Feed the Moths | Jenna McKendrik | Filed under: Kingsmouth, Things That Should Not Be Forgotten, Someone Is Reading My Notes
I pushed too hard.
I know. I know I know I know. You're not surprised. I'm not surprised. The only person who would be surprised is someone who has never read this blog, and if that's you — hello, welcome, this is probably not the best entry point but here we are.
I pushed too hard, the cheerful veneer cracked, and I found out some things I'm going to have difficulty unknowing.
Here's what happened.
The West Side
The street that doesn't appear on current maps is called Waites Lane.
I found the name on an older council document — pre-2013, pre-regeneration, pre-whatever-you-want-to-call-the-period-after-the-fog. It's a short residential street running parallel to the harbour on the western edge of town, tucked behind the old cannery building. On foot it takes about four minutes to walk end to end.
It did not get the bunting treatment.
The houses on Waites Lane are not derelict — someone is maintaining them, keeping the gutters clear, stopping the gardens from going fully feral. But they have the quality of places that have been maintained rather than lived in. Tidy in the way that empty things are tidy. No shoes by the doors. No bikes against the walls. Three out of seven houses with curtains still drawn at eleven in the morning, and not the curtains-against-the-sun kind of drawn. The other kind.
Except one.
Number four had its curtains open. Had a light on in the front room. Had, on the doorstep, a very old tabby cat who regarded me with the profound indifference of a creature that has seen things and filed them away and moved on.
I knocked on the door.
The People Who Remember
Her name is Dottie. She's in her seventies, she made me tea without asking if I wanted any (I did), and she has been living on Waites Lane since 1987. She was here in 2012. She was here in 2013 when the regeneration started. She has, in her words, "watched this town put on a costume and pretend to be somewhere else."
She wouldn't go on record. I'm not naming her surname. These are the rules and I agreed to them over the tea.
But here's what she told me, in broad terms, in the order she told me:
The fog in 2012 was not a weather event. This she states as simple fact, the way you'd state that the sea is salt. She doesn't elaborate because she doesn't think it needs elaboration.
The people who died — and people did die, whatever the official record says about accidents and a regrettable gas leak — were not all accounted for in the way the official record suggests. Some of the names on the memorial are wrong. Not fabricated. Wrong. Misattributed. She won't say more than that.
The regeneration funding arrived fast. Within six weeks of the fog clearing, there were surveyors on Waites Lane. She remembers it specifically because they came to her door and asked if she'd be willing to sell. She said no. They came back twice more, with incrementally better offers. She said no both times. They stopped coming, but she noticed that every other house on the street went quiet — owners relocated, she assumes, though she never saw any of them actually leave.
She doesn't know what BlackGlass is. When I mentioned the name she looked at me steadily for a moment and said: "That's new. They're usually better at staying nameless than that."
I wrote that down.
She noticed.
The Memorial
The 2012 memorial is in the small park at the top of Harbour Street, opposite what is now a very pleasant artisan bakery.
It's a good-looking memorial. Clean granite, well-maintained, a small garden of coastal plants around the base. From the street it reads as tasteful and appropriately sombre.
Two things, when you get close.
First: it faces north. Away from the harbour. You cannot see the water from where it stands, not even a glimpse between the buildings. In a harbour town, for an event that was centred on the harbour, this is an interesting choice. The park has clear sightlines to the water from three other positions. Someone chose this one specifically.
Second: the wording.
In memory of those lost during the events of October 2012. Kingsmouth remembers.
That's it. No names — there's a secondary plaque on the reverse with names, but the primary inscription is just that. The events of October 2012. Not the storm. Not the accident. Not anything specific. Just the events.
Kingsmouth remembers, says the memorial.
Kingsmouth is also working very hard to stop remembering, says everything else about this town.
The Building
This is where I pushed too hard.
Based on what Dottie told me, and on the contractor reference KM-2013-04 from the BlackGlass plate, I had a working theory that the groundworks weren't just for the harbour office. The project number suggested a wider scope. I wanted to know what else they'd been doing in 2013, and specifically whether any of it was on or near Waites Lane, where the surveyors had been so keen to buy up property.
The planning office on Marsh Road holds the full development records. They're public documents — technically accessible to anyone who submits a formal request.
I went in and asked.
The woman at the desk was professional and pleasant and found my request in the system within about thirty seconds, which told me it had been requested before and the response had been pre-loaded. She told me that the records for the 2013 groundworks project were not available for public access as they contained information pertaining to an ongoing infrastructure review.
I asked what infrastructure review.
She said she wasn't able to provide details.
I asked who I could speak to for more information.
She said she'd need to check, and would I like to take a seat.
I took a seat.
After about four minutes, a man came out from the back office. Not the planning officer — someone else. He was wearing a jacket that was slightly too good for a council planning office on a Tuesday morning, and he had the particular energy of someone who has done this specific thing before. Polite. Measured. Very clear.
He told me that the records I'd requested were subject to an exemption under the infrastructure protection provisions of the relevant act. He told me that if I had concerns about the development history of the area, I was welcome to submit a formal FOI request, which would be responded to within the statutory timeframe. He told me that he hoped I was enjoying my visit to Kingsmouth.
And then he held the door open.
Not aggressively. Not rudely. Just — held the door open, in a way that made clear that the conversation was over and my presence in the building was now, politely, concluded.
I left.
That Evening
I came back to the rental — a little place above a gift shop on the main street, very clean, very neutral, absolutely nothing wrong with it — and I sat down to write up my notes from the day.
My notebook was on the table where I'd left it.
The pen was on the wrong side.
I'm left-handed. I put pens on the left side of whatever I'm writing on, every time, without thinking. It's not a thing I decide. It's just what I do.
The pen was on the right.
The notebook was closed, which is how I'd left it. The contents, as far as I could tell, were undisturbed — nothing torn out, nothing added. Same notes in the same order.
But the pen was on the right side.
I sat with that for a while.
Then I photographed the room, packed my bag, checked out early, and drove until I hit the interstate.
What I Think Is Happening
Someone is managing the story of Kingsmouth, and they are good at it. They are so good at it that the town itself has mostly bought in — not through coercion, or not only through coercion, but through the gentler mechanism of making things nicer and hoping that people choose not to look too hard at the cost.
BlackGlass — and I'm more certain than ever that this traces back to Orochi, even if I can't prove the chain yet — was not just doing groundworks in 2013. They were doing something that required buying up a residential street, that required planning records to be sealed, that required a man in a good jacket to be available at short notice to show a blogger the door.
The fog is gone. The town looks fine. The memorial faces the wrong way.
And whatever was in the harbour wall cracks — whatever I photographed on the first day, whatever the council maintenance team cleaned off so efficiently on the second — I don't think it was left over from 2012.
I think it's new.
I'm Going Home. For Now.
I have photographs. I have notes that someone else has also read. I have a project reference number — KM-2013-04 — that I am going to pull on until something comes loose. I have a name, BlackGlass, appearing now in three separate investigations, and I have a very strong suspicion that the Black House files and the Lost Broadcast metadata are going to look different when I go back through them knowing what I know now.
I'm going home. I'm going to sit with everything I have, lay it out properly, and find the shape of it.
But I want to say one thing clearly, for the record, before I close this out.
Kingsmouth is not fine.
The bunting is lovely. The chowder is excellent. Dottie's cat is a treasure and I hope he lives forever. But underneath the fresh paint and the artisan preserves and the memorial that looks away from the water, something is still there. Something that BlackGlass came to manage in 2013, that they are apparently still managing now, that leaves traces in old harbour walls and in planning records that can't be seen and in the very specific quality of silence on Waites Lane.
The town decided to be fine.
That's not the same thing as being fine.
I'm going back.
Because someone in Kingsmouth is managing a story — and they care very much that I stop asking questions.
Which means, obviously, that I can't.
© Feed the Moths | All content Jenna McKendrik | The pen was on the right side. I know where I put it.
