First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  There is no doubt this is the way to approach Port Isaac, from St. Endellion on the Polzeath side of the port. The final hill is very steep and there is only a disused quarry in which you can park a motor car if you are not on foot. Not until you round a corner do you see any sign of Port Isaac at all. Then you see it all, huddled in a steep valley, a cover at the end of a combe, roofs and roofs, tumbling down either steep hillside in a race for shelter from the south-west gales. A fresh-water stream pours brown and cold along the valley, under slate bridges, between old houses, under the road and out into the little harbour.

  Port Isaac is Polperro without the self-consciousness, St. Ives without the artists. The same whitewashed slate houses with feathery-looking roofs which have been “grouted”—that is to say the old slates have been cemented over and limewashed—the same narrow airless passages between whitewashed walls. But here are winding paths that climb up steps of beautiful blue-green Delabole slate to other winding paths, hills too steep for anyone with heart trouble to manage, roads and lanes too narrow for buses or coaches. One of the sights of Port Isaac used to be to watch the Life-Boat being brought down Fore Street and missing the walls by inches as she was manœuvred round the bend at the Golden Lion into the Town Platt.

  Port Isaac has no grand architecture.

  A simple slate Methodist chapel and Sunday school in the Georgian tradition hangs over the harbour and is the prettiest building in the town. On the opposite side of the water is a picturesque Gothic style school, from whose pointed windows the teachers could, if they wished, pitch their pupils down the cliff side into the harbour below. Then, lost in rambling cliff paths between the walls, some so narrow that a fat man could not use them, is my favourite house in Port Isaac. It is called the “Birdcage”: an irregular pentagon in shape, one small room thick, and three storeys high, and hung on the weather sides with slates which have gone a delicate silvery blue. It’s empty now and obviously “condemned.” For that is the sad thing about Port Isaac. It is the kind of place Town Planners hate: the quintessence of the quaint. There are no boulevards, no car stands or clinics. The dentist calls once a week and brings his instruments with him in his car.

  The Community Centre is all wrong by Town Planning standards. It is not the public-house, but the Liberal Club. Anyone who knows Cornish fishermen must know that most of them do not drink, many are chapel-goers and a Liberal Club without a licence is the sort of place where you would expect to find them.

  The trade of Port Isaac really is fishing. The harbour does not draw much water. It hardly is a harbour. A better description would be an unexpected cove between high cliffs. Two arms have been built out into the water to keep back the bigger seas, while great guardian headlands keep the harbour calm in most weathers. It is used by small craft and these are reached by dinghies drawn up on the Town Platt among lobster pots and nets. The promise of a dark night after a shoal of pilchards had been sighted, the sound of rowlocks and splashing of oars in harbour water, boarding the fishing boat from the dinghy, the outside roar of the sea, the dark cliffs fading in twilight and dropping away as we move out to open sea, letting down the nets and drifting. Those were the times! Unless, like me, you were a shocking sailor and sick all night and thanking God for the dawn light and the nearing cliffs of Varley Head as you made for home and harbour.

  Even if you are no sailor, the smell of fish tells you the chief business of the port. And your eyes will tell you too. For the little houses (the oldest are sixteenth century), though so huddled together and so steeply hung on to cliffs, are like all fishermen’s houses, wonderfully clean and polished. Sparkling quartz, known as Cornish Diamond, is cemented into garden walls, figs and fuchsia bushes grow in tiny gardens, big shells from the Orient rest on window sills, brass and paint of front doors shine, carpentry is excellent, and all windows that can look out to sea, so that even as they die the old fishermen of Port Isaac may watch the tides. I expect the old people will all soon be moved to some very ugly council houses being built on the windy hilltop in those hideous grey cement things called “Cornish blocks.”

  Across stupendous cliffs, as full of flowers as a rock garden, is another little fishing port—Port Quin, an empty Port Isaac, mournful and still. For here the old cottages are nearly all ruins; the harbour is deserted, the gardens, once so trim, are grown over with elder and ash saplings, honeysuckle and fennel. The salting sheds are in ruins too. The story is that the whole fishing fleet of the village went down in a gale, and thirty-two women were left widows.

  And beyond Port Quin what caves, what rocks, what shuddering heights of striped slate, what hidden beaches and barnacled boulders, what pools where seals bask, there are between here and Pentire Point. All picturesque and grand, as blazing with colour as are the strange rock pools themselves on a summer day. The colours are brighter than the tropics. The veined rock, in which the warm salt water lies, is purple with white lines and then green, then purple again. Warm forests of red seaweed grow there, and green seaweed which looks like elm trees. If there is sand on the bottom of the pool, and the red weed waving, you may see a huge prawn gliding and shooting backwards, and the sudden dash of a small fish, too quick for the eye to see more than the sudden cloud of sand it raises. Or the rock pool may be one with shells and shingle at the bottom and perhaps those rose-tinted cowries, the pearls of this coast, and a huge starfish, magnified by the water in all its pink and grey and purple colouring. Never was such colour, never is the wonder of God’s creation more brought home to me than when I see the strange, merciless bright-coloured world of these Cornish rock pools. But in a storm or in a mist how infinitely horrible and mysterious this coast can be, as the rollers smash and suck, the blowholes thunder, and caves syphon out fountains of sea water a hundred feet and more into the air.

  ’Tis harsh to hear from ledge or peak

  The cruel cormorants’ tuneless shriek

  Fierce songs they chant, in pool or cave

  Dark wanderers of the Western wave.

  So wrote Hawker the parson poet of Morwenstowe, not many miles higher up the coast. He knew that the sea is an army fighting the land, as do the men of Port Isaac. But I like to stand in summer by the bit of wall in Fore Street, and lean over to look down at the harbour and inland at the little town below me. It is evening, harvest festival time. The small Victorian church has been hung with lobster pots and dressed with crabs and seaweed—a harvest festival of the sea. Church is over, but Chapel is still on. As I stand on this view-point above the town, the sea gulls are crying and wheeling, the flowery cliffs take the evening sun, the silvery slates of the old town turn pale gold. Above the lap of the harbour water, the wail of gulls and thunder of the sea beyond the headlands, comes the final hymn from the Methodist Chapel across the green and gently rolling harbour flood.

  Padstow

  Some think of the farthest away places as Spitzbergen or Honolulu. But give me Padstow, though I can reach it any day from Waterloo without crossing the sea. For Padstow is in Cornwall and Cornwall is another country. And Padstow is farther away in spirit even than Land’s End. It is less touristy than other fishing towns like Polperro and St. Ives: less dramatic than Boscastle or Tintagel: only just not a village, for it has more than two thousand inhabitants. It is an ancient unobvious place, hidden away from the south-west gales below a hill on the sandy estuary of the River Camel. It does not look at the open sea but across the tidal water to the sand-dunes of rock and the famous St. Enodoc Golf Course. There is no beach, only an oily harbour and remarkably large prawns may be netted where the town drains pour into the Camel.

  Green Southern Railway engines came right into the brown and cream Great Western district of Cornwall, to reach Padstow. Launceston, Egloskerry, Otterham, Tresmeer, Camelford—and so on, down that windy single line. I know the stations by heart, the slate and granite-built waiting rooms, the oil lamps and veronica bushes, the great Delabole Quarry, the little high-hedged fields, and I know where the small-holdings grow fe
wer and the fields larger and browner, so that I can see the distant outline of Brown Willy and Rough Tor on Bodmin Moor. Then the train goes fast downhill through high cuttings and a wooded valley. We round a bend and there is the flat marsh of the Camel, there are the little rows of blackish-green cottages along the river at Egloshayle and we are at Wadebridge, next stop Padstow. The next five and a half miles beside the broadening Camel to Padstow. is the most beautiful train journey I know. See it on a fine evening at high tide with golden light on the low hills, the heron-haunted mud coves flooded over, the sudden thunder as we cross the bridge over Little Petherick creek, the glimpses of slate roofs and a deserted jetty among spindly Cornish elms, the wide and unexpected sight of open sea at the river mouth, the huge spread-out waste of water with brown ploughed fields coming down to little cliffs where no waves break but only salt tides ripple up and ebb away. Then the utter endness of the end of the line at Padstow—260 miles of it from London. The smell of fish and seaweed, the crying of gulls and the warm, moist, west country air and valerian growing wild on slate walls.

  The approach to Padstow I like most of all is the one I have made ever since I was a child. It is by ferry from the other side of the estuary. It was best in a bit of a sea with a stiff breeze against an incoming tide, puffs of white foam bursting up below the great head of distant Pentire and round the unapproachable cliffs of the rocky island of Newland which seems, from the ferry boat, to stand half-way between Pentire and Stepper Point at the mouth of the river. We would dip our hands in the water and pretend to feel seasick with each heave of the boat and then the town would spread out before us, its slate roofs climbing up the hillside from the wooden wharves of the harbour till they reached the old church tower and the semi-circle of wind-slashed elms which run as a dark belt right around the top of the town, as though to strap the town in more securely still against those south-west gales. Sometimes we would return on a fine, still evening, laden with the week’s shopping, and see that familiar view lessen away from the ferry boat while the Padstow Bells, always well rung, would pour their music across the water, reminding me of Parson Hawker’s lines—

  Come to thy God in time!

  Thus saith their pealing chime

  Youth, Manhood, Old Age past!

  Come to thy God at last!

  Padstow is a fishing port and a shopping centre. There is an ice factory, an attractive Georgian Customs House, a hideous post office, an electric light company founded in 1911, and a gas works founded in 1868, this last, beside sad and peeling Public Rooms of yellow stucco dated 1840.

  Vast numbers of service people pour in today from a desert that has been made in the neighbouring parishes of St. Eval and St. Merryn—a form of desert known as an aerodrome.

  But the chief fact about modern Padstow to interest fact-maniacs, starts with a mermaid. She was combing her hair and singing in the estuary, when a Padstow youth went walking along the cliffs towards the open sea. He shot at her and in her rage she plunged down below the water and picked up a handful of sand which she threw towards Padstow, and that was the start of the Doom Bar. This bar is a bank of sand which for centuries has been slowly silting up the estuary.

  In 1948 at a Town Council meeting a letter was read from a Yarmouth firm of ship owners: “We have always been in the habit of sending our boats to Padstow, as we did last year, and we intend to do so again in 1949 during February, March and April. Like everyone else, we are concerned about the silting up of the estuary, making it extremely difficult to manœuvre our ships in and out of port, and if action is not taken very soon we shall be unable to use the port at all, to our mutual detriment.” So there are hundreds of thousands of tons of agricultural silver sand, increasing and increasing. I can well remember how as a child I could see the hulks of ships which had been wrecked on the Doom Bar sticking up black out of the yellow sand. These are now all covered over. Who will take the sand away? And how will they do it. Miracles are always happening. In Padstow they are easier to believe in than in most places, because it is so ancient a town. So probably the port of Padstow will be saved, even if it is a Government Department that performs the miracle.

  Slate-hung houses are built in a semi-circle round the harbour. Here and there the silver-blue tiled buildings are diversified by an old rose-coloured brick house and near me is a building called The Abbey House, with granite fifteenth-century quoins. A boy standing up in a dinghy propels her backwards across the calm, oily water by working an oar to and fro in the stern. I turn into the quiet square of the Ship Hotel and notice that Miss Tonkin’s boot shop is no longer there, though her house with its ferns in the window and lace curtains, its lush, enclosed front and back gardens, still stands. I see that a jeweller’s shop has been transformed into a souvenir haunt of tourists and new diamond-leaded panes look odd in the windows, and wooden beams, unknown in Cornwall, are fixed on to the outside walls. The main streets are, thank goodness, little altered. There’s not much grand architecture in Padstow. It is all humble unobtrusive houses, three storeys high. Yet as soon as one of them is taken down, the look of the town suffers. I take one of the many narrow roads that lead up the hill. And as I reach the upper air near the church, I realise what a lot of gardens and houses there are in Padstow, though the place looks all slate from the waterside. For here one can look down at the roofs of the houses, on palms and ilex trees and bushes of hydrangeas peeping above slate walls. Narrow public passages pass right through houses under stone arches and lead past high garden walls, down steps under another house to a further street. And I begin to notice that this slate is not grey, as we are inclined to think is all Cornish slate, but a beautiful pale green, streaked here and there with reddish-brown. This is all hewn locally from the cliffs. Slate roofs grouted over with cement and then lime-washed, slate walls, slate paving stones and, as I near the churchyard gate, slate hedges as high as a house on either side of me, stuffed with ferns and pennywort. I saw the little purple flowers of ivy-leaved toadflax on these hedges blooming as late as November last. Above these stone hedges are holly bushes and beyond the holly the circling belt of Cornish elms. A wrought-iron gate opens into the churchyard. In tree-shaded grass are slate headstones with deep-cut lettering of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and cherubs with ploughboy faces, Victorian marble stones to sailors with carved anchors and cables. The parish church of St. Petroc is built of a brown-grey slate and its large fifteenth-century windows are crisply carved out of that dark blue-black Cataclewse stone, a most beautiful hard stone for carving which lasts the centuries. The church is unusually large and lofty inside for a Cornish building. It was pleasantly restored in the last century. A huge monument with kneeling figures painted in reds and whites and yellows and blacks commemorates Sir Nicholas Prideaux, 1627, and leads me to Padstow’s great house, Prideaux Place.

  It stands on a grass clearing among elms, firs and many ilex trees, that specially west country tree, not far from the church, near the higher part of the town where late Georgian houses with ilex and palm-shaded gardens and glass-houses with geraniums and grapes in them, suggest the land agent, the doctor, retired tradesmen and old sea captains. A sign saying “No through road” encourages me to walk through, and I come to a low castellated slate wall in a toy-fort Gothic style, with a genuine Gothic door of dark-blue Cataclewse stone let into it. Behind this, in full view of the road, is the E-shaped manor house. The eastern front looks over the road to its little-planted park and on to the distant low sand hills across the estuary. The feathery slate walls are battlemented on top. Over the entrance porch, in the wings, and in the spaces between them, are noble granite windows. Even the old lead rain-water heads are there, with the Prideaux crest and initials on them. A large magnolia shelters in one fold of the house and a Georgian semi-circular bay is just seen on the south wing, looking across another part of the park. The inside of the house is said to be full of panelling and wood carving and plaster-work and fine furniture.

  All this is Eli
zabethan and seventeenth century. And the church and the houses in the town are medieval or Georgian. They seem comparatively new. What becomes apparent about Padstow is that it is even older than its oldest buildings. When the River Camel was narrower and when woods waved in the estuary which are now covered with sand, thirteen hundred years ago, St. Petroc, Servant of God and son of a Welsh king, crossed the sea from Ireland in a coracle and landed at Trebetherick on the other side of the water. And then he crossed the river and founded a monastery which was known as Petrocstow—that is to say Petroc’s church—which we now pronounce Padstow. Many miracles are recorded of him, tales of his kindness to animals, his long prayers standing in a stream on Bodmin moor where to this day his little beehive cell, made of turf and granite, survives. He raised the dead, cured the sick, tamed a savage, serpent-eating monster. A medieval life of St. Petroc was discovered recently which ended thus:

  “A woman, feeling thirsty one night, drank water out of a water-jug and swallowed a small serpent (in consequence of which) she was for many years in bad health. As no physicians benefited her, she was brought to the holy man. He made a mixture of water and earth which he gave the sick woman to drink, and immediately she had swallowed it she vomited a serpent three feet long, but dead, and the same hour she recovered her health and gave thanks to god.

  “After these and many such like miracles, Blessed Petroc, continually longing for heavenly things, after afflicting his body with much rigour, full of days departed to God, on the day before the nones of June. The sacred body, therefore, worn out with fastings and vigils, is committed to the dust, and the bosom of Abraham receives his spirit, the angels singing to welcome it. At his tomb miracles frequently take place and his bones, albeit dry, retain the power of his virtues. May his glorious merits intercede for us with Christ, Who with the Father liveth and reigneth world without end. AMEN.”