The Main Cages. Philip Marsden
to get over the river and take the twice-weekly boat to Truro market from Polmayne’s quays. Porth’s sea-captains, en route to ships in Falmouth, also relied on it. Until some years before 1914 a man named Crimea Trestain ran the ferry in a boat which, every Easter, he lovingly upturned on the shingle bar outside his cottage and painted pale pink.
‘Colour ’a maid’s ass,’ he explained. ‘Room aboard for eight men, six women, three sows – or a parson.’
No one knew how old Crimea was. It was not clear whether he’d been born on the day the Crimean War broke out or the day it ended, or some other day entirely. Nor in the end could anyone remember whether it was him that gave out first or the boat, but by the Great War a new ferry – much less regular – had replaced it downstream. Crimea and Mrs Trestain disappeared up ‘Bodmin way’, the boat was laid up in Gooth Creek and the lease of Ferryman’s Cottage was bought by an artist from London. The artist was Preston Connors.
Through Connors, the town of Polmayne and Ferryman’s Cottage began to acquire a certain status among painters and writers in London. A new strain of incomers sought out lodgings there. They spent their days perched on clifftops or sauntering thoughtfully through the creekside woods. In the evenings they crammed into the main room of Ferryman’s Cottage or gathered on the shingle beach outside. They had al fresco meals and made impromptu music. They talked. All were stirred by the remoteness of the place, and by the immanent beauty of the river and the woods above it. After his first stay in Polmayne the watercolourist Russell Flower wrote to his host: ‘You have found a wonderful place, dear Connors. The mystical buttress of Pendhu Point opens up mineshafts of perception in man …’
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