Below deck

Another in my 'Northender's' project featuring the everyday lives of King's Lynn's fisher folk.
Today in this country, Health & Safety has been embraced to the point of extremism and when paired to the 'public liability' law's our society feels more like a Monty Python sketch. It makes me laugh when I hark back to my youth when crewing with my father and various other relatives, health & safety was unheard of and in fact, danger, was treated with the utmost contempt even when the consequences were disastrous (which was often the case).
One seemingly simple daily task...The lunch break...would hardly raise a sense of foreboding to most people but if I were to detail a typical 'Dinner break' on board one of those fishing smacks today's folk would recoil in horror. 
The 'hold' which resided under a forward hatch or below a wheelhouse, if your boat had such a luxury, would be a very small compartment below the deck...just enough room for 2/3 people so long as they stooped/crouched and were friendly. Often the crew would number 4/5 which meant the heat blasting from a small tortoise stove atop which sat the ubiquitous kettle of tea created an extremely uncomfortable and hot 'dungeon'.
The stove would be lit at the start of the tide and the kettle full of water would be placed on it and it always amazed me as to how it defied the pitching and tossing of a sea swell, but it did and when it eventually came to the boil it would have numerous spoons of tea added along with at least a full can of evaporated milk and about a pound of sugar. This kettle, which must have held about half a gallon would 'stew' on the stove all the way to the end of the tide by which time it would be a kind of grayish/purple colour and have a slightly 'sandy' texture.
The only time the kettle came off the stove was when one of the crew wanted to have a fry-up. Often everyone wanted a fry up so they would take it in turns to use the large frying pan into which sat a good inch deep layer of lard which may have been in residence for a few weeks....it was a kind of 'self filling' frying pan which topped itself up with grease from enormous quantities of sausages, burgers, faggots and things that defied description...oh and a layer of sand, everything has a covering of sand, in fact sand was a part of the fisherman's staple diet.
This hold space was also used to store everything from old thigh boots to oilskins as well as coal for the stove, old bits of netting, provisions for the kettle, sea socks and mittens and old newspapers....what you wouldn't find were thing's that might clutter the place up ...such as a fire extinguisher or life jackets, distress flairs or even a first aid box...oh no, none of those sissy, mamby pamby accessories.

So, there is the story behind the picture...imagine a dark cramped dungeon of a hold unlit save for what light stole in from the hatch, packed with large hairy fishermen squashed around a fiercely hot stove with a giant kettle full of scalding...lets call it tea, alternating with a sizzling, spitting frying pan of exploding fat, offal and sand...on a 100 year old, wooden, 40 foot fishing smack which sat on a sandbank miles from the mainland without so much as a  sticking plaster or radio to call for help......Health & Safety...read this and weep.