The Main Cages Page 6

  Nearly a mile of nets remained in the water, pulling down on the cobles with their weight. And still the fish were coming, shoaling so thickly that they were drowning each other. The surface was full of their bodies. Gannets were diving all around the boat, striking the churned-up water in bomb-bursts and the gannets too were coming up in the nets, and they too were drowned, their necks caught in the mesh as they fed.

  ‘Now! Again!’ The sweat was running down Croyden’s face.

  Fish covered the deck. The head-rope on the roller was slipping back again. The boat was being pulled over. ‘Let it go, Croy!’ Jack lunged for the rope. Croyden pushed him off. He grabbed the head-rope and alone managed to pull a couple of inches. Jack reached down and slipped a gutting knife from inside the bulwarks. He slashed at the rope. He sawed at it – but Croyden shoved him aside and he fell. The knife spun overboard.

  Croyden continued to heave. The net was stuck fast. He tried to reach ahead but the strands of the head-rope were popping apart on the roller. The last one went and the Maria V sprang back onto an even keel. The remaining nets stretched out into the shoal. Still the fish were driving into them, but one by one the cobles disappeared from the surface, dragged down by the weight. Croyden watched them go. He remained at the gunwale, even as the boat turned and they made their way back through the fleet to Newlyn.

  The next morning, three million pilchards were landed at Newlyn, a post-war record, but for the Maria V the season was over. They left Newlyn and headed out towards the Lizard. In Polmayne Bay the Petrels were racing. Jack and Croyden and Double rowed in unnoticed through the Gaps, while a crowd of people stood at the quay wall cheering the yachts as they pushed towards the finishing line.

  CHAPTER 8

  Croyden leaned on the fence and looked at his pigs. Five was under the stern section of the old dinghy, Three under the bows. Croyden leaned there for some time and the August sun was hot on his back. In the end, it was Three who stirred, Three who rose to her feet and lumbered towards him. Scabs of dried mud were peeling from her flank. He rubbed her forehead with his knuckles. ‘We lost ’em, old girl. Nothing we could do.’

  With her snout, Three butted fondly at his hand.

  He did not tell Maggie. There was no need for her to know about the nets. He had a little to show for the fishing and he would give her that and he would be able to carry on at sea.

  Double, though, was leaving. When they reached Polmayne he took Jack to one side: ‘I’ll not go to sea again with that madman.’

  ‘But you’re in the lifeboat with him.’

  ‘That’s different. It’s the fish – they do something to him. You saw it yourself.’

  The next day, Jack rowed up the river to Ferryman’s Cottage. Rounding the corner he saw the familiar whitewashed walls and the heavy brow of the thatch and the little windows. They were shuttered. A flood board was across the door. The Abrahams had returned to London.

  Back at Bethesda, he sat down and wrote a letter, replying to Mrs Abraham’s questions about his fishing.

  ‘… It’s a see-saw business, Mrs Abraham, sometimes no fish, and sometimes too many …’ Then, although he had intended to make light of his losses to her, he found the whole episode at the Wolf Rock came flooding out.

  Three days later came her reply.

  … What a calamity! I have been thinking about it and whenever I read your letter it makes me shivering. I will tell you a story and you will understand. My father had a house in a small village in the seaside of the Baltic. He wanted to help the village people. He wanted to give them a grand piano. He took it along the coast in a sailing boat but the piano was too big and the boat turned over and sank and that is how I lost my father, Mr Sweeney. He drowned. So I have always been very afraid of the sea. Be careful, please …

  Maggie Treneer found out what had happened at Newlyn and confronted Croyden: ‘So now where’s his luck, your Sweeney?’ She told him if he went back to sea she’d throw him out of the house. Croyden weighed it up carefully, then took to sleeping in the net loft.

  Autumn came early that year. It crouched in the corner of August’s darkening evenings; it was there in the cold that lingered after dawn. In the second week of September, the wind freshened from the west and within a few hours had become a full gale. It tore the leaves from the trees and spun them in angry circles around the yards. Apples fell by the dozen and rolled down the leats. It lasted for the best part of two days.

  On Parliament Bench, they watched the storm whip up the seas beneath Pendhu Point and Toper Walsh folded his arms and said, ‘Well, there’s another gone.’

  ‘Gone!’

  ‘Another what, Tope?’

  ‘Another summer.’

  ‘Eeee,’ agreed Boy Johns.

  With the coming of autumn, the faces on the Bench became fewer. Toper Walsh still put in his daily appearance, arriving before everyone else to sweep the Town Quay and clear up any litter. No one was sure whether this was an official post for Toper, or whether he did it because it gave him some degree of authority. Boy continued to come, saying nothing more than his customary ‘Eeee’. But others like Brian Tyler liked to watch the visitors and when the visitors became scarcer so did they. Archie Stephens had grown so wheezy that he seldom left his home now. Dick Treneer went to see his cousin in Mevagissey. (Dick was commonly known as Red Treneer because of his political views and to distinguish him from old Dick Treneer, though it meant he was sometimes confused with Red Stephens who had no political views but had once owned a pair of very red trousers.) Brian Williams had fallen out with Toper. The Crates had taken their toll. It was said that Joseph Cloke and Moor Martin had a bench of their own up there. Tommy Treneer had not been seen since he left Cooper’s Yard.

  So in September, as the days became shorter and the hotels and guest houses emptied and the Petrels were towed in to Penpraze’s yard to have their masts taken out, labelled and stowed in the rafters, and as the Garretts laid up the Polmayne Queen and returned to stealing shellfish from other people’s pots, and Whaler Cuffe and the others left their summer sheds to take up residence again in their own houses, the Bench began to run out of things to talk about. Not only were there few strangers to criticise but nothing in the town was being knocked down, the autumn storms had been and gone with little destruction, and no one had died since March.

  Towards the end of the month things livened up. The lifeboat was called out twice – a false alarm and a schooner put under tow (no casualties) – and then on the afternoon of the twenty-third the Reverend Arthur Winchester was found dead on the floor of his study. On the desk was the conclusion of the latest chapter of his monograph ‘The March of Science’:

  … we are like a man standing on the edge of a great sea. He has been given a boat with which to cross it but he does not appreciate the dangers. This man gives up the land at his peril …

  The Bench had never acknowledged Winchester in life but now they competed to show their appreciation.

  ‘An inspiration,’ concluded Toper.

  ‘A true man of God.’

  ‘From up east, wan’t him?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘Ninety-one years old!’

  ‘Some age.’

  ‘They won’t come like him no more.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Eeee.’

  Within three weeks of Winchester’s death, a replacement had arrived at Polmayne’s rectory. The Reverend Andrew Hooper had spent fifteen happy years as an army chaplain in Aldershot, fifteen happy years in India and now he was going to spend fifteen happy years in Cornwall.

  He climbed down from the rectory cart, stretched his long limbs and breathed in deeply. ‘Sea air!’ he called to Mrs Hooper.

  Peering through the lych-gate, he saw the church tower below and the Glaze River beyond it and the graveyard half-hidden by vegetation.

  ‘What did I tell you, my dear! A jungle!’

  Hooper had already read the passage in The Cornish Coast, South (1910): />
  The grounds of Polmayne’s 14th-century church of St Cuby tumble into a quiet creek to the east of the town. In the 1860s the Reverend Pratt, antiquarian and horticulturalist, assembled the plants for this unspeakably lovely churchyard which, once seen, remains for ever in the mind as the England of one’s dreams …

  Pratt’s planting, it later turned out, was largely the result of his ‘Lent Prayer Tours’ during which he would visit the duchy’s great houses, conducting informal theological discussions while his driver took cuttings from the gardens’ rare plants.

  But in his twenty years with the living of Polmayne, Winchester had allowed Pratt’s sub-tropical gardens to lapse into a state of tropical disorder. Hooper wasted no time in restoring them. He recruited a team of part-time gardeners. ‘Hackers’ he called them, and he spent that first winter alongside them, clearing and slashing at the brambles and creeper. ‘Assaulting the pagan thorn!’ he trilled, and in doing so discovered for himself the half-hidden history of the town.

  The granite cross commemorating the victims of the Adelaide had almost toppled over; he re-bedded it. Down towards the creek, beside a swampy patch of gunnera, the Hackers came across a group of unmarked graves under an overgrown mound of ship’s tackle – rotting blocks, mossy warps, an anchor and shreds of cloth which may once have been sails or may have been clothes. The discipline of the tropics heeded Parson Hooper to burn the cloth for fear of cholera.

  Parson Hooper transformed the grounds of Polmayne’s church, and nowhere did he leave his mark more visibly than with his ‘Tablets’. Each month, after his diocesan meeting, he would visit the yard of Truro’s Pascoe & Sons (Monumental Masons), with a quotation of some sort. The following month he would put the Tablet in the back of his trap, return to Polmayne and install it alongside the main paths of the churchyard. The first month he put in a series of three. The first was by the lych-gate:

  And I will make thy windows of agate

  And thy gates of carbuncles

  And all thy borders of precious stones.

  At the beginning of the path’s descent:

  The Path of the Just is as the Shining Light

  That Shineth more and more unto the Perfect Day.

  Halfway down, the path took a steep right-hand bend and plunged into a bower of holm oak:

  They heard the voice of the Lord God

  Walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

  Each time he put in a Tablet, Parson Hooper gave a short ceremony. In time, the ceremonies came to be attended by the same group of dedicated Anglican women.

  Late in October Mrs Franks returned from several months in India. She was sorry to hear of Winchester’s death but pleased to see that Hooper was making such progress in the churchyard. Bending to inspect one of his new Tablets, she read: ‘They heard the voice of the Lord God/Walking in the garden in the cool of the day.’ When she found Hooper himself in his overalls, she beamed at him. ‘So you’re the new vicar?’

  He smiled humbly. ‘Madam, I am the gardener.’

  After Winchester’s creaking ministry, here was a man of energy and life. As Hooper stood half-singing his prayers of dedication the women looked up at his Asia-weathered face, and vowed to give more of their time to beautifying the church.

  CHAPTER 9

  On 11 November the Maria V left Polmayne for Plymouth. Losing the nets in Newlyn had made Jack even more determined to continue fishing. He had borrowed money and bought a set of used nets from a man in Porth. In Plymouth they began to recoup some of their losses.

  By mid-December the winter pilchards came to an end and Jack asked the crew if they wanted to go back to Polmayne. None of them had anything to go for, so they agreed to stay on for the herring.

  There were three of them now – Jack and Croyden and a man named Harry Hammels. Crew was hard to come by in Polmayne that autumn; six new houses were being built and the sea-wall was being extended, but Croyden told Jack: ‘There’s always Hammels.’

  Indeed there was. ‘Yes, please, Misser Swee, I come Plymouth!’ Harry Hammels was something of a mystery in Polmayne. In December 1931 people first started noticing his quick, light-stepped walk along the front, his grinning presence in the coalyard where he found a job. No one knew where he came from. His accent some thought was Spanish, some more Greek-sounding. He himself gave no clues to his past except to say that he had no nationality because all his life had been spent at sea.

  Off Plymouth that December the herring were scarce. It was only a year since a group of boats had trawled Bigbury Bay and fished out the spawning stock. Day after day went past without a fish being caught. Croyden moped around the bars of Plymouth. Hammels carved from pieces of driftwood his wooden ‘warriors’ – which he then sold at the entrance to Hoe Park.

  Jack had started a ‘Fishing Diary’. In an oilcloth notebook he recorded the weather, details of catches (time, place of shooting and hauling, quantities) and various anecdotes. He had also, since September, been having a lively exchange of letters with Anna Abraham. She had told him that she ‘needed news of Polmayne’; he in turn enjoyed explaining to an outsider the ups and downs of his fishing, the goings-on in the town. To begin with, he had held back on details, but she told him: ‘I want to know Every Thing, Mr Sweeney, you don’t imagine how I miss Polmayne.’ And he found himself anticipating with ever greater impatience the delivery of her replies, the particular lilt of her faulty English and her wry descriptions of the artistic milieu of Hampstead.

  On 15 December, the Maria V struck lucky. In a single night off Start Point they caught fifty-eight cran of fish and earned a total of £160. For almost a week they successfully fished the same spot. They returned to Polmayne in funds. Hammels bought a new French penknife. Maggie Treneer allowed Croyden back into his cottage, but only on condition that he kill one of his pigs. He agreed, but each day found a different excuse to delay the slaughter.

  ‘We are rich,’ wrote Jack to Anna Abraham. ‘Well, richer than we were – at last we have had some good fishing. This is my second winter here in Polmayne and this morning it is sunny and the harbour is quiet and I cannot think of anywhere in the world I would rather be …’

  It was the week before Christmas. The town had settled into its midwinter hollow. On frosty mornings the sun rose above the mists of the Glaze River, made a quick dash across the sky and sank back into the sea. They were still days, windless days, and at sundown the water was covered in a rusty light and the gulls came in and settled on it and briefly the whole bay shone orange-red and twitched in the breeze. It looked like the flank of some great hibernating beast, waiting for the spring.

  That Christmas, his first Christmas, Parson Hooper proposed holding an ecumenical carol service on Polmayne’s Town Quay. He wrote to his fellow ministers: ‘When better to unite the congregations of our parish than in this Christmas season?’ The United Methodist minister thought it a ‘splendid idea’, but the Bible Christians insisted that if they were to take part it should be billed ‘A Festival of Carols’, and the proposed sermons be in the form of a New Year Address.

  23 December dawned grey. Soggy clouds hung over a herring-coloured sea. Parson Hooper lowered the sash of his bedroom window, looked downriver and prayed for them to clear. By midday it had worked – a westerly breeze had driven away the clouds.

  On the Town Quay the three ministers stood with their backs to the sea. They each clutched a prayerbook to their chest and their robes rippled in the wind. The Town Band assembled beside them. In front, on the broad apron of the harbour, gathered a sizeable crowd. A group had come by boat from Porth and they stood apart from the others.

  Whaler Cuffe gripped Jack’s arm as he followed his stick along the cobbles. ‘Here, Jack … or there – what’s up there?’ They tried several places before finding the right one, where the sound of the band and the singing would be exactly in balance.

  At 2.30, Parson Hooper stood on Parliament Bench and spread his arms. The low winter sun shone on his face and gave it
a look of glowing innocence. The crowd fell silent beneath him.

  ‘We are gathered together in the sight of the Lord to celebrate the coming of His Son. Lord, you bestowed on us the great gift of Your Only Son and sent him into the world for our sins. We will begin by singing “Once in Royal David’s City”.’

  After that was Thomas Merrit’s ’Lo He Comes, the Infant Stranger’ and then Major Franks read from St John’s gospel. They sang ‘Hark the Glad Sound’ and with each carol the singing grew stronger.

  Parson Hooper climbed up again on Parliament Bench to make the first address. As he began to speak a few clouds drifted in over his head.

  ‘Last week,’ he announced, ‘I discovered in my study the unpublished tract of my late predecessor, the Reverend Winchester. It is a most interesting document and contains a passage on the coming of the New Year. He likens us at the beginning of each year to the captain of a ship sailing under sealed orders. Those orders tell him the course to steer, but he is commanded not to open them until he reaches a certain latitude. In 1936 we have every reason to suppose that even if we are sailing blind, our orders will be favourable. The world has pulled itself out of its recent mire and we are all stronger for it! So enjoy what you have. I have been in Polmayne only a short time but already I look around me and see an enchanted place and think of it – and we who live here – as somehow blessed …’

  The United Methodist minister, the Reverend Brendan Jones, followed. ‘When we wish each other “Happy New Year”, what do we mean? It is not so much a wish as a right of each and every one of you. We have no sympathy with those who frown upon pleasure. We do not hold that the world is worse because it laughs …’