Shameless Stories

When I was a teenager my favourite subject was English because it was the one place where the truth didn’t matter; where making things up was the point. I never felt the dread shame I did in History when it was Census Project time. Everyone had to fill in the occupations of their parents to be calculated and pie-charted and colour keyed. I suspect data protection might actually protect kids from the shame of this now but when I was a teenager it happened twice a year. My entries skewed the neat shaded pie charts. My dad was a fisherman. Students had to invent a new segment for him – a tiny sliver of working-class subsection that wasn’t worth colouring in. I felt the shame of this so painfully – the difference of my family in a slender blank segment of pie. Shame is a shaking-head that says “no, don’t speak”. I was good and quiet about my true stories for a long while and I got very good at making things up.

But truth, like a wreck, is never really lost – it just becomes something else. Years later and I’m at Woodhorn Museum in Northumberland; I’m telling a group of young writers what makes the North Eastern coble such a special and magical boat. There’s even a beautiful model of a coble here to show them. I’m telling them the secrets my dad told me about the importance of a boat’s name and how we can see the shadow of Viking boat builders in the prow of these resilient little vessels. 

I’m not ashamed. 

I share the knowledge passed down to me to a new generation of writers. Knowledge about how these boats are made by eye, how no two boats are alike and how they are drowned to float.  Following the traditions of naming to remember female relatives I ask the group to tell me what they might call their own boat. And together we remember those lost who the sea might carry home. 

And I’m not ashamed. 

I share the stories and superstitions I grew up with and that kept my family afloat. A tale of mermaids’ vengeance against the fishermen who trapped them. A tale of a sea god’s protection after being cut free from the nets by the gentle hand of my great-great-grandfather. These tales were my first encounter with story; told when the lights went out and the paraffin heater went on. Stories I’d never told at school because they’d say I’d made them up. They liked truth. The black and white and right and wrong of it. They’d only ever ask ‘Why can’t you swim?’ Because that’s not the bargain we make with the sea: if we take life from her we must be willing to let her take us. ‘Never take what you’re not willing to give back.’ I never said that. ‘Because we couldn’t afford it.’ I never said that either. Both were true. Both would have been the wrong kind of true and enough to get me a sly-mouthed slap of shame. 

But today I wasn’t ashamed. 

I was talking about my culture. My people – the Finfolk. Descended from Vikings, protected by sea gods. We live by the sea, not by as in near but by as in by her laws and with her grace. We don’t disrespect. We don’t take more than we need. And because my love of story took me far from home, I was able to take these writers on a journey from my little shore to all of the tale-tellers who have been sea-struck: from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to Hemingway’s Old Man. I shared the truths of all the Finfolk united by oceans not divided by borders. My colourful wrong kind of truths. I filled in that gap where people see working class and they see a blank segment of a chart and assume it is the same thing as an absence of culture and worse – the absence of imagination. It’s not. I’m good at making things up. Anyone who grows up watching the light perform on the high tide is good at making things up. But my truth is stranger and more dazzling than light on the water. How could I ever have been so ashamed? 

It’s because these stories were not part of the legitimate tale that England tells and sells of itself – there were no big red buses; no helpful policemen; the countryside was not a place of escape, mystery and adventure from the city and boarding schools – it was real and it was a hard and beautiful place to grow up. It’s where children learn to thrive unprotected by money, education and guardians. Where the threats of reality were and are as sharp as the threats of imagination. 

The writing and ideas the young writers came up with made the cockles of my heart toasty. They are Finfolk now too with seaworthy names for their boats; tales of briny creatures and their curses and tattoos (not real ones but symbols of protection).  

The final task I set was for the writers to design their own tattoo. One of the things I love about Finfolk is the way they wear their protection on their skin, a message to the power and unpredictability of the sea. A truth that is neither hidden nor spoken – like a blessing. The language of seafaring tattoos is beautiful and deep. Some of the symbols – the mermaids and sirens – speak directly to the sea, acknowledging her power, but so many more are about coming home safe. The compass rose, the lighthouse, the northern star. We may not all set out to sea but we are all capable of losing our way. For a long time I did. Finfolk call it the doldrums after a belt of calms and baffling winds north of the equator. Shame is the doldrums, a stagnant calm, a listless lostness until the sea calls you home.

Carmen Marcus is the author of How Saints Die, the story of ten-year-old Ellie Fleck and her fisherman father and the tales that keep them afloat when Ellie’s mother is taken away. How Saints Die won New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award as a Work in progress and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.

Carmen is a writer, performance poet and creative facilitator living on the wild North Yorkshire coast.

She is currently working on her Arts Council-supported poetry project The Book of Godless Verse, her second novel The Bait Boy and her writer’s development project The W Plan.

She is an advocate and campaigner for underrepresented voices in publishing. 

@Kalamene

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