When the boats come home

When the boats come home, Dorothy Stewart, paperback, October 1921 and the herring fishing fleets have converged on Great Yarmouth for the autumn season. Wick fisherman Robbie Ross has come to blows with his father and been thrown off the family boat. His sister, war widow Lydia, reluctantly sets out to bring him home, little knowing her world and her family are about to be turned upside down. Her money and ticket home stolen on arrival, she finds herself having to join the Scots fisher lassies gutting herring - lassies she was taught by her strict grandmother to look down on. Lydia finds herself with several hundred others in the Market Place on a cold Saturday night where God is waiting for them in the power of the Holy Spirit and a man called Jock Troup. Revival has reached Yarmouth and as the fisher folk turn to the Lord, Lydia's family and friends are touched and changed. They take her to meetings - and there she falls in love with Baptist minister Frank Everett. But Frank was a chaplain in the First World War and witnessed the family secret Robbie has been hiding ever since. Robbie knows he has to keep them apart.