THE MAIN CAGES

PHILIP MARSDEN

For my grandfather

JG Le NK

and

Zofia Ilińska

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

1 1934

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

2 May 1936

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

3 Saturday, 29 August 1936

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

Epilogue

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Main Cages – main, from maen, Cornish for ‘rock’; cages, possibly from Cornish kegys – ‘hemlock’ (on the coast east of Pendhu Point is a Hemlock Cove); or perhaps from cagal, Late Cornish for ‘the dung of sheep, goats or rodents’, and also denoting ‘clotted or spattered filth on the coats of beasts’, which, in certain lights, the rocks are said to resemble.

PROLOGUE

‘The Adelaide? ’91. ’90 was the Prima Donna and the Bonne Julienne and a couple of others I don’t recall.

‘First few days of the year she struck, they dead days right after Christmas, been blowing two days straight, an easterly that come up the channel with a freezing mist before it. Saturday evening it veered south-east and freshened to a full gale. That easterly brought the first snow we had in years but the worst of the easterly’s always the run it brings. Damn swell you can’t do nothing with.

‘She was a big barque, the Adelaide. Steel hull and new built, headed up Liverpool with a hold full of jute. After fifteen weeks she come on land in a snowstorm. Imagine that – fifteen weeks in the heat and you come to land in a bloody snowstorm …

‘They was taking soundings when they heard the bell. They knew what that bell was. Not a man who’s sailed this coast don’t know the Cages bell when he hears it. So the master orders them round but he misses stays and in that wind and they seas he didn’t stand a chance of getting free. Just out from Hemlock Cove, they struck the edge of the reef square on.

‘We was all down at the hall that night, Freeman Rooms, listening to a speaker. Colonel’d been staying up Dormullion but the weather was so bad he couldn’t get back and he was telling us about Africa or someplace. Anyway that’s where we was when the maroons went up. No one spoke a word. We’re off like long dogs to the station and of course the whole bloody audience follow us and that poor wretched colonel’s left talking to an empty hall.

‘In they days the boat was the Eliza Jane – pulling she was, just paddles and a pair of great heavy drop keels. Couple of the launch crew heaved open the doors and the noise hit us with the wind. I never heard such a noise. The sea against the piles of the slipway and some bloody howling easterly and a biting wind with thick snow in it. The crew was picked and we checked the gear and got on board, ten of we oarsmen and the cox and a couple of others and still none of us saying a word. So we’re sitting there and each of us takes hold of the gunwale and there’s snow all around and we’re sitting waiting for the launch.

‘Cox was Sam Tyler and he was standing in the stern looking out over us and listening to the wind and trying to get the seas and it’s still not too late for him to stop. But we saw him nod to Joshua Ball and take his seat at the helm.

‘That time the slip was new, roller-slip built just six months, and Joshua Ball was on the hard below us. He took away the strops and looked down at the surf. Once he’s knocked that pin out the chain drops and there’s nothing you can do. That’s the moment you dread – once you’re gone you’re gone but it’s the waiting that gets to you and it’s his decision when to launch. Someone asks where the service’s to and Tyler says in from the Cages and we’re all thinking what’d that be like in an easterly like this.

‘Josh knocks out the pin and the boat starts on her rollers, slow at first and then faster and all of we waiting for the bows to strike. We faced astern and that night I could see old Josh at the top of the slip getting smaller, with his hammer and the chain on the ground by his feet. He had the face of the hangman watching us go out in that.

‘Well we hit the water and pulled like hell. Got through the short seas into deeper water. Wasn’t too bad in the bay. There was great big swells but long and they weren’t breaking and we soon forgot the cold pulling as we were. Once out of the bay we hit the wind full on and the seas right above us. The very first one of they seas pushed up our bows and we was looking down on the cox, then the next he was up above us like we was on a bloody seesaw.

‘At night in a sea you never know the one that’ll break and swamp you. You don’t see it – but you can hear it. At first he’s distant – then he comes full and heavy above the noise of the wind and you can hear the size of him in the sound. Then one astern, and one abeam and you never know which one’ll get you. We got one going out, broke just as we came into it, steepened up ahead of us and then the noise of the crest breaking right above us and we knew he was a big one. We lost the bows and would have gone over if the starboard crew hadn’t backed their oars. Wave washed clear over us and no one stopped pulling but the cold afterwards – you could feel every inch of yourself that was wet and our fingers locked tight around the oars so we couldn’t let go even if we wanted – and we just thought of the seamen and the ship on the rocks and we pulled harder.

‘By the time we got to the ship the snow’d stopped and there was a moon. She was already well down by the stern, and with her stern under, the seas was breaking against her mizzen and washing up the decks. One of the deckhouses was breaking up and her bowsprit pointing up towards the cliffs and up there was the land crew come from Porth, but it was too far and in that wind their rockets were a bloody waste of time.

‘We looked around for survivors but there was no one on the decks. There was already timbers and bales of jute and debris and the Lord alone knows what swilling about in the water. Wasn’t a soul on deck or in the water and we thought, they’ve all gone already we’re too late and all that pulling for nothing. Then someone pointed up and we saw them – clinging to the mast and the yards and hanging on to the halyards.

‘She’d struck with her starboard bow and we had to get in leeward of her. We came in under their stern and along midships and one of their crew came down and you could see him waiting on the ladder ’til he could get across the decks between waves – the decks was awash one minute and then they was clear. We came in alongside and threw a line and it dropped on the deck and he jumped down but the next wave came and he had to get up in the rigging. We threw the rope again and this time he got a hold of it but the whip fouled and he had to leave it. Then we dropped in a deep swell and for a moment we lost her and went round abeam, thought we was about to broach but we got her round and dropped in again. We got three aboard that time, each coming down on deck and jumping and two of our crew hauling their weight. The tide was dropping and the deck was clearing and we had two more off no difficulty and each was so cold they could hardly speak when they came aboard.

‘Then we heard a noise, a groaning noise from in her hull and we knew she was starting to break up. Every time one of they waves pulled back it sucked more out of her hold.

‘First crack frightened the hell out of us. Like a gun. Then there was another crack and soon it was like a bloody battlefield. We didn’t know what it was and some of us was ducking and the cox was shouting, Keep her up, for Chrissake! Then one of their crew pipes up it was her rivets he says and we all knew then she hadn’t long to go.

‘Cox sent Giles Penna aboard, see ’em down out of the rigging and they came down one by one with each of we at our stations and watching them come hand over hand and slow with the cold and the seas rising and falling below. And we was each saying to ourselves – come on now, boy, one step now. The noise was terrible – the surf on the rocks, the cracking of they damned rivets and then the cries of the poor beggars still in the rigging. The bowman was shouting out, trying to get us to hold her steady and then a wave picked us up and we lost the bows again.

‘We was struggling to get back in when the first of the topmasts went – four of them in the rigging and the topmast goes and they hung on until it was half down and then they fell, away over the stern.

‘Could do nothing for them and there was another dozen or so in the for’ard masts so we went back in and one came down and we got him on board and Penna shouted up to the others to come down. He was shouting but on the wind they couldn’t hear. We was finding it difficult keeping steady. The snow was starting again and we could see they last ones up there clinging to the yards. The ship was going. Her back was broken and she was sliding off the ledge into deep water. We was all shouting to them and trying to stop them being afraid and they was too terrified to move. Then one of the survivors on board he took Tyler’s arm and says: “You won’t get them down now, my friend, they’re frozen to the shrouds.”’

1

CHAPTER 1

When Jack Sweeney arrived in Polmayne in May 1934, he brought with him several bundles of letters, his mother’s diamond ring and a small, oak-framed painting of a bird of paradise. He was twenty-eight.

Behind him was a farm in Dorset which had been owned by Sweeneys for three hundred years and probably a lot more. He himself would never have needed to farm if his elder brother had survived the shrapnel shard which sent him face-first into the Flanders mud. Nor would he have been left in charge so young if his father had not succumbed to pleurisy in the winter of 1925. And he may have come to keep the farm, to make it prosper, even perhaps to love it, had he made some provision for the upheavals that took place in the early 1930s.

But in truth farming had never appealed to him. As a child he resisted a practice which made narrow enclosures from the land and planted each one with a single species of plant. Nor could he feel a part of anything that made such a mockery of the beasts – the lumbering cattle, the confused sheep, the swollen pigs. He had already built his own pantheon from the world and its virtues were diversity, rarity, independence; the farm seemed opposed to all three. He bred rare hawk-moths, collected birds’ eggs. He had a habit of making remarkable finds. He was a dreamy child, they said, a natural.

He had been to Polmayne once before, in May 1913. The winter before had been a fug of bronchitis and come spring his mother took him to the Antalya Hotel. He loved the town. He loved its hugger-mugger houses, the strange sea creatures that came up in baskets from the boats, the constant harbourside shouting. Within two days he had seen a peregrine falcon, a pair of seals and a group of basking sharks. On Pendhu Point, a smudge of orange wings sped past him and he cried: ‘Mother, look! A milkweed!’

That autumn his mother became ill. By Christmas she was dead. Jack could not understand what it was that changed her so quickly, that sucked away all the flesh and reduced her voice to a whisper. But when the farm collapsed, twenty-one years later, and his father’s cousin offered him a job in a forestry project, and everyone else was surrounding him with their platitudes and promises, all he could think about was how to get away. He remembered Polmayne. He put the sale of the farm in the hands of solicitors, bundled up a few possessions and took the train to Cornwall.

In Polmayne he rented a room from a Mrs Cuffe. It was a loft room. It had its own staircase, its own entrance and two dormer windows which looked down over the sea wall, over the bay and out to Pendhu Point. At one end was a slate mantelpiece and there he propped his bird of paradise.

He never intended to stay. Polmayne was a stopgap, a stepping stone, a place in which to sit back and look around before starting afresh. But the weeks passed and the mantelpiece filled with assorted top-shells and pebbles, with rounded shards of pottery and ceramics and a piece of surf-polished driftwood that resembled the torso of an erotic dancer. Soon the bird of paradise was hidden by a foot-long blade of a ship’s propeller prised from the mud of Pritchard’s Beach.

That summer the threads that bound him to the earth thinned and frayed. He took his meals alone in Mrs Cuffe’s dining room. He listened to the alien murmur of the other guests. The only person he spoke to was Whaler, the almost blind husband of Mrs Cuffe.

Whaler Cuffe had spent his working life as bosun and mate on a succession of ships. He had never served on whalers but had once told a story about a whale and after that everyone called him Whaler. In the summer months he lived across the yard in a lean-to shed while Mrs Cuffe rented out their bedroom to visitors. Most of the day he sat outside the shed with his hands propped on his cane while the sun glowed against his sightless eyes. He told stories to anyone who listened and mainly it was strangers as no one in Polmayne believed him. On Parliament Bench, his stories were a byword for fantasy: ‘Tall’n a bloody tree, Whaler’s yarns.’

It was from Whaler that Jack first heard about the Main Cages. He reeled off the names of the ships that had been lost there as if they were the dead from some age-old campaign – the Carlisle, the Athens, the Prince Henry, the Adelaide. He told Jack about the Phoenix whose cargo of sugar turned to syrup as she sank, drowning the crew; and the Constance, loaded with rice which swelled as she filled and burst the hull open like a pea-pod. On the seabed below the rocks, he explained, there are thousands and thousands of barrels, locked there by the cement that spilled from them and hardened; the cement was on its way to San Francisco to assist in rebuilding the city after the 1906 earthquake. In gales, Whaler continued, you can hear in the pine trees the moans of ‘all the poor beggars who perished on the Cages’. He told Jack that they used to leave pirates on the rocks sealed inside an iron cage.

‘And that’s why,’ said Whaler with a vague waving of his cane in the direction of the sea, ‘we call the rocks as we do.’

Jack found a copy of Tom Bowling’s Book of Knots and spent the mornings working his way through it, sitting on his steps with a ball of whipping line and various lengths of lanyard. Beside him was a pump with a cow’s-tail handle and it was this pump that gave the cobbled yard the name of Bethesda. Each morning Mrs Cuffe come into the yard to draw water.

‘Still tying they knots, Mr Swee?’

‘Still tying, Mrs Cuffe.’

‘Well, one day you’ll knot your own fingers together and starve yourself to death …’

In early July, he woke on a cloudless morning and found he could not move his head. He lay staring at the ceiling. Veins of sunlight reflected off the sea and flickered on the rafters. An hour later he had managed to reach his stool in the yard. When Mrs Cuffe came to the pump she told him he looked ‘stiff as a scarecrow’.

Bending to pick up her pails, she told him: ‘I seen others like you, Mr Swee. You get out on the water, have a bit of a row-round.’

He did just that. He went down to the harbour and hired a boat, twelve feet of clinker-built dinghy with long, heavy paddles. On that first day he could barely move them. The following day he managed to push out through the Gaps and across the bay. The next morning he reached the entrance to the Glaze River and by the fourth, when he hauled the boat over the sand and into the water the last of the stiffness had gone.

It was a day of no wind. The sea stretched flat and featureless into a pale haze. The dinghy surged forward with each stroke, splitting the water. The only sound was the rowlocks working back and forth in their sockets: cler-clunk … cler-clunk …

He pointed the bows of the boat out of the bay. Pendhu Point slipped astern. A slight swell rose from the east. In the bright midday, the heat fell on his back and bounced off the sea and he shipped the paddles and uncorked his water bottle.

He looked back towards Polmayne. In the haze was the white blot of buildings around the quays. He raised the bottle to his lips and drank deeply, then he pressed in the cork and rowed on. He rowed south-east. Some time later he stopped again and pulled in the paddles and drank some more, and as he drank and wiped the last trickle of it from his chin, he heard from the direction of the open sea the very faint sound of a bell.

There was nothing at all for several seconds but then it came again. Three loud clangs and a softer one – then a silence and two soft clangs and some louder ones, and he realised that it was not a mechanical bell but one rung by the irregular motion of the sea.

Jack raised one hand to his brow, shielding the sun. He squinted towards the sound. In the flood of light he made out three or four shapes of rocks. He took up the paddles and headed out towards them. As he rowed closer so there came from them the noise of surf. Even with no sea to speak of and the tide almost slack, he saw how uneven the rocks made the water. It ran smoothly among their low summits, made eddies over those that remained just below the surface. The long swells rose and fell against them.

He drifted in among the rocks and came to the place where a channel ran between the two parts of the largest one, Maenmor. With each swell, the water sluiced through the gap and Jack held the boat off for a moment. The gap at its narrowest was about six feet wide, perhaps thirty feet long. He looked at it a long time, holding the boat still against the tide. It was dark between the rocks and he squinted to see in. He then spun the boat round, took two swift strokes and shipped the paddles. The bows shot into the gap. They did not swing but with the weight of the boat kept true. The sun was blotted out by the high rock above and the air was suddenly cool. The boat slowed and he felt the brush of weed against the hull. Then the bows started to swing and the stern nudged the rocks. He leaned over and his hand came up against the wall and he pushed off and all at once was out again, into the sun and the warmth and the still water.

He started to row again. He spotted a smooth patch in the water and shipped his paddles again and leaned over the side. The sun’s rays haloed his head and he could see down into the water, through the dust-motes of plankton, to the shadowy form of a rock. Oarweed flopped about beside it, swaying as the swells passed over it – back and forth, back and forth. And that is the image that remained with him from his early days in Polmayne – of his own lone figure suspended over the side of a boat, staring down into the water, while from below rose the half-hidden shape of a rock.

That August Jack Sweeney bought his own boat. He sold his mother’s diamond ring, gave Mrs Cuffe four months’ rent and walked up the Glaze River to Penpraze’s yard. He had already discovered the place on his wanderings. Just beyond the church was a pair of black tarred sheds and on the larger one a sign: ‘P. PENPRAZE, SHIP, YACHT & BOAT BUILDER, BLOCK & SPAR-MAKER & SHIPSMITH’.

Inside, years of sawdust and paint-chippings had been trodden down to form an uneven, hard-packed floor. The roof was hung with wrights’ moulds and assorted spars rested on the beams. Peter Penpraze blew the dust from a varnished half-model and told him: ‘Fourteen foot six, grown oak frames, timbers of pitch pine, oak garboards, elm keel. Whatever thwarts you like, Mister, and a good locker astern. Lovely little boat, steady as a rock in a blow, pound a foot.’

Three weeks later, on a cloudless afternoon, Jack rowed between the Gaps and moored his boat in the inner harbour for the first time. That evening Whaler tap-tapped his way along the Town Quay and Mrs Cuffe drained a bottle of stout over the boat’s stem, saying: ‘Blessed be this craft, and blessed be all her crafty tasks.’

Over the coming days Jack brought out the lines he had been preparing – the eye-spliced painter, the stern-line, the rope fender, and a few he had made up for good measure. He bought a small galvanised grapnel and spliced that on too.

He began potting. Whaler put him onto Benny Stone, a cousin of sorts, and a man half-crippled from twenty years of crabbing. From Benny Stone, Jack acquired a set of inkwell pots – ‘Woven from best Penpraze withies, Mr Swee, three seasons’ use’ – and a great deal of advice: ‘Haul at low water … use shore crabs to catch the wrasse, use the wrasse for the lobster … put out your old pots March-time, save the new for better weather … find a pitch round the Cages and ee’ll not go wrong.’

Rights to the potting grounds were divided up along complicated lines of allegiance, decided either by ties of blood or by any one of a dozen tacit fraternities. Jack rowed around the grounds and on an old Admiralty chart shaded in where he saw other pots. He ringed the other places marked ‘R’ (rocks) and ‘ST’ (stones) and on fine days took out a greased lead and plumbed the water, recording where sand was stuck to the grease, and where it came up clean.

But his early potting was not a success. He experimented with different sites – west of Kidda Head, down towards Porth, east of Hemlock Cove. In three weeks his efforts yielded little more than spider crabs, velvets, devils, a few small lobsters and a number of conger. He lost a third of his pots in a gale, and another string from leaving too short a head-rope at springs. When he rowed back through the Gaps the men on Parliament Bench watched him with their cold, omniscient stares.

In late October the weather came in and he stored his pots and kicked his heels around the town. On Armistice Day he saw the luggers leave Polmayne for Plymouth and one afternoon on the East Quay he met a young woman from Devon called Alice. She had red-brown hair the colour of fallen leaves and was working in the kitchens of the Antalya. He took her out rowing and she showed him the slate grotto of St Pinnock’s holy well. Alice said the waters were known in the town to cure barren women. In bed she would sing softly as he held her, and her eyes fill with tears.

In the middle of December, Polmayne’s luggers returned from Plymouth; they loaded the herring nets and went back east for several more weeks. Jack found a note under his door: ‘Dear Jack, it’s lonely here even though you’re kind. I gone back home to my people. Goodbye, Alice.’

That Christmas Jack accepted an invitation from his great-aunt Bess to spend the week in Bridport. He passed a few days in her hot and over-decorated rooms. On the third night he went into town and got drunk and fell asleep fully clothed. In the morning mud stains covered the foot of the counterpane and he told his aunt Bess he was leaving. She said Cornwall was not the place for him. ‘You’re a Sweeney, Jack, this is where you belong.’

January swept in over Polmayne with its two-day gales and its grey, restless seas. Squalls dashed around Pendhu Point, driving the water in the coves into chest-deep scuds of foam. Along the front, shop signs swung and squeaked in the wind. Jack brought his boat into Bethesda, upturned it on two sawn-off barrels and rubbed it and primed it and re-glossed its clinker hull. He went to see Benny Stone with an armful of withies. His first pots looked less like inkwells than doughnuts but in time he produced something serviceable. He counted off the days until March. He was running short of money.

One morning in late January he was walking on Pritchard’s Beach. It was a bright morning and the beach was scattered with the detritus of another storm. Squinting into the sun he spotted a figure pushing a wheelbarrow up the strand. The man was struggling to keep it going through the shingle. Jack recognised his black smock and the sand-coloured beret – it was Mrs Cuffe’s nephew, Croyden Treneer.

Setting the barrow down, Croyden caught his breath. ‘That’s some bloody heavy beast!’ He bent to light a cigarette and tossed away the match.

‘What is it?’

Croyden pulled aside the weed on top of the barrow and Jack glimpsed beneath it a stretch of leathery skin. And he smelt it. He put a sleeve to his nose.

‘Dolphin. Put him in under my potatoes and they’ll come up lovely.’

Croyden leaned on the front of the barrow and shuffled the pebbles with his boot. ‘Started potting yet?’ he asked.

‘Not yet.’

Croyden said nothing but stood for some time smoking in silence. Then he flicked away his cigarette, picked up the barrow and said, ‘You won’t get nowhere with it! I was you, I’d go back to England.’

CHAPTER 2

Croyden Treneer had once been a fisherman but now he worked ashore. He picked up jobs on building sites. He grew vegetables on his ‘piece’, one of the dozen or so allotments cut out from the gorse-cleared slopes above the town. He also had two pigs which he kept in an old quarry behind his house in Rope Walk. The pigs ate barley flour and scraps and lived beneath the upturned halves of a sawn-in-half dinghy. Their names were Three and Five. One and Two had been killed in previous years but in the autumn of 1934, when it had come to killing Three, Croyden couldn’t do it. He was still a fisherman at heart and killing Three was bound to bring him bad luck. He killed Four instead.

The Treneer family had always been in Polmayne. They had been boat-builders, ropemakers and sail-cutters, huers, blowsers and triggers. They had gone to sea in drift-netters, long-liners, crabbers and shrimpers. Some had dispersed to Plymouth, America, London, taken jobs on ships and sailed to Odessa, Genoa, Bombay, Panama. They had made new homes in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, lost their lives in the Bay of Bengal, the Menai Straits, Mount’s Bay. Three Treneers had been Coxswain of Polmayne’s lifeboat. The most recent was Tommy Treneer who was not yet Cox but crew when the Adelaide foundered in the winter of 1891.

Croyden was his second son. The eldest had gone to buy a pony at Bodmin Fair in 1913 but couldn’t see one he liked, so he went to America instead. When he failed to return, Tommy marched down to the board school and took Croyden away. ‘What he don’t know now,’ he told the headmaster, ‘he don’t need to know.’ He was twelve.

Croyden worked with his father on the Good Heart seine and took to long-lining and potting when the pilchards weren’t running. At eighteen he became the youngest-ever member of the Polmayne lifeboat crew. Though small in stature, he developed enormous strength and agility. He could pull a four-foot conger from a crab pot without flinching. He could bait up a boulter line at an astonishing speed. He knew the sea bottom, the underwater valleys and peaks, the sandy plains and rocky outcrops, as if he could see it all with his own eyes. He acquired the useful faculty, when fishing, of being able to wake in his bunk precisely at the turn of the tide.

But whatever his skills as a former fisherman, Croyden had always set much greater store by a set of well-moulded rituals and beliefs. He would mutter blessings as the nets went out, always eat a fish from tail to head, not let a priest near the boat, and refuse to load gear on a Friday. Above all he would never utter the word ‘rabbit’ either on board or ashore – and if he heard anyone say it at sea, he would be forced to head for home. If he needed to talk about rabbits he called them sheep.

Croyden’s ability at sea was not matched on land. As soon as he came ashore and left the quays, he was lost. People used to say: ‘Really there’s two Croydens, like they’s twins or something.’

Even as Croyden began with the Good Heart, the days of seining were reaching an end. The pilchard shoals did not come as they once had and in 1918 the Good Heart was laid up for good. Croyden was offered a place on the Blucher, a drift-netter in Newlyn. He was given a sixth share in the catch and returned to Polmayne sporadically – either out of pocket or flush after a good splat of fish. To Tommy Treneer, Croyden’s position was a betrayal. It was the drift-nets alone that he blamed for robbing the coast of pilchards. ‘The devil’s own nets,’ he called them and refused to address a word to his son.

But the Blucher did well. One moonlit night in December 1924, some ten miles south of Mount’s Bay, they struck a shoal of herring with such perfect timing that at once a total of 114 cran of fish caught their gills in the mesh. It took seven hours to haul the nets. While the others tired, Croyden found that the deeper the fish lay about his ankles the more vigorously he could haul. His share of the catch earned him more than £52. On board that evening, he leaned back on the Blucher’s frosty deck and felt he could stretch out his cutch-stained hands and rearrange the stars. Such dazzling high spirits lasted long enough to catch the eye of Maggie North whose mother ran Newlyn’s quayside tobacconist. Croyden returned that summer, in a borrowed boat, and after the wedding took his bride away from a harbour lined with waving well-wishers, back across Mount’s Bay and around the Lizard where, as they picked up an easterly swell, Mrs Croyden Treneer scattered the nibblings of her wedding lunch into the long arc of the boat’s wash.

In the coming years Maggie grew to hate the sea and all it represented. In the early thirties both prices and shoals became ever more unpredictable. Expecting her fourth child, she said she could no longer tolerate his feast-or-famine work.

‘Fishing’s a gambler’s life, Croyden Treneer, and all you seem to do is lose.’

Croyden came ashore. He bought his first pig. He worked his piece, planting potatoes and brassicas and using an old tuck-net to keep out the birds. He found a job on the roads – laying the first tarmac on Polmayne’s only approach road. When that came to an end, he spent a winter building one of the bungalows that were beginning to ring the town and every day he was reminded that he would rather be at sea. Working on solid ground to a clock and not to the tides, dealing with straight lines and right-angles, all contributed to a faint nausea. The truth was that labouring on land made Croyden seasick.

Then under the Housing Act of 1930 a compulsory purchase order was placed on Cooper’s Yard and a dozen old cottages around it – ‘unfit for habitation … prone to flooding …’. A large site was excavated for new homes above the church. Before they were even completed these houses became known as the Crates. Suddenly in Polmayne there was work for all and Croyden found he was earning more than he ever had on the drift-netter.

His father, Tommy, still refused to speak to him. He lived in Cooper’s Yard and now he was told he must leave. He had been born there. Croyden had been born there. Treneers had always been born there. Drift-netting was one thing, said Tommy, but at least it was fishing.

‘We was always seiners,’ he growled, ‘and now look at him – putting up bloody Crates so they can pack we away.’

In early March 1935, Jack Sweeney spent a couple of days plumbing out at the Main Cages. There he stumbled on a small unclaimed area of rough ground. It ran for about fifty yards just south of the gap between Maenmor’s two peaks – the tunnel that he’d shot in his punt the summer before. It would be hard to work in any kind of a sea, but in the middle of the month came a spell of settled weather.

On his first haul, he pulled seven good-sized crabs. Two days later he had five crabs and two lobsters. Within a week he had caught more than he had in the entire two months the year before. He began to make money – and on Parliament Bench they took to nodding at him as he came in. Once a week he gave part of his catch to Mrs Cuffe. Whaler told him about the lobsters he had seen the size of dogs and a crab in the tropics that would scamper up the palm trees and happily pick dates with his claws.

One evening at the end of March a freshening westerly began to flick at the wave-tops of the bay. Put out your old pots March-time … Jack had put out the lot. He cursed himself as he pulled on his boots and ran out through the yard.

Tommy Treneer shouted from the Bench as he passed: ‘Should take better bloody care o’ your gear!’

At the Main Cages the seas were already large. He rowed round into the lee of Maenmor. His marker buoys were rising and falling on a long swell. He hauled the first string quickly. It was mid-tide and flooding. The line was heavy. It jammed tight against the gunwale as he pulled and the boat dipped with each tug. Then came the bump of the first pot against the boat and he hauled it in. He extracted a good hen from inside. From that first line of pots he had three crabs. He rowed over to the others.

On the other side of Maenmor he could hear the seas breaking hard against the rock but for the time being he was sheltered. Through the tunnel came the roar of surf, and sudden white surges of water.

The other string was even heavier. The first pot had a spider crab and he threw it back. The pots were mounting in the bows and the boat’s roll was growing wider. He knew he’d lose some pots now; he’d never be able to row them all back in such a sea. As the third pot came in, the boat slipped off the top of a wave and Jack fell. The line slid back over the side and he found himself eye to eye with a cock crab on the bottom boards. He tried again. As the pot came up, still beneath the surface, he could see the dark form of a lobster. It was a vast lobster. Unable to fit in the pot it had its thorax wrapped around the outside. Its claw was so big that it was that that had jammed in the spout. Jack balanced the pot on the gunwale. With one hand he flicked a series of running hitches around both pot and lobster, lashing to the withies the starry sky of the creature’s back, the boxer’s forearm of its one free claw. He then cut the rope and abandoned the rest to the storm.

By the time he reached the quays, the water in the boat was slopping at his ankles. Within half an hour, a crowd had gathered to view the giant lobster. It was measured at 29 ¼ inches tail to claw and even Whaler, who came down to the quay and ran his fingers over its full length, admitted it was ‘a beauty’.

‘In Australia,’ he said, ‘I saw one like him, only –’

‘He was ten feet long, eh Whaler?’ teased Toper Walsh.

‘And wore spectacles,’ suggested Tommy Treneer.

‘Came up on our anchor chain and we measured him claw to tail at just over …’

But no one was listening to Whaler. They were all looking at the lobster. Two weeks later it was mounted on a wooden board in the saloon bar of the Antalya.

In the coming weeks, Jack’s luck continued. When he came in to the Town Quay, Tommy Treneer and the others would wander over from the Bench to see what he had. They never tired of hearing how he caught the big one – was it gurnard that got him, Mr Swee? Parlour pot or inkwell? Where d’ee say ’ee had him, near which of the rocks? Show us again how he was caught, how he was twisted round the pot and which was the claw he had hisself with, Mr Swee?

Then all at once, the catches stopped. During the middle two weeks of April, while others were reporting good hauls, Jack pulled nothing but empty pots. He set the strings at different angles. He replaced the wrasse with gurnard and then the gurnard with mackerel. He tried a piece of shark but it made no difference.

One morning Croyden Treneer came into Bethesda. Jack was sitting on the steps with his knots and Croyden came over and leaned against the wall beside him. He lit a cigarette. ‘You been having trouble with your pots.’

It was a statement, not a question. Jack waited for the ‘I told you so.’ But instead Croyden pushed up his sand-coloured beret, scratched his forehead and said: ‘Perhaps ’ee’d let me take a look.’

‘I’m going out tomorrow –;’

Croyden shook his head. ‘Tonight. Meet me on the Town Quay ten this evening.’

CHAPTER 3

The moon rose plum-red behind Pendhu Point. The tides were working up to springs. Jack and Croyden rowed round to the darkness of Hemlock Cove and beached the boat. They climbed over the rocks until the shapes of the Main Cages appeared against the moon-bright sea. A light wind blew from the west. They sat down to wait.

It was two hours before they heard the sound of paddles. A small boat appeared underneath the point and headed out to the rocks. They could see the silhouettes of two men on board. The boat worked Jack’s pots and replaced them. The men had passed beneath them, had gone round the point before Croyden hissed: ‘Bloody Pig. Might a’ guessed it’d be the Garretts.’

Jimmy Garrett and Tacker Garrett were two brothers who lived together in a room above the East Quay. They kept apart from the rest of the town. To visitors they were well-known characters as in summer they ran the pleasure steamer, the Polmayne Queen. Tacker was the younger and many in the town thought him simple. Visitors never noticed because he was so adept on the Polmayne Queen and because he had a singing voice to break hearts. On summer evenings, returning home from Porth or St Mawes or Mevagissey, Tacker would stand in the stern and sing ‘The Streams of Lovely Nancy’ or ‘The Cushion Dance’ or ‘Three Sisters’ and bring tears to the eyes of grown men – but without his brother Jimmy, he was lost.

Jimmy was taciturn, bull-necked and bald-headed. He rarely came out of the Queen’s wheelhouse. He wore a constant frown as he was always calculating – tides and times and winds, or fuel costs and fares.

The Garretts had arrived in Polmayne as teenagers, without family or connections, and in the early days before the war Jimmy supported the two of them in a number of ways. One way was to go to wrestling matches in Truro or Bodmin where he invariably picked up the £5 prize. There was something rough and untamed about Jimmy but in those days he was more mischief than malice. One summer he took to wearing a pig’s trotter around his neck, and he knew that all he had to do was to open his shirt and people would back away from him. That was how he became known as ‘Pig’ Garrett. Others, who saw none of that, remembered a certain gentle charm and the endearing way he looked after his younger brother.

Jimmy went to war in 1915 and the following summer was reported Missing in Action. Tacker was found half-starved in their room beside the Fountain Inn and Mrs Kliskey took him on to help in Dormullion’s gardens. Three months later Jimmy returned from the dead. He had been wounded in the thigh and lain for thirty-six hours in no-man’s land. When he limped off the bus in Polmayne he went straight to see his fiancée Rose Shaw. Her mother told him she was in Penzance. Three days later he received a letter from her: ‘Dear Jim, You was missing a month so I married another. Rose.’

Those who had known Jimmy before the war said he came back a changed man. He was bitter, and more withdrawn than ever. Before, he had never fought in anger but now he got into scrapes and when he broke the arm of a Camborne man in the Fountain Inn, he was convicted of assault.

‘Tell me why’ – he said quietly from the dock – ‘I fight for King and country for a year and get a wound for thanks but when I fight for myself for a couple of minutes I get fined?’

Jimmy gradually ceased to have any real contact with anyone but his brother.

Instead he worked. In the post-war collapse in fishing he bought a crabber, converted it to a petrol engine and sold it when the market picked up again. From then on he became an inveterate boat-dealer, a habit he preferred to keep secret by indulging it in other towns. He was spectacularly mean. By 1926, he had amassed a sizeable cushion of money but because he still lived with Tacker in one room, and because he continued to go long-lining and crabbing, and put out nets and haggle up the jouster to the brink of anger, it was assumed he relied on his catch to live, just like everyone else.

Then on the last day of March 1931, a forty-five-foot converted steamer named Queen of the Dart pulled in through the Gaps. From the bows of the boat Tacker leapt onto the Town Quay and secured her fore and aft.

‘Where’d ’ee steal that to, Tack?’ called Tommy Treneer from the Bench.

‘The future’s in pleasure craft!’ said Tacker, parroting the words of his brother.

‘Nonsense. Even Pig knows visitors have no money now’ days.’

But day-trips on the Queen of the Dart – renamed the Polmayne Queen – proved popular. It was the winters that were long for the Garretts. Rumours that they pulled others’ pots had been circulating for some time but until Croyden and Jack saw them that night, no one was quite sure.

When Jack Sweeney drew his pots the following day he did not replace the gurnard baits. Instead he stuck pigs’ trotters onto the stakes of the first two pots. He left the pots out for two days then reverted to gurnard. Within a week he was beginning to catch again, and his catches were good and he said to himself for the first time: perhaps this way of life really is possible.

Towards the end of April he received a letter from his solicitors in Bridport. The final lot of the farm had been sold, but a sum of remained outstand £236.35.6d remained outstanding. So that was it. He didn’t have that sort of money, nor could he earn it pulling a few strings of crab pots. Only when he read the letter a third time did he realise that the money was not owed by him but to him.

Two days later he started to look into the possibility of buying a bigger boat.

‘What?’

Maggie Treneer was lying in bed. Her two-week-old daughter lay beside her. Croyden was standing in the doorway and he was telling her that Jack Sweeney was buying a boat and was offering him a crew’s share. He was going with him, he was going back to sea.

Maggie looked at him not with anger but with a calm hatred. ‘What makes you think you can do any better this time?’

Croyden was holding his beret, toying with it.

‘What’s happened to you, Croyden?’

He shrugged and looked away. ‘Nothing.’

‘You yourself said this man Sweeney knows nothing of fishing.’

Croyden looked at her again and said, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘He’s lucky.’

First they went to Mevagissey. They found an old friend of Croyden’s called Sydney Bunt who offered them a black-hulled tosher that was much too small for their purposes. ‘There’s plenty more selling,’ he pointed along the harbour. ‘Try the Howard.’ But the Howard was in very poor condition.

Two days later Jack and Croyden took the train down to St Erth and from St Erth to St Ives where they saw a suitable-looking driver going for a good price. The man selling leaned back against the bulwarks and watched them as they inspected his boat. ‘From Polmayne, is ’ee? You’d know the man I bought her from. Jimmy Garrett?’

They thanked him and left and went to see a very talkative man named Edgar Pearce who owned a lugger named the New Delight. They looked at her closely and afterwards they stood on the sand and Croyden said: ‘Seems sound enough.’

Edgar Pearce shook his head. ‘She might look all right to you, but she’s no good.’

In her early days, he explained, she had been worked with a full lug-sail and a mizzen but in 1910 they’d put a steam engine in her and of course that meant drilling a hole there, out through the stern for the propeller but not central, on account of the deadwood bolts, and then so that the propeller spun free the rudder had to have a bit of a cut in her and then the stern-tube forced the crew’s quarters up for’ard and that meant the mainmast had to be restepped and that made the hold hard to get at, and then he’d put in a petrol-paraffin engine, and there was a knock she’d had the previous summer –

‘Wait,’ interrupted Jack. ‘Why are you telling us all this? Don’t you want to sell?’

He looked at them sheepishly. ‘Don’t believe I do.’

In Mousehole they met an elderly man with a Mount’s Bay driver that had been in his family thirty years (too big). In Porthleven the boat they came to see had just been bought by a Helston doctor as a pleasure ‘steamer’. In Falmouth, they looked at a drifter that was going cheap because she had been in a collision and ‘her handling’d gone strange’.

In the end they found the Maria V back in Mevagissey where they’d first looked. She was a high-bowed, thirty-seven-foot drifter with tabernacled mainmast and a mizzen astern. She’d been built in 1925 by Dick Pill of Gorran Haven and had been fitted more recently with a Kelvin engine. Maria V herself was Maria Varcoe, who had left the money to her great-nephew, the Gorran man who had originally commissioned the boat.

Beneath a sky of grey-brown cloud, Jack and Croyden motored the Maria V back around Pendhu Point and into the bay. Then came a week of strong northerlies and the Maria V remained on her moorings, tugging at the chain.

On 6 May the last of the winds blew itself out, the seas settled and the Cox of the old lifeboat died. Samuel Tyler was eighty-three and he died in his bed. He had been Cox in 1891 when the Adelaide struck the Main Cages. The following year he lost three fingers fishing and handed over the command to Tommy Treneer. In his years as lifeboatman Samuel Tyler had helped save a total of 233 lives.

At eleven o’clock that Saturday the cortège gathered at the lifeboat station. The RNLI flag flew at half-mast. The same flag lay wrapped around the coffin, its insignia uppermost. Tyler’s cork lifejacket and a yellow sou’wester rested on top.

The procession was led by two black cobs and Ivor Dawkins of Crowdy Farm. He wore a khaki coat and Wellington boots and carried a switch of hazel. Dawkins did not share the town’s reverence for the sea, nor did he have much time for those who risked their lives upon it. He was keen to get his horses back to work and was leading the cortège at something rather quicker than a funereal pace.

Funerals were as popular in Polmayne as lifeboat Coxswains, and almost the whole town turned out to line the route. Jack Sweeney stood with Mrs Cuffe outside Bethesda. Whaler leaned on his stick, staring over the procession to the glow of sun above the bay. On the Town Quay they set down the coffin and for the first of several times sang ‘Crossing the Bar’:

Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me;

And let there be no moaning at the bar

when I put out to sea …

Beside the coffin stood the six pall-bearers in their red dress-hats: the current Cox, Edwin Tyler; his lineman, Dee Walsh; Red and Joseph Stephens; and Croyden and Charlie Treneer.

In front of them all, struggling to keep up with the coffin as it left the quay, was Tommy Treneer. He was hunched and shuffling. His black jacket was too large for him. But the others dropped back to give him space. From his lapel dangled, one above the other, three RNLI service medals. He was now Polmayne’s senior retired Cox.

CHAPTER 4

The following week the town gathered together again, this time for the Jubilee of King George V. On a breezy afternoon, they made their way to the recreation ground. At one end of the field was a low stage, topped by bunting and flanked by a pair of poles. On each of the poles was a trumpet-shaped speaker through which a Broadcasting Apparatus, loaned by Mr Bradley, relayed a crackling version of the ceremony in London.

Major Franks stood on the stage and began by addressing the town’s children. ‘My dear little friends! You have more opportunities for enjoying yourselves than any generation before you. You are living in a wonderful age, you must always endeavour to make the most of this privilege …’

That afternoon’s endeavour was sports. Not a child over two was denied the joys of competition. Each one was placed on the starting line and instructed to run, skip or hop towards a flickering white tape. They were given eggs and spoons and sacks. They had their knees tied together for three-legged races, were upended for wheelbarrow races. They were arranged into relay teams and given a stick. There were chariot races, sprints, sixty-yard slow cycling and a snake race.

All afternoon the cheers rose from the recreation ground. Spirits were high. It was that brief moment between the beginning of fine weather and the coming of the visitors.

Mrs Kliskey of Dormullion was there in her bath chair to hand out the prizes. Two spaniels sat at her feet, their collars wrapped in red, white and blue ribbon. Jack had brought Whaler Cuffe. At three o’clock various people assembled on the stage and the elderly Reverend Winchester was helped to his feet by Mrs Winchester.

‘What’s happening now, Jack?’ asked Whaler.

‘Speech,’ he whispered.

‘Good! Who is it?’ Whaler enjoyed speeches.

‘Winchester.’

‘Oh.’

‘On this auspicious day,’ mumbled Winchester, ‘we thank God for our King’s service to the Empire. We ourselves should never be ashamed of being his servants. For service never degrades. All honest, useful work is a means of glorifying God –’

‘Piff!’ grunted Whaler.

‘Time was when artisans were proud to hang the implements of their craft on the walls of cathedrals. Some foolish people used to be ashamed of certain kinds of manual work, but to the true Christian, work brings dignity –’

‘What does he know of work?’ hissed Whaler. A murmur of conversation began to rise from the crowd.

‘Our King is a devout man who recognises full well his dependence on God. He has been an example of reverent and unaffected devotion. There is in him nor in his Queen no cant or hypocrisy, which is an enemy to the cause of true religion. Loyalty is an easy thing when such a king is on the throne and when

The Reverend Winchester turned the page. But it was the wrong one. He turned the next page, and the next. Major Franks took the chance to nod to Mr Bradley and once again Polmayne’s celebrations were bolstered by sounds from London’s streets. Already the crowd was moving away from the stage to a row of trestle tables where several tea-urns had been set up by the ladies of the Jubilee Committee. The Reverend Winchester looked confused. Mrs Winchester took his arm and said: ‘Come along, dear. Tea.’

The following day, the Garrett brothers brought the freshly-painted Polmayne Queen into Polmayne’s inner harbour. Her funnel was painted custard yellow, her topsides strawberry red, and like a stick of angelica a cove-line of green ran along her side. On the Bench they said, ‘Looks more like a bloody fairground ride ’n a boat.’

At Penpraze’s yard they were preparing the Petrels. One by one they brought the pencil-thin yachts into the shed. Their canvas covers were peeled back to reveal the honey-coloured varnish of their combing, their gently raked decks, the immaculate curves of their hulls. A team of three men rubbed down the topsides and filled every tiny blemish. Then they closed the big shed doors, damped down the dusty floor and in absolute silence applied coat after coat of gloss paint until it shone like enamel.

On the third Saturday in May the first visitors arrived. Whaler took his chiming clock and cane and crossed the yard to his lean-to. Mrs Cuffe and the other landladies gathered outside the Antalya Hotel to wait for the arrival of their paying guests. Shortly after four, the rumble of an engine came from the direction of Pritchard’s Beach and Harris’s Station Bus rolled to a halt. Soon two dozen people were spilling from it, stretching their shoulders in the sun, collecting their bags and turning their faces to the south for the first real smell of the sea.

It was shortly before dawn, mid-May. Croyden Treneer leaned on the Maria V’s gunwale, watching the dan buoy. Charlie Treneer, his younger brother, was holding a T-hook aft of him. Bran Johns was between them. Jack Sweeney was half in and half out of the wheelhouse. The fishing lights were strung above the deck. Pushing up his beret, Croyden scratched his forehead and nodded to Jack: ‘Knock her in!’

The bows edged forward. Croyden leaned over to make a grab for the buoy. Pulling it aboard, they flicked on the motor jenny and started to haul the line. Fishing aboard the Maria V had begun.

In the first week they caught over a thousand stone of fish – ray, ling, conger and skate. They threw back a good deal of small conger but in all they grossed £146. For the next three weeks they fished ground to the south of the Lizard. The bait was patchy at times, and in late May they lost almost a week to the weather, but when they did go out they never came back with less than a couple of hundred stone.

Jack himself settled into the rhythm of long-lining – the chug of the Kelvin as they headed south to the grounds, the softer note as they paid out the line, the netting, the hauling, the baiting, the relentless wear on gear and boat. He was constantly tired. He woke tired, rowed tired to the Maria V, motored out of the bay tired, felt morning drag him from the night’s swamp still dripping with fatigue and drop him back there before they were home. When the weather came in the Maria V stayed on her moorings and Jack filled the time splicing spare warps, making monkeys’ fists, doing odd jobs on board. He learned that if there was anything more tiring than fishing, it was idleness.

But the catches when they did go out were good. Croyden directed the fishing, decided where to go and when. Bran and Charlie followed their given roles and, so long as the fish were there, all was well on board the Maria V.

Regular summer visitors to Polmayne spent their first day or so checking the town for damage – as though they themselves had lent it out for the winter. In May of 1935 they saw the newly-occupied properties of the Crates; they counted the five new villas above the church, the group of half-built bungalows above the Antalya Hotel. They recorded the gap left by various toppled trees and the thatch replaced by slate on the roof of Major Franks’s harbourside house. ‘It’ll be ruined!’ they said that May as every May. ‘They’ll wreck the town.’ (The mysterious trenches that had appeared did not worry them as they were told that these were for ‘something ornamental’, probably beds of Jubilee flowers.)

But after a few days the visitors tended to forget all about the changes and settle instead into the indolence that arose from the far greater number of things that had not changed: the granite curve of the twin quays, the smell of escallonia in the mid-morning sun and the swish of evening waves on the pebbles of Pritchard’s Beach.

The trenches, it turned out, were not for flowers. On the last day of the month, a public meeting was convened in the Freeman Reading Rooms. A Mr Perkins was going to explain all about the wonders of electricity. For years there had been generators in Polmayne – Dormullion had one, so did Pendhu Lodge and the Reading Rooms – but now mains electricity was coming, and for many it was not a moment too soon. Not that the electric itself held much attraction; it was just that in Porth the cables were already laid, and no one in Polmayne could accept that Porth might get it first.

There were those however who saw only ill in the invention: ‘I’ll not have that damned spark in my house. Supposing he spills out night-time and burns ’ee?’

Whaler Cuffe asked Jack to get him to the meeting good and early. They were the first to arrive. Whaler unbuttoned his coat and told Jack a story about a holy man he’d met in China who had shown him a perpetual candle made from the tallow of a pregnant yak.

Major Franks and Mrs Franks arrived and sat in the front row. They were joined by Mrs Kliskey, Dr and Mrs White and the Winchesters. Before them was a table covered in green baize and behind it Mr Perkins.

Mr Perkins was from Redruth. He had a well-clipped moustache and a heavy green suit of Harris tweed. On the table before him were a lightbulb, two smoked-glass lampshades (orange and brown), a plug and a length of flex.

Major Franks checked his watch and signalled to Mr Perkins to start. Rising to his feet, Mr Perkins pushed each object on the table forward an inch, and looked up.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you all for coming out on such an evening to hear what I hope will be an – er – illuminating experience.’ Sunlight seeped in behind the curtains of the hall. Mr Perkins was used to making his speech in the winter.

‘I have here before me a number of objects with which many of you will be familiar. Others may look at them and say to themselves: “My goodness me, what manner of device have we here then?” But I can assure you that in years to come these articles will become as indispensable to you and your daily life as the very roof over your heads.

‘And I am offering them to you now free of charge. They are free to all those who decide to welcome the miracle of mains electricity into their homes.’ Mr Perkins gripped one of his lapels. He fixed his gaze on the rafters two-thirds of the way down the room.

‘A great tide is sweeping the county, ladies and gentlemen – a tide which now laps at the fringes of Polmayne. We who live at this time should count ourselves lucky to witness such glad improvements.’

‘Hear, hear,’ whispered Whaler.

‘I myself have no doubt that when history looks back at our century it will be amazed. It will say to itself: how did they manage to live then? It will look to the moment when life for all classes was immeasurably improved by this’ – he held up the length of flex – ‘the advent of electric current.’

Tentative applause spread back from the front row. The Reverend Winchester stood and pulled out the unused section of his Jubilee speech.

‘Light, ladies and gentlemen, is symbolical of knowledge and guidance and hope. As we survey the years to 1910 we thank God for –’

Major Franks stood and started clapping. ‘I’m sure you’ll agree that Mr Perkins has made a most convincing case for electric current. If you’d like to come up, I believe Mr Perkins will be happy to answer your questions.’

Mr Winchester sat down.

One or two people stepped up and looked at the props on the table. They asked Mr Perkins: ‘How’s it made?’ and ‘What’s it look like?’ Jack signed up for Bethesda and on Whaler’s instructions collected a brown shade.

Later that evening, with the careful placing of several slates, Dee Walsh managed to divert the stream below the holy well. The water crossed the road and poured into the cable trench in Chapel Street. He kicked over the hazard fences, threw in some rocks and pissed over the whole lot. He had nothing against electricity. But the trenches were being dug by Truro men and if there were trenches to be dug in Polmayne it should be Polmayne men that dug them. It put the work back by a few days and the corporation agreed to recruit a number of local men for the job. Walsh was not among them.

CHAPTER 5

One evening in early June a giant anvil of white cloud rose into the sky beyond Pendhu Point. The light sharpened. Every grass-tussock glowed on the headland. In each of the town’s barometers, the mercury dipped, then dipped further.

The next day dawned muddy yellow. The wind blew hard from the south-west and shafts of sunlight broke low out of the running clouds. The sea was very disturbed. Two warning cones were hoisted on the East Quay and in the inner harbour the punts twisted and tugged at their warps. No boats went out.

Throughout the morning the wind freshened. Shreds of thatch were torn from the roofs and spiralled up into the gloom. Along the front, one or two figures passed each other in silence, bent against the wind, clutching their collars together. No one was sitting on the Bench, but Toper Walsh was on the Town Quay, telling whoever was around that the weather had ‘gone a bit dirty’.

At two o’clock Croyden Treneer opened Jack’s door and called up the stairs: ‘Mizzen’s loose, Jack!’

Jack cursed. He pulled on his coat and his boots and ran out along the Town Quay. Even Toper had now gone home. Shielding his eyes, he looked across to the Maria V and could see the boom swinging back and forth in the gale. Dammit! It was only a matter of time before it did some damage.

The wind was on his beam as he rowed and he had to follow a long arc out across the bay. He reached the boat and secured the boom. The timber was scarred and the lacing at one point had worn through. He made it all fast and checked the halyards and the stays and the bolt on the wheelhouse door and went up in the bows to look at the mooring.

It was now blowing very hard. The water ahead was streaked with spume. The mooring buoy was jerking at the chain, but secure. From the slopes ashore came the roaring of the wind in the pines. He stood blinking into the rain, then turned his back to it and looked astern. He felt safe with the force of the weather and everything stowed and fastened and his boat braced against the gale. The gusts howled in the rigging. It was difficult now to look into the wind. He would not attempt to row back to the quays. He would drop down on the wind and leave his boat in the quiet of the river.

As he pulled in his punt, he became aware of two figures on the rocks several hundred yards downwind. They were a man and a woman. The man was wearing a big double-breasted jacket and carrying a small box on a string. With his other hand he was waving his hat. They were both soaked.

Jack rowed down to them and they climbed aboard. ‘Thank God!’ The man had to shout over the noise of the wind. ‘No ferry! Thought we’d be spending the night there!’

The woman was wearing a sky-blue headscarf. Her hair kept spilling from it and eventually she gave up, pulling off the scarf. ‘I don’t know – how does it blow so quickly?’ The rain ran down her cheeks and dripped from her chin. But she was laughing.

Three, four, five … Tommy Treneer was sitting in Cooper’s Yard. He had been sitting there for half a day now and he was counting the rows of cobbles between him and the rising water. That one stopped seven short of his feet and pulled back. Through the arch he could see the inner harbour and each wave coming through the Gaps and spreading out inside and up onto the road. There was still more than an hour until high water.

The first of the boats had long since risen into view and he had been watching the rogue seas among them. He knew the yard would flood because it was just three days since new moon and now this south-westerly would drive the spring tides in even higher. Knowing the yard was going to flood gave Tommy a satisfaction of sorts when it did, when he looked through the arch and saw the first waves rise and flop their water onto the road.

The others had all left. The cottages around Cooper’s Yard were empty. It was now some days since the Stephenses and Mrs Moyle and the other Treneers had gone ‘up the Crates’. For weeks before they had been packing up, but Tommy would have no part of it. He spent the time on Parliament Bench, or wandering the town, or in the lifeboat station. Sometimes he sat on his stool outside the cottage and showed a contemptuous indifference to all the activity around him. ‘Sorry about Tom,’ Mrs Treneer apologised for him. ‘Just he’s gone back-along.’

She herself spent those days going through the cottage room by room, packing the trunk with the clothes she no longer wore, the lace and embroidery she had been given for her trousseau, her Bible wrapped in untouched silk and her well-used copy of Old Moore’s Almanack. She took down the framed picture in their bedroom of Moses viewing the Promised Land. Croyden and Charlie came to collect the bed, the wardrobe and the boxes and they too took no notice of their father as he sat and scowled in the yard.

Mrs Treneer had now been a week at the Crates and she liked it. She liked the flat’s new smell and the blood-red linoleum floors and the sunlight it received for most of the day. She tried to convince Tommy to join her. ‘It’s lovely up there, Tom. We got a tap.’

‘I’d sooner die here,’ he told her.

Now they had all gone and he sat on his stool in the gale. Dusk had come early. He did not look at the empty buildings above him; he ignored their lampless windows. He saw only the grey-black shape of the water that formed a channel beneath the arch. He looked beyond it to the flooded road and out into the inner harbour and through the Gaps to the open sea. All his life he had been gazing at the sea and now it was here and he was alone with it. It had reached his boots and crept in under the door behind. The yard was submerged. He sat there muttering and scratching his forearm and scowling and still there was another half-hour until high water.

In the morning, small clouds drifted in the pale blue sky. The sun sparkled on the water. A barnacled bottle crate, stamped with ‘ST AUSTELL BREWERY’ and containing the snapped-off leg of a china doll was jammed in under the steps of Eliza Tucker’s general store. In the churchyard the roots of an old Monterey pine had prised open a newly-dug grave as it fell. The Reverend Winchester stood over it, horrified.

The good news was that a large section of sea-wall had collapsed beyond Pritchard’s Beach and it would keep four men busy for at least a month.

In Cooper’s Yard a thin layer of sediment lay over the cobbles. Pools of water remained on the slate flags inside; a brown line three inches up the wall marked the height of the flood. There was the soft smell of sewage.

Croyden found his father in the old kitchen. He was sitting on his stool, scratching his forearm. He looked up at Croyden with watery eyes. He stood slowly, and without a word brushed past his son and made his way up the hill to the Crates.

‘Maria Five!’

Jack and Croyden were bringing the Maria V in through the Gaps, and on the end of the East Quay Jack recognised the man he had rescued from the rocks. He was waving.

‘Ahoy there! Maria Five!’

Beside him was the woman in the sky-blue headscarf. Jack nudged the boat in against the quay wall, and as Croyden took a line ashore the man came up and thrust his hand over the gunwale towards Jack.

‘Abraham,’ he said. ‘Maurice Abraham. And my wife, Anna.’ He looked up and down the boat’s length. ‘Look, Mr er –’

‘Jack Sweeney.’

‘Mr Sweeney. I was wondering, could you take me out next time you go? I wouldn’t get in your way – just need a corner to sketch. I’m an artist, you see.’

Jack told him to be there tomorrow morning at five-thirty.

Croyden watched them both go, merging back into the quayside crowd. He shook his head. ‘Damn boxies.’

CHAPTER 6

Above Penpraze’s yard and above the withy beds, the Glaze River narrowed and there was the old crossing-point for the ferry. In years gone by, the ferry allowed smallholders to get over the river and take the twice-weekly boat to Truro market from Polmayne’s quays. Porth’s sea-captains, en route to ships in Falmouth, also relied on it. Until some years before 1914 a man named Crimea Trestain ran the ferry in a boat which, every Easter, he lovingly upturned on the shingle bar outside his cottage and painted pale pink.

‘Colour ’a maid’s ass,’ he explained. ‘Room aboard for eight men, six women, three sows – or a parson.’

No one knew how old Crimea was. It was not clear whether he’d been born on the day the Crimean War broke out or the day it ended, or some other day entirely. Nor in the end could anyone remember whether it was him that gave out first or the boat, but by the Great War a new ferry – much less regular – had replaced it downstream. Crimea and Mrs Trestain disappeared up ‘Bodmin way’, the boat was laid up in Gooth Creek and the lease of Ferryman’s Cottage was bought by an artist from London. The artist was Preston Connors.

Through Connors, the town of Polmayne and Ferryman’s Cottage began to acquire a certain status among painters and writers in London. A new strain of incomers sought out lodgings there. They spent their days perched on clifftops or sauntering thoughtfully through the creekside woods. In the evenings they crammed into the main room of Ferryman’s Cottage or gathered on the shingle beach outside. They had al fresco meals and made impromptu music. They talked. All were stirred by the remoteness of the place, and by the immanent beauty of the river and the woods above it. After his first stay in Polmayne the watercolourist Russell Flower wrote to his host: ‘You have found a wonderful place, dear Connors. The mystical buttress of Pendhu Point opens up mineshafts of perception in man …’

It was at about this time that the first of Polmayne’s net lofts was converted to an artist’s studio. The people of Polmayne became used to coming across semi-circles of easels on the quays or around the holy well. The painters became known as ‘boxies’ for the wooden cases they carried. In the summers before the war, many of the town’s young men, including Croyden Treneer and his brother Charlie, learned that they could earn sixpence for stripping off and cavorting in the coves around Pendhu while L.J. Price – in velveteen coat, hobnailed boots and cravat – sat on the rocks and painted them.

After the war, Preston Connors and Mrs Connors, now in their late fifties, moved up to Wicca House. The cottage continued as a haunt for artists. Throughout the twenties, an ever more colourful group beat a path to it. The sculptor Denton Sykes rode up the river at low tide on his Royal Enfield. Edeth St John, the surrealist painter and mystic poet, spent a winter in Ferryman’s, composing her haunting book The Dances of Still Things. In the Introduction she wrote: ‘Sometimes I listen to the wood-spirits sing above the Glaze River, and sometimes I listen to them weep …’

It was in a loft near Cooper’s Yard that the Russian émigré Nikolai Bukovsky experimented with his famous mathematical paintings, where he wrote The Furious Manifesto, and where, one morning in 1929, he was found hanging from a beam.

Bukovsky’s suicide cast a shadow over Polmayne’s small colony of artists although in truth, by the summer of 1930, the group had already begun to dissipate. The art market had collapsed. Some went to St Ives or Lamorna, others returned to London, a few went abroad. Preston Connors entered the first stages of senility.

In June 1934, Maurice Abraham made a pilgrimage to Ferryman’s with his wife Anna. Distressed to see the cottage abandoned, he applied to the Connorses for the lease.

At that time, Maurice Abraham was an accomplished if not particularly innovative painter. For all the precision of the portraits, the evocative power of the Scottish canvases and the moodiness of the seascapes, his work had always been overshadowed by his own physical beauty. The sculptor Brenda Fielding said: ‘One would rather wish that Maurice was a statue so as to be able to stare at him at length without having to talk to him.’

Photographs show his girlish beauty. His two or three self-portraits do not, but reveal instead an oddly blank expression.

Maurice and Anna Abraham lived in a four-storey house in Hampstead inherited from Maurice’s father. In June of 1934 they closed it up and came to Polmayne for several months. They had the roof re-thatched. They pulled off the ivy and re-rendered the walls. They replaced the rotting stairs. Preston Connors, who understood less and less of the world around him, applauded their efforts. ‘Fine place for partridges, Ferryman’s …’

In May 1935, having spent several months of the winter in South America, Maurice came back to Polmayne with Anna. They planned to spend the summer there. As the weeks passed Maurice found himself transported by the atmosphere at Ferryman’s – not so much by the river or the woods but by the great names who had preceded him – Sykes, Bukovsky, Connors, St John.

‘Here in the darkness,’ he wrote to the poet Max Stein in Germany, ‘one feels the echo of a thousand unspoken conversations, the presence of a thousand unworked canvases, and the whisper of a thousand yet-to-be-written poems.’

‘Marvellous light!’

Maurice Abraham took a deep breath of morning air. He was wearing his double-breasted jacket and a floppy trilby that shadowed his face. He was standing in the wheelhouse of the Maria V with Jack. As they motored out of the bay, he lit a pipe and began to talk.

What had occupied him over the last couple of years, he explained, was ‘man and work’. ‘In our machine age, work has become more and more mercenary, something done for money rather than something that is fulfilling in itself. Work should be a noble thing, Jack. Instead we see it as a chore. Mind if I call you Jack?’

Jack shook his head. He was thinking about the tides. Springs had eased a little but were still strong. If they didn’t reach the grounds within two hours, the ebb would make fishing impossible. They should have left earlier. He opened the throttle to full.

Maurice sucked on his pipe and raised his voice. ‘This winter I spent some time hopping up the Amazon, place to place, painting. The further up the river I went the more of a stranger I was. But you know what struck me most of all?’

Jack leaned out of the wheelhouse and called out to Croyden, ‘We’re going to be pushed!’ Croyden and Bran hauled out two maunds and hurriedly finished the baiting up.

‘It was this. The difference between those who hunted and those who had abandoned hunting for agriculture. Something was lost, Jack. Hard to put your finger on what. That’s why this is so interesting.’

‘What?’

‘This!’ Maurice gestured out to the deck with his pipe. ‘You fishermen are neither cultivators nor pastoralists. You do not control the stock you depend on. Essentially you are hunter-gatherers – perhaps the last in all Europe to make a living like this. Do you see?’

They were coming round under Pendhu. ‘Well …’ Jack was only half-listening. He was watching the open sea as it came into view. On the horizon he could see a line of low serrations; it was going to be lumpy. He picked a course of 170 and the boat began to pitch in a long swell.

Maurice dipped a match in his pipe and puffed on it twice. ‘Mind if I start?’

Outside he began to sketch Croyden and Bran as they slipped the pilchard fillets over each hook. He worked with great application for a few minutes, alternating pipe and pencil in a well-practised rhythm. He swayed a little with the motion of the boat, but lodged in under the bulwarks it did not affect his drawing. Then he put away the pipe. Ten minutes later he put aside his pencil and looked at the pad. Then he put aside the pad, stepped over to the side, and vomited. Croyden glanced at him, finished baiting up and joined Jack in the wheelhouse. Within a few minutes Maurice appeared at the door.

‘Take me back …’ Maurice groaned.

Croyden shook his head.

‘I’ll pay. How much do you want?’

They were passing the Main Cages and Croyden pointed to the lee of Maenmor. The rock shielded the sun and despite the swell outside, the sea was quiet in there. Slowly, Maurice realised what was happening. ‘You can’t – you can’t put me there.’

Croyden leaned close to him and said, ‘We’re not losing a day’s fishing on account of you, Mister. We put you ashore here or you carry on aboard. Up to you.’

Maurice looked up at the hulk of the rock.

Croyden stood by the gunwale. ‘Hurry! We got work to do.’

They reached the grounds in time and the fishing was good. When the Maria V returned to the Main Cages that afternoon, Maurice climbed back on board in silence. In Polmayne he mumbled his thanks to Jack and hurried off along the East Quay without a backwards glance.

On Saturday afternoon, Jack returned home from fishing to find a note pushed under his door:

Beach Supper – Ferryman’s Cottage 7 p.m. – do come!

Maurice and Anna Abraham.

He rowed there. After a day of broken cloud, the sky had cleared and left the bay wrapped in silky evening light. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Jack passed the Maria V, motionless at her mooring. He passed the other working boats and the three rotting schooners in the mud, and the Petrels near Green’s Rock with the sunlight flickering on their glassy sides. Beyond Penpraze’s yard the river curved inland and there were no more boats. Nothing but the boughs of scrub oak brushing the top of the tide. He heard the cry of a curlew and he leaned on the paddles and let the boat drift on in silence. He gazed at the woods and their reflection in the water and felt the last of the sun on his back. Then he caught the faint smell of woodsmoke and the sound of voices. He dipped his paddles again and rowed on around the corner.

As soon as he arrived at Ferryman’s Cottage, Jack wished he had not come. About a dozen people were sitting outside. He let the boat slide in to the beach and he climbed out and hauled it up. One of the men was standing, telling a story in a succession of different voices. ‘In the back was a darkened room and he told them …’

Maurice saw Jack and came over. In a hushed voice he explained who everyone was. The story-teller was the ‘poet and distinguished Communist’ Max Stein. There were several painters from London, St Ives, Lamorna. Jack recognised Preston and Dorothy Connors. There was a sculptress called Peter, a ‘radical’, an ‘anarchist’ and several others. Everyone had an epithet. Everyone was listening to Max Stein: ‘… and he says – there’s only two of us but the woman’s for free!’

Laughter rang out around the creek.

Max spotted Jack. ‘Ah, Maurice – your fisherman!’ He came over and looked Jack up and down. ‘Are you un vrai pecheur?’

‘Hardly …’ muttered Jack.

‘Know how to tell a true fisherman?’ Max turned to the others.

‘You ask him,’ said the woman called Peter.

‘He catches fish,’ said the anarchist.

‘The smell!’ Max made a show of sniffing Jack’s shoulder. ‘Sea-salt … damp … soap …’

Anna Abraham came out of the cottage, wiping her hands on her apron. Her sky-blue scarf was tied peasant-style behind her neck. She said quietly to Jack: ‘Please – I need your help.’ She had a crisp, rounded accent: Icelandic, according to Mrs Moyle, whose late husband had spent five years fishing up there and had come back speaking exactly like Mrs Abraham.

He followed her inside. On the slate floor of the kitchen were four hen crabs. One of them was slowly snapping a paintbrush in its claw. Anna lunged for it but it scuttled away. Jack removed the brush himself. He captured each of the crabs and put them in a large bucket. Anna Abraham boiled water on the range and Jack dropped the crabs in one by one. When the crabs were cooked Jack smashed the claws with a scale-weight. He showed Anna how to open the carapace and extract the good meat with her fingers.

‘What a strange fruit the crab is!’ Her hands were smeared with crab meat. ‘Maurice said he had a very interesting time fishing with you.’

‘He told you about the rock?’

‘What rock?’

Jack told her about Maurice’s day spent on Maenmor.

‘Poor Maurice!’ Anna was still laughing as they took the plates of dressed crab outside.

When Jack rowed back, it was nearly dark. A thin moon had risen over Pendhu and its light glittered and spread across the water. He rowed on into the middle of the bay, filled with an elation that he could not quite explain.

CHAPTER 7

The following afternoon Anna Abraham came to call on Jack. She brought him a bag of cherries. When he opened his door, she made a mock bow. ‘You must accept my thanks, Mr Sweeney – twice.’ And she made another little bow.

‘Twice?’

‘One – for explaining to me the crab. Two – for saving our lives in the storm.’

She was not wearing her headscarf. Without it, she looked different. The hem of a fawn raincoat reached down to the top of her Wellington boots and she said: ‘I am out for a walk. Will you come?’

So they walked along the front eating cherries. The sky was a deep blue and there was little wind. They followed the path to the end of the houses and up out of town. At the top of the hill they caught their breath and looked back over the roofs to Pendhu Point. The dark tops of the Main Cages were just visible beyond it, ruffed with white surf. In one corner of Dalvin’s field were the first of the visitors’ white tents. Anna said, ‘They look like mushrooms.’ At the lifeboat station, she stood on tiptoe to peer in at the boat and was amazed how ugly it was. ‘A bull in a barn!’

There was a small beach below the station. Anna pulled off her boots and paddled in the water. She splashed through the shallows and then they sat on the rocks and she laid her bare feet on the weed and looked at him askance. ‘You have bird’s feet, Mr Sweeney, here beside the eyes. We say that’s a happy sign.’

‘In Iceland?’

‘Iceland?’

‘You are from Iceland, Mrs Abraham?’

She laughed and shook her head. ‘I’m not even sure where Iceland is. I come from Russia!’ And she jumped down from the rocks and ran back to the water.

Two days later Jack rowed up the river to Ferryman’s Cottage. He had brought the Abrahams a turbot. Finding no one there, he wrote a note thanking them for supper. He put it on the table under the fish, then changed his mind: he rolled up the note and jammed it into the fish’s mouth.

One afternoon in late July a red, snub-nosed lorry drew up on the Town Quay and Jack and Croyden stepped away from the wall to meet it. On the side of the lorry was written ‘Hounsells of Bridport’ and in it were twenty brand-new pilchard nets.

Jack remembered Hounsells as a child. He remembered the treacly, creosote smell that came from it; he was told it was a factory for ‘fish-traps’ and always imagined a fish-trap as something like an underwater mousetrap, baited with tiny sacs of treacle.

Helping to unload the nets, fielding as he did so the half-respectful jibes from Parliament Bench about doing a ‘bit ’a shrimpin’’, he picked up pieces of Bridport news from the driver. His farm was now in the hands of a ‘fat Devon man’ who was selling off some of the woods. The driver did not know Jack’s great-aunt Bess but he did know Arthur Sweeney – Jack’s cousin – who had made himself very unpopular by cutting down two famous oak trees. Jack was more pleased than ever to be free of the land.

The Maria V was almost ready. It was time for Newlyn and the pilchards. The summer pilchards, said Croyden, that’s what makes or breaks the year. For him it was even more critical; if they failed, he would be forced back to the building sites. From the long-lining he had taken home almost enough to pay off last winter’s debts and Maggie grudgingly accepted that he should carry on. With the boat’s fifth share Jack had rented a net loft above the East Quay. Already it was filled with gear – some of his pots, a number of dan buoys, a pile of inflatable buffs, countless cork cobles and a couple of miles of warp for the head-rope.

He had also recruited a new crew member. Bran Johns had left to join his brother’s boat so they took on Toper Walsh’s son, Albert. Albert was a deft, wiry man in his forties. He was a whistler. He didn’t whistle on board because it was bad luck but Croyden did allow him to hum. He had an appealing half-smile and an elaborate cipher of nicknames. Because his hair had once stuck straight up like a brush he was called ‘Brush’ Walsh – but for some ‘Brush’ became ‘Deck-Brush’, and in time ‘Deck-Brush’ became ‘Deck’ and ‘Deck’ mutated to ‘Dee’ and then ‘Dee’ became ‘Double-dee’ and simply ‘Double’. Most had no idea why he was called Double as he was now completely bald.

In Newlyn, the fishing began well. In the first week they cleared nearly £50. At the end of it, Jack received a letter addressed to Captain Jack Sweeney, Maria Five, The Harbour, Newlyn and delivered by a boy from the post office. It was from Mrs Abraham.

Dear Mr Sweeney,

Thank you for the fish! I drew him quickly – then cooked him. Now I am sitting outside the cottage. It is very early in the morning and as quiet as Heaven. Maurice is asleep. He was up in St Ives and they had a big meeting of painters. They all get together for a meeting and speak nonsense to each other and they agree important things and then they go out and drink and talk more nonsense and disagree about everything. I stayed here. What is it like catching pilchards, I wonder? I think of you out on the sea with your nets and here I am sending some magic messages from Polmayne.

Anna Abraham

[She had drawn a picture of a line of birds flying over the horizon towards his boat; as they came closer the birds dived into the sea and became fish and were gathered up in his nets.]

Jack lay on his bunk in the mid-afternoon. It was very hot. He could feel the sun on the deck above. The boat creaked against its warps. They had landed thirteen thousand pilchards that morning and now they were tied up in the inner harbour and everyone was asleep. But Jack could not sleep. He was lying on his bunk with the letter in his hand and he was watching a patch of sunlight where it spilled through the hatch, sliding back and forth against the bulkhead. She’s being friendly, that’s all. She is married and she is being friendly. He tried to tell himself that is just how they are in Iceland or Russia but he did not try that hard because it was much more pleasant in the hot afternoon to lie on his bunk and think of her – and it was pleasant at night when the nets were out and they were waiting to haul, pleasant in the morning too when they were motoring in with a hold full of fish.

It was not until the following week that the pilchards stopped coming. Four nights in a row they drew black nets. The gains they had made began to slip away. When some of the St Ives boats announced they were cutting their losses and returning home, Double suggested doing the same.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ sighed Jack.

Croyden told him: ‘You leave now and you leave without me.’

Jack knew he could not continue fishing without Croyden. They agreed to give it another week. On the Sunday another half-gale set in from the south and they lost a further two days. The rafted boats in the inner harbour strained and knocked against each other, as did the crews. Croyden and Double came close to blows and Jack told Croyden to go and stay with his wife’s family in their tobacco store.

On Tuesday afternoon the wind began to ease. The next evening, in a brilliant blue and orange dusk, the entire fleet put to sea again. The Maria V headed west, and with a group of Mevagissey boats reached a place some three miles south of the Wolf Rock. It was a warm night. A light westerly breeze just filled the mizzen. The moon glowed behind a thin layer of cloud. Down to leeward, the other boats took up positions and on the Maria V they could hear the murmur of conversation and the single, united voice of a crew singing.

Double rubbed his hands. ‘They’re about tonight, Jack! I feel it in my bones.’

Croyden glared at him. ‘Shut up, Dee.’

They shot the first fifteen nets with ease. The seas had settled and the boat wallowed in the last of the swell. From the bows, the line of cobles stretched out into the darkness. Some way off, receding, was the light of the dan buoy. Double was humming as he paid out the leech. Croyden had his eyes on the head-rope. Every five fathoms he flicked at the line and a coble came swinging up out of the net room, over the gunwale and into the water.

‘Come on now, my darlings!’ cooed Double at the sea.

Jack leaned out of the wheelhouse. ‘All twenty?’ Croyden’s beret nodded as he worked and he fed out the line and the buoys. Below the surface the mile-long curtain of nets grew.

Croyden had reached the seventeenth buff when he suddenly paused and looked up. Double stopped his humming.

‘What is it?’ called Jack.

Croyden held up his hand. He was looking up to windward. ‘Quick – knock her in!’

Jack pushed the boat forward. Then he noticed it too, a faint oily smell on the breeze. As he eased the throttle, he became aware of a brook-like sound off the starboard bow. The nets spun out of Croyden’s hand, the cobles shot overboard. Jack turned on the fishing lights and watched. He could hear the shoal coming nearer. The fish were now very close, speeding towards them like a flash-flood. Then he saw them – the furring of the water, the swarming of fish at the surface. It was a vast shoal!

‘Best haul now,’ shouted Croyden. ‘We’ll leave the others.’

The first net came in thick with fish. They fell out and slid over the deck.

‘I told you they was here, Croy!’ shouted Double.

Even Croyden seemed excited. He was pulling in the head-rope two feet at a time. The first couple of nets were heavy. Fish spilled out of them and Croyden and Double shoved what they could down into the hold.

‘Yee-ee!’ yelled Double.

‘In now,’ muttered Croyden with each haul. ‘In ’ee come now …’

With the third net Croyden began to falter. Jack watched the head-rope tighten on the roller. He brought the bows over it – but it hardly slackened. Croyden braced himself and with Double beside him the net came aboard again. In places the fish were so thick it was hard to see the net at all.

The fourth net had turned over the head-rope as the fish drove into it and it was lighter. Another great mound of pilchards fell on the deck. Then the head-rope tightened again. Jack eased the boat forward. But it did not slacken on the roller. It did not budge at all.

‘Hold her!’ said Croyden. ‘Hold her now!’

Jack steadied the boat on the throttle. He watched Croyden and Double gripping the head-rope, frozen against its weight. The fish were all around the boat. Gannets were diving into the shoal. He looked out beyond the loom of lights and saw the flash of fish-backs far into the darkness. There was no end to the shoal. For the first time he thought: how were they to land such a catch?

He left the wheelhouse and hurried forward. Together the three of them managed to haul a little more. But the weight came again and with each haul they managed less. Still the fish were coming. Another ten inches of net. But now again the head-rope was jammed on the roller.

‘Hold her now! Hold her!’ cried Croyden.

Then Double lost his footing. They dropped another several feet before he recovered. The scuppers were dipping below the surface with the weight of the nets.

In with the shoal now were dogfish. Hundreds had been drawn to the shoal, driven mad by the plenty. Their brown bodies squirmed amidst the silver. They snapped at the fish. Their eyes flashed in the lights. Some of them came up with the nets and Double knocked them off when he could. Those on deck continued to thrash about among the pilchards, even as they died.

‘Out of there, you bastard! Get on now, get on!’ Croyden kicked one away and turned back to the nets. ‘Come in, my beauties! Come in now!’

The boat was low in the water and heeling hard to the nets. It was difficult to tell which was water now and which was boat. Double shouted, ‘Leave it, Croy! Leave the nets!’

There were still twelve nets out. Croyden’s face shone in the lights. He was grinning.

‘For Christ’s sake, Croy!’ shouted Jack. ‘They’ll drag us down!’

‘Pull!’

Together they managed a little. ‘Again!’ shouted Croyden.

Five inches. ‘Again!’

Seven inches. ‘We’re winning!’

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.

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