The writing desk at the harbour mission opens at ten on Wednesdays. I sit behind it with a pad of lined paper, a box of ballpoints and a mug of tea that goes cold before anybody comes.
Most weeks nobody comes. Skellhaven has four hundred pensioners and every one of them can fill in their own forms.
Walter Nunn came in on the third Wednesday in March, wearing a coat that had been good in 1985 and carrying a plastic folder he did not open. He stood in front of the desk until I asked whether he wanted a chair.
“I want a letter written,” he said. “I can’t do it.”
“Can’t write, or can’t say it?”
“Both.”
His voice had the harbour in it. I got the pad out.
The letter was to Ivy Trewin, and it was about the night of 14 February 1971, when the lifeboat Nellie Pratt went out to a coaster dragging her anchor off the Skell. Walter had been on the shore crew. He had passed the bearing to the coxswain, Dennis Trewin, Ivy’s husband, and the boat had gone over the bank in the dark and turned over, and three men had come home and two had not.
“Tell her it was me that gave the bearing,” he said. “Tell her I’ve not slept a full night since.”
I wrote that down. I have taken a lot of letters at that desk: benefit appeals, complaints to the council, one letter to a landlord that took three weeks and worked. This was the first one where I had to stop and ask for a spelling. Trewin. T-r-e-w-i-n.
The reply took a long time coming, and while we waited we wrote thirteen more.
That is how the spring went. Every Wednesday, ten past ten, the chair creaking. He would sit with his hands flat on his knees and dictate two or three paragraphs about the weather, about his sister in Aberdeen, about the boat shed that had been turned into flats. Then he would reach the part that mattered, and it would be four words long. I should have gone. I was ashore. It was my bearing.
I began adding a line of my own at the bottom. Not much. The café where the net loft used to be. The ferry timetable. Once, that a seal had been sleeping on the slip all week.
He read the first one twice and put it down. “That’s not mine,” he said.
“No.”
He came back the following Wednesday and said, “Keep that bit in. She’ll want to know what’s here.”
By June I had sent fourteen letters and forty-one pages, and nothing had come back. I asked him whether she might have moved.
“She’s in Fenwick Bay,” he said. “The home on Sea Road. She’s been there four years.”
“Then why write at all?”
He looked at the window, at the grey water and the two cranes.
“Because a letter can be picked up when she wants it,” he said. “A phone can’t.”
The answer came on the first Wednesday in July, and it was addressed to me.
Cass Trewin wrote two sides in a firm, upright hand. Her mother had the letters. She could not hold a pen any more, but she could listen, and Cass had read all fourteen aloud, twice, over three evenings. Ivy had something to say to me rather than to Walter, and would I come to Fenwick Bay on Saturday.
The home on Sea Road smells of soup and floor polish. Ivy Trewin is small and straight-backed and keeps her glasses on a cord round her neck. Beside her bed stood a jug of water and a library book with a date stamp from 2019, and she saw me look at it.
“They don’t check them out,” she said. “You just take one. It’s the only dishonest thing I do.”
I sat down with the pad on my knee, because I did not know what else to do with my hands. She said the letter had to be exact.
“Walter thinks he drowned my Dennis,” she said. “The whole town thought it. They stopped speaking to him at the co-op, and he went to Aberdeen for eleven years, and when he came back the town had forgotten and he hadn’t.”
“Did he give the wrong bearing?”
“He gave the right one.” She took her glasses off and folded them. “The engine had been failing since November. There was a report. The committee put it in a drawer, and a drawer is a very quiet place.”
I wrote that down, because I take things down. She watched me do it.
“He didn’t lose the boat,” she said. “The boat was old and the night was black. I worked that out by the Wednesday. So I wrote to him in 1972 and told him, and he never answered. I thought, well. That’s that, then.”
She asked to see the pad. I turned it round.
“I want him to know I wrote,” she said. “That’s all.”
Back at the mission the next Wednesday I went through the box under the counter, the one we keep for letters that come back. It is a big box, and mostly it holds Christmas cards for men who slept on the boats and moved on. Eleven of the envelopes in it were for Walter Nunn. The top one had a Fenwick Bay postmark and the date 4 October 1972, and across the front, in a hand I had been reading all spring, somebody had written: Gone away. Return to sender.
He came in at ten past ten and sat down and put his hands on his knees.
“There’s no letter today,” he said.
“No,” I said. “There’s one from 1972.”
I laid it on the pad and slid it across, and he picked it up and turned it over twice, and then he opened it there at the desk, with the tea going cold beside him.
