The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

04 : The Anchor Lakey

28th August 2016

THE ANCHOR LAKEY: Episode 1

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Intro: A segment of Ludovico Einaudi's "Fly" is played on the piano over a track of rustling trees and whispering.

SUKIE:

Hello, and welcome to The Anchor Lakey! My name's Sukie Watanabe, and don't believe the accent – I've lived in Anchor Lake my whole life, but I can't shake being raised by parents who moved here from Huddersfield. I'm here with my friend and co-host, Oliver Day, who you just heard playing the intro.

OLIVER:

Um, hi, whoever's out there. If you're listening, thanks. Forgive us if this is painfully awkward and you turn us off after five minutes – this is our first time attempting a podcast.

SUKIE:

If you're listening, then chances are you're a fellow fan of The Key to Anchor Lake by Mary S Nesbitt. If you've never heard of the book, then you're probably not from here, and I don't know why you're listening.

[Oliver laughs]

Anyway, the point of this podcast is to talk about the book, which probably remains the town's greatest mystery. Who is Mary S Nesbitt? Why did she write The Key to Anchor Lake? Where is she now? If you know me, then you know that I'm a bit of a superfan, hence this show. Anchor Lake may be small, but this book unites us as a town, and it sheds light on our history, and it ends with a huge question.

OLIVER:

What will happen in 2019?

SUKIE:

We'll get to that, Oli. First of all, I want to talk about the book a bit. I'm sure all of you have come across it at some point. Maybe, like me, you've read it from cover to cover as many times as you've been able to borrow it from the library. Maybe you've just heard about it. Maybe you've seen the memorials around town and wondered, hey, what's with all the tragedy?

[Sukie pauses and takes a deep breath]

Anchor Lake has a chequered history. This town has seen more than its fair share of disasters, dating back hundreds of years, and with The Key to Anchor Lake, Mary S Nesbitt – I'm just going to call her Mary from now on, as it's a bit of a mouthful – collected these snippets of the past and laid them out in a pattern that some people have attributed to the curse of 1619.

OLIVER:

Disclaimer – there's no actual curse. Nearly four hundred years ago, a bunch of innocent women were executed in this town during the witch trials, because they were odd or rude or too clever, or they hung around with too many other women, or they broke one of the ten commandments. Stuff that everyone does constantly these days. But back in the sixties, I think—

SUKIE:

Yeah, it was the sixties. The nineteen sixties, not the sixteen sixties.

OLIVER:

Right, yeah. So, back in the sixties, during the whole hippie revolution, someone decided that all the bad shit that happens in this town is because one of those witches must have cursed the town when she was executed. So let it be known that calling it the curse is more of a convenient nickname, unless you're a hardcore believer who thinks that some bitter women three hundred and ninety-seven years ago actually managed to curse the town to be hit by some kind of disaster every twenty-five years.