The boy watched starfish wiggle their tube feet, observed tiny seahorses tread water, saw crabs as big as dinner plates, found the world's ugliest monkfish, came across eels injured by perhaps propeller or fishing knife. Each animal could only wait it out until a tide would return and lift it back into the freezing Forth, perhaps eventually right out to the North Sea.
The boy passed much of his childhood out on the same rocks where an uncle he never knew had drowned as a boy. Both males aged eleven, one's life had ended long before the other's began.
A woman could sometimes be seen. A distant speck farther out closer to the low tide. Stooping, the boy's mother raked for sea-coal, placing any bounty into old hessian sacks. Even the usable coal needed separating from the larger stone it formed part of. Much of her find was unusable. Her labours represented the geology of direst economic necessity at work.
At home, sitting near the fire would pose a risk. Explosive reports signalled hot bullets that might attach molten stone to any uncovered flesh or clothing.
But the boy once had a father - nature required this - and the woman for a time endured a difficult marriage. That was back when sparks of a different nature punctuated long sulking silences.
Back now at the beach, at the coalface so to speak, the boy stopped play and met his approaching mother. She'd had enough gleaning for the day and, now walking beside her son, handed him one of her sacks as they both took the bounty homewards.
Stretching her aching back she looked up at the sky.
"Looks like rain," she said.
Proverbs 19:17 (KJV)
17 He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.