Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  Day-boat skippers carve their own small paths through the world, quietly working inshore to their own schedules, and carrying a range of nets and pots for different fisheries: trammels (two layers of netting with a smaller mesh inner net between the two in which the fish become tangled) and tangle nets (single-walled nets like gill nets) for turbot and monkfish; hand-lines for mackerel, sole and the bit of haddock they are allowed to catch; nets for bass, gurnard, red mullet; pots for lobster and crab. Day-boat fishermen need to be acutely aware of their work environment, attuned to the changing of the seasons, feeling the way that the natural world shifts over the year.

  For hand-lining, the most traditional fishing technique, a single line is attached with feather lures on hooks to catch mackerel by hand. Hand-line fishermen tend to work alone, often those men who most desire seclusion, keeping a distance from the main hubbub and rivalry of the industry. They are often more environmentally conscious than other fishermen. Newlyn’s own ‘Mad Dick’, a self-proclaimed ‘Environment Nut’, who is in his seventies and wears shorts every day of the year, declares he would like to see all the technological advances that have wrecked the industry destroyed. He believes boats such as trawlers, which ‘drag up the whole seabed’, miss the essential intimacy of fishing: where you can literally feel each fish tugging on your line. These days there also exist long-lining commercial fishing vessels, which carry up to a hundred kilometres of line with hooks set at intervals along them. In this way the most environmentally sustainable mode of fishing has been transformed into a damaging one that results in far more waste, or by-catch – fish that you will not sell and may not have quota for.

  There is fierce competition between the different kinds of fisherman. Every man I speak to has his own – often incredibly biased – opinions about the other kinds of boats, assuring me that his style of fishing is superior and takes a cannier sort of individual. One man, who was a gill-netter for all his career, describes trawling as ‘kid’s play – not proper fishing’. When I tell him about the huge monkfish we caught on the Filadelfia, he says: ‘Yeah, huge for a trawler’, and when I show him a picture of the great beast, he laughs: ‘Nooo, that’s a babby compared to what we gill-netters get!’ Kyle, meanwhile, tells me he’s never fancied the idea of day-boat work like crabbing because it is ‘too much heavy lifting, not enough fishing’. For trawlermen the constant coming and going of day-boating is nightmarish: ‘While you are out sea, you want to be properly gone – that way you know where you are.’ Meanwhile some of the day-boaters say they could never imagine spending weeks away from their family. Another fisherman I speak to, who has worked both types of vessel, believes that the most skilled craft of all is trawling: it is an exact art, if even the smallest thing goes wrong, ‘the whole trip is fucked’.

  8

  FISH THROUGH FINGERS

  Most Saturday mornings Denise and Lofty’s friend Nicky pops round for a coffee and a yarn. The three of them, several couples, and Don when he is ashore, are all part of what I come to think of as the Star crew, a group of long-time Newlyn residents, between forty and sixty-something, who spend most evenings laughing their nights away huddled around the table by the window at the Star, or playing sudden-death pool at the Royal British Legion Club round the corner.

  I don’t think I really knew what community meant before staying with Denise and Lofty. Because those who live in the town also work in the town and socialise here too, there is a depth to their relationships virtually unheard of in sprawling cities, where you are never served by the same cashier twice and your local is only your local for the year you live in that area, before your tenancy ends and you find yourself starting all over again in a new part of the city.

  Despite never having played pool, I join the Star crew one night at the Legion. We take over the whole club, causing its older, more wizened members to grumble loudly about the youngsters coming in and causing a ruckus. ‘You clearly didn’t have enough of a misspent youth!’ Nicky laughs as I miss yet another easy pot. There is a glass jar on the main bar, filled half the way up with 10ps. Every time one of our gang swears loudly, the old man behind the bar coughs disapprovingly, which in turn triggers a chorus of voices around the pool table to yell gleefully: ‘We’ve broken rule fucking twenty-one again!’ This is followed by a loud clattering as pockets are emptied into the jar for breaking the club’s stringent swearing ban on the premises.

  Denise and Lofty occupy a spot at the centre of Newlyn’s community, loved dearly by everyone in the town. Though they have both always lived in the West Penwith area, they didn’t come across one another until later in life. Their relationship is the kind you hold up as a model to strive for. Each day during their lunch hour they walk home from their neighbouring places of work to eat and smoke together, living their lives side by side with an ease and sense of play that seems to come more naturally to them than I’ve ever seen in any another couple. While staying with them, I learn that the best conversations are not the big ones, the ones you are trained to reach for at university, all those long words with which to explain the world away; the best ones are the small chats that occur during the adverts between TV shows or while chopping vegetables for the Sunday roast, which make you laugh, which are repetitive and forgettable and need never be anything more than that.

  Lofty works in the high-ceilinged marine equipment warehouse across from the Strand and just two doors down from the fishmonger’s where Denise works, which means that Lofty is acquainted with almost every fisherman working in Newlyn. The shop, whose large front windows face the harbour, is filled with reams and reams of colourful rope, nets coiled up like snakes, oilskins and blue plastic fishing gloves spread out across the floor. I keep him company one afternoon, discussing the town and how it differs from where I grew up – our conversation punctuated by fishermen coming in every few minutes and calling out from the entrance: ‘All right Lofty, I want you for oilskin trousers’, or ‘I want you for lifeboat cord’.

  Sat there in the backroom office amongst half-inflated lifeboats, Lofty provides me with a list of some of his favourite ‘Newlyn’ phrases. ‘Good as gold’ is one he uses all the time to describe other members of the community, the goodness in this case simply meaning kindness and not needing to mean anything more than that. I can’t believe so many people in one place can be as good as gold. One of my friends back home suggested that calling someone nice is practically an insult; when any of us gives a person a compliment, it is always that they are interesting or smart or cool, in recognition of some external factor rather than an innate quality or the way they treat others. But those words suddenly sound overwhelmingly hollow.

  ‘What about dreckly?’ he says. You must know dreckly?’ I shake my head. Lofty explains that it’s a quintessential Cornish time phrase. Though a near homophone of directly, its linkage to the word is perhaps ironic since dreckly tends to mean at some point in the future – a rough equivalent to mañana in Spanish. I soon hear it everywhere around the town. On one fisherman’s kitchen wall is a clock that has word DRECKLY spelled out in block letters across its face, while the numbers themselves are suffixed by ‘ish’. A St Ives-born fisherman has named his small day-boat collective ‘Dreckly Fish’. And most texts I get from Newlyn residents I’m meant to be meeting imminently end with a vague: ‘See you dreckly!’

  More than almost anyone else in Newlyn I hear the phrase good as gold attached to, is Nicky. Perhaps counter-intuitively, he is also regarded as one of the grumpiest people in town. When you ask him how he is, he will inevitably say ‘terrible’, before – more often than not – breaking into a wild grin, so that you never quite know how to respond. I also hear rumours that he has the most beautiful singing voice. When he deigns to take the mic at karaoke nights in the Red Lion, the whole crowd falls silent in anticipation.

  Nicky works at both the overnight grading in the market, a job requiring men to sort through all the fish that have arrived into the harbour that evening into sizes and species r
eady to be sold at auction the following morning, and on the fish auction itself. As a result, he is almost always exhausted. When I catch him about during the day, he is wearing the dreamy, absent expression seen on the faces of all those who are more accustomed to the uninhabited hours of the night. After we finish playing pool, he agrees to let me observe the grading one night the coming week, while the following morning I will come again to watch the auction, these two vocations providing the incomes of a significant number of people in the town. As I am so very often told: ‘For every one man at sea, that’s five jobs on land.’

  Nicky meets me outside the imposing market building at 8 p.m., wearing a white coat, his hair tucked into a bright blue hairnet. The harbour water on the market’s other side is already oil-slick black and the last few lights of crab boats can just be seen making their way back in through the Gaps.

  The market is cavernous, damp and rattling; scaffolding climbs up its cement-coloured interior. Built in the 1980s, after years of complaints about its shoddiness the place is finally in the process of having its roof redone. We enter through a rectangular green up-and-over door. Above us harsh strip lights are suspended from corrugated iron buttresses fixed to the ceiling; their glow is so white that it seems to suck away all other colour, making the room appear like one enormous operating theatre. A large sign on the opposite wall declares: ‘No smoking. No spitting. No eating’. Five men also dressed in white coats work silently at humming silver machines. They do not notice me come in. The atmosphere is especially low tonight, Nicky tells me. The men will be working flat out until six tomorrow morning: every fish must be graded before the auction takes place and last night over a quarter of a million fish came in from the boats. I look at the men working silently under the shadows of the market. I thought I’d met most of Newlyn by now, but I have never seen any of these night men with their purple-blue shaded eyes before, who toil all night in a decrepit building at the very edge of the harbour and who return to their homes before the rest of the town wakes.

  Nicky gets to work on the large silver chute. He separates the clumps of icy fish that have just been unloaded from a trawler and sends them down the chute to be weighed and sorted into the appropriate red box. I ask if I can help and he gestures through a plastic curtain to a box of gloves, which I find are coated with a hardened layer of fish juice. I get to work, standing opposite Nicky, unpacking box after box of fish, sending them skidding down the chute.

  No one speaks or even looks up, each of us retreating to our separate worlds as we work in sync with the monotonous background drone of the machines. Without a clock in the market, my only way of measuring time is through the arrival of each new boat’s haul before the conveyor belt. I notice how crews cut the monkfish at different points, some of their slices cleaner, others more jagged. If the monkfish are the hardest fish to gut, then the endless numbers of tiny lemon sole are a nightmare to break apart. When a few boxes of monk tails arrive, the spark of variety it provides is a welcome distraction. I think of the men out on the boats, slinging these same fish into boxes and then stacking them up into swaying towers that move together with the waves. I wonder if I know the man who has caught these fish. Was it Kyle? Or Andrew? Or maybe David on the Crystal Sea?

  The cold of the ice gradually seeps through my gloves until I can no longer feel my fingers. ‘This is a bad job, Lamorna,’ says Nicky, breaking the silence at last. ‘It’s a bad job.’ He was a fisherman for most of his working life, but when you get older the strain the job puts on your body eventually catches up with you, he says. Grading and working on the auction seemed the only way he could avoid leaving the industry entirely. It is the same with a lot of retired fishermen. To lose your connections to fishing would simultaneously entail a loss of your place in the community. Still, grading is relentless, the hours unforgiving and, though the sea is at your door, you are bound to the land.

  Within the rhythm of work we find moments to ask each other questions. Favourite music, favourite football team, what his daughter does, what my parents do, our relationships, our favourite fish.

  ‘Monk. You?’

  ‘I like John Dory.’

  ‘Never had John Dory.’

  Nicky stops. ‘Are you pulling my leg? Fry it up in a little oil, a little butter and there is nothing better.’

  Around 10 p.m., Nicky yells out: ‘Okay you lot, tea break!’

  Instantly all work ceases. The machines grind to a halt and a line of us traipse out along the edge of the harbour, our shadows long and slender in the lamplight. We pass alongside the rows of trawlers, lifted up and down by the gentle lap of water, their breath rising and falling in sleep. Down in their berths, fishermen from Eastern Europe, Latvia and the Philippines, are tucked up for the night in their sleeping bags; these men tend rarely to step foot on land for the six months they work on the Cornish fishing boats, as if not quite committing to the idea that they are far from home, in a distant country, before they return to their families for the rest of the year with their earnings.

  Halfway round the harbour’s edge we go through a door that I have never noticed before and enter a cramped room. The men at once sit themselves down and begin unwrapping lovingly packed snacks and sandwiches, mostly made by their wives. The kettle boils continuously and spoonful upon spoonful of instant coffee, with equal amounts of sugar, is heaped into mugs. The only sound comes from occasional yawns, noisy sighs and the munching of crisps. Then, apropos of nothing, someone makes an unexpected sarcastic comment, causing the company to shudder into wheezing laughter. After this, silence reigns once more, before the next joke comes in to slice through the solemn atmosphere of the room. It reminds me of the way that distinct moods seem to bloom out of different spaces on the Filadelfia, as if the moods themselves preceded the humans moving between them: the melancholy fish room and its silent stacks of iced fish; the contemplative still of the wheelhouse; the silliness of the galley.

  The hush is broken by Martin who, I am told, is ‘the driest chip in the whole of Newlyn’.

  ‘How we all doing?’ he shouts out, playing compere to the room, before responding to his own question with: ‘Fucking great! Whoop-de-woo!’ accompanied by a brief jig.

  The men roar with laughter until Martin sits back down, his face settling back into a sullen vacancy and everyone looks down at their sandwiches again.

  Then a huge, tattooed man called Leon, declares in a dead-pan voice: ‘Life is what it is and then you die.’

  One beat, a second, a third passes and then he slaps his leg, and the room erupts once more.

  Next it is Nicky’s turn. He cries out mournfully: ‘What did I do in my past life to deserve this, then?’ and the men howl with laughter.

  After fifteen minutes of this pattern of laughter followed by glum silence, the men reluctantly down their last dregs of coffee and finish off the crumbs of biscuits and we make our way back across to the market. As we walk, Nicky tells me that none of the men sleep longer than a few hours after their shifts. I ask him why, thinking they must surely be knackered. ‘Because then you would be a ghost,’ Nicky replies.

  We are close to ghosts now, I think, haunting the empty harbour in the dead of night. The graders are haunted by time, too: the white-coated men with clipboards joined at the shoulders who will march through the auction at precisely 6 a.m. the next morning to buy and then sell the fish onwards.

  Just as we reach the edge of the market, Leon picks up a massive mouldy monk’s head and chucks it into the harbour water. We all wait in silence as it sinks down. A second later, a fat dark smudge breaks through the surface and swallows the head whole.

  ‘That’s Sammy the seal,’ Leon tells me, ‘he’s been living here long as I have.’

  The hours draw out, and the boxes of fish keep coming. I find myself entering into a hallucinatory state, personifying each fish that passes through my gloved fingers. Two entwined monkfish tails are an old married couple, their feud forever frozen in ice. I pick up several glum
Dovers and come to a huge, ugly ling, my least favourite type of fish. I am certain its gutless body twitches in my hand as it slips out of my fingers and tumbles down the conveyor belt. I tell Nicky that in a strange way I am beginning to enjoy the repetitious nature of the work.

  He looks at me sternly. ‘That’s what they call novelty. And you know what happens with novelty?’ – he throws another lemon sole down the chute – ‘It wears off.’

  He is right. Several trawlers worth of fish later, when I guess midnight must be approaching, I feel my eyes start to droop. He notices and laughs at me. ‘You don’t have to stay here all night, you know? Go on, get yourself to bed!’

  I pause to watch the other men, each alone with their thoughts as they turn handles and weigh out boxes, their night of work barely halfway through. Then I throw one last monkfish down the conveyer and head off to unpeel my gloves.

  ‘Oi, hang on!’ Nicky jumps down into the room behind the plastic curtain and returns with a carrier bag containing two vast fish, their bristles poking out through the sides.

  ‘John Dorys!’ He grins. ‘Little bit of butter, little bit of olive oil. You don’t need anything else. All right? See you at the auction at six, Lamorna.’

  I thank him and shout goodbye to the other men, who don’t look up. Then I make the three-minute walk back up to the cottage in the Fradgan. Denise and Lofty’s cats greet me enthusiastically at the door – smelling strongly, as I so often do now, of fish.

  Six hours later and I am pulling my boots back on to meet Nicky outside the market for the auction. I notice his face has drained entirely as he gives me a weary half-smile. Around the back of the market I see the other graders heading for home now their part is over.