Sunday, nine o'clock, and something in the room is humming. It isn't the mast. Degsy's mam moved into the unit next door on Friday, and the first thing she did was plug in the fridge.
She says she only came because Degsy's postcard said "wish you were 'ere". Gaz reckons that's the most Swedish thing that has ever happened in the room. In 1867 the north of Sweden got frost in July, and one night in September finished off the harvest. By the time it was over, more than a million Swedes had gone to America. When a government investigator asked fifty men on an emigrant ship in 1907 why they were going, not one of them was heading somewhere he knew nobody. Somebody went first and wrote home, and in the early 1880s close to half of those who followed travelled on a ticket somebody else had already paid for.
The way out ran through England: two days from Gothenburg to Hull, where landing on a Sunday made you a "bona fide traveller" who could drink in any pub at any hour, then an emigrant train with no toilet across the Pennines to Liverpool. One of the early ones, in 1853, went straight through Salford in the dark. Back home, the great and the good founded a society against emigration — in a Stockholm restaurant.
And under the custard creams in Brenda's handbag, there's a ring.
Two new punk tracks off the back of it: PREPAID and ANOTHER PERSON.
The history is fact-checked. The mangling is the comedy.
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