by Derek Tangye
But a lobster pot still did not provide the answer. We had an ideal spot to drop it, a rock which jutted out into the small bay then fell sheer to the water so that even at low tide it was thirty feet deep. Our method of operation was to weight the pot with stones, bait it with gurnet which we collected from Newlyn fish market, and throw it with a splash into the sea, watching it gurgle its way to the depths. The connecting rope was fastened to a ring we had cemented in a hole in the rocks – one of several holes each a few inches wide which obviously had been man-made for some mysterious reason in the distant past.
Then we left the pot for twenty-four hours in hopeful expectation that lobsters and crabs would crawl to their doom. We had good reason for hopefulness because the lobstermen themselves dropped their pots out in the cove within a stone’s throw of our rocks; and so what was likely to go into their pots had only to travel a few yards to go into our particular one. They did not bother to do so. Our total catch in eight weeks consisted of several useless spider crabs, one lobster, and a three-foot conger eel whose fang-like teeth gave me the fright of my life as I fought for half an hour to extract it from the pot. I was proud of this conger eel and I carried it up the cliff to the cottage as if I were Monty boasting the catch of a mouse. ‘Look!’ I said to Jeannie, ‘look what I’ve caught!’ The dead eyes leered at her, the grey elongated body was slimy in my hands. Quickly I realised my pride was misplaced. ‘It’s horrible,’ she said, ‘take it away out of my sight!’
Then one evening in the Mousehole pub we met a fisherman called Ned who described a trammel net to us; and he made it sound so alluring that we concluded we would be able to catch enough fish to supply not only ourselves but our neighbours as well. The technicalities were these.
The trammel net was fifty yards long, six feet deep and had a two-inch mesh. Weights were fastened at intervals along one length of the net and corks along the other, specially balanced so that the net floated six feet deep from the surface of the sea. Normally the net was used by either end being attached to two boats, so that they swept the fishing ground like a minesweeper; but Ned’s proposal was that we should adjust this principle to our particular conditions which demanded, of course, that we should ‘shoot’ the net from the rocks and use a buoy anchored in the cove with a pulley attached. The net had long ropes at either end and one of these was threaded through the pulley, then brought back to the rocks; so that when we ‘shot’ the net we would haul one rope to send it out to sea, and haul the other when we brought it ashore, both ropes of course being at other times securely tied to the rings we had cemented in the holes in the rocks.
One morning, therefore, when the sea in the cove appeared as quiet and innocent as a cow musing in a meadow, Ned nosed in his boat and dropped overboard a 56 lb weight with the buoy attached about sixty yards out from where Jeannie and I were standing on the rocks. He had with him the net and the ropes, one of which he threaded through the pulley; then, feeding the net over the side of the boat into the sea, he edged his way towards us until he was near enough to throw the rope-ends, which we promptly fastened to the rings. Thus the trap was set and we could see the shadow of the net stretching halfway across the cove; all we had to do was to go away and think of the fish swimming into it.
For a couple of weeks they obliged to such an extent that we had fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner while Monty stuffed himself with plateful after plateful. The snag was, however, that it was always the same fish – pollock – and we grew sick of the sight of it. True we also caught the bony, many coloured, uneatable wrasse, but these were thrown back into the sea; there was never a sign of the fish of the fishmonger’s slab, the mullet, bass and mackerel. The hope they would come remained. Every day at low tide we went down to the rocks and pulled in the net, picked out the fish, then ‘shot’ the net once again. The weather was fine and the task was simple except for one aspect; and this was to prove our undoing. There was no clear run between the buoy and where I stood pulling in the net. I had to stand in such a position that the net had to be dragged on a jagged channel of rocks close to the water line, and where in fact we picked out the fish. Inevitably I stood the risk of tearing the net but, heavy and cumbersome as it was to control, there was little danger of doing this while the weather was calm; and if it were rough Ned had already warned us to untie it from the ropes and hoist it far out of danger on to the upper part of the rocks – for if the net was out in the cove when a gale blew up, it would certainly be lost.
The first gale caught us prepared, or so we thought. We heard the warning on the six o’clock shipping forecast, and raced down the cliff, pulled in the net and carried it high and dry above the rocks. As I have said, the net was heavy and when just out of the water, felt like a ten-ton weight; so it took time to get it to safety, and the effort brought a sense of satisfaction.
Around midnight I was wakened by such a convulsion of wind roaring round the cottage that I began to worry whether we had taken the net high enough up the rocks. The old nagging worry of the wind which chased us always at Minack; lying cosily in bed with a sound outside like tube trains rushing; as if the cottage had angered a madman who was jabbing at it with a madman’s venom. Hate in the wind. Merciless with a bully’s power. Wedging a stick of conscience as I lie in bed and listen and fear. Was I careful enough? Or did I only pay court to care? Was I lazy because the day was still, my imagination dull? The seasons lie behind me and the wreckage of the wind cuts into my memory like a general remembering the dying in a lost battle.
At one a.m. Jeannie and I got up and dressed and lit a hurricane lamp, and with heads down against the wind, the light spangling the dancing grasses at our feet, we struggled down the cliff. The seas were enormous. Spray wetted our faces like a sponge and the white crests of the waves ribboned the rocks; and it did not take an instant for us to realise that the net had been dragged from its safety.
‘It’s my fault,’ I shouted, ‘I should have taken it further up!’ So easy to self-blame when the exception had occurred; such admission softens, too, the disappointment. And yet that night the waves were lunging at rocks high above the water line we had never seen wet before; where wayward seeds had fertilised, like meadow sweet and sea pinks and wild alyssum, in crevices of wind-blown soil. We staggered forward oblivious of the danger, enraged that care in our fashion had been rewarded by the cheat of the sea. Then, as we stood amid the shower of the waves with the lamp swinging in my hand, I suddenly saw the net stretched like a straddled whale along the rocks; for one instant in black relief in the lamplight, the next lost in the mouthwash of the sea.
I gave Jeannie the lamp and she held it above her head, the light shining on her salt-wet face, feebly acting as sentinel, eyeing the gush of water as it recoiled from the rocks, reflecting the quiet pause, flickering a warning as a white mass gathered momentum then crashed in a thousand fragments splintering the night with spray. At each pause I dashed forward and tugged at the net. I loosened it first from one crevice, then another, and above the thunderous noise Jeannie would shout: ‘Quick! Come back! Another one coming!’ I struggled as if with an octopus, bit by bit, further and further from the water line until the waves no longer grasped with hands but clawed with fingers instead, becoming weaker, strength in spasms, until impotent and defeated they could only stretch at the net as if to caress.
The next morning we looked at the damage, and it was not as bad as we had expected. We laboured up the cliff and took the net to the fisherman’s store in Newlyn where we had bought it. It remained there for three weeks during which time an old salt patiently repaired it. By now the net had cost us over £20, and the fish it had so far produced had been highly expensive; but the summer was still young and the lesson to take greater care well learnt. We listened to the forecasts and whenever there was a suggestion of wind we pulled in the net and piled it high up on the rocks. Such methodical caution was admirable provided the forecasts were correct, but one Sunday evening when the net was stretched across the cov
e, the sea as still as a saucer of milk, the sky clear, the forecast promised the same quiet weather would continue for the next twenty-four hours – yet within twelve the sea was a cauldron.
As dawn broke behind the hills on the other side of Mount’s Bay, I was straining with all my might to bring in the net, but just as part of it reached the channel of rocks where it lay when we picked out the fish, the pulley jammed on the buoy that was bobbing like a cork out in the cove. I was in any case in danger and Jeannie was yelling to me to retreat. I watched for a moment the net swirling in the waters and wrapping itself round the jagged points of the rocks like a black serpent. This was good-bye to our fish. No chance would arise now to carry the net like a wounded animal to Newlyn. The sea had exacted its revenge.
10
One summer the violets were in the meadow below the cottage which had been a bog when we first arrived, and where Tommy and I had sunk yards of earthenware drain pipes. I was weeding the plants one afternoon when Jeannie, who had gone for a walk over the cliffs, returned highly excited. The delight of her character was the way in which her zest relished our adventure in a manner so natural, so persuasive in its truth, that never at any time did she fail to enthuse even when I, crowding my mind with materialistic fears, blocked her enthusiasm with doubts.
I doubted, for instance, on this occasion when she bubbled the news that the farmer whose land bordered John’s to the west, five minutes’ walk from Minack, was prepared to rent us two acres. These particular acres, together with a cascade of small meadows which fell to the sea below them and which the farmer was to retain for himself, had a reputation in the district of being a potato gold mine. It was a reputation which stemmed from the war when new potatoes fetched ten shillings a pound and daffodils of the most common variety five shillings a bunch. It was early land facing south with the Wolf Rock a finger in the distance, so early that the farmer concerned had never failed to keep his record of sending the first mainland potatoes to market. Thus Pentewan, as the land was called, seemed to provide the chance we were seeking. We were cramped at Minack, but now we could launch out as big growers.
‘I wonder why he’s giving it up?’ I said to Jeannie. My hesitancy was a poor reward for her enthusiasm and she told me so bluntly, nor was my caution to be relied upon. It was a mood which might well be concerned with my dissatisfaction over the growth of the plants I was hoeing, a trivial moment of gloom unfitted to greet a challenge. It certainly was unfair to Jeannie.
‘He says there’ll be room for four tons of potatoes,’ she went on as if she were trying to put a match to my woodiness, ‘so that with four tons over here we’ll have eight tons of seed next year and at three and a half to one that means twenty-eight tons of potatoes. We could take at least a thousand pounds, and with luck much more!’
If her reasoning sounded optimistic, it also made sense. We had cropped eleven tons of potatoes from three tons of seed during the past season and had averaged £45 a ton; thus Pentewan together with the land we were continuing to reclaim at Minack would put us firmly in sight of establishing ourselves. We would have elbow room, space for more bulbs, be able to grow a greater variety of crops and each on a substantial scale if we so wished. It would counter the disadvantage of Minack where, in view of the endless reclaiming that had to be done, we resembled two people living in a house that was in the process of being built. At Pentewan the meadows awaited us, old hands which knew what was expected of them, a century of sundrenched labour within their boundaries. I had become as excited as Jeannie.
Meanwhile Jeannie’s Meet Me At The Savoy, for which Danny Kaye had written the foreword, had sold as a serial to John Bull, and we had invested the proceeds in making the cottage our own particular palace. We installed a petrol-driven pump at the top of the well and became reacquainted with the comfort of a bath and indoor lavatory, having added a wood-built annexe at the far end of the one-time chicken house. This development – hot water came from a calor gas heater – gave us as much pleasure as that of a millionaire sailing a maiden voyage in his yacht. We revelled in our independence of the weather, and the gush of a tap gave us the same sharp wonderment as that of natives being introduced to the plumbing civilisation for the first time. We still could not afford a sink with running water from a day and night burning stove, nor a hole through the end wall of the cottage with a connecting lobby to the spare room and bathroom; and it was two years before we could do so. Thus, in order to reach the bathroom, we had to go through the front door, a task which was inconvenient but not disastrous; and as far as the washing up was concerned we had to continue to use a basin, then empty the contents over a neighbouring hedge.
I sometimes wonder whether the ghosts of the cottage cast a spell over us, enabling us to accept this abuse of twentieth-century comfort in the way we did. Inconvenience had pervaded the cottage for over five hundred years, so was it inevitable that we should act as if it were natural? The twentieth century decorates life like a Christmas cake, but it still cannot do anything about the basic ingredients; and there seemed to be a starkness in our companionship which enabled us to find a fulfilment without the aid of man-made devices; as if the canvas of each day was so vast that mirrorsmooth techniques of living, coma entertainment like television, would only make it unmanageable. We are still without electricity and we remain thankful we have no telephone; yet it would be a pose to pretend that self-denial did not seek its compensations.
We have revelled in occasional brisk returns to the life we used to know, being flattered because we were new faces in an old circle or rejoicing in the stimulation of reunions. It was fun being at the first night of A. P. Herbert’s musical play ‘The Water Gypsies’ which he wrote at Minack, to stay at the Dorchester because Richard Aldrich wanted us to be present when his book Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs A was launched. All this was the sugar that titivates a day but does not provide its bread; and the basic fact remained that we could not build Minack by playing as if it were an accessory to our life instead of its foundation.
These sorties to an existence which used to be our daily round confirmed the wisdom of our escape, but, at the time, we were doped by the paraphernalia of sophistication. We delighted in the silliness, the laughter in cocktail bars, relaxing late in the afternoon over lunch, parties at night. No one could have called us peasants. But when we returned to Minack we looked back on those gilded shadows and were thankful they had passed over us so briefly. We felt pity instead of envy for our contemporaries whose company had regained for us so much pleasure. Success in this age breeds only a rackety happiness, providing little time for its own enjoyment. The bite of competition is too sharp for leisure, so success is either pimped by others to further their own ends or creates its own demoralisation and betrays the truth from which it sprang. There is no freedom in twentieth-century achievement, for the individual is controlled not by his own deep thinking processes but by the plankton of shibboleths which are currently in fleeting fashion; and by his own desperate need to maintain financial survival in the glittering world he has found himself. Jeannie and I have also to fight for survival, but it is an easy battle compared to that in a city. At least the countryman still possesses the luxury of being able to live at the same leisurely pace of another age.
We took over Pentewan meadows and briskly decided to cultivate them by modern methods. They were, for the most part, large sloping meadows which from time immemorial had been shovel-turned in the autumn, shovel-planted with potatoes in early spring, shovel-cropped in the summer. They had never seen a machine, and even the laborious task of hacking the ground into suitable condition before planting had always been done by hand. Obviously my new landlord had found an extra man would be needed on the farm if the meadows were to be worked, and unless the wage was that of a coolie profits would be small; and in any case he could not be bothered with the trouble that labour in such circumstances often involves.
I, on the other hand, untrammelled by tradition, was convinced that the answer to t
he problem was mechanisation; and that once I had gathered around me the correct assortment of machines I would forge ahead with the same relentless success as a gang on a motorway. I was not thinking in terms of the normal-sized tractors but of the hand-controlled variety, one of which I had already tried out at Minack; and I thought that if I had a motor-hoe and a motor-driven hedge cutter, tedious time-absorbing tasks would be cut to the minimum.
I bought the Minack tractor second-hand, a monstrous looking thing with a plough, and an engine that kicked like a mule every time I started it. Tommy, who could handle any horse, had nothing in common with this example of progress, and he behaved to it always as if he were a fox sniffing danger; and when one day I suddenly saw Tommy careering down the big field towards the cliff, hanging on to the handlebars with the tractor quite out of his control, I decided it was time to get rid of it.
It was exchanged for a second-hand rotovator and this was the machine with which we first went into the attack on the Pentewan meadows. It was a dualpurpose machine, for if I exchanged the normal small wheels for large ones, removed the rotovator from the engine and substituted a specially designed shaft I could use it with a plough; and a plough can sometimes do work for which a rotovator is useless. For instance some experts will say that a rotovator used often on the same ground will pommel it into uselessness; and that ground should be spared the rotovator and ploughed instead at least once every two years. This probably applies where blades are used but in this instance I had claw-like tines fitted to the machine which churned the soil as if they were forks being used at maniacal speed. The theory was right but the execution wrong, because every time a tine hit a rock hidden beneath the soil it would snap; and as there were many such rocks this method became ridiculously expensive.
