The Main Cages. Philip Marsden

      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