped peaks, I'd much rather stay at home sitting in a deckchair shelling broad beans and listening to my 16-cassette audio pot boiler. I don't suppose Anne Rivers Siddons would thank me for calling her saga about the Chamblis family of New England a pot-boiler. The blaze on the back cover of Colony describes it as a modern American classic but the turbulent goings on of four generations of Chamblises is nearer Jacqueline Sussan than E Annie Proulx.

Everyone but me went for a ride in the boat. I don't pretend to be nautical. Besides, I've been round the island many times and while it would be gratifying to show off my knowledge of the local flora and fauna to our guests and casually pass-off Gaelic names of the distant snow-copped peaks, I'd much rather stay at home sitting in a deckchair shelling broad beans and listening to my 16-cassette audio pot boiler. I don't suppose Anne Rivers Siddons would thank me for calling her saga about the Chamblis family of New England a pot-boiler. The blaze on the back cover of Colony describes it as a modern American classic but the turbulent goings on of four generations of Chamblises is nearer Jacqueline Sussan than E Annie Proulx.

I've got to the bit where flame-haired temptress, Elizabeth Potter Villiers, wearing a beige jersey tube that could have been poured over her body like cream, is about to seduce happily married Peter Chamblis jr while her long-suffering mother lies dead downstairs in the den. I wish we had a den.

None of the women in Colony are nautical. Their men-folk, as the women of Maine universally refer to fathers, uncles, brothers and sons, are constantly putting out to sea in small craft while the women sit patiently at home shelling beans and baking endless trays of doughnuts which no one has time to eat because when the menfolk do eventually come home there's always another crisis looming. Nobody in Colony ever comes into a room normally. They enter swaggering, their faces drained, blasted, blanched and stiff, having just heard the news that young Calib has run off, or Miss Lottie has drowned herself. The sea, the cruel sea, is at the heart of everything. I go along with that especially where women are concerned.

There's only one category of female less appealing than a horsey woman and that is a sea-faring women and if you think I'm generalising let me tell you I've spent enough summers up here to know what I'm saying. I've watched them through the telescope massive women with arms the size and colour of railway sleepers, shivering their spinnakers and hauling in their cleats or whatever they do out there and I gather the folds of my broderie anglaise housecoat more closely about me and give thanks that I'm not nautical.

A couple of summers ago we saw a yacht weigh anchor in the bay opposite and shortly after two figures climbed into a dinghy and began rowing powerfully towards our cove. To get to the beach to our patch you either have to climb up a waterfall or scale a fairly rugged cliff, neither ascent easy, so I didn't expect to see them for some time. Not a bit of it. They must have run up the cliff like the erstwhile natives of St Kilda whose livelihoods depended on catching fulmers in their cliff-top nests. After several generations St Kilda babies were born with prehensile toes like claws. I couldn't see the toes of the two women striding purposely through the flag irises and meadowsweet towards the house, they were wearing oilskins and boots, but in any case it was not their toes but their ages that alarmed me. They were both well into their seventies. Friends of friends they said had told them to look in on us, so here there were and since the sun was well over the yardarm what about a snifter?

"Weren't they amazing," said my husband later when we'd seen them back into their dinghy. The wind had risen and they were going to have to row twice as hard to make any headway against the tide "don't worry about us, we've survived choppier waters than this haven't we Cynthia," said the one called Midge. And then later looking at the two small figures hunched against the elements he said wistfully "I wish you were a bit more nautical," and wind up with skin like an Arbroath Smokey and muscles like King Kong, I snapped. Yes, why not. He said he liked big strong women. "Shell your own beans," I said and drained, blasted, blanched and stiff I staggered back to the house.