Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Ketterby ·
The Ferry Hand at Ketterby
A ferry hand on the Ketterby crossing reports that the boat took on one passenger more than the manifest allowed, and that the extra passenger paid the fare in coins that had not been minted yet.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: Ruth Ancell, ferry hand
I have worked the Ketterby crossing for eleven years, on the early boat and the late one, and I know the count the way a shepherd knows his flock. Sixteen passengers is the limit on the chain ferry, and the manifest, which I keep in a red cover under the wheelhouse ledge, is signed off by the skipper at the start of each crossing and checked against the tally at the far bank. Nobody has ever been over the limit on my watch. Nobody I can recall has even asked.
On the evening of the nineteenth I took the last crossing with Dan Holloway at the wheel. We had fifteen aboard. There was a farmer with two dogs, a couple from the terraces going home from the cinema, a woman in a green mackintosh with a parcel under her arm, and a boy of about twelve who sat on the bench by the rail with his cap pulled down. I counted them twice. Fifteen.
Halfway across, when the chain was running steady and the river was black under the lamps, I went to take the fares and found a sixteenth passenger standing by the stern gate. A man in a long dark coat with the collar turned up. I had not seen him come aboard. I had not heard the gate.
I said, "Fare, sir?" and he held out his hand, and in it were three coins.
They were shillings, or they looked like shillings. The milled edge was right and the weight, when I took one, was right. But the head on the front was not any king I have ever seen on a coin, and the date beneath it was in figures I could not read. It was 1961. Or it was 1916. Or it was a year that had not yet come. The figures kept moving as I looked at them, like a sum being worked out in a hurry.
I gave him the fare receipt. He took it without looking at it and folded it into his coat pocket, very neatly, and said, "Thank you, Miss Ancell. I shan't keep you."
I had not told him my name. It is on my badge, I suppose, but he had not looked at the badge. I went back to the wheelhouse and told Dan, and Dan looked at me the way he does when he thinks I have been at the sherry, and then he looked at the manifest and said we had fifteen and that was that.
We docked at the far bank with the lamps swinging. The farmer's dogs went off the ramp first, then the couple, the woman in green, and the boy, who gave me a little wave from the top of the slip. The man in the long coat was not at the stern gate. I searched the deck with my torch. I looked in the cable locker and under the bench, and then I went back to the wheelhouse and found the manifest open on the ledge, the red cover turned back, and in the column for the last crossing there was a sixteenth name written in pencil, very faintly, in my own hand.
I do not know how it got there. I do not remember writing it. The name is one I cannot read clearly now. It looks like a word for a place that is not on the river.
Dan says it was the sherry. I have not touched a drop in eight years. But the next morning, when I went to bank the takings, I found three odd coins in the tin, dull and cold, with dates on them that I still cannot make out. I have not spent them. I keep them in a jar on the windowsill of the wheelhouse, and when the boat is out on the water in the dark, I sometimes count them, and I always count sixteen.