A Writer's Disgrace

Plenty of e-mails these past few days supporting what I have said in the post below this one: that this 'mad writer woman' is making things up when she says that the writing workshop she ‘owned’ closed because of me. 'Nothing could be further from the truth,' wrote one writer. The writers in the group were forced to reform under a new-forged name because this writer woman would not let them continue to use a name she felt she had ownership of even though she had made moves to leave the site herself. I tell you, there is something amiss with concepts of ownership here. You can’t play, the ball is mine and I just want to sit on my ball! And two other writers saying to me ‘please do not reveal that I wrote to you – her power to blackball other writers is frightening’. Not my words but the words of people she worked with. And an anonymous comment posted elsewhere says I am the disgrace!

Anyway. Enough for now. Find below another in the Port Brokeferry series.

AIDEN MARKS THE CHANGES

It’s different, is what Aiden thinks. The bay and everything in it. Different from how it was. Even the air. Smells familiarly of salt and the sea, and yet something is missing. The sounds of the gulls are quieter than before, and everything in the early morning is eerily still. Or as still as still can be with the sea coming and going every day.

All his years spent in Port Brokeferry, and Aiden has seen the changes. Used to be there was fish landed here, in the harbour. Boats queuing to land a silver catch. And the laughter of men who have come home safe again, their boats heavy in the water. There is not laughter like that these days, not even with Dodie and his squeak-squeak bike and his red flying scarf.

When he was a boy, Aiden remembers there were horses pulling carts with big wheels, a whole line of them at the shore. Driven by men smoking long pipes and talking a different language it seemed, when they talked to their horses in clicks and clacks of the tongue. The carts stacked with still silent-singing fish packed in ice or salt in wicker baskets and taken to waiting trains ten miles from Port Brokeferry.

Then, as a man, Aiden seeing the bay from out at sea. The flickering oil lanterns that the women set in the windows, the yellow light as though the village was set to flame, just one room in every house. And the roofs all shiny grey in the moonlight, and the hills behind seeming to dance, when it was the boat that was dancing. Aiden, every looking-back-leaving, not knowing if this would be his last. For it was so for some. Jonathan, hands like shovels and the man as big as a door, and as broad; the sea just scooped him up in her arms and carried him away, out of reach of everyone on ‘The Purse’. He did not shout protest, or cry, or wave. He just gave himself up, as a man gives himself up to the bed of a woman. Murdo, too, taken before he was even wed, though there were plenty of girls in Port Brokeferry who grieved afterwards, lanterns left burning in the windows of their houses for days upon days. One girl outstaying the rest, grieving still, they say, though she is grey now.

Then came a time when the boats set out less and less to sea. Tied to the harbour as though every day was a Sunday. Men, their hands in their empty pockets, not knowing what it was they should do with themselves. Many left, following the last fish onto the ten-miles-away-trains, just as fully lost as Jonathan and Murdo and all the other sea-wed men.

Aiden stayed. All his years in Port Brokeferry, marking the changes, writing it all down in black leatherbound notebooks, the changes great and small. And it is different now, so that even if Jonathan and Murdo and all the rest returned, they would not know it was their home..