The Main Cages
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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.