How to listen to Hulked

by Jeremy Scott

Looking out towards the Isle of Grain. Boats either stricken, lying on their sides or wallowing in the mud, or bobbing at the end of their mooring chains like multi-coloured ducks in a bathtub. It doesn’t look like a particularly good place to be growing grain from here. Which it isn’t. The name comes from the Old English word for gravel: greon. Greon. Grain.

Far on the horizon, the skeletons of cranes, like the Martians’ Fighting Machines in War of the Worlds, march across the horizon. 

Are they coming this way?

The causeway runs out through the mud, draped with seaweed, wending its way out towards the chimney stacks. Maybe it’s covered by the river now. Or maybe you can see it. The Winkle Path. It makes the boundary between Twinney and Halstow creeks and runs all the way out to Seagull Island there in the distance. Colonies of herring gulls love to flock out there among the wavelets. Wonder why there’s a causeway? Wonder who built it? Where were they trying to go? Seagulls don’t need things like that. 

And look. 

Just sticking out of the water or in plain sight if the mud is uncovered now. 

It’s the hulk of Ernest and Ada. 

Poor old girl.

She was built in 1865 up in Paglesham, way up there in Essex on the banks of the Crouch. 

But who were Ernest and Ada? 

Nobody seems to know. 

Perhaps we can dream a little. Perhaps we can look out at the river and mud and grass and stones and bricks and glass and bottles and imagine.

She leaked like a sieve, did Ernest and Ada, they say. Most of the voyage you spent bailing out her hold with buckets and mopping the decks. If you were carrying bricks, then that was that. They’d be a mush by the time you even got to the Thames. And hops? Forget it. 

So the best they could do was fill her with manure from the horses and carts that jammed up the streets of London and try their best to make a living that way, lugging it down the Thames and onto the Medway for the use of the Kentish farmers. It didn’t matter how wet the manure got, see? But the smell. 

Anyway.

One night, her skipper, sick to death of the endless leaks and the fruitless bailing, ran her aground out there by Seagull Island. Him and the mate hopped into the dolly boat and just left her there to row ashore. People from the village remember seeing her out there in the darkness, sails still up, bob fluttering wildly, rigging flying in the wind, sprit wagging to and fro like an admonishing finger. 

‘Naughty boys. Naughty boys, leaving me out here on my own.’ 

And then, bit by bit, she settled. Say the bob went first, the little pennant at the top of the mast to say which way the wind is blowing. No need for that now. Then the topsail blew away in a gale, flapping off in an easterly like a giant brown bat. Then the other sails, one by one. Main sail, foresail, staysail, mizzen, jib. The the sprit itself, with a crack and rend, punching a hole in the deck as it fell and bringing the mast down with it. She was even more leaky now, of course, and so she filled with water and cracked open. And, year by year, there was less and less of her left. 

And now look at her. How much longer does she have to go? 

But look. 

Look again. 

And if you’re here at the right time, and the moon is out, and the mud is uncovered… Well, look. There they are, now. Here they come. Here come Ernest and Ada, hand in hand, Ernest in his white work shirt with rolled up sleeves, Ada in her forget-me-not blue cotton smock, white apron with a bow. Here they are. Walking towards you along the Winkle Path. Smiling. Waving. Drowning.