“Chris!” I heard Pam call to me from the house and turned to see her walking down to join me, jangling a set of keys in her hand. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“I’m going to drive down and let Mum and Dad know what’s happened.
Better than a phone call, I thought.”
“Good idea.”
“Do you want to come?”
“No thanks. I… um …”
“Have somewhere else to go?”
I smiled uneasily. “Yes. I probably will… take a drive while you’re gone.” “To see the Jagos?”
“It seems you’ve read my mind.”
“I reckoned it was either that or you’d head straight back to Pangbourne.”
“No. I… think I’ll probably stay for a few days. If that’s all right.”
“No problem.”
“Of course, if you need the room …”
“I said there was no problem.”
“Yes. So you did. Thanks. I…”
“Chris, there’s something you should know. About the Jagos. They had a son, didn’t they?”
“Yes. Tommy. A few years younger than Nicky and me.”
“He died. A while back. I read about it in the paper. A farming accident. A tractor rolled over on him, I think. Something like that.”
I glanced away. “Oh, great. That’s just great.”
“I was going to mention it to you, but by the time we next heard from you … I must have forgotten.”
“Never mind.” I put my arm round her in a fleeting gesture of brotherly affection. “Tell Mum and Dad I’m really sorry if this has spoilt their anniversary.”
“It’s not your fault.” She sighed. “At least it didn’t happen the night before.”
“It couldn’t have.”
She frowned at me. “Why not?”
“Because I wasn’t here then. That’s why it is partly my fault. He was waiting for me. He wanted me to be here when he did it, and to see what he looked like afterwards.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I think I can.”
“But why? What would be the point?”
“I’m not sure. But I’m going to try and find out.”
“And you think the Jagos can help you?”
“Maybe. I have to start somewhere.”
“You don’t have to start. It’s not compulsory.”
“No? Well, I’ll tell you this, Pam. It certainly feels as if it is.”
Uncle Joshua never spoke openly of his years in North America. The most detailed information I ever had out of him was when he found me looking at a map of Alaska and the Yukon territory of Canada one day.
It was in a big old atlas in the library at Tredower House. He’d bought most of the books in the room from Lady Pencavel as a job lot, as a way of filling the shelves, I assumed, since you’d never have called him a literary man. But maps he seemed to like. Maybe they reminded him of the wandering life. It must have answered some need in his soul, otherwise he wouldn’t have followed it for so long. And, not surprisingly, the atlas always seemed to fall open at that particular page.
Juneau, Sitka, Skagway; Whitehorse and Dawson City; Valdez, Fairbanks, Nome. He knew them all. That was obvious from the way he spoke about them. He had his memories: of the tented city on the beach at Nome, where gold sparkled in the black sand of the Bering Sea; of the mud-steeped streets and smoke-filled saloons of Dawson; of the smokestacks and aerial tram ways of the Treadwell gold mine stretching along the shore of Douglas Island across the channel from Juneau so big it was a town unto itself; of the long sunless winters, when the snow drifted higher than the houses and the temperature dropped to 50 below; and of the short night less summers, when the flies and mosquitoes could literally drive a man mad. He spoke of such things that afternoon more freely and fully than at any other time. I don’t know why. Maybe my curiosity and his nostalgia for the land that had been his second home peaked simultaneously by pure chance. It was a day in the early spring of 1947, cold enough to remind him of Alaska; a day in the last spring he ever saw.
Fairbanks, deep in the Alaskan interior, was the place he said most about. He’d spent more time there than anywhere else. Years, it seemed. He talked of when it was just a scatter of tents and log cabins, but also of when it was a large and bustling town, laid waste by fire one year but rebuilt by the next. He described the annual sweepstake on the date the ice would melt in the Chena river. He recounted the celebrations that greeted the news of Congress granting Alaska the right to self-government. And he mentioned an organization I knew nothing about: the Northern Commercial Company. I absorbed these names and events with the wonder and lack of understanding of the child I was.
After his death, when the true scale of his wealth became apparent, I borrowed every book about Canadian and Alaskan history that Truro Public Library held. There weren’t many, but from them I gleaned enough to put some flesh on the skeleton of his past, to trace the outline of the life he led during his twenty-three-year exile from Cornwall. Mum and Dad disapproved of my interest in the subject. They said it was disrespectful of the dead. Even then, I knew that was eyewash. With secretive zeal, I went on, while other boys were collecting stamps and birds’ eggs and cigarette cards. More than once,
I wished I had Nicky to impress with my discoveries. But that wish had to be protected with even greater secrecy than my historical researches.
Joshua Carnoweth left Cornwall in the autumn of 1897, bound, like thousands of other optimistic fortune-seekers around the world, for the Klondike gold field That’s a fact. The rest is my reconstruction of what he must have done but it’s as close to the truth as we’re ever likely to get.
Anybody who came as late as Uncle Joshua to the Klondike was bound to be disappointed. Gran was right on that score. The gold field was compact and accessible if you were lucky enough to be there at the start. But that was in 1896/97. If, like Joshua Carnoweth and countless others, you were still working your way up the coast of British Columbia in the spring of 1898, you were chasing a wild goose, not a golden one. And the chase was hard and long. You reached Skagway, a ramshackle crime-ridden port just over the Alaskan border.
If you weren’t robbed and/or murdered there on a mud-smeared plank-walk, you headed north across the mountains via the notoriously heartbreaking Chilkoot Pass to the Canadian border. You repeated the journey as many times as it took to stockpile the year’s supply of food which the Mounties insisted you have before entering Canada. Then you trudged on to Lake Bennett and scrambled for a berth on a riverboat up to Dawson. And when you got there, you rapidly realized that there wasn’t even a living, never mind a fortune, waiting for you. In the summer of 1898, 20,000 people, Joshua Carnoweth among them, confronted each other and their collective folly on the muddy streets of Dawson City. The Mounties ensured they were at least safer than they’d been in Skagway, but rich they weren’t nor ever likely to be. The gold was all gone or spoken for, and glitter was in short supply. Uncle Joshua must have despaired, realizing he’d come halfway round the world to gain nothing but an insight into his own stupidity. What was he to do?
The question answered itself that winter when word reached Dawson of a bigger better gold strike at Nome, on the far western coast of Alaska.
The stampeders were off again, in mad pursuit, sledging or walking down 2,000 miles of frozen river. Uncle Joshua went too. On foot, I reckon. If he did have money, it wouldn’t have been enough to buy a sledge or dogs to pull it. Maybe he knew by then that it was hopeless, that as soon as you heard of a strike it was already too late to profit from it. But there was no alternative; he had to follow the course he’d set.
Nome was in fact kinder than most gold fields to the small-timer. The metal was right there for the panning, laced through the sand along the beach. There was no premium on expensive machinery, but, as elsewhere, priority counted for everything. The best claims were taken by the spring of 1899. For the rest, there was g
old to be had, but not enough and certainly not quick enough to yield a fortune. Uncle Joshua must have crossed from alternating hope and despair into a hard new realism on the tented foreshore at Nome that last summer of the century. You could sift a living of sorts from the sand, but if you reckoned up the profit and loss, you came out scarcely better than even. Two of the three years Cordelia had granted him were up, and it was obvious the last of them wasn’t going to be any better. It was over, finished, done with. The gamble was lost.
What did he do? Here the evidence becomes sketchier. I think he realized his only chance of making good was to learn the craft of gold prospecting and to apply the knowledge in areas where none had so far been found, but where there was some reason however slender to believe it might be. If so, he must also have realized that the effort could take years and still go unrewarded, but I think he preferred that to creeping home, destitute and defeated. How he set about it I don’t know. His familiarity with Juneau and the Treadwell mines suggests he may have worked in them to raise funds for his grand effort. As an experienced miner, it would have been a logical recourse when he left Nome even poorer than he’d left Dawson. He may have laboured there, salting away his wages, for a year or more. Then … Fairbanks. The strike there broke the gold rush trend, because most of the gold lay in accessibly deep. It took time and heavy machinery to exploit its potential, so the town of Fairbanks grew as a stable forward-looking community, spared the worst excesses of boom and bust. Uncle Joshua made it his home for the rest of his time in Alaska, and that decision made his fortune.
I think he was in from the start: July 1902, when an Italian prospector named Felix Pedro struck gold near a trading post, that was all Fairbanks was then, on the Chena river. I think he may even have been in partnership with Pedro. I remember Gran speaking scornfully once in Uncle Joshua’s hearing of the Italian prisoners of war the Jagos had been lent to help with the harvest. The old man had flown to their defence, describing the Italians as ‘good and honourable people’. I didn’t know then that it might have been Felix Pedro he was really thinking of.
Uncle Joshua remembered Fairbanks when its permanent structures could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Which means he must have been there that first summer. He remembered the town’s great fire, which swept through the business district in May 1906. And he remembered news reaching the town of President Taft signing the Alaskan home rule bill in August 1912. I think it’s safe to assume he was there continuously from 1902 until the outbreak of the First World War, slowly accumulating a fortune from what must have been highly lucrative mining interests. The Fairbanks region produced 63,000,000 dollars’
worth of gold between 1902 and 1914, a statistic that’s stuck in my mind ever since I first came across it. Uncle Joshua presumably formed a company to administer production at his mines. Maybe he also had a stake in the Northern Commercial Company, the outfit he mentioned to me. The NCC established a virtual monopoly on road and river transport to the coast and supplied the town with water, electricity and steam heating. Maybe he invested in some of Fairbanks’ other industries as well, like brewing and logging, and made generous donations to the schools and hospitals. Maybe he became a pillar of the community and decided to settle there permanently, helping civic values to establish themselves in the Alaskan heartland. For what it’s worth, I believe he’d have ended his days in Fairbanks, nourishing his memories of Cordelia, yet reconciled to never seeing her again but for the war.
That was a phase of his life he never once discussed: the four years he spent in the Canadian army, fighting on the Western Front. Some patriotic instinct must have prompted him to leave Fairbanks and volunteer his services to the military authorities in Canada. He had plenty of good reasons to stay put in Alaska. He was over forty and documents that came to light after his death showed he’d already been an American citizen for more than ten years. But still he went. Gran found some campaign medals and frayed epaulettes in an old tobacco tin when she was clearing out his effects. It’s only because of them that I know he was a major in the Royal Canadian Engineers. His mining experience probably meant he was a valuable recruit. Maybe he oversaw trench construction and tunnelling operations. We’ll never know, because he never said so much as a word. The only certainty is that he emerged from the conflict with mind and body intact. Unlike Cordelia’s husband, Archie Lanyon, who ended his war with a German bullet lodged in his brain, an injury that was to prove all the crueller for not being fatal.
Uncle Joshua knew nothing of that when he was demobilized. Even so, something had changed in him. He wanted to go home, and home, it seems, meant Cornwall. The death and destruction he’d seen in France must have made him yearn for the land where his life had begun. I suppose he went back to Fairbanks to sell off his business interests and settle his affairs. That would explain why he didn’t reach England until the spring of 1920 and had only liquid assets with him when he did, assets on a scale that must have shocked the manager of Martins’
Bank in Truro when he made it clear just how much he meant to deposit with him. The fact was that Joshua Carnoweth had returned to the city of his birth a millionaire several times over.
I felt a haunting affinity with Uncle Joshua in the distant hour of his homecoming as I drove out of Truro late that afternoon. There’s a point at which absence becomes its own sustenance. Beyond that point, any return to the place and people you’ve abandoned becomes impossible.
Not in the physical sense, of course. You can go back, but only to discover that what you remember is no longer there.
I was heading for the Jagos’ farm down on the Roseland peninsula, following the same route as in August 1946, when my father had driven Nicky and me down to Trelissick in the grocery van and seen us on to the King Harry Ferry, satisfied that Dennis Jago, Nicky’s uncle, was waiting for us with the dog cart on the other side of the river. Petrol was rationed then, holiday makers in cars hadn’t been -seen since 1939
which meant never in my recollection and horse-drawn traffic was commonplace. The ferry was an ageing steam-powered craft that looked as if it had been in operation since before the internal combustion engine was invented. Travelling on it without adult supervision even if we were under observation from both banks was a great adventure. As the ferry limped across, I stared over the rail at the tree-lined windings of the river, imagining a galleon in full sail gliding up from Falmouth in times gone by, or smugglers stealing out by night on secret errands.
Something of that childish wonder was still with me as I approached the ferry that afternoon. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon and I wasn’t surprised to find a queue winding back up the hill at Trelissick. I had to sit out one crossing before getting aboard. It might well have been quicker to drive the long way round through Tregony. But I didn’t care. The thickly wooded banks of the Fal, as it stretches languidly towards Carrick Roads, hold more associations for me than I could tire of in a whole day of waiting.
When I reached the other side, I took the St. Mawes road, letting my memories soak in with the heat of the sun and the familiar green folds of the fields and hedges. No vehicle followed me when I turned off down the deep fern-shuttered lane. It had been less overgrown in 1946, on account of wartime traffic to and from a nearby anti-aircraft battery. But the sign at the end of the track leading to Nanceworthal was exactly as I remembered it, sagging on its post at what seemed the very same angle.
I passed a half-built brick structure, visible through a gap in the hedge. The grass was nearly as high as its walls, suggesting its construction had been abandoned a long time ago. That was the only change I noticed as I approached the house, tucked beneath the brow of the hill just where the land began to descend towards the cliff top.
The fences looked in good order, the cattle in the fields healthy and numerous. When I pulled into the yard, though, I noticed a Dutch barn that hadn’t been there in the Forties and a bigger more modern milking parlour. Nanceworthal had moved on, if not exactly with the tim
es.
There was a dog already snapping around the car when I climbed out. I heard Ethel call it to heel before I saw her, watching me from the door of the cob and slate farmhouse. She was about sixty-five, but looked older in a frayed brown dress and green cardigan, her hair lank and grey as a winter’s dusk, her eyes dimmed by a surfeit of misfortune. I was suddenly lost for words, capable of nothing beyond a smile and a vague gesture of the hand, offering sympathy without consolation.
“Hello, Ethel,” I said, sensing the incongruity of the greeting; I’d never addressed her by her first name before.
“Hello, young Christian.” Her Cornish accent surprised me. I’d forgotten how strong it was. “Reckoned as how it was you.”
“Have you heard… from the police?”
“We been told ‘bout Nicky, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’m sorry. I wanted to … Can I come in?”
“Come in and welcome. There’s tea in the pot.”
Beyond Recall Page 4