The Main Cages Read online

  ‘Good afternoon, vicar!’

  Hooper glanced up. His face was drawn, and he shook his head.

  There had been a break-in, he explained. He took Jack into the church. In the north aisle the dust sheet still covered the painting and Hooper pulled it back. The face of Christ had gone, chiselled away. A large ‘X’ had been scratched over the boat and the figures in it; the word ‘Alive’ was scrawled across the sea.

  Parson Hooper suddenly put his face in his hands and groaned. ‘Why? Why, why, why!’ He pulled his fingers down his cheek, and looked up at the painting. There were tears in his eyes. ‘We live in an evil place, Mr Sweeney. Evil, evil! Who on earth could do such a thing?’

  Jack left Parson Hooper and, out in the sunlight again, wandered back among the slate headstones. Bright red azaleas bloomed between them. At the top, by the lych-gate, he found Parson Hooper’s latest Tablet propped against the bank:

  How beautiful it is to be alive,

  To live – to love – to work for God! –

  Till He sends His messenger

  Kind death – to call us home!

  2

  May 1936

  CHAPTER 11

  On a damp May afternoon, the first of the summer visitors arrived in Polmayne. They spilled out of Harris’s Station Bus with their leather valises and their country coats, and the porters from the Antalya busied themselves in the square, checking the tags on the cases and leading the guests up to their rooms.

  Mrs Cuffe and the other landladies escorted their visitors through the town, the luggage wheeled in wheelbarrows by the same husbands who now had to vacate their rooms for the summer (Mrs Cuffe had asked her nephew Charlie Treneer to do the wheeling). Idly they listened to the visitors’ animated chatter about this shop and that house, to their exclamations of ‘I say, that’s new!’ and ‘What is that?’, and paused with them as they stopped to read the newly-painted board that had just been tied to the railings of Town Quay:

  PLEASANT DAY EXCURSIONS!

  PER

  FAST AND COMMODIOUS MOTOR LAUNCH

  POLMAYNE QUEEN

  (Weather and Circumstances Permitting)

  The next morning a group of visitors stood on the quay. They were waiting for the Polmayne Queen. Women clung to their hats in the breeze. A swan landed feet-forward in the Gaps, settled down into the water and, with a shake of its tail, swam into the inner harbour. A young girl knelt down and stretched out a hand towards its beak.

  Toper Walsh, behind her, was in good humour. ‘Mind there, girl! ’ee’ll have an arm off you!’

  Parliament Bench was filling up again. The coming of the visitors had brought back Red Treneer and Jimmy Stephens and Brian Tyler and a number of others. Edward Harris also began to put in a daily appearance. Harris was a proud and diligent man who saw himself as a cut above the rest of the Bench. He had a watch for a start, which he kept on a lanyard in his waistcoat pocket and for this he was known as Tick-Tock. He was also a lovely speller. Those on the Bench could throw any word at him, even some foreign ones, and he would just send it back, letter by letter. In the summer months, he liked to come to the Bench with a cutting from a newspaper or a photograph from the illustrated press.

  Events beyond Polmayne were depressing that May – the war in Abyssinia, growing unrest in Spain. Much more exciting was the forthcoming inaugural voyage of the Queen Mary. Each morning when Tick-Tock Harris arrived, they would ask. ‘Anything on that ship, Ticker?’

  He learned to pace his information. He would take a pair of glasses from his top pocket. ‘… launched on the Clyde last September … the largest British liner ever to be built. First transatlantic crossing scheduled for June 1 … it is hoped she’ll take the Blue Riband before the end of her first season …’

  ‘But how big’s she, Tick? How big?’

  ‘Patience! … Here – nearly twice the displacement of the ill-fated Titanic, the Queen Mary’s displacement is 81,237 tons … Her length overall is nine hundred and seventy-five feet …’

  ‘Lord!’ said Toper.

  ‘Eeee,’ said Boy Johns.

  Two new establishments appeared along Polmayne’s waterfront that May. Mr Tanner opened his grocery store a couple of doors down from Eliza Tucker’s general store. As she no longer liked trading in ‘hard goods’, she was happy to let Mr Tanner sell paraffin and soda and cattle feed and fowl feed. She herself concentrated on sweets and tobacco and barm and home-made bread and an assortment of whatever miscellaneous merchandise caught her eye. In 1935 it had been china dogs and straw hats; this year it was gramophone records.

  Near the East Quay, a Mr and Mrs Monk from Exeter converted an old pilchard palace into Monk’s Tea Rooms. Mr Monk was of a nervous disposition and had a squint in his right eye. When the tea rooms were empty he would stand in the doorway and look up and down the road, rubbing his hands together. Mrs Monk said that’s the way to drive off trade. He told her he couldn’t help himself, not at the beginning anyway.

  Parson Hooper put the investigation of the church break-in in the hands of the police. He himself became withdrawn. Services were all taken by his Curate. Everyone condemned the vandalism. Even Red Treneer, who had little time for the ‘English Church’, admitted that it ‘weren’t right’.

  ‘If I find the bastard that done it,’ promised Toper, ‘I’ll wring his bloody neck!’

  It was very wet. In the middle of the month a gale clogged the leats with green leaves and pasted them like paper to the cobbles of Bethesda. Two yachts broke their moorings and at the Antalya an old lean-to collapsed, killing Mr Hicks’s spaniel. Time dragged its heels through those blustery days and in the cottages and villas the clocks slowed, their mechanisms burdened by damp.

  Then there were the snails. They appeared in mushroom clusters on wet stone walls, on window-panes, their silvery smears criss-crossing the paving stones. They crept and slithered over the redundant fishing gear below the recreation ground, the mountain ranges of old net, the squashy globes of buffs, the causeway withies of broken crab-pots. They made quick work of the potato plants in the town’s pieces and crawled in through the lips of the postboxes to chew at the stamps on newly-posted letters.

  On the fifteenth, Parson Hooper drove into Truro for the diocesan meeting. The Bishop took him to one side and told him that he had carefully considered his application to become Dean but that on reflection they wanted someone a little younger. The post was to be taken by Hooper’s own Curate. Parson Hooper went to Pascoe’s and commissioned a new Tablet:

  When the Light of the World stood before them

  They cried: Not this man but Barabbas.

  Arthur Treneer died. Agnes Thomas died. Betty Johns did not die as everyone thought she would but rose from her bed to sing ‘The Lark in the Morn’ at her grandson’s wedding.

  There were two weddings that May. The Jenkins wedding took place in the Anglican church of St Cuby and the Johns wedding was in the Methodist chapel. Both were followed by receptions at the Antalya Hotel.

  On 20 May, Tick-Tock Harris brought a copy of the Illustrated London News to the Bench. ‘… the forward funnel,’ he read, ‘is seventy feet in height from the boat deck. The diameter of each funnel is thirty foot and would permit three modern locomotives to pass through it …’

  Toper frowned. ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘Don’t see what, Tope?’

  ‘Don’t see why ’ee’d want bloody trains on a ship.’

  Towards the end of the third week of May, the French freighter Charbonnier was driven onto Pendhu Point. The Kenneth Lee rescued all hands. They managed to salvage the ship but not before much of its cargo of tinned food had been lost. The cupboards of Porth and Polmayne became filled with ‘Charbon’ tins – but because the labels had been washed off no one ever knew whether when they opened one they’d find tinned salmon or cling peaches.

  At the Antalya, visitors reported that the hotel was not the same this year. Mr Hicks, they said, was behaving ‘immoderately’.
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br />   The Garretts had a good fortnight with the Polmayne Queen, but on a trip to Falmouth the water intake blocked and the engine overheated. They returned to port safely but for a week the boat was out of action.

  A new member of the Petrel fleet was launched with a small ceremony at Penpraze’s yard. She was painted canary yellow, commissioned by an art historian from Berkshire and named Hope. Petrel racing began on 23 May.

  That afternoon Boy Johns’s grandson Joseph leaned on the harbour wall not watching the sleek and heeling Petrels in the bay, but reading his monthly magazine:

  LADS! The best life for town and country lads (16 to 21 years old) is upon Australia’s big and prosperous farms. Greatly reduced steamship passages, only £3 payable before sailing. Apply for illustrated pamphlet to the Assistant Superintendent of Immigration for New South Wales and Victoria, 3 Melbourne Place, Strand, WC.

  At the monthly Parish Council meeting it was reported that Cornwall’s Public Health and Housing Committee had approved a grant for the building of a reservoir to ease Polmayne’s water shortages. The site chosen was Pennance. Major Franks said that ‘it would cause a gross violation of natural beauty’. Parson Hooper pointed out that it would threaten St Pinnock’s holy well: ‘Have we not seen enough sacrilege of late?’ The only alternative site would cost a further £30,000. The dam, Hooper was assured, would be well below the spring. Despite the rain the water engineer reported to the Sanitary Inspector that in the previous three weeks Polmayne’s reserves had been reduced by six thousand gallons. Work was due to start at Pennance the following month.

  It was rain that prevented the Tea Treat of the Bible Christian boys. As a special concession they were allowed to go on the Wesleyan Tea Treat the following week – although not to process near the Wesleyan banners nor to touch the banners’ tassels as they marched. Afterwards the Bible Christians asked to go with the Wesleyans again next year as the buns were bigger and had more currants in them.

  At 4.35 on Whit Saturday, Mr and Mrs Monk recorded their first full house. Mr Monk was ‘a bit fingers and thumbs’ that day but all went well. On board the Maria V, Jack and Croyden and Hammels took off the dog line and made up a spilter.

  Shortly after dawn on 28 May Joseph Johns met his grandfather on the East Quay. Boy Johns gave him £3.95.6d.

  ‘Thanks, Granddad,’ said Joseph.

  ‘Eeee.’ Boy watched him as he walked past the Antalya Hotel, up out of town, on his way to Australia.

  The police told Parson Hooper that they had arrested three men in Penzance. They were from up-country and they admitted to breaking into St Cuby’s. ‘It’s that damn road,’ said Toper. ‘Look at the scum comes in on it.’

  By the end of the month it was hot. The first tents appeared in Ivor Dawkins’s fields. The water engineer recorded a further drop in reserves of eight thousand gallons.

  Tick-Tock Harris read from the Western Morning News:

  Cunard White Star’s Queen Mary is undergoing final preparations for her maiden transatlantic voyage. She will leave Southampton on 27 May …

  Burnt flakes of cloud filled the western sky. It was late, after ten. In Hemlock Cove two punts were pulled up on the sand. Sitting on the cliff above, beside the coastguard hut, were Toper, Red, Tick-Tock and the others. They had been there an hour already.

  ‘Anything, Boy?’ asked Toper.

  Boy Johns had a telescope propped on his knee and he was looking through it, out beyond Kidda Head. He had said nothing for all that time and he said nothing still.

  ‘So, Tick, where’s this damned ship o’ yours?’ growled Red.

  Tick-Tock took out his watch for the fifth time and shook his head. ‘I can’t understand it …’

  It was well after dark before the two punts returned. In silence they passed back through the Gaps. The next day on the Bench there was no sign of Tick-Tock Harris, nor the next. Shame kept him at home after he read the report on the Queen Mary’s maiden voyage: she had not gone straight to New York from Southampton – a route that would have taken her three miles south of Pendhu – but had crossed the Channel to pick up passengers in Cherbourg.

  Early on 10 June, the Maria V was working ground some five miles off the Lizard. It was warm and misty. Dawn was a grey smudge to the east. They were hauling on the tide and the only sound was the slop of the nets on the deck as they came back in. To the south were Cove boats, open boats from the villages of the Lizard, their lights haloed in the mist. Hammels was humming.

  The Maria V’s nets were almost in when they heard it. Hammels raised his head. A faint thrup-thrup-thrup. Croyden secured the head-rope. It was hard to tell in the mist where it was coming from. It grew louder. It seemed it was moving across their bow, out of the south-east. No, across their stern. It appeared to echo off the mist. Each of them stood still. They could feel it throbbing across the water, up into the boat and through their feet. A great shadow appeared off the port bow, some three hundred yards to the south. They watched the stream of lights flow past them in the dawn. When the bow wave hit them, Croyden gripped the gunwale to prevent himself going over. Jack held the wheel to keep his balance and Harry fell, striking his knee on a stanchion. He waved his fist at the ship’s shrinking stern. ‘Great bloody bastard!’

  To the south, three of the Cove boats had their lines cut by the Queen Mary. By morning news of it had reached the Bench.

  ‘Build these ships too damned big nowadays,’ said Toper Walsh.

  ‘Where’ll it all end?’ asked Red.

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘I’ll tell ’ee where it’ll end,’ said Toper.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, Tope?’

  ‘I’ll tell ’ee …’

  But somehow he could not think of what it was that he wanted to say.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jack Sweeney stood half-in and half-out of the wheelhouse. It was midday. The long-line was out. The sea lay still all around them and a few pale-edged clouds drifted across the sun. Croyden was asleep. Harry was playing the harmonica in the bows.

  During May the Maria V had spent more time at sea than in harbour. They left the bay on countless rain-washed mornings, on sultry windless mornings, on mornings when the low cloud was still pierced by moon-shards. They returned at dusk, in the early morning, at midday. Sometimes they would be gone for thirty-six hours. The ling and conger were plentiful, the prices good. Around the quays word spread again that Jack Sweeney was lucky and that the Maria V was a lucky boat.

  He himself barely noticed anything that month but the sea. The rhythms of his days were sea rhythms. He had no land life; his gaze was filled with the waves and their rise and fall, with gannets travelling against grey skies; he watched cloud-ranges swell on the horizon and the rain on the boat’s fresh paint form into droplets and vibrate with the engine. He heard the water sliding beneath the boat, the slosh of beam seas against it, the creak of the mizzen and the chug-chug of the Kelvin. He knew the slow dozing afternoons and the hot noons and the coming ashore late, after midnight, knowing they would be leaving again early the next day. He knew his own concentrations at hauling and at shooting, the precision when the spring tides ran at their quickest, and he watched the line in Croyden’s hand tighten and was ready to throttle back as soon as it snagged.

  Two or three times that month the weather came in. The wind went round to the east. It freshened and the white-topped seas ran long and high past Pendhu Point and it was not possible to go out. On these days Jack Sweeney was overwhelmed by a frustration that he could no longer keep at bay with the intricacies of his knotwork, nor with the more pressing tasks of the net loft, nor with the hours sitting with Whaler Cuffe outside his wooden shed but only with long walks that had no direction when they began but invariably led either to St Pinnock’s holy well at Pennance, or across the Glaze River to Priory Creek and up over the top to Pendhu Point. There above Williams’s coastguard hut he sat in the sheep-cropped grass and watched the motionless shapes of the Main
Cages.

  When they fished, the land was always to the north. Sometimes it dissolved in the haze and at night it was marked only by the loom of the Lizard light sweeping the sky and sometimes by the light of St Anthony Head. At other times they motored down to the Ray Pits and for half a day or more saw nothing but the wide circle of sea and then it came back into view, that thin, dust-grey coast. Jack preferred the mornings when they were setting out, with the open sea before them, pushing south.

  That was May.

  In early June, the bait became harder to find. They prepared to go to Plymouth. They brought the Maria V in through the Gaps and gathered supplies on the East Quay: four drums of fuel, several maunds of spare line, two new dans, a mass of cobles, four bags of Croyden’s new potatoes, three pounds of butter and a box of unlabelled Charbon tins which Hammels said he had learned to identify: ‘Put ’em in a bucket of water and if one sink quick, he’s salmon, sink slow he’s peach. He sink very quick and he’s no good.’

  On the last evening, Jack closed up the net loft and came out onto the front with a canvas bag of tools over his shoulder. The bay was quiet; patches of wind drifted across its surface. They would have a clear run to Plymouth. As he passed Monk’s Tea Rooms, he spotted a familiar-looking couple coming towards him. It was the Abrahams.

  ‘Look – it’s Jack Sweeney!’ called Maurice, and came over and shook Jack by the hand.