Everyman's England (18 page)

CHAPTER 19

On the Cornish coast, somewhere between Fowey and Falmouth, there is a certain fishing village. It is not well known. It has attracted no colony of artists to disturb the rightful atmosphere of the village inn, nor does it have many visitors during the summer. I am not going to give its name, for that would undoubtedly incense the few
foreigners
, as the village folk term those who spend their holidays there, who treasure its secret. Besides, it would detract from its pleasure to make it easy to find. The joys which are hard to come by are the sweetest.

On the other hand, I do not wish to be accused of being a curmudgeon, selfish in my pleasure, so I will give enough clues to enable the diligent seeker to identify the village.

If you are looking for the ideal fishing village where you can spend your summer holiday, forgetting your worries by bathing in tiny coves with only the gulls and the cliffs for company, and by wandering along brackened headlands where thyme and gorse fill the air with their scent, then this is the village for you.

There are scores of villages in Cornwall which are just as pleasant and in looking for this one you may discover the charm of a dozen other places, for the Cornish coast is lavish in its beauty and its villages have a character which no other coastal villages in England can rival; which is a pathetic admission from a Devon man, but nevertheless the truth.

I have spent several holidays in this village, during the high summer, when the days were drowsy with heat and there was always the pleasing rattle of mowing-machines filling the scented air. It was lovely then. How much lovelier, I used to think, would it be in the spring. I always longed to see it in the spring and at last my desire drew me there when I had no excuse for going, and every reason for remaining where I was, which was far enough from Cornwall to make the thought of the village a tantalising prospect of joy.

The village lies at the narrow mouth of a short, steep valley. A tiny freshet runs through the valley, hardly enough to fill a duck pond and almost hidden by a waving mass of garlic-mustard and tall cow parsley.

It was raining as I walked down the steep, high-hedged lane that leads from the top of the hill to the narrow-mouthed cove around which are grouped the grey-slated houses and cottages of the villagers. I did not mind the rain. It was a gentle, caressing drizzle that soaked into the eager ground and filled the runnels at the lane's side with a brown-tinged torrent that sang over the worn outcrops of slate. Hart's tongue ferns dripped water on me from the high banks, and from a farm gate a sheepdog puppy came out and sniffed at my legs. A jackdaw balancing on top of a telegraph pole muttered something rude as I passed and, feeling happy, I returned the compliment. The jackdaw flew away, disgusted.

There were violets still in the bankside, not easily seen against the flaring pads of primroses. I came to the first houses and saw fuchsias blooming in pots behind the windows, and I wondered how long it would be before they were blooming in the hedges of the gardens which were now full of spring colours. A wave of heavy scent made me aware of a clump of wallflowers rooted in the sparse soil between the roof slates of a shed, their crimson heads held stiffly against the gentle wind.

I turned a corner and immediately the roar and call of the sea was all around me. The wind was suddenly stronger, full of salt. It drummed against my face, and my ears were filled with the clamour of gulls circling over the tiny harbour. Nothing had changed since my last visit. Grey and white cottages lined the roadway and crab nets were stretched over the wall which separated the road from the beach. High on the other side of the cove stood the white clump of coastguard buildings and the slender flagpole from which I have never seen a flag flown. Beyond the blunt nose of the headland which projected halfway across the harbour mouth the open sea tossed and heaved under the low pall of a rainy sky.

I passed by the general store, its window crammed to bursting point with an indiscrimination of wares arranged in a way which would have given a professional window-dresser apoplexy. A line of washing straggled up the far cliff slope with, I fancy, the same blue shirt and pants that used to grace it during the summer of my last visit. I could have sworn to the shirt. The pants I was doubtful about.

The first persons I saw were three men mending lobster pots in a fishing store at the head of the beach. The door was open and they were laughing at some joke, while ten yards away the full tide spouted over the rocks, tossing its fringe of bladder wrack and refuse. They were bareheaded, dark haired, and dressed in blue jerseys. They nodded to me politely and then went on with their work, joking as though I were not still leaning against the doorpost watching them.

If I had started a conversation they would have replied and been affable. By themselves they were diffident of strangers and never eager, more from shyness than want of matters to talk about, to take the lead in a conversation. The noise of a heavy breakwater growling over loose shingle made me look up. They made no movement, but I knew that they had heard the sea. Never did they forget the sea. It had become part of their lives so that even now, as they plied hazel boughs into the plinth of their lobster pots, they knew which rocks the tide had still to cover, and how the wind and currents were setting. The changing face of the sky and the quick lift and fall of the soft Cornish mist and rain were things which had been with them since birth and which they had come to know with a precision that was now more an instinct than conscious knowledge.

I went down on to the beach, past the little white post office. The only concessions to the conventional furnishings of a seaside resort were a weighing machine standing against the side of the building used as a sort of club for the fishermen, and the display of postcards in the post office window. The weighing machine, filmed with a dew of rain, was crowned by a villainous looking herring gull which stared at me with its lustreless yellow eyes and then launched itself into the air to join its fellows crying along the cliffs. It was a handsome, cold-minded bird, graceful in the air, revelling in its powers of flight, and like all its kind, a most rapacious thief, ready to steal from or murder any living thing too weak to resist its ugly curved beak.

Drawn up on the beach, out of reach of the tide, were the motor boats used in the lobster and crab fishing which provides the men of the village with a living. The motors and screws of some boats were carefully covered. On the bottom boards of one or two were broken pieces of starfish and the white fans of coral brought up in the pots, and in a heap on the beach were some spider-crabs, useless, grotesque, like fantastic spiders from the cave of some lurid story for boys. F.H. 9, F.H. 14… all the boats had registration numbers and some bore names, painted in unsteady characters, across the bows and gunwales.

I ate my bread and cheese lunch with the landlord of the Ship Inn for company. He is a tall, boyish-faced man, with a happy habit of finishing his remarks, whether humorous or not, with a gurgling laugh. He takes life merrily and I found it disconcerting for a while to hear him chuckling as he told me, with a wealth of detail conned from his morning paper, how an American gangster was at that moment being executed in Chicago.

‘Ay, they have a proper game with 'em over there. Shaive off their hair, all of it, they do, and then sit 'em in the 'lectric chair. By Gor, tes some game, I tell 'ee.'

‘It's quicker than being hanged,' I said.

‘I don't knaw 'bout that. Tes more unnatural though, to be 'lectrocuted.' He gurgled happily and began to set up the pins of the skittle-table. Games in public houses differ from county to county. In Kent there are always darts and in Cumberland dominoes. In this village the fishermen prefer table-skittles with their beer.

The bar was dark from the shadow of the headland that protects the village from the channel gales. Just inside the door was a coloured plate of a blue-chequered racing pigeon and on the other walls two realistic engravings entitled ‘Horses in a Storm' and ‘Groom and Horse.' There was, I thought, little need for this last title, for although the picture was bad there was not the slightest chance of anyone mixing up the horse with the groom or the groom with the horse. I only had to count their legs to be sure which was which.

The landlord shook his head and pursed his lips as I asked him about the winter.

‘Purty bad, it's been. There's been a tidy few gales and the boats hav'n been out more 'n a score of times since September. Ess, tes been tidy bad for some of the men.'

He was not exaggerating. Gales keep the boats locked in the harbour and while they idle there the pots are swept away from their moorings and lost. Only men of stubborn spirit could face such setbacks with fortitude. The men grumble but never despair, otherwise they could not wrest a living from the capricious sea.

In a glass case on the counter were rows of little figures of pirates, jockeys and Long John Silvers. They were ingenious figures modelled in clay about the wishbones of chickens, the prongs of the wishbone forming the legs. The pirates with cocked hats and black patches stood in a bow-legged array above the brightly painted jockeys, and above them all stood a massive Long John Silver, made from the bone of a turkey, brass earrings, crooked smile, but no parrot. The landlord saw me looking at them and said:

‘There's more money in that kind of thing these days, than in fishing. Feller in the village makes 'em up and sells 'em. He does quite well.'

When I left him, I walked up the hill on the other side of the village and out to the sweep of cliff that runs back from the headland which protects the village. Here, beneath crimson-trunked firs and pines, over the short turf and dead bracken, was waving the gold of wild daffodils, a long, seething, billowing sheet of colour. On the rocks below, the sea broke in white foam and gulls went to and fro along the shore, crying, and beating the wind with their wings. Long streamers of soft rain swept across the sea, and as I watched there came through the mist the steady beat of a motor and slowly around the headland a dark shape moved across the tossing water and gradually disappeared into the murk. On board were three men, perhaps the three men I had seen in the store laughing. They were probably still laughing, though that would not make them careless of the work in hand. There were pots to be lifted, lobsters to be caught and sold, fresh bait to be set and nets to be shot… there was always something to be done, and in the end a man sitting in his room, fiddling with clay and wishbones, made a better living than they did with no part of their hardships…

I walked back through the village, wondering if the day of physical courage was gone. Strength was no longer capable of earning a living for itself. These inshore fishermen were antiquated, working hard and making little, and helpless against the competition which came from an industry organised by men of brain and worked by giant trawlers and the latest scientific apparatus. They would have to go, already their sons were leaving the sea to become mechanics and clerks, to get themselves jobs which involved no great dangers and brought them food and the comfort of contented minds. In some villages the change is nearly complete, fishermen have become landlords and their wives landladies, and their living is made during the summer by catering for visitors. Soon all the Cornish villages will be seeking to catch the visitor and make his fortnight by the sea feed them during the winter. But this village, I think, will be the last to make the change. Even now the summer brings a little more money, easier money, but fishing is in their blood. They never regard it in any heroic light. It is a job which they know how to do, and do. At the moment they want no other life. Why should they worry about the years ahead?

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