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| Gorgeous artwork is by Sailesh Thakrar |
In The Mermaid’s Gift, an old family story about a mermaid encounter brings romance and drama.
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“My grandfather, Josiah Young…” he began, coughing as he always did. I once heard Grandmother say to Mum that she always knew the old boy was lying when he coughed, but I didn’t believe that. “…once saw a mermaid.”
The Mermaid’s Gift was my third story with The People’s Friend. It was also my first appearance in the weekly magazine rather than the monthly specials. It was released June 18th, 2016. The setting was 1840s Great Yarmouth.
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“Josiah hadn’t been a fisherman, like my father, myself and your fathers were. He had been a rippier, one of the men who took the net’s catch and sold it further inland. In fact, Josiah was afeared of water, yet he loved to walk the beach each day’s end to see the fall of the sun. That was where he saw it.”
Grandfather blew away the smoke cloud and we realised his eyes were shut. After a few minutes, we thought he’d fallen asleep. We all called for him to continue, asking what Josiah had seen.
His bushy eyebrow lifted as he opened a single eye.
“Why, the mermaid of course! I can’t be telling you everything. As the sky darkened to the colour of fire, he noticed a thousand sparkles, like light upon the water, but this was nowhere near the sea. It was back by the rocks, just barely peeking out. Josiah followed and there was the merwoman. The poor creature was trapped, with only a puddle of water to sustain her. She’d come in the hightide and got her tail caught.”
In The Mermaid’s
Gift, it’s this story which triggers the plot. A man helps a trapped mermaid
and receives something in return. A carved stone that can seek out the holder’s
true love.
Net weaver Hetty has
now inherited the stone, but when it leads her to fisherman Seb, can she really
rely on good luck charms once doubts arise?
The People’s
Friend publishes feel good fiction and prefers grounded, non-magical stories,
but historical writers don’t always have to keep to a rigid realism vs fantasy
theme. The past is a different world. Our ancestors believed in plenty of
things we dismiss nowadays.
A macabre creature could turn out to be a shadow, ghostly encounters the work of a fraudulent medium, or a mermaid sighting dismissed as the tall tale of an old fisherman.
Even with a
folkloric element, the main focus in this story was on the characters’
relationships, particularly Hetty and her reluctance to wed after her younger
sister’s disastrous marriage.
Seb
unhooked our arms and lowered himself on one knee. The ring, which was as thin
as a fishing lure and had a pearl in the centre, was held up.
My
hand stretched out to touch it, to feel that it was real, but I paused. This
wasn’t just a story my grandfather had told me. This was marriage, and fairy
tales and magic stones could not hold it together.
Norfolk’s Mermaids
Legends about
mermaids have intrigued people across the world, but why? Is it because of
their close resemblance to humans, with most depictions showing them as
beautiful women with fishy features, or do they speak to something deep inside
us, something which yearns to explore the sea and discover the strange,
wonderful things hiding within its dark depths?
Many of Norfolk’s
villages and towns are on the coast, so it’s no surprise there’ve been plenty of
mermaid encounters throughout the years. Mermaid Sand, near Snettisham, was
apparently named after a dark-haired mermaid who would pluck off her tail and
walk amongst humans in search of love.
However, Norfolk’s
most popular mer myth is of the Sheringham mermaid. This strange visitor has
been immortalised with a wood carving on one of the pews in All Saints church. The
legend goes that the mermaid was drawn by the congregation’s singing, but being
unable to transform into a human, she was forced to drag herself along the
beach and sneak in at the back.
Explanations vary
as to why mermaid stories are so prevalent, with the main one being drunken,
feverish fishermen desperate for female company. Freakshows would also capitalise
on the interest. Eager to get the crowds in, they stitched animals together to
create a gruesome chimera, such as the Fiji mermaid in America, which was a
mummified monkey and fish. Manatees, also known as sea cows, were also blamed
for mermaid sightings. These chunky creatures were thought to look like women
in the distance, by those drunken sailors from earlier, although, to me, they
look more like pebbles with a tail 😊
No matter the truth, for centuries humans have had a complicated relationship with the sea. It is a world we will never be able to fully explore. In the past, it was even more secretive and dangerous. Perhaps mermaids were a personification of those violent waves that, while beautiful, took so many fishermen away from their families.
Sequels & Where to Read
Being able to include mermaids, even just as a tall tale, was fun. The Mermaid’s Gift also got a sequel. For Those in Peril was published three years later by The People’s Friend. This time it followed Seb and examined superstitions in the fishing community.
Both stories have
since been re-released under their original submission titles, The Sea Stone
and The Lucky Net, in my anthology collection The Wherryman’s Daughter.
Kitty-Lydia Dye wanders the beaches for inspiration with her dog Bramble. Her historical fiction has been influenced by the local myths roaming the haunting landscape of the Norfolk marshes. Many of her short stories have appeared in The People's Friend magazine. She has also released a collection inspired by Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. She enjoys knitting dog jumpers, gazing at the waves at night, exploring church ruins as well as taking part in amateur dramatics (and played the part of an evil flying monkey!)
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