Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  In the same way that people brought up between two countries and two languages describe the feeling of being rent in half if they are suddenly prevented from returning to one of the places they call home, fishermen are no longer quite themselves without a sea to go back to. Don tells me that the longest he has been away from the sea since he was a teenager is about three weeks. Another trawlerman tells me of an occasion when he had been out at sea for a week, and the skipper was deliberating whether or not to do a few more days’ work: the majority of the men quietly hoped that they could just go home, but one crew member who had recently broken up with his wife said ‘Well, I don’t have anything to go back for, so we might as well stay out here.’ Sea men are always on the verge of falling. If one of their two worlds collapses, either on land or at sea, that balance is lost, and he is in danger of losing himself.

  For those lucky enough to have family, the day you have to leave them and go back out to sea is rarely easy. Even in my limited experience, the sea has never felt vaster and lonelier, the land never more appealing, than when you are staring out at it knowing that you are about to set out for long days and nights in comparative isolation. Nathan tells me that if there are crew members he doesn’t get on with, he can go whole weeks without speaking, sometimes months. If you’re in a real low patch, you can shut yourself off from everyone out there. He is hit with a case of ‘sailing day blues’ every time he passes that red and white lighthouse on his way out through the Gaps at Newlyn. He describes the experience of leaving as being ‘torn away – literally torn from your home’.

  Sometimes I cannot understand why it is that Nathan continues to fish. ‘What do you like about it?’ I ask him.

  ‘I don’t like any of it.’ He pauses. ‘I like the fact that it gives my family security.’

  In that case, couldn’t he find another job I ask? I should have known what his reply would be; it is the same as so many other fishermen have explained to me before.

  ‘It’s all I know,’ he says.

  Few of the skills on a fishing boat are directly transferable to any other professions. If men were to quit they would suddenly find themselves at the beginning of the career ladder again, earning comparatively little in a county with limited opportunities. Fishing is not merely a job; it is a way of life that you cannot unlearn, you are forever bound to it. As Nathan tells me, ‘You know nothing else.’

  The men cope with this sense of being wrenched from the land through what I come to see as a kind of mindfulness – a practised disassociation from the land while they are away from it. Perhaps in the same way that prisoners describe time dissolving while they are in confinement, fishermen have to let the outside world go while they’re at sea, so as to not be driven mad by its absence.

  In The Need for Roots, French philosopher Simone Weil speculates on the meaning of work in the twentieth century. She describes what she sees as a dearth of spirituality and a concurrent decline in civilisation that is endemic to the modern age. When a youngster first begins to plough a field by himself the work is ‘pure poetry’, she writes. The sense of elation he feels at being, for the first time in his life, truly active in the world soon descends into a weariness and he recognises that he will have to repeat this same monotonous routine day after day, year after year, with no hope of variation. At this point: ‘The young man starts to spend the week dreaming about what he is going to do on Saturday.’ It is from this moment onwards that the man is lost.

  Nathan describes a sensation just like this: ‘Soon as I go out those Gaps I start counting down the days, and the hours until I’m home. And as soon as I go ashore I’m counting down the days and the hours before I have to go away again.’ The men grow detached, unrooted, from their present environment, their actions mechanised and performed abstractedly while their thoughts are fixed far away, back on the land. ‘When you’re away, all you can think of is home,’ he continues, ‘and when you’re ashore you can’t get it out your head, the feeling that you’ll have to leave them again in a day or two.’ You are stuck in a not-quite-place, a saltwater space somewhere between the lower world and the world of men.

  For Weil, it is possible to move away from this spectral condition through resituating work at the spiritual core of life. In this way, we might root ourselves once more in the world. In fishing, as you stand before the sea, the brackish waters spraying your face, gripping a small knife in a thick glove, slicing into a twisting fish that has just come up from the water, you get the sense that you are engaged in a kind of work that is truly real. In these moments, you feel you are the closest to being in the world that a person can be. We cannot attain this spirituality within work without first acknowledging the burdensome nature of work, the monotony that ‘hangs with an almost intolerable heaviness’.

  Once this monotonous, dragging time is recognised, Weil believes that we might ‘mount upwards’. For, she suggests, ‘monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity – the most atrocious if it is a sign of an unvarying perpetuity.’ Whether eternal or in perpetuity, Weil’s sense of monotony is somehow outside of or beyond time, and there lies its potential for spirituality – for man to recognise that ‘through work he produces his own natural existence’ and therein accept the endless cycle between work and rest. She states that it is only ‘when man sees himself as a squirrel turning around and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation’.

  For fishermen, this sense of an endless rebounding between work and respite is brought into even sharper focus by their oscillation between the sea and the land. It is perhaps for this reason that they are especially attuned to the condition of ‘turning around and round in a circular cage’ and therefore closer to acknowledging the fundamental condition of work that Weil argues workers must strive towards.

  In Newlyn, ex-fisherman Larry tells me that he and a crew were once left shelling langoustine on a Scottish boat for more than twenty-four hours. To pass the dragging time, they listened to music, but only had one CD. For an entire day and night, they listened to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on repeat. When Larry hears the opening chords of ‘Dreams’ play on the jukebox in the Swordy it still makes him shudder. On the way home from the langoustine-shelling trip, the crew, delirious from exhaustion, began to giggle hysterically. I imagine Larry, his hands aching as he sits amongst thousands of flakes of pink shells with Rumours floating out of the boat’s sound system, feeling suddenly that monotony fly outwards into a kind of transcendence.

  ‘There’s mornings out there when a gale’s just ceased,’ says Nathan, ‘you’re all on your own in that wheelhouse and the sun’s coming up, the gulls are squawking away, and it’s not too bad, you know?’ He tells me that it’s during these moments, when you are ‘staring out at the sea, on your own, proper contemplative, that everyone has a little cry now and then – not that many fishermen would admit to it’. These silent moments are a kind of therapy. The boat seems to slip away and it is just you and the big blue yonder and nothing else. In those brief periods of sublimity, you encounter a kind of release that must be close to Weil’s sense of ‘mounting upwards’.

  Nathan often prefers a force 8 to flat calm. ‘You’re out there in a screaming gale of wind and you think look at this, look at what the sea can do.’ When the sea is like that you cannot help to feel a sense of reverence. Fishing is humbling, forcing you to confront your own insignificance. Out on the water, you witness sights daily while you work that people would pay to see, and which the vast majority of people will never even come close to experiencing. There are sunsets and sunrises out there so extraordinary that you cannot help but weep. You catch glimpses of basking sharks and mammoth whales that dwarf your boat and dolphins that arch through the water acrobatically with a single flick of their tails. Nature can do all this, you think, without requiring some 220-tonne metal thing that hefts and drags itself through the water, its engine belching fumes into the
sea.

  As I leaf through my sea diary entries, trying to find in them some kernel of information that might tell me what it is to be a fisherman, I notice a repeating pattern emerging in accounts. Almost every entry includes a burst of humour, something that happens on deck or up in the wheelhouse that breaks up the monotony of the work and in a sudden joyous moment draws the crew together like a family. Fishermen are some of the funniest people I have met, finding opportunity for play and silliness within almost every difficult situation at sea. This is something that Weil never mentions in her concept of work. And yet it is this sense of humour, the genuine companionship felt between the men, that stops them from being overwhelmed by the tedium of the work, allows them to keep going despite the many tragedies that they have experienced as an industry.

  During his time spent on the remote Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, the writer J. M. Synge saw how humour was used as a means of coping with melancholia. During an evening in a pub on Inisheer, translated as east island, he noticed a wildness to the men who would now and again break into a ‘half sensual ecstasy of laughter’. In his meditation on where this kind of laughter comes from, he writes: ‘Perhaps a man must have a sense of intimate misery … before he can set himself to jeer and mock at the world.’ There are times too when I think that the unending pranking and playfulness among the Newlyn fishermen, apart from easing the monotony and exhaustion of fishing, is born of a certain sense of desolation that comes from a life half-lived on the sea.

  I hear of one brilliantly elaborate prank played on a decky learner – a fisherman who has just started out in his career – about to join them for his first week at sea. The crew set up the groundwork for the prank by telling the novice fisherman that a container ship of animals from a zoo had been lost at sea and they might see animals in cages floating along in the water. Meanwhile, another crew member bought a gorilla costume. Midway through the trip, while the decky learner was tucked up asleep, they dressed one of the men in the suit and jumped onto the bunk of the young man, scaring him half to death.

  On the Filadelfia, Kyle made me laugh almost every minute, both of us cracking up for a good half hour after he tried to explain to me how navigation position systems work and accidentally asked me: ‘What’s your favourite position?’ One afternoon, Andrew got a load of large tomatoes (which Kyle calls ‘the devil’s food – unless they’re in ketchup’), and hid them in Kyle’s wellies so that when he woke up after the Fishwife Call he squelched down into them and had tomato-drenched boots for the rest of the trip.

  Another time, Andrew, the self-proclaimed Prank King, promised me that if you rub ray juice into your face it gives you a lovely complexion. After regarding him suspiciously for a minute, my slimy glove raised halfway up to my face, I cried out: ‘No! Bollocks!’

  Andrew, laughing his Muttley laugh, replied: ‘Why else do you think fishermen have such beautiful, youthful skin?’

  I had passed my first decky learner test.

  A gill-net fisherman tells me that near the end of a thirty-hour shift your hands and back are often aching and you want to collapse, but then you look around the deck at the other men just like you. ‘You’re in it together, still cracking jokes and getting on with it – and you think to yourself: That’s it. That’s why I am here.’

  13

  SMOKE

  One evening I head out to the Swordy to meet a girl from Newlyn a couple of years younger than me who I’ve seen hanging around the skate park below the promenade most evenings with other kids, doing tricks and playing music out towards the sea. A few days previously she had approached me out of the blue asking who I was – ‘because everyone’s clocked you, you know?’ – and what was I doing disappearing off on fishing boats for weeks at a time?

  In London the majority of my time is spent amongst young women. When I call them up after adventures in Newlyn, none of them can quite believe what I am doing, or why. Amongst my friendship group I often get branded with words like ‘kooky’. This is my role; it is how my shape can be known – even though nothing that I have done has ever felt especially odd to me. I ended up in Cornwall because it was my mother’s land and on boats because that gave me the opportunity to experience how other people live, not just hear about it and infer from that how it must feel. There was no other way of doing it.

  The girl and I sit in the hut outside the Swordy underneath Ben Gunn’s abstract painting, while she talks at a hundred miles an hour, I doing my best to match her, as she tells me of her fisherman dad, her certainty that there is nowhere better to live than Newlyn and of her Grandmother Lamorna – ‘So I can’t help but thinking of you as a really old lady with wrinkles!’

  She makes me laugh constantly. I’ve missed talking to young women. There is a breathlessness and a joy to these kinds of first conversations that I’ve never managed to replicate when meeting boys on dates and the like. We are accommodating, eager to know things about each other. There is no power play, no need to display or present the best versions of ourselves. We just want to speak and be spoken to, about anything, about everything.

  Two men at the next table come over to us to borrow a light. One is in oilskins and yellow gumboots, the characteristic garb of a fisherman just in from the sea, the other is his image, but as if that copy had been twisted through something painful, something sharp. This second man has two black eyes, the right one an old bruise – greeny-yellow to the left’s blackberry – and a thin scar right across his forehead. He lacks the muscular, meaty build of his fisherman friend, his arms comparatively thin and white, his hands noticeably shaking. Both are drunk, but the drink covers the thinner man more; it wears him, pushing him around and causing him to stumble. The fisherman notices me watching his companion.

  After lighting up, the fisherman tells us that this is his best friend – has been his best friend since they were kids, mucking about down by the harbour together. His best friend nearly collapses again and swears loudly at the ground, as if blaming it for rising up at him. As if I have said something, maybe my expression speaking words enough, the fisherman says: ‘It’s negative reinforcement, yeah?’ He smacks the table and his friend ducks his head instinctively. ‘He needs to be told he’s doing a good job, not given a slap every time he tries.’

  I nod, uncertain how to respond to this. The two men head back inside to get themselves another round, the fisherman with his arm protectively linked through that of his friend’s and hoisting him up by the back of his hoodie so he does not fall again. I finish my drink and the girl returns to the flat where she lives with her boyfriend, promising to meet up again soon, and to think of me when I’m out on trawlers. It sounds so grown up to me, so secure, to already be living with one person.

  Once adjacent with the harbour, I find myself compelled to walk right up to its perimeter. I stop at its very edge so that my toes are floating over its dark waters. Whether it is caused by the drink or the conversation we had with the fisherman and his friend, something doesn’t sit right in my body that night. It is as if some part of me has become unsettled. I hang there for a moment, suspended above the black water, then turn up the Fradgan back to Denise and Lofty’s, where they are still watching telly, both cats squeezed in beside them on the sofa.

  14

  SEA-HAB

  The strange feeling from the night before does not subside but carries over into the next day, as I set off along the promenade to Penzance to meet a newly trained fisherman called Harry. It is the day before his first week-long beam trawler trip, Harry tells me nervously as soon as I sit down. He has already had two trial trips – one on a gill-netter, the other a twin-rig trawler – but this will be the first time that he fully participates in the work of the boat, hoping that it will land him a permanent berth as a decky learner. Unlike the knotted-armed and wind-tanned faces of the fishermen I am accustomed to, Harry is thin, pale and somewhat fragile-looking. He checks the exits of the cafe we meet in several times and speaks with a habitual wariness,
avoiding eye contact throughout. This is something most fishermen never do: they regard you with a fixed gaze, daring you to break focus. Nathan tells me that if a new crew member avoids looking him in the eye, he knows immediately the man is ‘no good’.

  Harry does not avoid looking at me because he is no good, but because his experience of life differs wildly from those men who have grown up in Newlyn, for whom fishing has provided them with a certain confidence and unshakeable sense of identity. Though born in the countryside, Harry has lived on the peripheries of cities for much of his adult life – loud places where people come and go too quickly to call them home and where trains only ever pass through. For years, he toiled in supermarkets and other long-shift work, but six months ago he lost his job as a result of continuing struggles with addiction and, finding himself homeless, hit one of the hardest periods of his life. He speaks to me with an honesty that is disarming. He is forthcoming about even his most private, painful experiences.

  Harry tells me that during this period of darkness and before it, from childhood even, he dreamed of becoming a fisherman. When I ask him why, he seems to grow larger in his chair. He speaks of the pride that comes with calling yourself a fisherman, earning a respectable wage in an industry that is ‘prestigious’. Most importantly, after years of being regarded not just as an outsider, but often entirely forgotten about by society, he will be part of a community. Lofty and Denise tell me how shocked they are when they go to London and find that people in need are just ignored. When they see a homeless person in Newlyn or Penzance, they always check that they’re okay and ask them if they want something to eat.