The Main Cages. Philip Marsden
Inside, years of sawdust and paint-chippings had been trodden down to form an uneven, hard-packed floor. The roof was hung with wrights’ moulds and assorted spars rested on the beams. Peter Penpraze blew the dust from a varnished half-model and told him: ‘Fourteen foot six, grown oak frames, timbers of pitch pine, oak garboards, elm keel. Whatever thwarts you like, Mister, and a good locker astern. Lovely little boat, steady as a rock in a blow, pound a foot.’
Three weeks later, on a cloudless afternoon, Jack rowed between the Gaps and moored his boat in the inner harbour for the first time. That evening Whaler tap-tapped his way along the Town Quay and Mrs Cuffe drained a bottle of stout over the boat’s stem, saying: ‘Blessed be this craft, and blessed be all her crafty tasks.’
Over the coming days Jack brought out the lines he had been preparing – the eye-spliced painter, the stern-line, the rope fender, and a few he had made up for good measure. He bought a small galvanised grapnel and spliced that on too.
He began potting. Whaler put him onto Benny Stone, a cousin of sorts, and a man half-crippled from twenty years of crabbing. From Benny Stone, Jack acquired a set of inkwell pots – ‘Woven from best Penpraze withies, Mr Swee, three seasons’ use’ – and a great deal of advice: ‘Haul at low water … use shore crabs to catch the wrasse, use the wrasse for the lobster … put out your old pots March-time, save the new for better weather … find a pitch round the Cages and ee’ll not go wrong.’
Rights to the potting grounds were divided up along complicated lines of allegiance, decided either by ties of blood or by any one of a dozen tacit fraternities. Jack rowed around the grounds and on an old Admiralty chart shaded in where he saw other pots. He ringed the other places marked ‘R’ (rocks) and ‘ST’ (stones) and on fine days took out a greased lead and plumbed the water, recording where sand was stuck to the grease, and where it came up clean.
But his early potting was not a success. He experimented with different sites – west of Kidda Head, down towards Porth, east of Hemlock Cove. In three weeks his efforts yielded little more than spider crabs, velvets, devils, a few small lobsters and a number of conger. He lost a third of his pots in a gale, and another string from leaving too short a head-rope at springs. When he rowed back through the Gaps the men on Parliament Bench watched him with their cold, omniscient stares.
In late October the weather came in and he stored his pots and kicked his heels around the town. On Armistice Day he saw the luggers leave Polmayne for Plymouth and one afternoon on the East Quay he met a young woman from Devon called Alice. She had red-brown hair the colour of fallen leaves and was working in the kitchens of the Antalya. He took her out rowing and she showed him the slate grotto of St Pinnock’s holy well. Alice said the waters were known in the town to cure barren women. In bed she would sing softly as he held her, and her eyes fill with tears.
In the middle of December, Polmayne’s luggers returned from Plymouth; they loaded the herring nets and went back east for several more weeks. Jack found a note under his door: ‘Dear Jack, it’s lonely here even though you’re kind. I gone back home to my people. Goodbye, Alice.’
That Christmas Jack accepted an invitation from his great-aunt Bess to spend the week in Bridport. He passed a few days in her hot and over-decorated rooms. On the third night he went into town and got drunk and fell asleep fully clothed. In the morning mud stains covered the foot of the counterpane and he told his aunt Bess he was leaving. She said Cornwall was not the place for him. ‘You’re a Sweeney, Jack, this is where you belong.’
January swept in over Polmayne with its two-day gales and its grey, restless seas. Squalls dashed around Pendhu Point, driving the water in the coves into chest-deep scuds of foam. Along the front, shop signs swung and squeaked in the wind. Jack brought his boat into Bethesda, upturned it on two sawn-off barrels and rubbed it and primed it and re-glossed its clinker hull. He went to see Benny Stone with an armful of withies. His first pots looked less like inkwells than doughnuts but in time he produced something serviceable. He counted off the days until March. He was running short of money.
One morning in late January he was walking on Pritchard’s Beach. It was a bright morning and the beach was scattered with the detritus of another storm. Squinting into the sun he spotted a figure pushing a wheelbarrow up the strand. The man was struggling to keep it going through the shingle. Jack recognised his black smock and the sand-coloured beret – it was Mrs Cuffe’s nephew, Croyden Treneer.
Setting the barrow down, Croyden caught his breath. ‘That’s some bloody heavy beast!’ He bent to light a cigarette and tossed away the match.
‘What is it?’
Croyden pulled aside the weed on top of the barrow and Jack glimpsed beneath it a stretch of leathery skin. And he smelt it. He put a sleeve to his nose.
‘Dolphin. Put him in under my potatoes and they’ll come up lovely.’
Croyden leaned on the front of the barrow and shuffled the pebbles with his boot. ‘Started potting yet?’ he asked.
‘Not yet.’
Croyden said nothing but stood for some time smoking in silence. Then he flicked away his cigarette, picked up the barrow and said, ‘You won’t get nowhere with it! I was you, I’d go back to England.’
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