Stack of books with a reading quote

The swell has been tossing the boat about like a drunk at a doorway, so I've been spending the watches below with the lamp turned low and the Dickens you left me. I'm on the third volume now, which I'm told is the one where everybody cries, so keep your handkerchief handy when you write back.

Skipper Dunne says I read like a man bailing a leaking boat, all elbows and no sense of the thing. Maybe so. But when the hold is full of cod and the deck is slick with the lot of it, a book is the only place I can be anybody but the lad who was sick over the rail on his first trip out. Last Tuesday I came off a sixteen-hour haul with my hands split and my head ringing, and I sat on an upturned crate with Pip's story open across my knees. The first page was wet with spray before I'd reached the second. I read it anyway.

By the time I got to the bit on the marshes I'd stopped shaking. Nobody tells you that about books, that they settle your hands again. I put my thumb on the page where I'd left off and went up on deck. The sky had gone the colour of pewter, and the gulls were screaming astern as if they had opinions of their own.

Tell Dad I'm eating, and tell him the rope burns are mending. I'll send the next lot of pages when we're in at Lowestoft.

Your loving brother, Tom