The Main Cages

by Philip Marsden

  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 lug-sail and a mizzen but in 1910 they’d put a steam engine in her and of course that meant drilling a hole there, out through the stern for the propeller but not central, on account of the deadwood bolts, and then so that the propeller spun free the rudder had to have a bit of a cut in her and then the stern-tube forced the crew’s quarters up for’ard and that meant the mainmast had to be restepped and that made the hold hard to get at, and then he’d put in a petrol-paraffin engine, and there was a knock she’d had the previous summer –

  ‘Wait,’ interrupted Jack. ‘Why are you telling us all this? Don’t you want to sell?’

  He looked at them sheepishly. ‘Don’t believe I do.’

  In Mousehole they met an elderly man with a Mount’s Bay driver that had been in his family thirty years (too big). In Porthleven the boat they came to see had just been bought by a Helston doctor as a pleasure ‘steamer’. In Falmouth, they looked at a drifter that was going cheap because she had been in a collision and ‘her handling’d gone strange’.

  In the end they found the Maria V back in Mevagissey where they’d first looked. She was a high-bowed, thirty-seven-foot drifter with tabernacled mainmast and a mizzen
astern. She’d been built in 1925 by Dick Pill of Gorran Haven and had been fitted more recently with a Kelvin engine. Maria V herself was Maria Varcoe, who had left the money to her great-nephew, the Gorran man who had originally commissioned the boat.

  Beneath a sky of grey-brown cloud, Jack and Croyden motored the Maria V back around Pendhu Point and into the bay. Then came a week of strong northerlies and the Maria V remained on her moorings, tugging at the chain.

  On 6 May the last of the winds blew itself out, the seas settled and the Cox of the old lifeboat died. Samuel Tyler was eighty-three and he died in his bed. He had been Cox in 1891 when the Adelaide struck the Main Cages. The following year he lost three fingers fishing and handed over the command to Tommy Treneer. In his years as lifeboatman Samuel Tyler had helped save a total of 233 lives.

  At eleven o’clock that Saturday the cortège gathered at the lifeboat station. The RNLI flag flew at half-mast. The same flag lay wrapped around the coffin, its insignia uppermost. Tyler’s cork lifejacket and a yellow sou’wester rested on top.

  The procession was led by two black cobs and Ivor Dawkins of Crowdy Farm. He wore a khaki coat and Wellington boots and carried a switch of hazel. Dawkins did not share the town’s reverence for the sea, nor did he have much time for those who risked their lives upon it. He was keen to get his horses back to work and was leading the cortège at something rather quicker than a funereal pace.

  Funerals were as popular in Polmayne as lifeboat Coxswains, and almost the whole town turned out to line the route. Jack Sweeney stood with Mrs Cuffe outside Bethesda. Whaler leaned on his stick, staring over the procession to the glow of sun above the bay. On the Town Quay they set down the coffin and for the first of several times sang ‘Crossing the Bar’:

  Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me;

  And let there be no moaning at the bar

  when I put out to sea …

  Beside the coffin stood the six pall-bearers in their red dress-hats: the current Cox, Edwin Tyler; his lineman, Dee Walsh; Red and Joseph Stephens; and Croyden and Charlie Treneer.

  In front of them all, struggling to keep up with the coffin as it left the quay, was Tommy Treneer. He was hunched and shuffling. His black jacket was too large for him. But the others dropped back to give him space. From his lapel dangled, one above the other, three RNLI service medals. He was now Polmayne’s senior retired Cox.

  CHAPTER 4

  The following week the town gathered together again, this time for the Jubilee of King George V. On a breezy afternoon, they made their way to the recreation ground. At one end of the field was a low stage, topped by bunting and flanked by a pair of poles. On each of the poles was a trumpet-shaped speaker through which a Broadcasting Apparatus, loaned by Mr Bradley, relayed a crackling version of the ceremony in London.

  Major Franks stood on the stage and began by addressing the town’s children. ‘My dear little friends! You have more opportunities for enjoying yourselves than any generation before you. You are living in a wonderful age, you must always endeavour to make the most of this privilege …’

  That afternoon’s endeavour was sports. Not a child over two was denied the joys of competition. Each one was placed on the starting line and instructed to run, skip or hop towards a flickering white tape. They were given eggs and spoons and sacks. They had their knees tied together for three-legged races, were upended for wheelbarrow races. They were arranged into relay teams and given a stick. There were chariot races, sprints, sixty-yard slow cycling and a snake race.

  All afternoon the cheers rose from the recreation ground. Spirits were high. It was that brief moment between the beginning of fine weather and the coming of the visitors.

  Mrs Kliskey of Dormullion was there in her bath chair to hand out the prizes. Two spaniels sat at her feet, their collars wrapped in red, white and blue ribbon. Jack had brought Whaler Cuffe. At three o’clock various people assembled on the stage and the elderly Reverend Winchester was helped to his feet by Mrs Winchester.

  ‘What’s happening now, Jack?’ asked Whaler.

  ‘Speech,’ he whispered.

  ‘Good! Who is it?’ Whaler enjoyed speeches.

  ‘Winchester.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘On this auspicious day,’ mumbled Winchester, ‘we thank God for our King’s service to the Empire. We ourselves should never be ashamed of being his servants. For service never degrades. All honest, useful work is a means of glorifying God –’

  ‘Piff!’ grunted Whaler.

  ‘Time was when artisans were proud to hang the implements of their craft on the walls of cathedrals. Some foolish people used to be ashamed of certain kinds of manual work, but to the true Christian, work brings dignity –’

  ‘What does he know of work?’ hissed Whaler. A murmur of conversation began to rise from the crowd.

  ‘Our King is a devout man who recognises full well his dependence on God. He has been an example of reverent and unaffected devotion. There is in him nor in his Queen no cant or hypocrisy, which is an enemy to the cause of true religion. Loyalty is an easy thing when such a king is on the throne and when

  The Reverend Winchester turned the page. But it was the wrong one. He turned the next page, and the next. Major Franks took the chance to nod to Mr Bradley and once again Polmayne’s celebrations were bolstered by sounds from London’s streets. Already the crowd was moving away from the stage to a row of trestle tables where several tea-urns had been set up by the ladies of the Jubilee Committee. The Reverend Winchester looked confused. Mrs Winchester took his arm and said: ‘Come along, dear. Tea.’

  The following day, the Garrett brothers brought the freshly-painted Polmayne Queen into Polmayne’s inner harbour. Her funnel was painted custard yellow, her topsides strawberry red, and like a stick of angelica a cove-line of green ran along her side. On the Bench they said, ‘Looks more like a bloody fairground ride ’n a boat.’

  At Penpraze’s yard they were preparing the Petrels. One by one they brought the pencil-thin yachts into the shed. Their canvas covers were peeled back to reveal the honey-coloured varnish of their combing, their gently raked decks, the immaculate curves of their hulls. A team of three men rubbed down the topsides and filled every tiny blemish. Then they closed the big shed doors, damped down the dusty floor and in absolute silence applied coat after coat of gloss paint until it shone like enamel.

  On the third Saturday in May the first visitors arrived. Whaler took his chiming clock and cane and crossed the yard to his lean-to. Mrs Cuffe and the other landladies gathered outside the Antalya Hotel to wait for the arrival of their paying guests. Shortly after four, the rumble of an engine came from the direction of Pritchard’s Beach and Harris’s Station Bus rolled to a halt. Soon two dozen people were spilling from it, stretching their shoulders in the sun, collecting their bags and turning their faces to the south for the first real smell of the sea.

  It was shortly before dawn, mid-May. Croyden Treneer leaned on the Maria V’s gunwale, watching the dan buoy. Charlie Treneer, his younger brother, was holding a T-hook aft of him. Bran Johns was between them. Jack Sweeney was half in and half out of the wheelhouse. The fishing lights were strung above the deck. Pushing up his beret, Croyden scratched his forehead and nodded to Jack: ‘Knock her in!’

  The bows edged forward. Croyden leaned over to make a grab for the buoy. Pulling it aboard, they flicked on the motor jenny and started to haul the line. Fishing aboard the Maria V had begun.

  In the first week they caught over a thousand stone of fish – ray, ling, conger and skate. They threw back a good deal of small conger but in all they grossed £146. For the next three weeks they fished ground to the south of the Lizard. The bait was patchy at times, and in late May they lost almost a week to the weather, but when they did go out they never came back with less than a couple of hundred stone.

  Jack himself settled into the rhythm of long-lining – the chug of the Kelvin as they headed south to the grounds, the softer note
as they paid out the line, the netting, the hauling, the baiting, the relentless wear on gear and boat. He was constantly tired. He woke tired, rowed tired to the Maria V, motored out of the bay tired, felt morning drag him from the night’s swamp still dripping with fatigue and drop him back there before they were home. When the weather came in the Maria V stayed on her moorings and Jack filled the time splicing spare warps, making monkeys’ fists, doing odd jobs on board. He learned that if there was anything more tiring than fishing, it was idleness.

  But the catches when they did go out were good. Croyden directed the fishing, decided where to go and when. Bran and Charlie followed their given roles and, so long as the fish were there, all was well on board the Maria V.

  Regular summer visitors to Polmayne spent their first day or so checking the town for damage – as though they themselves had lent it out for the winter. In May of 1935 they saw the newly-occupied properties of the Crates; they counted the five new villas above the church, the group of half-built bungalows above the Antalya Hotel. They recorded the gap left by various toppled trees and the thatch replaced by slate on the roof of Major Franks’s harbourside house. ‘It’ll be ruined!’ they said that May as every May. ‘They’ll wreck the town.’ (The mysterious trenches that had appeared did not worry them as they were told that these were for ‘something ornamental’, probably beds of Jubilee flowers.)

  But after a few days the visitors tended to forget all about the changes and settle instead into the indolence that arose from the far greater number of things that had not changed: the granite curve of the twin quays, the smell of escallonia in the mid-morning sun and the swish of evening waves on the pebbles of Pritchard’s Beach.

  The trenches, it turned out, were not for flowers. On the last day of the month, a public meeting was convened in the Freeman Reading Rooms. A Mr Perkins was going to explain all about the wonders of electricity. For years there had been generators in Polmayne – Dormullion had one, so did Pendhu Lodge and the Reading Rooms – but now mains electricity was coming, and for many it was not a moment too soon. Not that the electric itself held much attraction; it was just that in Porth the cables were already laid, and no one in Polmayne could accept that Porth might get it first.