The Main Cages

by Philip Marsden

  There were those however who saw only ill in the invention: ‘I’ll not have that damned spark in my house. Supposing he spills out night-time and burns ’ee?’

  Whaler Cuffe asked Jack to get him to the meeting good and early. They were the first to arrive. Whaler unbuttoned his coat and told Jack a story about a holy man he’d met in China who had shown him a perpetual candle made from the tallow of a pregnant yak.

  Major Franks and Mrs Franks arrived and sat in the front row. They were joined by Mrs Kliskey, Dr and Mrs White and the Winchesters. Before them was a table covered in green baize and behind it Mr Perkins.

  Mr Perkins was from Redruth. He had a well-clipped moustache and a heavy green suit of Harris tweed. On the table before him were a lightbulb, two smoked-glass lampshades (orange and brown), a plug and a length of flex.

  Major Franks checked his watch and signalled to Mr Perkins to start. Rising to his feet, Mr Perkins pushed each object on the table forward an inch, and looked up.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you all for coming out on such an evening to hear what I hope will be an – er – illuminating experience.’ Sunlight seeped in behind the curtains of the hall. Mr Perkins was used to making his speech in the winter.

  ‘I have here before me a number of objects with which many of you will be familiar. Others may look at them and say to themselves: “My goodness me, what manner of device have we here then?” But I can assure you that in years to come these articles will become as indispensable to you and your daily life as the very roof over your heads.

  ‘And I am offering them to you now free of charge. They are free to all those who decide to welcome the miracle of mains electricity into their homes.’ Mr Perkins gripped one of his lapels. He fixed his gaze on the rafters two-thirds of the way down the room.

  ‘A great tide is sweeping the county, ladies and gentlemen – a tide which now laps at the fringes of Polmayne. We who live at this time should count ourselves lucky to witness such glad improvements.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ whispered Whaler.

  ‘I myself have no doubt that when history looks back at our century it will be amazed. It will say to itself: how did they manage to live then? It will look to the moment when life for all classes was immeasurably improved by this’ – he held up the length of flex – ‘the advent of electric current.’

  Tentative applause spread back from the front row. The Reverend Winchester stood and pulled out the unused section of his Jubilee speech.

  ‘Light, ladies and gentlemen, is symbolical of knowledge and guidance and hope. As we survey the years to 1910 we thank God for –’

  Major Franks stood and started clapping. ‘I’m sure you’ll agree that Mr Perkins has made a most convincing case for electric current. If you’d like to come up, I believe Mr Perkins will be happy to answer your questions.’

  Mr Winchester sat down.

  One or two people stepped up and looked at the props on the table. They asked Mr Perkins: ‘How’s it made?’ and ‘What’s it look like?’ Jack signed up for Bethesda and on Whaler’s instructions collected a brown shade.

  Later that evening, with the careful placing of several slates, Dee Walsh managed to divert the stream below the holy well. The water crossed the road and poured into the cable trench in Chapel Street. He kicked over the hazard fences, threw in some rocks and pissed over the whole lot. He had nothing against electricity. But the trenches were being dug by Truro men and if there were trenches to be dug in Polmayne it should be Polmayne men that dug them. It put the work back by a few days and the corporation agreed to recruit a number of local men for the job. Walsh was not among them.

  CHAPTER 5

  One evening in early June a giant anvil of white cloud rose into the sky beyond Pendhu Point. The light sharpened. Every grass-tussock glowed on the headland. In each of the town’s barometers, the mercury dipped, then dipped further.

  The next day dawned muddy yellow. The wind blew hard from the south-west and shafts of sunlight broke low out of the running clouds. The sea was very disturbed. Two warning cones were hoisted on the East Quay and in the inner harbour the punts twisted and tugged at their warps. No boats went out.

  Throughout the morning the wind freshened. Shreds of thatch were torn from the roofs and spiralled up into the gloom. Along the front, one or two figures passed each other in silence, bent against the wind, clutching their collars together. No one was sitting on the Bench, but Toper Walsh was on the Town Quay, telling whoever was around that the weather had ‘gone a bit dirty’.

  At two o’clock Croyden Treneer opened Jack’s door and called up the stairs: ‘Mizzen’s loose, Jack!’

  Jack cursed. He pulled on his coat and his boots and ran out along the Town Quay. Even Toper had now gone home. Shielding his eyes, he looked across to the Maria V and could see the boom swinging back and forth in the gale. Dammit! It was only a matter of time before it did some damage.

  The wind was on his beam as he rowed and he had to follow a long arc out across the bay. He reached the boat and secured the boom. The timber was scarred and the lacing at one point had worn through. He made it all fast and checked the halyards and the stays and the bolt on the wheelhouse door and went up in the bows to look at the mooring.

  It was now blowing very hard. The water ahead was streaked with spume. The mooring buoy was jerking at the chain, but secure. From the slopes ashore came the roaring of the wind in the pines. He stood blinking into the rain, then turned his back to it and looked astern. He felt safe with the force of the weather and everything stowed and fastened and his boat braced against the gale. The gusts howled in the rigging. It was difficult now to look into the wind. He would not attempt to row back to the quays. He would drop down on the wind and leave his boat in the quiet of the river.

  As he pulled in his punt, he became aware of two figures on the rocks several hundred yards downwind. They were a man and a woman. The man was wearing a big double-breasted jacket and carrying a small box on a string. With his other hand he was waving his hat. They were both soaked.

  Jack rowed down to them and they climbed aboard. ‘Thank God!’ The man had to shout over the noise of the wind. ‘No ferry! Thought we’d be spending the night there!’

  The woman was wearing a sky-blue headscarf. Her hair kept spilling from it and eventually she gave up, pulling off the scarf. ‘I don’t know – how does it blow so quickly?’ The rain ran down her cheeks and dripped from her chin. But she was laughing.

  Three, four, five … Tommy Treneer was sitting in Cooper’s Yard. He had been sitting there for half a day now and he was counting the rows of cobbles between him and the rising water. That one stopped seven short of his feet and pulled back. Through the arch he could see the inner harbour and each wave coming through the Gaps and spreading out inside and up onto the road. There was still more than an hour until high water.

  The first of the boats had long since risen into view and he had been watching the rogue seas among them. He knew the yard would flood because it was just three days since new moon and now this south-westerly would drive the spring tides in even higher. Knowing the yard was going to flood gave Tommy a satisfaction of sorts when it did, when he looked through the arch and saw the first waves rise and flop their water onto the road.

  The others had all left. The cottages around Cooper’s Yard were empty. It was now some days since the Stephenses and Mrs Moyle and the other Treneers had gone ‘up the Crates’. For weeks before they had been packing up, but Tommy would have no part of it. He spent the time on Parliament Bench, or wandering the town, or in the lifeboat station. Sometimes he sat on his stool outside the cottage and showed a contemptuous indifference to all the activity around him. ‘Sorry about Tom,’ Mrs Treneer apologised for him. ‘Just he’s gone back-along.’

  She herself spent those days going through the cottage room by room, packing the trunk with the clothes she no longer wore, the lace and embroidery she had been given for her trousseau, her Bi
ble wrapped in untouched silk and her well-used copy of Old Moore’s Almanack. She took down the framed picture in their bedroom of Moses viewing the Promised Land. Croyden and Charlie came to collect the bed, the wardrobe and the boxes and they too took no notice of their father as he sat and scowled in the yard.

  Mrs Treneer had now been a week at the Crates and she liked it. She liked the flat’s new smell and the blood-red linoleum floors and the sunlight it received for most of the day. She tried to convince Tommy to join her. ‘It’s lovely up there, Tom. We got a tap.’

  ‘I’d sooner die here,’ he told her.

  Now they had all gone and he sat on his stool in the gale. Dusk had come early. He did not look at the empty buildings above him; he ignored their lampless windows. He saw only the grey-black shape of the water that formed a channel beneath the arch. He looked beyond it to the flooded road and out into the inner harbour and through the Gaps to the open sea. All his life he had been gazing at the sea and now it was here and he was alone with it. It had reached his boots and crept in under the door behind. The yard was submerged. He sat there muttering and scratching his forearm and scowling and still there was another half-hour until high water.

  In the morning, small clouds drifted in the pale blue sky. The sun sparkled on the water. A barnacled bottle crate, stamped with ‘ST AUSTELL BREWERY’ and containing the snapped-off leg of a china doll was jammed in under the steps of Eliza Tucker’s general store. In the churchyard the roots of an old Monterey pine had prised open a newly-dug grave as it fell. The Reverend Winchester stood over it, horrified.

  The good news was that a large section of sea-wall had collapsed beyond Pritchard’s Beach and it would keep four men busy for at least a month.

  In Cooper’s Yard a thin layer of sediment lay over the cobbles. Pools of water remained on the slate flags inside; a brown line three inches up the wall marked the height of the flood. There was the soft smell of sewage.

  Croyden found his father in the old kitchen. He was sitting on his stool, scratching his forearm. He looked up at Croyden with watery eyes. He stood slowly, and without a word brushed past his son and made his way up the hill to the Crates.

  ‘Maria Five!’

  Jack and Croyden were bringing the Maria V in through the Gaps, and on the end of the East Quay Jack recognised the man he had rescued from the rocks. He was waving.

  ‘Ahoy there! Maria Five!’

  Beside him was the woman in the sky-blue headscarf. Jack nudged the boat in against the quay wall, and as Croyden took a line ashore the man came up and thrust his hand over the gunwale towards Jack.

  ‘Abraham,’ he said. ‘Maurice Abraham. And my wife, Anna.’ He looked up and down the boat’s length. ‘Look, Mr er –’

  ‘Jack Sweeney.’

  ‘Mr Sweeney. I was wondering, could you take me out next time you go? I wouldn’t get in your way – just need a corner to sketch. I’m an artist, you see.’

  Jack told him to be there tomorrow morning at five-thirty.

  Croyden watched them both go, merging back into the quayside crowd. He shook his head. ‘Damn boxies.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Above Penpraze’s yard and above the withy beds, the Glaze River narrowed and there was the old crossing-point for the ferry. In years gone by, the ferry allowed smallholders to get over the river and take the twice-weekly boat to Truro market from Polmayne’s quays. Porth’s sea-captains, en route to ships in Falmouth, also relied on it. Until some years before 1914 a man named Crimea Trestain ran the ferry in a boat which, every Easter, he lovingly upturned on the shingle bar outside his cottage and painted pale pink.

  ‘Colour ’a maid’s ass,’ he explained. ‘Room aboard for eight men, six women, three sows – or a parson.’

  No one knew how old Crimea was. It was not clear whether he’d been born on the day the Crimean War broke out or the day it ended, or some other day entirely. Nor in the end could anyone remember whether it was him that gave out first or the boat, but by the Great War a new ferry – much less regular – had replaced it downstream. Crimea and Mrs Trestain disappeared up ‘Bodmin way’, the boat was laid up in Gooth Creek and the lease of Ferryman’s Cottage was bought by an artist from London. The artist was Preston Connors.

  Through Connors, the town of Polmayne and Ferryman’s Cottage began to acquire a certain status among painters and writers in London. A new strain of incomers sought out lodgings there. They spent their days perched on clifftops or sauntering thoughtfully through the creekside woods. In the evenings they crammed into the main room of Ferryman’s Cottage or gathered on the shingle beach outside. They had al fresco meals and made impromptu music. They talked. All were stirred by the remoteness of the place, and by the immanent beauty of the river and the woods above it. After his first stay in Polmayne the watercolourist Russell Flower wrote to his host: ‘You have found a wonderful place, dear Connors. The mystical buttress of Pendhu Point opens up mineshafts of perception in man …’

  It was at about this time that the first of Polmayne’s net lofts was converted to an artist’s studio. The people of Polmayne became used to coming across semi-circles of easels on the quays or around the holy well. The painters became known as ‘boxies’ for the wooden cases they carried. In the summers before the war, many of the town’s young men, including Croyden Treneer and his brother Charlie, learned that they could earn sixpence for stripping off and cavorting in the coves around Pendhu while L.J. Price – in velveteen coat, hobnailed boots and cravat – sat on the rocks and painted them.

  After the war, Preston Connors and Mrs Connors, now in their late fifties, moved up to Wicca House. The cottage continued as a haunt for artists. Throughout the twenties, an ever more colourful group beat a path to it. The sculptor Denton Sykes rode up the river at low tide on his Royal Enfield. Edeth St John, the surrealist painter and mystic poet, spent a winter in Ferryman’s, composing her haunting book The Dances of Still Things. In the Introduction she wrote: ‘Sometimes I listen to the wood-spirits sing above the Glaze River, and sometimes I listen to them weep …’

  It was in a loft near Cooper’s Yard that the Russian émigré Nikolai Bukovsky experimented with his famous mathematical paintings, where he wrote The Furious Manifesto, and where, one morning in 1929, he was found hanging from a beam.

  Bukovsky’s suicide cast a shadow over Polmayne’s small colony of artists although in truth, by the summer of 1930, the group had already begun to dissipate. The art market had collapsed. Some went to St Ives or Lamorna, others returned to London, a few went abroad. Preston Connors entered the first stages of senility.

  In June 1934, Maurice Abraham made a pilgrimage to Ferryman’s with his wife Anna. Distressed to see the cottage abandoned, he applied to the Connorses for the lease.

  At that time, Maurice Abraham was an accomplished if not particularly innovative painter. For all the precision of the portraits, the evocative power of the Scottish canvases and the moodiness of the seascapes, his work had always been overshadowed by his own physical beauty. The sculptor Brenda Fielding said: ‘One would rather wish that Maurice was a statue so as to be able to stare at him at length without having to talk to him.’

  Photographs show his girlish beauty. His two or three self-portraits do not, but reveal instead an oddly blank expression.

  Maurice and Anna Abraham lived in a four-storey house in Hampstead inherited from Maurice’s father. In June of 1934 they closed it up and came to Polmayne for several months. They had the roof re-thatched. They pulled off the ivy and re-rendered the walls. They replaced the rotting stairs. Preston Connors, who understood less and less of the world around him, applauded their efforts. ‘Fine place for partridges, Ferryman’s …’

  In May 1935, having spent several months of the winter in South America, Maurice came back to Polmayne with Anna. They planned to spend the summer there. As the weeks passed Maurice found himself transported by the atmosphere at Ferryman’s – not so much by the river or the woods but by the great na
mes who had preceded him – Sykes, Bukovsky, Connors, St John.

  ‘Here in the darkness,’ he wrote to the poet Max Stein in Germany, ‘one feels the echo of a thousand unspoken conversations, the presence of a thousand unworked canvases, and the whisper of a thousand yet-to-be-written poems.’

  ‘Marvellous light!’

  Maurice Abraham took a deep breath of morning air. He was wearing his double-breasted jacket and a floppy trilby that shadowed his face. He was standing in the wheelhouse of the Maria V with Jack. As they motored out of the bay, he lit a pipe and began to talk.

  What had occupied him over the last couple of years, he explained, was ‘man and work’. ‘In our machine age, work has become more and more mercenary, something done for money rather than something that is fulfilling in itself. Work should be a noble thing, Jack. Instead we see it as a chore. Mind if I call you Jack?’

  Jack shook his head. He was thinking about the tides. Springs had eased a little but were still strong. If they didn’t reach the grounds within two hours, the ebb would make fishing impossible. They should have left earlier. He opened the throttle to full.

  Maurice sucked on his pipe and raised his voice. ‘This winter I spent some time hopping up the Amazon, place to place, painting. The further up the river I went the more of a stranger I was. But you know what struck me most of all?’

  Jack leaned out of the wheelhouse and called out to Croyden, ‘We’re going to be pushed!’ Croyden and Bran hauled out two maunds and hurriedly finished the baiting up.