Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Not every mermaid -
would you believe? -
weaves a song hoping to lure and deceive.
I have it, on the surest authority,
down in the depths of the rolling sea,
there fell a maid so pure and bright
that she shone like a star on the darkest night.
Her eyes were sometimes a blue of the deepest, darkest hue.
Other times, they were as green and bright
as the North Star on a clear, cold night.
Her hair was tangled black and wild.
She was not quite a woman, but no more a child.
A girl who could never quite be
tied and anchored to the deep, dark sea.
By day, she combed her hair with a herring backbone,
but come the night,
and that's when she felt her most alone.
By day, she made friends with the starfish, shellfish and cray.
But come the night,
and these friends would drift and float away.
By day, she danced in the seas -
diamond shards of sun -
but come the night and in the dark,
she felt her most undone.
So, she swam to the surface to find solace in the sun.
But to her shock and very great fright,
she discovered that the sun did not come out at night.
The lonesome maid, bereft and aloft, heaved herself up to weep upon a rock.
Her hair was tangled black and wild,
and that night she wept like a little lost child.
Then suddenly and quite miraculously,
she saw a dancing light beaming across the sea.
The maid ceased to cry the moment she gazed back up to the sky.
Bright and buoyant, up on high,
there hung a great shining moon up in the sky.
The moon was her beacon of light,
constant and returning each and every night.
So each and every night,
she would swim to the surface to be with the moon,
and never a moment after, nor too soon.
She began to learn and love his changing faces.
For her, they sang of evershifting places.
Tempest rage, storms below, but the moon was her beacon of light.
Once, there was a fearsome storm,
the likes of which made a sailor wish he'd never been born.
Waves rolled, winds billowed and thunder and clouds ruled the sky.
Our mermaid looked for the moon but found he was not nigh.
In an instant,
not a moment after, nor too soon,
she knew that she must become the moon.
There were ships rolling out in the bay,
sailors swearing and praying for one more day.
So she climbed a rock in plain sight,
knowing how the moon would come to greet her that night.
Relieved, the moon wrapped the maid in his great light,
and she shone like the North Star on a clear, cold night.
Its great, beaming beacon she became that night,
warning the ships of the rocks, like a guiding light.
Because not every mermaid -
would you believe? -
weaves a song hoping to lure and deceive.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
So, the first story I ever wrote,
I read to a friend of mine who is also a professional storyteller,
and when I managed to actually look up from the page,
she said to me, "Olivia, you're a writer."
And those words were as magical to me
as Hagrid saying, "You're a wizard, Harry."
And I thought I could begin to think of myself of a writer,
I just hadn't quite found the story
that would take me from beginning to think of myself as one
to introducing myself as one.
It turned out that the story hadn't just been under my nose the whole time,
I'd been under its roof.
The mermaid tale you heard
was an extract from a play called "The Coastguard's Daughter,"
which I wrote based on the untold and true story
of the previous residents of my home.
In 1914, the coastguard of Pentewan Village, Cornwall,
and his crew
left their post and volunteered to fight in the First World War.
It was his wife and two teenage daughters,
Olive and Irene,
who stepped up and became the coastguards.
One very stormy January night,
the two sisters answered a call about a ship's light in the bay.
Hand in hand, they went down to the harbor to investigate.
The younger sister let go of her older sister's hand to tie her boot.
In that time, the high ebb tide lifted and swept her sister out to sea.
Despite the efforts of many, Olive went down and was lost at sea.
Her bravery and her story were so nearly lost with her,
becoming nothing more than a half-forgotten whisper on the winds,
one I only heard by chance.
Thankfully, my neighbor heard the story
and kept a copy of the newspaper report of it
and a copy of the inquest.
When I heard their story,
I didn't just feel a sadness for the sisters;
I felt a great burning pride
that what they had done shouldn't be lost and forgotten,
but shared and celebrated,
that we will remember them, all of them.
So I knew I had this story I wanted to tell;
I just didn't know how to yet.
The spine of the story were the facts:
names, dates and fates.
I had a spine for these characters,
but there was nothing left in the printed facts remaining
to flesh them out.
I knew very little of them as people.
So it was by weaving in my own stories
that I gave these stickmen characters flesh and heart,
a beating heart that brought their stories to life.
I looked into the chambers of my own heart and found three stories there
that really inspired and influenced my interpretation of that family's tale.
The first
was one of the best dates I've ever had.
(Laughter)
He was a sailor, first mate on one of the old tour ships,
had a red port star tattooed on his left arm
just below the coordinates
of where he and a crew had once capsized and been rescued at sea.
He literally wore his heart and the scars of the sea upon his sleeve.
One very cold night,
he took me to sit along a shore and watch a meteor shower.
As the stars fell, we tentatively shared our tales,
and he taught me that no matter how lost and desperate you might be,
there's always the North Star to guide you,
whether it is to lead you home
or to unpathed waters and undreamt shores.
The second is my great-great-uncle Harry's.
Harry's portrait always hung in my granny's best room,
a room we never used.
The few times I crept in,
it was under the watchful gaze of Harry's portrait of a man in uniform.
As I grew up,
I realized that the man in uniform was really just a boy.
First at 16, and then at 17,
Harry successfully lied about his age
and volunteered to fight with the Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry.
By 18, Harry was missing,
presumed dead in the Battle of the Somme.
The third story is my Cornish grandfather's.
He died when I was very young,
and my strongest memory of him was actually after he passed away.
He served with the Port Isaac RNLI for ten years
and in that time helped save 37 lives.
I can remember being stood on the slipway of Port Isaac Harbor,
listening to the fishermen's friends
singing shanties at one of their RNLI fundraising gigs.
In that moment, shanties became the sound of the sea -
all that it can give,
and all that it can take.
So with these three stories burning brightly in my mind's eye,
I approached "The Coastguard's Daughter."
But the strongest link between my story and theirs
was not the shared walls of our home,
but the foundations of my whole self,
being a sister.
I'm the youngest of three,
and, I'm assured, the most annoying.
There's one thing I've learned in life:
you can't win an argument with someone if you're wearing their jumper,
(Laughter)
especially if you didn't ask.
(Laughter)
When my parents were feeling charitable,
they once described us as being like a flock of swallows,
weaving and diving in and around each other.
When we pushed that charity to the limits of sanity,
they said we were like a three-headed monster.
The push and pull of being so linked and yet so independently different,
that rhythm, I felt,
was echoed in the rhythm of the push and pull of the changing tides,
in the relationship between the salty sea and its sandy shore.
So, with all this and much more,
we created a story full of heart and history.
We interweaved it with live shanty singing,
and our aim was
to celebrate the unsung heroes of a community who had once lived there
and bring together those that still do,
to connect ourselves with where we live and to each other.
Storytelling is how we learn and interpret the world.
It connects us both to people and place.
A museum, for example, isn't just filled with objects at random -
it is curated,
it tells a story,
and in doing so it connects us both to historical people and place.
A spoken word artist and TEDx alumnus, Phil Kaye,
when asking the question, "Why do we tell stories?"
suggests that story lets us carve our initials
into the wet cement of a moment.
But what's more,
I think story lets us carve other initials into the trees,
the trees that become the paper that become our history books.
Storytelling is conservation;
storytelling is heritage.
I found my story upon the shore,
but I hope you find the stories in your hearts and share them,
that we keep learning, living
and carving more initials into the monuments of time.
Thank you.
(Applause)