The following statements were produced at the February 10th workshop in Nottingham in response to the recent tragedy in Morecambe Bay, where 19 Chinese cockle-pickers lost their lives:
We had no choice, we’ve got nothing.
The state we live in is disgusting, my husband works hardly for nothing.
I stay at home and raise a family - six kids but we still can’t afford to live.
Only love and kindness we can afford to live.
My son took control to raise some money to help our home but tragedy took its toll.
God rest his soul.
Kerinn Blair
They might as well be sitting at the bottom of the sea with me
Where better is there for the likes of us to be
I am dead. I am no longer lonely, my little girl she’s lived five years away from me.
Five years I live in this country, five years my blood, bleed me dry, they trickle their lies,
“You go home Sunday, you work hard for me for six more days”
I work till I bleed and count the days.
But no one leaves, everybody stays.
No freedom, here forever is six ‘days’
A fisherman ask me once why am I here, why do I stay
I laughed and laughed and laughed and spat in his eye and ran away.
He thinks I want to chose to be here on the edge of being washed away.
I long to hear my daughter above and below the waves.
Because even though she did not die this death, one day she too will lose her breath.
I pray but I know it is true to say that back in Fujian she will pass in just such an ugly way.
Serenah Cole
No I don’t feel guilty when I’m taking those people from their homes
and packing them as tight as I can into the van
-the more we can get in there the better it pays me.
I’ve got a family too and they need feeding and clothing.
They’re the ones that want to be here (England)
so I just facilitate them by driving them where they need to be.
If I get stopped by the Police/Customs
I’ll just say that I never knew how many people were in there
-I was told that I would be delivering pallets of some kind.
At the end of the day what do I care - they’re nothing to me.
They’re just a means to an end.
I am commissioned to drive these people by my boss.
I am not the one who is in charge here - I’m just the driver for God’s sake!!
What do you want me to do, cry?
They’re the ones foolish enough to want to do this.
They don’t even get paid anything - they couldn’t get me to do that crap.
Rose-Madame Fyffe
Thinking about when I was there, them memories in my head,
Still give me that feeling, that same feeling I felt
back then, for all the people who took part
in putting all us people there.
I hated it, it was like hell,
And now hearing about what’s recently happened,
It makes me feel sick, to know that this is still
Going on and that the police forces haven’t tracked
Those head twisted gangmaster maniacs that are behind all this down
I believe that justice will be served though,
I feel sorry for them people.
So what do you think about it.
Dwaine Hayden
You see, I have a mother and twelve siblings aged between one and fifteen back home in China.
We live in one room with no running water.
It’s very difficult to find employment where we live since the closure of many factories.
Though labour was cheap it was still a regular income for many families - the difference between life and death.
Many people in our village have lost children through starvation and poor sanitation.
I wanted better for myself and my family.
Being the oldest - I turned nineteen the other day - it was my responsibility to be the bread winner.
England was my first choice - the home of football and Manchester United.
The journey was long and hard.
We scraped together what money we had, so I could be smuggled across continents.
It was very dangerous.
Then I found work picking shellfish off beaches in Britain.
After only one month, I risked my life for a pound a day
Was it worth it? What do you think?
Stephanie Hernandez
I watch his face, trying to work out what it means, this smile.
He’s singing to me, trying to teach me the words but I can’t catch hold of them.
His breath is on me. He smells of white man.
I’d never seen the sea before. It took my breath away.
It was as if the river that runs through our village had flooded and filled the world, eaten the sky.
I felt the sea before I saw it; felt its rocking, its soothing lull and lilt like my mother’s rocking arms.
My mother. We were squashed tight and we stank.
It was dark. I closed my eyes and imagined my mother rocking me.
The man is rocking me. Rocking my knees so that I’ll open my eyes and look at him
I can hear his low singing but I am too tired.
I am heavy.
He says something to me but I don’t understand.
Today one of the women told me that, if they’d lain down flat on the sand,
stretched out like starfish, then the sand wouldn’t have been able to suck them in like it did.
But how do you lie, calm as a starfish, tentacled to the sand, when you’re drowning?
How is this possible?
The woman who told me about the starfish, her husband died.
He hadn’t know about starfish.
I can hear here wailing above the man’s crooning.
He’s trying to get me to say the words and at last I think I can.
This song. This line, I can say it I think.
I can sing it. He smiles as I open my mouth.
He’s a nice man, so I sing for him.
“Cockles and Mussels, alive, alive-oh”
Linda Kempton
Pat(65):
“No, I didn’t know nothing my love.
You don’t have things like that happen around here.
I was right shocked.
I was just doing my usual walk in the morning - you know - past the pool,
up past where Frontierland used to be and onto Front, as if I were goin round Heysham way
you know, towards Power Station.
Been doin it 20 odd years.
You never saw any funny business going on.
We’re all locals round here - well except for students and they don’t count!
Why would I know anything?
Him round the corner, funny Chinese fella, he might know something but I keep myself to myself.
Ask no questions, that’s what I say.
Terrible shame though.
All those young lives wasted.
If they’d not met, well let’s say, if they’d gone and lived somewhere else
Southport maybe - they’d still be around now, looking for jobs.
Shocking, that’s what it is. Sad.
Did I not tell you something like this would happen one day, if people didn’t keep an eye on things?
Anyway as I was saying,
I was just doing my usual walk and I got stopped.
They closed the beach.
I had to go the other way instead - you know
Towards Broadway, against the wind.
They’ve not opened it yet.
Even when they do, my walks on the beach’ll never be the same - you know, on past the B&Bs and student houses,
past all the boats and the swimmers in their funny diving clothes and on to Power Station...I’ll keep thinking about them.
Didn’t know nothing about it though. Nothing. Ask someone else.
Sad it is. Do you not think so?
Allie Spencer
Well at the moment the main priority of this case is to catch the suspects as they have caused the death of 19 people.
These gang members may also only be small players in a big network so until we apprehend them we have no further information.
To catch the gangmaster we would also need the co-operation of the Chinese police.
Graham Taylor
My memory washed away, in the mist
Yeah I was one of the nineteen on the drift
But why I took the risk is neither here nor dere
Because to some I never existed - and really do they care
I swear, I promise - to raise my family’s fare
Fare so they could escape the poverty and the dark
Squalid air, but once I was dere I mean here
It was not like I was told
It was like I had been stripped - and left in da cold
I suppose I sold my soul - solely for my betterment
But I suppose now I think it’s better dat I never went
Obe Watson
Yes it has.
I have been in the force now for most of my life.
I have never experienced anything like this before.
I had been at work all day.
I was knackered and wanted to get off home.
My wife is ill and I have had to look after the kids after I get home from work.
I was dying to get back to them.
The we got the call to say that this incident had taken place.
My heart sank.
I knew it was going to be a long night.
I knew how many victims there were and I knew Lesley would go ballistic....again!
I managed to give here a quick text to say that she’d have to get her Mam to have the kids that day, because I wouldn’t be home for a while.
She texted back:
“FINE!”
When I got back, eventually, after doing a double shift, she gave me “the look”
I knew I was in for trouble.
I went to bed, I was so tired, very tired.
But I lay in bed and all I could see were bodies.
Bodies floating in the water,
bloated, purple, bodies.
Bodies that didn’t deserve to be there,
bodies that should have been lying in bed,
lying with their wives, husbands, partners, kids.
Then I had a dream the following night.
The bodies were back in the water inside my head.
I woke up sweating.
I felt sick.
I haven’t slept for more than two hours at a time since that night.
Lesley told me to “pull myself together.”
Told me it was part of my job, dead bodies.
If it is, then forget the job,
who wants a job like this.
Andrea Weatherston
Listen to me duck, it’s nothing to do with me. I’ve been selling cockles in The Trip for the past twenty years. There’s always someone prepared to collect them. And don’t think it’s a cushy number for me, neither. It’s all la-de-da food now -youngsters won’t touch them now- only want crisps in foil packets. Mind you, Atkins has improved me business -cockles, a pure protein. I barely make enough to make ends meet. I have to buy the fish, weigh the portions, put them in the polystyrene pots. And if I don’t sell them I’m stuck with them. Then there’s the salt, vinegar, lemon juice… It’s not just them Chinese that have it tough. I make about 10 pence a pot after all my expenses and it can take three or four hours to shift forty pots. In a night it’s not exactly minimum wage but at least I don’t have to pay tax on it. And anyway, no one’s forcing them to collect the shells. No one’s forced them to come over here. I mean, it must be better here than it is back home for them else they’d go back, wouldn’t they? I’m not saying it’s right what happened but I’m not taking any rap for it. If it wasn’t the Chinese, them Africans would dig them out -people who need money desperate will do anything to get it. Even go out in all weathers selling cockles in pubs. Nah -it’s the middle man what makes the money. Him that drives his flash car and lives in his big house and has his kids in a posh school. Not me, selling pots of cockles for ten pence profit. And not the poor bastards who are still out in all weathers collecting cockles for ten pence an hour. Ali Murray