Stolen stories

The door isn’t locked,I push it open and walk inside,the floorboard creaks, the wind moans though a broken windows, papers lay on a long abandoned desk along with a cash box, stubs of duplicate books and an old typewriter.

Ghosts of long dead fishermen waiting for their settlement hang around like dust mots in the sunlight. I blow the dust off the typewriter will it still work ? and I wonder will they tell me their stories? The day gets colder, The wind increases and I can hear moans, words, chatter and songs hidden in the rise and fall of the wind. Who were these men who chased the cod to the ice, who braved the storms to harvest the sea. The deckies and mates, engineers and sparkies and the skippers? Long forgotten. Their lives were small, work and home, names as insignificant as the dust on the desk.Their chatter increases I find myself trying to catch snippets.

“rolling down the Humber with the tide’

someone or should that be something sang

“I’ll have a bob or two on settling day”

a woman’s voice sang “and on the ice we die” and my blood runs cold, she tries to tell me her story, waiting for her man who never came home, fighting to get his settlement, hard work in the gutting lines, and the quiet desperation of death. I type trying to get it all down, the woman’s solidarity, their friendships, the cold, heavy clothes, the money, the pubs, the songs. She tells me about the shops which ones would do tic, public houses and the bank were the sensible ones put their money. The room is dark, I’m typing by touch, there are pages of stories here, finally it goes quiet as if even the ghosts have left.

I leave the old house go past the long shuttered shops, the abandoned pubs and the empty bank, past the derelict smokehouses with their wonky vents and seek the warmth of my little boat.

But I have new stories, and any writer knows the pleasure of new material to work with I look at the papers.

There is nothing on it except the line “and on the ice we die”

later that hat week I went to a production called “ six silk handkerchiefs” about the fishing industry here. There was one song that particularly resonated with me and when she sang the line “and on the ice we die” I knew I wasn’t the only one who had been in that haunted house.