The Main Cages (16 page)

Wandering out of the village, he inspected the new villas and the Crates. So much new building! Beyond them was a block of pasture which looked down over the withy beds to the Glaze River. He paced around it, considered the view and dismissed it. He knew what people wanted. In the city they might like something modern, but on holiday they preferred the traditional style. ‘In business, look forward,’ he mused. ‘In leisure, look back!’

On a wet afternoon, he strolled up the laurel-flanked drive of Dormullion House. He counted the upstairs windows. The columns of the terrace, he noted with some satisfaction, gave the façade a faintly Regency air. They were also badly in need of paint. That evening he wrote to Mrs Kliskey. He had the letter delivered by hand. The reply came back to the Antalya at noon the next day:

Dear Mr Bryant,

I don’t know who you are but the answer is no.

No, no, no!

Joan Kliskey

Up towards the lifeboat station was a half-hidden Victorian house named Pendhu Lodge. The house had been built by
an Azariah Dupont, amateur yachtsman, entomologist and founder and Chairman of Dupont Steam Irons in Sheffield. It was now owned by the current Chairman, his grandson Joshua Dupont.

Mr Bryant peered through its gates and saw a group of people sitting on wicker chairs and rugs on the lawn. A young girl in a floppy straw hat was running around among them, chasing a terrier.

Bryant received a courteous answer from Joshua Dupont:

Although it is true that Pendhu is only fully occupied for a brief period of the year it is nevertheless a much-loved family house and greatly appreciated by all members of it – particularly the younger ones. I sincerely hope that Pendhu Lodge will be enjoyed by Duponts for generations to come …

A year later, Mr Bryant read in the paper of the insolvency of Dupont Steam Irons. He wrote again, naming his price. A letter of acceptance came back from a firm of Sheffield solicitors.

Against all the predictions of his architect, the hotel was completed on time. ‘You want a job doing well,’ Bryant told him, ‘you get your own men to do it.’

5 August 1936 was a breezy, sunny day. Mr Bryant congratulated himself on choosing it for the hotel’s Grand Opening and Buffet Lunch. At 12.30 the first guests stepped into a hall laid with checkerboard parquet. Several aspidistras umbrellaed out over a stained-oak counter marked ‘Reception’. Above the fireplace hung a large, gilt-framed painting. It showed a great lick of a green wave breaking on the sands of Hemlock Cove; the Main Cages were dark shapes in the background. There was a patch of sky on one side where the bare canvas showed through; in the bottom right-hand corner the painting was signed ‘M.J. Abraham, 1936’.

Upstairs, one of the bedrooms was on show. Mrs Bryant’s imaginative colour scheme was admired by all who saw it – except
Mrs Franks, who called it ‘irredeemably vulgar’. The walls were painted sand-yellow, the counterpanes and lampshades were a woody yellow and beside the window was a custard-yellow, plumbed-in washbasin. The butter-coloured towels were embroidered with ‘GOLDEN SANDS’ in ochre thread. The window looked down over the lawns, between stands of fur-trunked Fortune palms to the hotel’s beach – which was neither golden nor sandy but covered in grey pebbles.

One hundred and twenty guests attended the lunch. The Petrel owners came. They stood in a group at the bar and Ralph Cameron with his George V beard sipped at a pink gin. ‘Might be time to change watering-holes.’

‘The Antalya’s become very gloomy,’ said the Dane Soren.

‘Rather!’ agreed Lawrence Rose.

The Hoopers brought Captain and Mrs Henriksen. Mr and Mrs Connors arrived with Anna Abraham. Major Franks and Mrs Franks appeared on the terrace with their house guest of three weeks, a very distinguished-looking Indian man in a white suit and white panama hat. Mrs Franks introduced him to Parson Hooper as ‘the Master’.

After lunch, the guests gathered on the lawn below. At half past two, Mr Bryant climbed up on a bench on the terrace and clapped his hands for silence. On one side of the bench was Mrs Bryant, on the other, three feet taller than her, was Lady Banville. The brigantine
Lady Banville,
bound for Liverpool with a cargo of copra and teak, had been wrecked on the Cages in 1862. Her figurehead was spotted rotting in a garden by Mr Bryant. He bought her for ten bob, had her restored, repainted and erected on the hotel terrace. Her eyes were now glossy blackcurrants, her lips re-rouged, and she displayed a spectacular décolletage – in which was stuck a blood-red rose.

‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ Bryant was without his hat. The wind flicked at the lapels of his dark suit. ‘I would like you to imagine, if you will, a town such as Polmayne one hundred
years ago – before the railways. In those days it would take the best part of a week to get from here to London. The people here lived in ignorant isolation, depending for their livelihood on the meagre fruits of the sea. All that has changed. Like a beautiful debutante Polmayne stands on the threshold of a – er, “golden” age. Today she is coming out!

‘Business, I always believe, is a little like marriage’ – for effect, he glanced down at Mrs Bryant. ‘Both depend on the principle of mutual benefit. Likewise, here at the Golden Sands we are providing not only repose for our guests but employment and prosperity to a town which is sorely in need of it.’

In the hot sun, Mr Bryant’s hairless head was shining with sweat. He paused for a moment and surveyed his audience.

‘Several years ago Mrs Bryant and I came here for the first time. I speak for her too when I say I could not have conceived of a more splendid place. Our hope now is that our pleasure will be shared by all our guests. A pleasure shared is a pleasure doubled!’

He turned to his wife. ‘My dear –’

Mrs Bryant took a pair of scissors and cut the cord that was wrapped around Lady Banville’s waist. Above the ground-floor windows a stretch of sailcloth fell away from the façade. Behind it was a board painted gold and white and broadcasting its little lie to all who entered Polmayne Bay by sea: ‘GOLDEN SANDS HOTEL’.

Jimmy Garrett was lying on his bed. He was thinking. His forearm lay across his face. The
Polmayne Queen
was out of action. Her pump had perished the previous week. The propeller shaft needed repacking. She was taking in water at the stem and along the deck and there was no money left for repairs. The wreck of the
Constantine
had helped; if not for that, she would have been out barely a dozen times since May. Even so he had failed to plug his debts. Jimmy was wondering
if it was time to sell her. He hadn’t bought or sold a boat in a long time and he was ready to trade the
Queen.
But for what?

Tacker sat across the room from his brother on a stool. He was whittling a piece of washed-up timber, and curls of wood lay all around his feet.

‘Could talk to Bryant,’ he said.

‘Who’s Bryant?’

‘The new hotel.’

Jimmy grunted.

‘Give him a share, Jim. We could give him a share in the boat.’

Jimmy lay unmoving, still thinking. After a few minutes he hauled himself up, swung his bad leg round and scratched the great orb of his bald head. ‘So where’s he to, this Bryant?’

The hotel’s oak-panelled office was practically empty. There was only a desk and some packing cases. Mr Bryant leaned back against the desk and folded his arms. ‘Well, gentlemen?’

‘We got a proposal, Mr Bryant.’ Jimmy spoke softly but without directing his gaze away from Bryant. ‘You’d know our steamer the
Polmayne Queen.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Well, we was thinking maybe the hotel could take her on for some of her trips.’

Mr Bryant remained silent.

‘She’s a lovely boat for excursions, sir!’ said Tacker.

‘Excursions?’

‘Yes, sir! Tin’t the same in a bus, taking visitors everywhere in a bus now’ days sir, tin’t the same, not like being on the water –’

‘What are you saying, gentlemen?’

‘We’re offering you a share in the boat,’ said Jimmy. ‘We would run it and we could still have our passengers from the quay, but any time you want the boat, you have her.’

‘You could have her, sir!’ added Tacker. ‘We’d take her to
a nice spot for your visitors, let ’em have a nice picnic and we’d run her for you, keep her serviced and trim …’

Bryant looked at Jimmy and Tacker in turn. He smiled. ‘So, when can you show me this boat of yours?’

P
olmayne had never been busier than that August. Fifty-six white tents were now ranked in Dawkins’s fields – more than three times as many as in 1935 – and within a week of opening the Golden Sands Hotel had filled every one of its sand-coloured rooms.

The
Constantine
had much to do with it. Every time the newspapers ran a story about the ship’s precarious position and the progress of her salvage, another wave of visitors swept into town asking where to find the ‘famous stranded barque’ before she broke up.

But it was also the weather. June had been fine – high clouds and long warm days. For a while in July, fog muzzled the headlands and on St Swithun’s day – the day before the
Constantine
struck – it thickened into heavy rain. Parson Hooper was very pleased. The freshly-cleared gardens were already looking parched. ‘St Swithun’s Day if thou dost rain/for forty days it will remain,’ he recited at Evensong.

The next two days were damp and foggy and the gardeners
among Parson Hooper’s congregation, who made up the largest part, gladdened to his words. But then the skies cleared, steam rose from the newly-tarmaced roads and the crowds returned to the beaches in even greater numbers.

Parliament Bench did not like it. ‘Goes on like this and the whole bloody world’ll be here.’

‘Tin’t right, so many people all in one place.’

Tick-Tock Harris produced
Picture Post
photographs of the summer hordes in Nice and Blackpool. He said it was like that everywhere. No one was convinced.

‘They pictures are just made up,’ explained Toper.

‘Eeee,’ agreed Boy Johns.

‘It won’t last,’ warned Red Treneer. ‘You mark my words.’

‘Weather’s bound to break.’

But Red was not talking about the weather. For him there were darker clouds just over the horizon. Since the Spanish coup on 20 July he had been collecting for the Republicans and had raised a good deal of money. He was careful not to say it was for the Republicans, but simply for the ‘Spanish Cause’. In that way he managed to raise funds from Franco’s sympathisers too – and they tended to give much more money.

Then the water started to run out. At seven o’clock on the morning of 27 July, Mrs Cuffe carried her two buckets into Bethesda’s yard, cranked the cow’s-tail handle and watched the spout produce a trickle of green-brown sludge. Then nothing.

Work had started on the new reservoir at Pennance but it would need the winter’s rain to fill it. The extra visitors were helping to drain the existing supplies. Mrs Cuffe took to joining the queue at the pump below the Fountain Inn.

At the Parish Council meeting at the end of July, water was the main topic. Two camps emerged – those who thought that visitors should be told to stay away until there was water, and those who claimed the town now depended as much on the visitors as on water. Chairman of the Council, Major Franks, produced the Sanitary Inspector’s report.

‘He proposes, gentlemen, that we boil drinking water. According to this report, it seems that our friend the Reed Fever may have popped out just as the water table dropped.’

So that confirmed it. The visitors
were
to blame for the Reeds.

Captain Henriksen sat across from Parson Hooper. His frame filled the leather chair that he had occupied, every evening, since the day the
Constantine
had foundered. As the weeks passed so his bulk sunk deeper into that leather chair. He became more and more silent, more and more convinced that his ship would never float again. Visits from insurers, salvors’ reports, letters and valuations filled his days; he could no longer read weather reports in case they told of the shift of wind to west or south that would destroy his ship. He had arranged for a barge to empty her holds. They offloaded twelve hundred tons of grain – less than a quarter of the cargo. The rest was sodden.

Captain Henriksen told Parson Hooper it was a terrible thing to witness the slow death of a ship. ‘It is like my own flesh falling off me.’

‘Nonsense, Captain!
Du courage!
’

Parson Hooper remained busy. The captain’s sinking spirits required his daily counsel. Each morning he went down to the far corner of the churchyard and joined six of the
Constantine’s
crew who were clearing the last jungly recess of the churchyard. Two or three afternoons a week, at Mr Bryant’s request, he took tea on the terrace of the Golden Sands Hotel and led discussions with the hotel guests. Then a sailor from the
Constantine
fell for one of the Johns girls. He said he wanted to marry her. The Johns family were against it as she was already engaged to Joe Stephens. Captain Henriksen did what he could but it was Hooper who persuaded them not to run away as they threatened to do, but to wait.