Vikings by Helen Carr
I have never knowingly had a conversation with someone who lived way in the past or the future, but I have experienced communication of a sort. It was on one of the Shetland Isles. On the beach were the remains of a Viking longhouse; these are common in Shetland.
Part of the ruined walls was high enough to offer some shelter from the wind and it was here that my husband and I sat and ate our lunch. We watched gannets plunge spearlike into the turquoise sea. The sun shone in a clear blue sky. There was one other person on the beach, away in the distance.
I became aware of the sound of talking, men talking and laughing, so close to me that they seemed to be in the house with me. I could not understand their language. The atmosphere was warm and familiar. It’s hard to tell how long this lasted; it had a timeless feeling.
Walking up the hill away from the bay, past the ruins of more recent farmsteads, I told my husband about it. He told me that he had experienced entering a room through the fire place. In the room were men, talking in a language he didn’t recognise. They wore clothes that suggested they came from some ancient time; they appeared to see him. His experience, like mine, was calm and matter of fact.
Neither of us had ever pursued weird psychic phenomena. On the contrary, it was the kind of thing I preferred to avoid. But this just happened. Out of the blue. Vikings.
Simon says: This piece is a good example of how effective simplicity can be. Sometimes, the words ‘a true story’ or ‘based on a true story’ can be off-putting in writing, but here they are entirely appropriate. What is being described could be sensational or melodramatic, but its power derives from how naturally the narrative develops. The ‘no nonsense’ tone of first sentence makes us trust the narrator. Her feet are firmly on the ground, she is not the sort to be a prey to extravagant fantasies. So, we believe her when she tells us of hearing voices speaking in a language she could not understand. And this impression of veracity is reinforced when we hear that her husband also had a similar experience. Again, though, neither of them reacts extravagantly to the strange experiences they have shared. They are ‘calm and matter of fact’. Neither wife nor husband ‘had ever pursued weird psychic phenomena’ and yet that is what they have both just witnessed. The evenness of the narrative makes what happened to them completely believable.