by Lamorna Ash
The two men harmonise their work perfectly, fish and gear crossing between them in a metrical flow. It is a symphony built of intricate parts that come together at the end of each haul in a satisfying coda. And it is musical, too: the whirring of the pulley system, the clatter of each crab in the bongo, the continuous beat of the sea against the boat and occasional squawk of seagulls from a great height. During the first cycle of work, I watch carefully to see where I might be able to slot into its rhythm. On the next haul, James instructs me to stand behind Will and take the bait-stuffed pots from him and line them up along the back of the boat. Easy, I think. And yet every task that seems straightforward on land becomes arduous at sea. I initially struggled just to walk across the deck of the Three Jays without stumbling, and now I must factor in the additional challenge of carrying an unwieldy crab pot, the size of a large dog.
Will gives me precise instructions about how to stack the pots. The first row should have two storeys of pots, the second three storeys, except for the two outside columns, and the next four rows all with three pots piled on top of each other, until the deck is covered with lines of neatly arranged pots. I try to keep a mental image of how this stacking had looked when Will had done it, and keep count in my head as James begins pulling up the second line of pots of the day. But the added weight of the pot unbalances me. Each time I try to make a straight path from where Will hands me the pot to where I ought to place it, I end up zigzagging across the back of the deck. The cold makes my heavy breathing come out in thick streams. Now and then, the boat lurches unexpectedly, sending me crashing into its side. If I were to fall in, I imagine that the pot awkwardly cradled in my arms would tug me down with it to the bottom of the sea. Luckily, both men complete their own work facing forward and are so immersed in their own roles that they do not witness the look of sheer terror on my face as I am flung right across the boat – or perhaps they do see me fall but save my dignity by pretending they haven’t.
During the twenty minutes or so it takes to locate the next buoy marker, James tells me more about his time fishing. This last year has been especially trying. His decision to purchase the Bonnie Grace, hoping he could work both boats at once by taking on more crew and make a bit more money, has not exactly gone to plan. She has needed constant repairs, he has struggled to find extra people to crew her and it has been the worse year for crabbing in a while – the amounts we are bringing up in the hauls today should be far greater, considering how many days the pots were left on the seabed. Day-boat fishing is also far more limited by the weather: you cannot go out in bad conditions, as the larger boats do, but must wait on the shore for the seas to change, counting in your head the amount of money you have lost that you will not get back. And so you have to seize any opportunity you can to fish when the weather is good. This means that James sometimes works eleven days on the trot and often all night too, because that is the best time to catch mackerel. James tells me that day-boats are barely given any quota compared to the bigger boats, despite the fact that the trace they leave on the seas is negligible compared to the destruction trawlers cause. Trawlers have also been known to ravage smaller boats’ gear, crashing right through it and causing thousands of pounds of damage to nets. This happened to James earlier this year and it cost him a couple months’ worth of wages – another setback in a year when he needed to get his second boat going. ‘That’s just how it goes in fishing,’ he shrugs his head philosophically. ‘You just have to hope your luck changes soon.’
When I remark how calm he seems about all this, he shakes his head, responding quietly: ‘No, no, it still makes me mad. Sometimes this job can be the hardest thing.’
James is quite unlike the rougher-edged fishermen of Newlyn I have met so far. There is something more measured about his approach to his work. He tells me that a lot of the younger fishermen are like this. They have come into the industry after the excessive overfishing of the eighties and the decline of fishing in the nineties with a greater awareness of man’s potentially devastating impact on the oceans. Both Will and James speak with urgency about the need for conservation and their responsibility to the sea, telling me they would never leave broken nets in the water or throw their rubbish overboard. It is their job to protect the oceans for the future.
Around eleven o’clock the sun comes out. The clouds seem to fold back into themselves and everything is a shocking blue.
‘Even days when you catch bugger all,’ James says, ‘it’s so bloody beautiful out here that you don’t really mind.’ He tells me there have been dolphins beside their boat every day for the last month, and it doesn’t matter how many times he’s seen them, you still feel you have to stop what you’re doing, just to look at them.
I begin to find my own rhythm. Leaning the pot against my knees makes it easier to carry. I learn to keep my body low to the ground and move sideways like a crab across the deck to prevent myself suddenly sliding forwards. I no longer have to ask Will again and again which rows have which numbers of pots but can hold the pattern in my head. Our faces are warmed by the sun gleaming off the water and we all peel more layers off, stripping down to t-shirts and oilskins. While Will sits on top of the pots smoking, I lean against the side of the boat and think, quite truthfully, that there is nowhere I would rather be.
Midway through the third haul, James stops to tell me to climb down below the wheelhouse for a second. I go down and, from the belly of the boat, hear that distinctive clicking sound of dolphins communicating underneath us. I rush back out and lean right over the deck, trying to spot them. My head flicks to the left and right and back again as I think I see a glint in one direction, or a disturbance of the water in another. Finally, just over the starboard side of the boat, barely metres from where I am leaning, I see a sleek grey body arc across the waves. A few seconds later I see another, and then four or five at once rise elegantly up above the water and disappear again without breaking its surface. They stay with us for the rest of our trip.
We do not see a single other fishing boat all day. It is just the three of us gently rocking on the ocean, silent apart from the low thrum of the engine, Radio 1 and the whirring of the equipment that drags the pots from out of the water.
Late in the afternoon a hulking great container ship passes along the horizon. With the declining sun right behind it, we are able to make out the silhouettes of two men standing on top of the ship’s corrugated iron containers, which conceal the industrial cargo – cars, train carriages, lumps of metal – that have doubtless travelled halfway across the world. Will says that he’s never seen a person on a container ship before and I realise that in all the times that I have seen them drifting ghost-like across the seas, I hadn’t either. You imagine the men on them sunk somewhere at the bottom of the ship, mysterious night creatures who do this job because of its isolation, because for six months or so they get to be away from their everyday realities. Now and then they venture outside for the first time in weeks to blink at the sun and check their cargo, before slipping back into the depths.
At any one moment, there are tens of thousands of container ships gliding across the oceans. On MarineTraffic’s online live map of the seas you can view them all at once via satellite tracking, visualised as arrowpoints to indicate their direction of travel. They draw precise lines between countries and continents, many hugging their perimeters so that the shape of the land may be defined by their progress around it. The proliferation of these sharp little arrows around the coasts reminds me of piranhas swarming around a lifeless mass, gnawing at its edges.
But container ships can also have devastating, world-altering consequences on the seas and the creatures that live within them. Each day at least four freighters are lost to the seas, their cargoes spilling out into the water to be dispersed by the waves and discovered on beaches years later – trainers, cogs from machines and plastic packaging mixing in with the seaweed and foam left by waves. In 1967, between 25 and 36 million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Co
rnish seas from the 974-foot SS Torrey Canyon, chartered to BP. It took several days just to float the container ship off Pollard’s Rock in the Seven Stones reef between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. During this time, an oil slick spread out relentlessly across the seas, like blood from a shotgun wound. To disperse the oil, an untested detergent was used – 10,000 tonnes of it sprayed by various vessels, including fishing boats, onto the slick. This detergent was highly toxic and only added to the vast destruction of wildlife and marine organisms along the coast. Over 15,000 seabirds died, as well as huge numbers of seals, crustaceans and fish. When it was discovered that the detergent was simply sinking the oil rather than destroying it, planes were sent in to bomb and set fire to the container in order to hide the evidence before the tourist season began. There are still two colossal tanks down there, beneath the fishermen’s nets and pots, filled with thick oil that one day may rupture.
All the pots back in the water now and the fish room below filled up with bongos of snoozing crabs, we race back towards the harbour with the setting sun. At this point, I can no longer pretend to myself that I am not desperate to use the loo. After giving the Three Jays a quick scan before we left Newlyn harbour, and seeing that there was no toilet or even a bucket, I made the executive decision not to drink anything all day. I watch jealously as the boys turn away to piss off the stern, one hand on the rail to prevent them from slipping unexpectedly into the water. I try to imagine myself completing such an elegant manoeuvre. Under my oilskin dungarees, I am wearing a layer of tracksuit bottoms, and another of tights under that, all of which would have to be pulled down around my ankles before I could even begin. I would then have to squat in my wellies with my bare bottom suspended outside the boat above the water, almost certainly risking being sprayed by icy cold waves, and all the while clinging on to the rail above me like a monkey so as not to topple off the back of the boat.
I shake the image from my head; there’s no way I could face the shame. Instead, I sit cross-legged trying to think of anything but my bladder, which is easier said than done on a boat surrounded by water. I look back behind us at the mournful grey dash of the Wolf Rock Lighthouse, a sole exclamation point to the sky. The clouds have almost knitted over it, but there remains a small tear in them, allowing a burst of late sunlight to cut through above the lighthouse.
As we follow the coast around to Lamorna Cove, James says that when we met this morning he thought he recognised me from somewhere and realises it was right here: a lone figure with loose hair looking back from the Filadelfia as the land disappeared and the sun set.
We pass Mousehole and James tells me that his grandparents have recently sold their cottage there, which they had lived in for almost their whole lives. He says they were desperate to sell to a Cornish person, but the amount was too much for anyone from down here, so eventually they had to settle for a holiday let agency. James’s grandad was so upset that he could not speak for weeks afterwards, knowing that he is now, in some small way, part of the gentrification of the area that is cleaning it out of actual Cornish people. James laments that you can barely tell anymore that Mousehole and St Ives were once thriving fishing ports. The very thing that made them what they are today has been torn right out, leaving behind only husks, their harbours merely facades. Newcomers arrive in Cornwall wanting the beauty of the coast, the fishing boats lined up in the harbour and old men in oilskins smoking pipes, but none of what makes it a real, living industry.
As soon as James steers the boat alongside Newlyn market to land the crabs, I say a hurried goodbye, scale up the harbour ladder faster than I ever have before and dash back up the cobbled lane to Denise and Lofty’s to go straight to the toilet.
I am in bed by eight. Outside, the town feels especially still this night. I wonder whether I would be lonely if this place became my home and I no longer had the roar of the city to return to. For one of the first times in my life, my body aches with physical fatigue. The next morning, I wake with the badge of pride of dark purple bruises all over my legs from carrying the pots, of which I proudly send photos to my parents and friends.
10
MISWAYS
On an especially warm spring day, I sit on the patio sunning myself with Denise. The music from the radio in the kitchen carries across from the open back door, the cats loll beside us and the light wind rolling in from the sea gently blows the laundry hanging from a line between our cottage and the cottage next door. The peace is interrupted by a loud splattering noise on the cobbles.
‘Not again! Not again!’ Denise jumps to her feet crying out in anguish. ‘Those bastards!’
A streak of cream and black seagull shit runs down the length of her sheets.
‘They do it on purpose, I’m sure of it,’ she tells me, her hand sheltering her eyes from the sun as she squints up into the sky in an attempt to spot the culprit. These battles between the seagulls living along the Fragdan roofs and Denise’s freshly washed laundry occur at least twice a week.
Since the day is so fine, I plan to take myself off on a walk along the coast towards Lamorna and beyond to Porthcurno. Time spent in any new place is always characterised for me by what Virginia Woolf described as ‘solitary tramplings’. Learning the landscape by first feeling its ways under my feet and letting it brush up against me from all sides. ‘Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known,’ wrote Daphne du Maurier of her teenage escapades in Fowey. ‘Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone.’ I imagine following these women out along the coastal paths of Cornwall, each of us trying to carve our own particular paths of freedom. They are also my way of staving off the sense of loneliness that comes over me at unexpected moments in Newlyn. Human feelings, or feelings for humans, dissolve on walks.
I often leave notes for myself on my phone when I go on these solitary walks, little inanities I wish I had someone else with me to whom I could say them out loud. This morning I write myself a particularly bold one: ‘For someone who gets lost a lot, coastal walks are a godsend. Only if the sound of the sea disappears from your left ear, can you have possibly gone wrong.’
Finding myself behind a cluster of tourists, I veer away from the coastal path and take one of the many flights of stone steps that reach down towards the sea below the cliffs. It sometimes rushes on me without warning – the compulsion to be as close to the water as possible, like a needy lover for whom no amount of physical closeness to their partner is enough. I take the narrow steps two at a time and let out a long breath when I find myself in an unpeopled cove at the bottom. The sea pours into the spaces between rocks to create small pools, before rushing out of them again like lungs inflating and deflating. It comes up so high that I am forced to hug the dark green wall of the cliff as I make my way along the curve. The wet slick covering the rocks dyes them black. They are stained, sharpened teeth rising out of the water. I keep one hand pressed against the cliff side, my face right up close to its moistened surface so that I create a right-angled triangle between my slanted body, the cliff wall and the rocks below me.
I edge my way around the bight, testing each new seaweed-thick rock with my no-grip trainers before scrambling over it and on to the next one. I pull myself up and over the last bulk of granite in the far corner of the cove, only to find another identical cove with yet more treacherous boulders, boasting even smoother surfaces ready to fall away from my feet and send me into the depths of the sea.
In between the crevices of rocks, I see occasional washed-up polyps – stranded from a Portuguese man-of-war that they would have moved through the sea with as one mind. I eye them suspiciously: Portuguese men-of-war can still sting long after they have died. I imagine what it would be like if humans had a similar power – to leave some sharp trace, some electric pulse beyond death that would afford those who knew them one final, physical memory to remind them: yes, I was alive and you were alive and that knowledge hurts.
The man-of-war is a siphonop
hore, meaning it is made up of colonies of organisms. These polyps have recently appeared along the Cornish coastline in unprecedented numbers, blown in by south-westerly winds. They look otherworldly against the dull rocks: pale pink and almost glowing, shaped like partially deflated balloons or those plastic organs you find on models of the human body in classrooms with pretty, electric-blue frills along their bottoms. Before Hurricane Brian disbanded them and washed almost five hundred of them up onto Cornish beaches, fleets of polyps would have drifted without direction through the sea with their sail-like main arm rippling above the water: the lightest lace blowing in the wind.
I get out my camera and take a photo of one, delaying the point at which I will have to face the next round in my coastal assault course. Cupping my hand around the screen of my camera, I notice in the thumbnail version of the photo on my camera that the polyp has a slight discoloration to it: a yellowed stain curled over its body like a ring left by a mug of coffee. I zoom in closer, wiping the sea spray from the screen, and expanding the stain into a more complex form. A face emerges across the pale surface of the creature: the reflection of a woman whose hair blows outwards, her face filled with dark, uncertain features, like the craters of a moon. As in the famous Escher lithograph of the artist himself reflected in a glass orb, impossibly I see myself there, crudely drawn out upon the polyp’s translucent skin. The stain seeps outwards across the polyp, veins of colour bleeding across it, and I see Newlyn harbour emerge in the background.