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shoulders above the waterline. He held his
mouth tightly shut and reached for the
phone in his pocket, but it was saturated and
wouldn’t switch on. People were screaming
around him and one man was desperately
shouting in English: “Sinking water... Many,
many sinking water...”
Li removed the waterproofs that were
weighing him down and the clothes beneath.
He had no idea in which direction to go. He
tried to swim, but was hit by a wave, turned
on his back, and swept along in a channel of
rushing water. He came to rest on a raised
bank and, with incredulity and relief, felt the
ground beneath his feet again. He stumbled,
waded and then simply stood still, the water
seething all around.
He couldn’t see the vehicle, nor hear human
voices. He thought about his mother and
how she used to pray every day. He prayed,
but he felt forsaken. He’d been in England
for only a few days. This was his first day
as a cockle-picker.
The hope he had carried in his heart like fire all the way on the
trans-European journey was dissipating. The near-naked man
sank to his knees in the freezing water – but then there was
brightness, a radiance that lifted him. In the black sky above,
he heard the thwack-thwack-thwack of a low-flying helicopter,
its searchlights probing the waters. He waved his hands and
shouted out but he could not be heard above the wind and the
noise of the engine. The
helicopter circled above,
pulled away, but returned, its
searchlights scanning the water.
Li jumped up and down, his
arms outstretched, as if in manic
celebration. There was a golden halo of light – he was saturated
in it – and he felt a sudden, all-enveloping warmth, as if a safety
blanket, or heatsheet, had been wrapped around his bare
shoulders. “I thought I saw God in the water. The feeling at that
moment is very hard for me to explain. I was alive again.”
A RNLI hovercraft searched the sands the next day and,
eventually, what was described as a “sea of bodies” was
discovered. Twenty-three Chinese workers drowned or died from
hypothermia that night. The last man alive in the water was
30-year-old Li, and he was rescued after being located by a search
helicopter’s thermal imaging camera. He was standing in water on
Priest Skear, an expanse of raised land, covered at high tide. Li’s
survival was described as the “miracle” of the sands. “The devil’s
beach” was how one Chinese newspaper described Morecambe
Bay in the aftermath.
The inquiry into the tragedy was the largest ever undertaken by
Lancashire Constabulary. DNA samples were taken by police to
southern China so that they could be matched with relatives of
the dead. Lin Liang Ren, the gangmaster, was convicted of
multiple counts of manslaughter and served six years of his
sentence before being deported to China. Li gave evidence at the
trial. He spoke in court from behind a screen so that he could not
be identified.
One morning during the pandemic, Li and I had a long
conversation. He still lives in the UK, runs a restaurant and owns
a house in which he lives with his wife, two grown-up children
and one grandchild. He speaks little English, so we talked on
Zoom, with help from Irene, a translator, and Paul Francis,
a retired police officer who organised Li’s witness protection
and created a new identity for him. Li, Paul and Irene had a lovely,
relaxed intimacy: the mutual trust was hard-
earned. At one point, Li’s wife appeared
alongside him and waved into the camera.
“Hello, hello everyone!” she said.It was only in 2012 that Li finally repaid the
outstanding debt to the gangmaster in China. He
often thinks about other victims trafficked into
slavery, suffering in plain sight as the cockle-
pickers did. He mourns the dead whose stories
briefly become news whenever their bodies are
discovered in lorry parks or in sealed containers,
or when they fall from the undercarriage of an
aircraft, or when they drown while trying, in
small boats, to cross the English Channel. He
thinks of those he slept alongside in the room in
Moscow and the room in Liverpool – the people
who died on the sands. Even at his most
despondent, Li believed he would reach England
and would one day be free – until that night,
when everything seemed lost.Li told me he dreams regularly about that night
in the water – the terror he experienced and the
hopelessness. He has panic attacks and night sweats.“The horror
is imprinted on my mind,” he said. “I have many, many
nightmares. I’m trying my best to forget. I try every day not to let
it bother me, to bother my work. But the shadow is always there:
it keeps bothering me. I didn’t realise I was the only survivor until
I was in the ambulance later that night. I asked about the others.
Where were they? What had happened to them?”“We were not warned about the tides, never once,” Li added.
“We were exploited by the
snakeheads. I understand they
wanted to make their money,
but they should have shown
humanity. We have our families
too. We were promised proper
legal work. None of us ever
expected to end up on the seashore picking cockles. When one is
desperate, hungry, lack of sleep, you will take any job to escape
from hunger and a restless mind.”After a long pause, he told me about what he had hoped for. “In
my dreams, England was beautiful and big,” he said. “Peaceful
and friendly.” Before coming to the UK, he had worked on a farm
in China. It wasn’t escape he sought from the drab tasks in the
fields, or from his family, but a more secure future for all of them.“I knew England is a democratic system,” Li said. “People are
protected to live in a peaceful and respectful environment,
citizens have freedom to speak. Police will catch the bad guys.
Everyone can find a job they can do. Or wish to do. My wish
was to live in a country like England. I was determined to make
that wish come true. Our village was so poor, finding work to
survive was nearly impossible. I was told by snakeheads I
would have a job if I worked hard. If I’d stayed in China,
been stuck in China all those years, we would be a bunch of
miserable, unhappy people depending on a tiny farming income
to feed our unhappy, miserable family.”But perhaps he had suffered too much. “Had I known I’d be in
that horrible accident in Morecambe Bay, would I have left?”
he asked. “No. I would not have come. But now I feel blessed.
Fate brought me to England and kept me alive. When I was
picking cockles, before the water came in, I promised myself
I would one day find my own job, without a link to snakeheads.”
He looked directly into the camera then, leaning forward just
a little. “And, you know, I did that.”Extracted from Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England
by Jason Cowley, published by Picador at £20.The last word
9 April 2022 THE WEEKThe aftermath of the tragedy“Li prayed, but felt forsaken. He had been
in England for only a few days. This was
his first day as a cockle-picker”