Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Marsh Road ·
The Crates That Argued at Marsh Road
A night watchman at a Marsh Road warehouse hears the stacked crates trade complaints in a dialect of the docks, and the crates that complain are always the ones with no address painted on them.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: Gert Moll, warehouse night watchman
I have kept the night watch at the Marsh Road warehouse for seventeen years, and in that time I have heard the usual things. The roof timbers ticking as they cool. The rats on the girders. The lorries idling at the gate with their lights off, waiting for the early shift. I know the building the way a sailor knows his ship, by its noises and its smells, the tar and cardboard and damp sacking.
The crates began to talk in October.
It started at the far end of bay four, where the unclaimed freight is stacked three high against the back wall. I was doing my round with the torch when I heard a sharp, dry voice say something about the weather. Then another voice answered, lower and wetter, complaining about the cold. They were speaking in a dialect I did not know at first, a thick, rolling patois with the vowels stretched like wet rope, the sort of speech the dockers used when I was a boy and wanted to keep their business private.
I stopped by the crates and listened. They were arguing about a shipment of tinned peaches that had come in from the coast in August and had not been collected. One crate said the peaches should have been sent on to Ostmark. Another said the consignee was dead. A third said the freight had been paid for in advance and nobody had the right to hold it, and the first two agreed with a sort of weary satisfaction, as if they had made the same argument many times before and were tired of winning it.
I checked the manifests the next morning. Every crate in bay four had an address on its side, stencilled in black. Except the ones that spoke. Those three had nothing at all. No address, no consignee, no shipper's mark. Just grey pine boards with the grain showing through and a faint smell of peaches.
I told the supervisor, Mr Dunne. He said the damp was getting into the wood and making it creak, and that I should get some sleep. I said I had heard the words. He said I had probably heard the rats.
The arguments grew louder through the winter. The crates discussed their freight, their routes, their fees. They quarrelled about who had been left waiting longest and who had been sent to the wrong bay. Once I heard one of them say, quite distinctly, that it did not matter where the goods were addressed, so long as somebody was waiting at the other end to sign for them.
In February the crates went quiet. I went to bay four to check and found all three had been moved to the front of the stack, labelled, with addresses painted on in fresh black paint. The addresses were all in Calder Row, the three terraces where the Marsh Road families used to live before the slum clearance. I did not recognise the names.
The crates have not spoken since. But on quiet nights, when the roof is cooling and the lorries are gone from the gate, I still walk my round past bay four and listen. Sometimes I hear one of them clear its throat, very softly, and ask whether the last parcel has been signed for yet.