The Main Cages

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.