Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  ‘Come on then, nutter,’ Nicky says and beckons me back inside.

  It is hard to believe it’s the same building. The shape of the space, earlier defined by a spectral quiet that seemed to make the interior yet more gaping, now appears less intimidating as jovial Cornish voices boom across it. From the entrance to the furthest reaches of the room the market is packed with white-coated fish buyers, moving between hundreds of rows of red fish boxes laid out across the wet floor. Nicky inspects a few of the boxes and then checks his watch. The auction will inevitably begin late because, as another fish merchant interrupts him to tell us, the ageing auction supervisor ‘can’t supervise himself’, letting one of the auctioneers know he’ll be there ‘dreckly’.

  After ten minutes of no one knowing quite what to do, the supervisor arrives and the auction gets into full swing. Two auctioneers circle the room, a huddled group of white-coated men following them yelling out prices at each box. Like planets we rotate around the far-spreading rows of boxes. A mess of dark ink drips out from the cuttlefish boxes and is picked up and trodden around the market by the men’s boots, painting trails all over the stone floor.

  Every few bids someone will throw in a fake, ludicrously high bid, and another bidder will yell back, ‘KERCHIIIIING!’, after which the word continues to ping around the market for several minutes. If you were blindfolded you’d be forgiven for assuming we were still at the Star. Throughout the morning there is incessant bantering, catcalling and practical joking, men tripping each other up while dragging boxes off to the vans waiting outside to ship the fish off around the country.

  Despite the chaos, the number of boxes declines rapidly. Nicky is bidding for Stevenson & Sons today and decides I’m bad luck because he keeps losing out on bids. Every now and then people leave to smoke and drink tea from polystyrene cups outside. Nicky and I follow a few of them to stand before the harbour’s edge where you can just make out the horizon behind the sea walls. The water, pitch-black six hours ago, is clear as anything.

  ‘It’s a spring tide,’ Nicky tells me, ‘that’s why it’s so high and glassy.’ We watch a man next to us get out a huge bacon sarnie from his back pocket and demolish it in seconds. A moment later he turns to run back in, shouting: ‘Shit, I should be bidding on that turbot!’

  As with almost every other aspect of fishing in Newlyn, an element of play runs through the auction. And yet, the constant fluctuation of prices at the market (set by the suppliers at the end of the chain) has a wider impact on the industry. The fishermen out at sea each week depend on their fish reaching adequate prices. When the prices drop suddenly, as they do after particular holidays such as New Year and Christmas, there is nothing the fishermen can do but accept that their week of precarious, exhausting work has earned them almost nothing at all.

  After the auction, the men flow across to the Harbour Cafe on the other side of the Strand for their customary fry-ups. It is a bleak, windy morning. Streams of air rip down the road and the buyers drag their thick yellow boots behind them. The cafe’s dark green, square-crossed window has fogged right up and its red sign with a copper trawler suspended above it swings back and forth in the wind. Inside it is snug and smells potently of grease. Along the sides of the room are fixed wooden benches like church pews. No one sits on the inside of the tables, preferring to position themselves with their backs to the wall from where they can see everyone else in the room and more easily jump between conversations. Each man has before him a white, unbranded coffee mug and a sausage sandwich on white bread dripping with lovingly and unsparingly squirted ketchup and HP Sauce.

  Many of those present are retired fishermen. They spend hours here each morning, yarning about the years they spent at sea, or bent over page spreads from Fishing News and the Cornishman. When it gets to noon, they pick themselves up to make their way down to the pub, where they will continue the same conversations with the same lined faces.

  Today the men are in the midst of a heated discussion about haddock quotas. Nicky sighs deeply, slipping into a seat beside the men to join in with their grumbles, a version of which they have had a thousand times before, which their fathers and grandfathers have had before them, revised to suit the frustrations of their own generation, and which their children and children’s children will continue to have for many years, so long as the industry stays afloat in Newlyn.

  We watch through the window as the last few fish boxes are sold and lugged out into the car park to be taken off in the vans. I hear the sound of plastic against gravel as one final fish merchant pulls a box across the Strand and into Stevenson’s, where Denise will unpack it and lay it out across the display table to be sold that morning. Beyond the market, the meshwork of connections opens out across the country to endless supermarkets and suppliers.

  In the introduction to The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin theorises on what it is that a storyteller does. He sees each story as first needing to be absorbed, sunk ‘into the life of the storyteller’ as he phrases it, so that they can then draw it out again in words that connect the story to their own experiences: in this way the ‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’. The tracks and rhythms of the fishing industry too, told via the many hands through which the fish pass, cling to the creatures themselves; though the consumer can know nothing of the pranks, the storms and the struggles that their weekly fish supper has been privy to, these leave their mark, sunk there, within their sequinned bodies.

  9

  LEATHER PURSES

  I wake to my alarm at 4.30 a.m. Outside it is henting it down, one of many Cornish terms for rain. It sounds appropriately heavy and unpleasant enough to describe the thick black drops illuminated in patches by the dim street lamps along the Fradgan. It is silent here in a way that it is not at any hour in London. The alleys that run alongside the cobbled ways behind the Strand, picturesque at day with washing strung up from one side to the other, by night reform themselves into foreboding passages filled with crudely sketched-out ghosts, whose peg-stretched arms reach out to draw you into their darkness.

  I am up before daybreak to meet James and Will, the two-man crew of Three Jays, a 35-foot crabber, on the pontoons. I imagine the other day-fishermen around town hitting their alarms and lying still for a few seconds, counting those last moments of respite before they face the long hours of work ahead of them. At last, with a sigh, they reach across the bed to kiss their wives on the foreheads, slip out of bed, pull on their work clothes, grab a coffee and packed lunches, and leave, noiselessly shutting the front door behind them.

  All along the pontoon, the white floodlights of boats are being turned on. Half-asleep fishermen prepare their vessels, and the juddering splutters of engines come to life one after another. James and Will are already on the Three Jays when I arrive, readying her for the sea without a word. They motion me to jump on board.

  ‘It’s going to be a cold day,’ James announces.

  From what I can make out through the grainy darkness, the Three Jays is an egg-yolk-yellow colour. She has a small wheelhouse that is protected from the cold by a heavy door and down below I can just see a cabin packed full of ropes and equipment, which could just about be slept in if the occasion called for it.

  Day-boats look like overgrown toy boats; there is something jolly about their tubby wheelhouses with their round-edged, oblong windows. James starts up the engine and steers the Three Jays around the harbour and over to the market, where he climbs up the ladder to pick up some frozen bits of by-catch from other boats. These chunks of fish will be used as lure in James’s crab pots. As fish move through sectors of the fishing industry from boats to grading to auction and outwards, to retailers, they are also recycled between vessels.

  Once loaded up with by-catch, we head off towards Wolf Rock, beyond Land’s End, where James’s 350 crab pots are lying in wait on the ocean bed. As we pass out of the harbour, I look back at Newlyn in darkness. There are a few more sq
uares of light shafting across the town now. I imagine people sitting in their windows, peering out at the boats of their friends, husbands, fathers, children, passing through the Gaps – this whole town whose gaze centres upon the harbour.

  The journey to Wolf Rock takes two hours. To prevent my body from slowly turning to ice during the trip out – James tells me that for some reason the heater only works in the summer months – I set to work with Will, chopping up the boxes of by-catch into more manageable chunks. He gives me a satisfyingly large blade resembling a machete to hack through the various frozen rays and unidentifiable small fish. Their texture is entirely unlike that of the live fish I am used to gutting on the trawlers; it feels a bit like slicing through ice cream just out of the freezer. Once the bait is sufficiently broken up, the three of us sit together, still bleary-eyed, in the tiny wheelhouse with Radio 1 blaring out of the speakers to the empty sea.

  There is something verging on the absurd about listening to a London-based radio presenter’s ‘shout-out to all those stuck in rush-hour traffic’ while you are motoring through the running seas without another soul in sight. I think of all the long faceless offices of London that I have interned in, with their floor-to-ceiling windows designed to trick employees into believing they are almost outside. I imagine myself sitting there and quite suddenly those tall windows gracefully collapse downwards, computers and desks sliding away. The endless white corridors fold along new edges pulling them in towards me, the last person left in the whole building. The white corridors rise up and bend in until the space around me has been reformed into a sleek and streamlined paper boat. The concrete below the office slides up to meet me at the eleventh floor, where I have spent days dreaming of the sea, before melting into a body of water that picks up my paper boat on its tide and floats me away.

  The Three Jays gives a cough and picks up speed. I am back here – in an old yellow boat tipping up and down through the waves, the three of us in oilskins and dark waters all around us.

  Now and then there are spurts of conversation. I find out that James is only three years older than me, but he already has two children, a wife and a house to provide for. As well as working this boat for her owners, he also has his own boat, the Bonnie Grace, a day-boat with a dark blue keel and turquoise hull. Like many of the other twenty-somethings in Newlyn, James seems generations, rather than years, older than me and my friends back home. The work of fishing provides you with an immense sense of responsibility and obligation – the traces of which are just starting to show through the streaks of white in the hair around his ears. When he was seventeen, he tells me, he started going down to the harbour with his cousins to fish off the pier and gradually found himself spending longer and longer down by the water, before finally getting the chance to spend a day out on another fisherman’s boat. Though the industry has changed over the years, fishermen’s descriptions of their first days at sea are often the same; once they’ve experienced that first immersion in that world, they cannot imagine another kind of life for themselves.

  For hundreds of years now, the sea’s call has drawn young Newlyn lads away from school and a comparatively safe life on the land and out into its depths. ‘It’s in your blood,’ Don tells me in the Star one night – after serenading me with a full rendition of the folk song ‘Way Down to Lamorna’ – ‘it’s the salt in your veins’. The phrase in Nance’s Glossary of Sea-words is to ‘go upon the water’: ‘I do b’long to go ’pon the water,’ Nance quotes a St Ives fisherman telling him. Will, who is a few years younger than me, has fished for just one season. He has always known that he could only work on the sea though. The very idea of being kept within the four walls of an office appals him; from a young age, his evenings and weekends were spent angling with friends and drinking beers along the shore.

  The Three Jays’s floodlights beam out across the waves as we pass Mousehole, Lamorna, Porthcurno and on to Land’s End. I keep expecting the sky to lighten, but it remains a thick treacle colour until we are well into the actual work of fishing. On calm days on the Filadelfia, I would almost forget I was on a boat, the rhythm of movement becoming so steady and predictable. When the Three Jays rolls, her whole form lurches right over and it is hard to find any kind of balance. She is much lower in the water, too, which makes it feel as if the sea is drawing right around her in every direction and licking at her sides. If the boat jerks unexpectedly, you could slide right off the back in a way that is impossible with larger vessels. And yet she is less daunting than other boats I have been on; she seems easier to get to know somehow.

  I tell James I think she seems a friendly boat. He laughs and tells me this bloody boat is anything but friendly. He complains about her throughout our trip, listing her problems on his fingers: she’s old and difficult, rolls and creaks melodramatically, even in only marginally bad weather, and frequently refuses to work at all, spending days out of the water down by the Old Quay, the sickbay for unseaworthy boats, while James tries to find out what’s wrong this time.

  ‘She’s bad luck,’ he says, looking her up and down, resentfully.

  James slows the engine as we get closer to the ominous Wolf Rock Lighthouse, near to where all his lines of crab pots are submerged – little buoys demarcating their place below the water. The looming lighthouse remains our lodestar for the day; whatever direction we are facing as we pull up each line, it is always there, swaying up and down together with the horizon line and in time with the Three Jays’s lolling motion. The lighthouse is eight nautical miles from the coast, a lone mark on the sea. Against the black sky, painted a solitary grey colour that is nothing like the jaunty, pleasant lighthouses from picture books, it resembles a thin man with a long bony nose, one of those stock images of death personified. Roger the geologist told me that the rock on which the lighthouse was built had been an active volcano during the Cretaceous period and that it produced phonolitic lava. I wonder if the land remembers its old power: this resting rock that once boiled and spat flames at the shore from across the water.

  Before the arrival of the lighthouse, multiple ships were wrecked on Wolf Rock. The first attempt to erect some manmade structure on the rock occurred in 1791, when a 20-foot-high unlit daymark (mast), surmounted by a metal sculpture of a great wolf, was constructed. It was washed away only four years later, the wolf freed to roam the seabed. Each tale of the manmade daymarks or beacons placed upon the rock ends in a similar destruction: man’s attempt to impose his vision on the sea, to claim a stake in it, forever failing and wiped away by the waves. Besides the lighthouse itself, only the engineer James Walker’s cone-shaped beacon, which took five years to complete and comprised iron plates and concrete rubble, has survived to this day, and can still occasionally be seen just above the water amidst the waves that smash over Wolf Rock. Walker started to build the lighthouse tower itself in 1862 but didn’t live to see its completion seven years later.

  Nim, a retired shipwright from Newlyn who is now in his eighties, tells me that one of the best practical jokes he ever played involved the Wolf Rock Lighthouse. One day his young apprentice, Nigel, came upon several huge tins of paint outside their workshop down by Tolcarne near the bottom of the town, and asked Nim what they were for.

  ‘They’re for us,’ Nim replied, quick off the mark if ever there was an opportunity for a tease.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘We’re going to paint the Wolf Rock Lighthouse tomorrow!’

  The boy went white. That evening Nim turned up at Nigel’s mother’s house. As soon as she opened the door and saw Nim, she cried out: ‘Just don’t let my boy be the one on that ladder!’

  Nim assured her he’d be the on the ladder, suppressing the urge to laugh.

  ‘What will he need, then?’ She asked.

  ‘Tinned potatoes, butter, warm pyjamas and an eiderdown.’

  The next day Nigel, who was only fourteen at the time, arrived at work with a huge bag carried over one shoulder.

  ‘What the hell are
you all packed for?’ Nim remembers their boss asking the boy. ‘We’re going to paint Wolf Rock Lighthouse,’ he replied, earnestly.

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Says Nim.’

  ‘I never said that,’ Nim replied innocently and went back to work, leaving the boy stood before the row of half-built ships in utter bemusement.

  Nim sighs, coming out of the memory with a thoughtful expression. ‘Ah, he was a good lad. He got lost on the lifeboat, poor boy.’

  Around 7.30 a morning gloom begins to spread across the sea revealing Land’s End in the distance. The dark brown scraped edges of its cliffs look more severe from the Three Jays than they do from the higher vantage point of trawlers. James’s plan today is to haul up the seven lines of crab pots that they ‘shot’ on their last trip, before refilling the emptied pots with the bait we picked up from the market and dropping them all back in the water for another few days.

  To even find the buoy marking your line of pots can be a struggle, particularly when the first few hauls are completed in relative darkness. On his navigation map, James has marked the position of each pot like an ‘x’ on a treasure map. After circling these coordinates several times, he finds the flag that indicates the pots are below. As soon as the first flag is pulled up, the two fishermen wordlessly leap into their respective positions. A machine next to the wheelhouse winds up the line and the pots emerge from the sea like ancient drowned birdcages, black and gnarled and dripping with seaweed that twists around their steel frames. Inside each is a lattice of intricately woven wire-mesh pockets, so designed that crabs can scuttle into them to grab the bait but cannot escape again afterwards.

  As each pot surfaces, James sticks his hand in to pull out the four or five affronted crabs that have found themselves unlawfully dragged from the water. The crabs themselves look to me like old leather purses, the kind you find in boxes at the back of charity shops or swinging from the arms of grannies. James holds them by their back legs, from where their pincers cannot spin round and grab a hold of your gloved fingers, and slings them into large cylindrical containers called bongos. When one bongo is completely filled with its seething mass of claws, James covers it over with a thick layer of material that pacifies the crabs beneath – though a few of them do still make almost successful bids for freedom. After James has emptied a pot of its crab guests, he hands the pot back to Will, who stuffs it with bait before carefully stacking the pot up in the back of a boat. The men do not speak at all during the forty-five minutes that it takes to raise and clear the pots. All the while from the small stereo in the wheelhouse Radio 1 plays, not ear-splittingly like Don’s multicoloured sound system on the Filadelfia, but quietly. I love these profound silences of fishing. No needless word is spent. Rather, each person on the boat performs his individual tasks with a measured precision.