The Main Cages (8 page)

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.

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

With her snout, Three butted fondly at his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three days later came her reply.

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

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

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

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

‘Gone!’

‘Another what, Tope?’

‘Another summer.’

‘Eeee,’ agreed Boy Johns.

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

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

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

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

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

‘An inspiration,’ concluded Toper.

‘A true man of God.’

‘From up east, wan’t him?’

‘London.’

‘Ninety-one years old!’

‘Some age.’

‘They won’t come like him no more.’

‘Never.’

‘Eeee.’

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

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

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

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

Hooper had already read the passage in
The Cornish Coast, South
(1910):

The grounds of Polmayne’s 14th-century church of St Cuby tumble into a quiet creek to the east of the town. In the 1860s the Reverend Pratt, antiquarian and horticulturalist, assembled the plants for this unspeakably lovely churchyard which, once seen, remains for ever in the mind as the England of one’s dreams …

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

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

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

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

And I will make thy windows of agate

And thy gates of carbuncles

And all thy borders of precious stones.

At the beginning of the path’s descent:

The Path of the Just is as the Shining Light

That Shineth more and more unto the Perfect Day.

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

They heard the voice of the Lord God

Walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

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

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

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

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