Tom Flett scrapes the sand for shrimp at low tide with his horse and wagon, risking his life in a job that is both boring and dangerous. He lives with his widowed mother who entertains gentleman suitors while Tom longs to perform folksongs and court local girl Joan but lacks courage. An avid reader apprenticed at 14, Tom yearns for escape from a lineage of shrimpers. When an American film director, Edgar Acheson, arrives scouting locations, he recruits Tom as a local guide and a fast friendship forms amid Tom's awareness of his antisocial odor and the treacherous beachfront.
Tom is clearly in the Hardyesque tradition of unworldly young men who tend the land or work with their hands (Gabriel Oak, Jude Fawley), and it's this that alerts us to his vulnerability to charmers and chancers. Apprenticed by his pop at 14 (every other Flett had been a shrimper, going back to his great-grandpa), Tom nevertheless longs for a life less circumscribed.
When the latest suitor turns out to be a slick American film director named Edgar Acheson, Tom sees his chance of escape. Edgar is scouting locations for a movie adaptation and immediately looks to recruit Tom as his local guide, a guy who knows the beach, the tides. Tom agrees at once, though acutely aware of his antisocial stink of pervasive sweat and shrimp rot, fish guts, crab flesh, seaweed, dander, forage, gull shit, horse dung.
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