The Main Cages

by Philip Marsden

  He started to row again. He spotted a smooth patch in the water and shipped his paddles again and leaned over the side. The sun’s rays haloed his head and he could see down into the water, through the dust-motes of plankton, to the shadowy form of a rock. Oarweed flopped about beside it, swaying as the swells passed over it – back and forth, back and forth. And that is the image that remained with him from his early days in Polmayne – of his own lone figure suspended over the side of a boat, staring down into the water, while from below rose the half-hidden shape of a rock.

  That August Jack Sweeney bought his own boat. He sold his mother’s diamond ring, gave Mrs Cuffe four months’ rent and walked up the Glaze River to Penpraze’s yard. He had already discovered the place on his wanderings. Just beyond the church was a pair of black tarred sheds and on the larger one a sign: ‘P. PENPRAZE, SHIP, YACHT & BOAT BUILDER, BLOCK & SPAR-MAKER & SHIPSMITH’.

  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.’

  CHAPTER 2

  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 to load gear on a Friday. Above all he would never utter the word ‘rabbit’ either on board or ashore – and if he heard anyone say it at sea, he would be forced to head for home. If he needed to talk about rabbits he called them sheep.

  Croyden’s ability at sea was not matched on land. As soon as he came ashore and left the quays, he was lost. People used to say: ‘Really there’s two Croydens, like they’s twins or something.’

  Even as Croyden began with the Good Heart, the days of seining were reaching an end. The pilchard shoals did not come as they once had and in 1918 the Good Heart was laid up for good. Croyden was offered a place on the Blucher, a drift-netter in Newlyn. He was given a sixth share in the catch and returned to Polmayne sporadically – either out of pocket or flush after a good splat of fish. To Tommy Treneer, Croyden’s position was a betrayal. It was the drift-nets alone that he blamed for robbing the coast of pilchards. ‘The devil’s own nets,’ he called them and refused to address a word to his son.

  But the Blucher did well. One moonlit night in December 1924, some ten miles south of Mount’s Bay, they struck a shoal of herring with such perfect timing that at once a total of 114 cran of fish caught their gills in the mesh. It took seven hours to haul the nets. While the others tired, Croyden found that the deeper the fish lay about his ankles the more vigorously he could haul. His share of the catch earned him more than £52. On board that evening, he leaned back on the Blucher’s frosty deck and felt he could stretch out his cutch-stained hands and rearrange the stars. Such dazzling high spirits lasted long enough to catch the eye of Maggie North whose mother ran Newlyn’s quayside tobacconist. Croyden returned that summer, in a borrowed boat, and after the wedding took his bride away from a harbour lined with waving well-wishers, back across Mount’s Bay and around the Lizard where, as they picked up an easterly swell, Mrs Croyden Treneer scattered the nibblings of her wedding lunch into the long arc of the boat’s wash.

  In the coming years Maggie grew to hate the sea and all it represented. In the early thirties both prices and shoals became ever more unpredictable. Expecting her fourth child, she said she could no longer tolerate his feast-or-famine work.

  ‘Fishing’s a gambler’s life, Croyden Treneer, and all you seem to do is lose.’

  Croyden came ashore. He bought his first pig. He worked his piece, planting potatoes and brassicas and using an old tuck-net to keep out the birds. He found a job on the roads – laying the first tarmac on Polmayne’s only approach road. When that came to an end, he spent a winter building one of the bungalows that were beginning to ring the town and every day he was reminded that he would rather be at sea. Working on solid ground to a clock and not to the tides, dealing with straight lines and right-angles, all contributed to a faint nausea. The truth was that labouring on land made Croyden seasick.

  Then under the Housing Act of 1930 a compulsory purchase order was placed on Cooper’s Yard and a dozen old cottages around it – ‘unfit for habitation … prone to flooding …’. A large site was excavated for new homes above the church. Before they were even completed these houses became known as the Crates. Suddenly in Polmayne there was work for all and Croyden found he was earning more than he ever had on the drift-netter.

  His father, Tommy, still refused to speak to him. He lived in Cooper’s Yard and now he was told he must leave. He had been born there. Croyden had been born there. Treneers had always been born there. Drift-netting was one thing, said Tommy, but at least it was fishing.

  ‘We was always seiners,’ he growled, ‘and now look at him – putting up bloody Crates so they can pack we away.’

  In early March 1935, Jack Sweeney spent a couple of days plumbing out at the Main Cages. There he stumbled on a small unclaimed area of rough ground. It ran for about fifty yards just south of the gap between Maenmor’s two peaks – the tunnel that he’d shot in his punt the summer before. It would be hard to work in any kind of a sea, but in the middle of the month came a spell of settled weather.

  On his first haul, he pulled seven good-sized crabs. Two days later he had five crabs and two lobsters. Within a week he had caught more than he had in the entire two months the year before. He began to make money – and on Parliament Bench they took to nodding at him as he came in. Once a week he gave part of his catch to Mrs Cuffe. Whaler told him about the lobsters he had seen the size of dogs and a crab in the tropics that would scamper up the palm trees and happily pick dates with his claws.

  One evening at the end of March a freshening westerly began to flick at the wave-tops of the bay. Put out your old pots March-time … Jack had put out the lot. He cursed himself as he pulled on his boots and ran out through the yard.

  Tommy Treneer shouted from the Bench as he passed: ‘Should take better bloody care o’ your gear!’

  At the Main Cages the seas were already large. He rowed round into the lee of Maenmor. His marker buoys were rising and falling on a long swell. He hauled the first string quickly. It was mid-tide and flooding. The line was heavy. It jammed tight against the gunwale as he pulled and the boat dipped with each tug. Then came the bump of the first pot against the boat and he hauled it in. He extracted a good hen from inside. From that first line of pots he had three crabs. He rowed over to the others.

  On the other side of Maenmor he could hear the seas breaking hard against the rock but for the time being he was sheltered. Through the tunnel came the roar of surf, and sudden white surges of water.

  The other string was even heavier. The first pot had a spider crab and he threw it back. The pots were mounting in the bows and the boat’s roll was growing wider. He knew he’d lose some pots now; he’d never be able to row them all back in such a sea. As the third pot came in, the boat slipped off the top of a wave and Jack fell. The line slid back over the side and he found himself eye to eye with a cock crab on the bottom boards. He tried again. As the pot came up, still beneath the surface, he could see the dark form of a lobster. It was a vast lobster. Unable to fit in the pot it had its thorax wrapped around the outside. Its claw was so big that it was that that had jammed in the spout. Jack balanced the pot on the gunwale. With one hand he flicked a series of running hitches around both pot and lobster, lashing to the withies the starry sky of the creature’s back, the boxer’s forearm of its one free claw. He then cut the rope and abandoned the rest to the storm.

  By the time he reached the quays, the water in the boat was slopping at his ankles. Within half an hour, a crowd had gathered to view the giant lobster. It was measured at 29 ¼ inches tail to claw and even Whaler, who came down to the quay and ran his fingers over its full length, admitted it was ‘a beauty’.

  ‘In Australia,’ he said, ‘I saw one like him, only –’

  ‘He was ten feet long, eh Whaler?’ teased Toper Walsh.

  ‘And wore spectacles,’ suggested Tommy Treneer.

  ‘Came up on our anchor chain and we measured him claw to tail at just over …’

  But no one was listening to Whaler. They were all looking at the lobster. Two weeks later it was mounted on a wooden board in the saloon bar of the Antalya.

  In the coming weeks, Jack’s luck continued. When he came in to the Town Quay, Tommy Treneer and the others would wander over from the Bench to see what he had. They never tired of hearing how he caught the big one – was it gurnard that got him, Mr Swee? Parlour pot or inkwell? Where d’ee say ’ee had him, near which of the rocks? Show us again how he was caught, how he was twisted r
ound the pot and which was the claw he had hisself with, Mr Swee?

  Then all at once, the catches stopped. During the middle two weeks of April, while others were reporting good hauls, Jack pulled nothing but empty pots. He set the strings at different angles. He replaced the wrasse with gurnard and then the gurnard with mackerel. He tried a piece of shark but it made no difference.

  One morning Croyden Treneer came into Bethesda. Jack was sitting on the steps with his knots and Croyden came over and leaned against the wall beside him. He lit a cigarette. ‘You been having trouble with your pots.’

  It was a statement, not a question. Jack waited for the ‘I told you so.’ But instead Croyden pushed up his sand-coloured beret, scratched his forehead and said: ‘Perhaps ’ee’d let me take a look.’

  ‘I’m going out tomorrow –;’

  Croyden shook his head. ‘Tonight. Meet me on the Town Quay ten this evening.’

  CHAPTER 3

  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.