Inkerman Writers
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This is the opening to an idea i had for a novel i called 'Oh sweet home'
I don’t remember what year it was when I began to look for myself, when I started calling the Missing Person’s Register - to give them my name, place and date of birth to find out if anyone was looking for me.
It was a strange thing to do but I was curious.
It was after the century turned and the web began its exponential expansion that I would scan the websites, scrolling down page after page of lost looking faces, most of whom just stared back at me; thought some would smile and laugh and occasionally someone would wave at me as I scrolled by.
There were children, of course, too many. A few smiling proudly in their school uniform, as they sat in front of a cloudless blue sky.
When I first left this place I had no idea I would stay away so long. Scanning the long row of terraced houses I couldn’t recall having any childish desire to runaway, or for that matter having much of a reason to do so. But the longer I stayed away the harder it was to go back until so much time had passed that coming back would have felt like turning up at a party just as everyone else was leaving.
Coming back was Alice’s idea. She said I had to do it. She said, given what I recently discovered that it was probably the right thing to do and that whether I was aware of it or not that I had to do it. Unlike most of the women I have been with Alice was usually right about this sort of thing. Alice made me promise that no matter what that one day I’d come back.
On the way up here I passed the site of a crash. Anyone else might have taken that as an omen.
From what I could tell and what I found out later a lorry had pancaked the back of a prius, crushing the engine into the barrier, buckling the engine block, the steering wheel speared the drivers seat. Shards and shrapnel missiled into the windscreens of the oncoming traffic.
The occupants of the prius - a nuclear family of exactly two and half children - were either so close to the front of the queue they might as well be.
It could have been worse, was all the sentiment I could muster as I waited for the police to give the all clear, as I stared at the green door of 49 Bush street - the house where I grew up, the house where I spent the first sixteen years of my life. It would have been worse if the traffic in the southbound carriageway hadn’t been stuck in a ten mile tailback, crawling along slower than a crippled snail it would have a lot worse.
I remember that last morning as clearly as I do the wrecked car, memory doing to time what time eventually does to memory.
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About
DfC
The Inkerman Writers are members of Darlington for Culture (DfC), which was set up in 2010 to help save Darlington Arts Centre from closure.
Its members include representatives of arts and community groups.
DfC was established after the centre’s owner, Darlington Borough Council, announced that budget cuts meant that it would have to withdraw its subsidy from the Arts Centre.
Although the centre closed, the organisation remains active - more at www.darlingtonforculture.org
Publications
Welcome to the site created by the Inkerman Writers to showcase our work.
Based in Darlington, North East England, and having celebrated their tenth anniversary in 2013, members have enjoyed success in a variety of arenas, including winning, and being shortlisted and highly commended, in short story competitions, having novels published and publishing the short story anthology A Strawberry in Winter, which can be obtained by visiting the website www.blurb.com
The group's second anthology of short stories, Christophe's Farewell and Other Stories, can be obtained, cost £4.95 plus postage and packing, from
The Inkerman Writers’ latest book, Out of the Shadows, which was launched as part of the 2013 Darlington Arts Festival, is on sale. The book can be ordered direct from
http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/4204019-out-of-the-shadows
The group also produced The Last Waltz, a double CD of short stories, available by contacting deangriss@btinternet.com, cost £5 plus p and p.
Several of our writers wrote original one-act plays in a collaboration with the Green Theatre company, which were performed at Darlington Arts Centre early in February, 2012.
Darlington-based Inkerman Writers have produced their latest anthology of short stories, Inkerman Street, based on the demolition of a fictional northern street and the stories of the people who lived in it.
The book, which features a variety of stories ranging from horror to comedy, was launched to a large audience at the Darlington Arts Festival Literary Day on Saturday May 26 and begins like this:
“Inkerman Street is still and graveyard-hushed tonight, the terraced houses cold behind boarded-up windows, silent sentinels among a sea of wasteland. No one lives here now and tomorrow the bulldozers will move in to flatten the houses to make way for the Council’s Grand Plan.
“Although the people are long gone, the houses still have life. Peek into one of the bedrooms and see on the wall a painting of a seaside scene, brightly-coloured boats bobbing in the harbour, fishermen pipe-smoking in the noonday sun and seagulls wheeling high above the choppy waters. In the roaring silence of the night, you can hear the screeching of the birds and taste the salt air, acrid and herring-sharp at the back of your throat. It is an illusion; the bedroom is empty and the blooms on the faded wallpaper have long since wilted.
“The air in the houses is musty with neglect yet but a few months before, these were bustling homes filled with frying bacon and steaming irons, whistling kettles and playing children. The houses witnessed all these scenes for more than 150 years. Behind their curtains were enacted a thousand stories but tomorrow they will be destroyed because Inkerman Street is the last of its ilk.
“Now, on the eve of the street’s death, the people who once lived here have returned, gathering solemn and silent in the mist, the ghosts of the past come to pay final tribute….”
The anthology can be purchased at http://www.blurb.co.uk/bookstore/invited/7524452/bae89c993c98ec8c8b37b12d6b9b37ecced5dec3
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