by Lamorna Ash
Several weeks ago, with the help and support of his family, Harry got the money together for a one-way ticket to Penzance and enrolled in Seafood Training’s three-week ‘Introduction to Fishing’ class. It’s the best thing he’s ever done, he says. He has never paid such attention in class before, nor found the lessons so rewarding. Many of the figures I have got to know over the last few months come up in his narration. Harbourmaster Rob gave the recruits a talk, informing the would-be fishermen that this was the very best time to be going into the industry; Andy Wheeler, an instructor and ex-fisherman, taught them about the environmental responsibilities of fishing and how it can enrich one’s life; Clare, an administrator at Seafood, has called him up weekly since the training to check how his trial shifts have gone and to find out whether he has a permanent berth yet. Harry tells me that this is the first time in a long while that people have ‘had his back’. In this way, it is much more than training. Mentor schemes are fighting to prevent the end of fishing in Newlyn, by bringing young men into the industry and nurturing those for whom fishing is not in their lifeblood.
Since Harry is the only other person I have met who is as much of a fishing novice as I am, we spend a joyous half an hour or so discussing particularly embarrassing mistakes we have made in front of other fishermen. Like me, every time Harry has had to use one of the thin, slippery metal quayside ladders and then jump across to a boat, he has been terrified that he will miss the boat completely and have to be pulled out of the harbour waters below. We both agree that this would instantly destroy any slight chance he may have had of gaining the crew’s respect early on. Even worse, he says, he is terrified of heights. I admit what I have not to any other fishermen: that there were times on the Filadelfia that I felt truly frightened and alone, knowing I could not contact my parents and that there was nowhere I could escape to.
Crews tend to be hard on decky learners until they prove themselves. As Harry and I chat, I cannot help but think about the drinking culture amongst fishermen on land. Even for men who have grown up fishing, it is hard to retain the balance of the extreme vacillation between excess and teetotalism that Newlyn fishermen experience weekly. Many men have slipped under. I meet one skipper in the Swordy who tells me he had to bring his boat back early this week having found one of his crew – ‘a young lad’ – shooting up in the toilet. Sometimes, even when you’re at sea, the land is not far enough away to escape the various problems and intoxicants it offers.
Harry tells me that, actually, the fishermen’s self-enforced alcohol ban at sea has been a relief for him – many of the Newlyn fishermen jokingly call it their ‘sea-hab’ or ‘sea-tox’ because it ensures ‘a week away from the piss’. While Harry knows that none of it will be easy, ‘I will die before I give this up,’ he tells me fervently.
In Walter Benjamin’s essay cycle ‘Nordic Sea’, which emerged from his voyage to Norway and Finland, he describes how boats become ‘the time in which even he who has no home lives’. For those who leave no home behind, the boat is no less than a palace. Fishing will give Harry a home; it will give him the opportunity to live and a new, clearly defined identity. I think about the way in which Newlyn has become a place that has helped me, too, or at least shown me that there are other ways of living: that there still exist communities for whom looking out for and fiercely defending one another is valued above all else.
Harry and I swap numbers, and I text him the following day to wish him good luck and ask him to let me know how it all goes. Fishing-related tragedies have left many holes in the fabric of Newlyn but talking to Harry I see that fishing can also bring salvation to those who are lost. ‘Fishing can kill you,’ I write in my diary that evening, ‘but it can also save your life.’
The next morning, I go to a large open-fronted warehouse by the Strand to meet Simon Milne, who until very recently was the cook on the gill-netter Governek of Ladram. He proudly tells me that he is actually quite famous on Twitter because he was part of the crew filmed for the fishing reality TV show, The Catch. Where Harry is at the very start of his life as a fisherman, Simon’s has been cut short. Though only in his mid-forties, the physical strain and intensity of gill-netting – spending great swathes of time bent double over nets – has left his body permanently damaged and has forced him to retire early. He now has carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands, the bones in his thumbs are wearing away and he has osteoarthritis to boot.
As we talk, Simon rigs nets, taking sheets of netting and stitching it onto leaded ropes, for the ‘foots’, and ropes with floats attached for the ‘heads’, so that the gill nets will stand upright on the seabed. The hake nets he works on are joined into tiers, each of about three miles long, comprising around fifty separate small mesh nets. Each hake net is worth about £10,000. I follow Simon up and down the warehouse, as he stretches the net from one side of the echoing room to the other, weaving a net needle in and out of a single tier.
‘With fishing, you know what you’re about,’ he states simply. ‘It’s the very first thing you tell someone about yourself, if they haven’t worked it out already, and after that you don’t have to say anything else, really; people know exactly who and what you are.’ He explains that he does not know another job in the world that gives you such a feeling of confidence and competence – ‘not that I’ve ever been shy of confidence’, he adds, which does not surprise me in the least – ‘but it’s turned me into a better person.’ Through fishing, ‘you soon learn your limits, you learn to push your limits and finally you learn that limits are just something in your head.’ Simon is not yet entirely comfortable with working on land. He finds it mind-numbing spending his days in an unchanging, monochrome environment, faced with the oppressive quiet of a cavernous warehouse. For a fisherman, it is unthinkable – at times almost unliveable – to be away from ‘that big wet thing out there – that life-giving, life-taking thing that is everything’, as I have heard it called. To suddenly lose that illimitable world that is so beyond human articulation requires colossal readjustment.
Simon has started cooking more at home, he tells me, though his wife and daughter repeatedly complain about the vast portions he gives them. He says he can’t help it; at sea he would make each man a whole roasting tray of food. ‘You must have heard about my meals?’: he sucks his breath in and starts to reel off some of his most famous fishing dishes, each of which sounds more extravagant than the last: Thai fish curry with whatever they had caught that day; hake and onions for lunch with thyme butter and a bit of fresh bread; fish mornay (‘but not so French’), which would usually be haddock on a bed of shallots with Gruyère cheese and bacon on top; beef brisket, red wine, dauphinois and a bit of veg (‘like beef bourguginon, but not so French’ he adds emphatically once more); and a roast with all the trimmings every other day. He pauses in his net-rigging and looks out to where you can just see the masts of trawlers in the harbour and says wistfully: ‘Kilo and a half of rice for six people. That’s how you do it.’
Simon asked his wife recently: ‘What am I now, then? I mean, are you all right being with a bloke, who’s just a bloke?’ In response she said she was just happy to have him home. It is those men who don’t have this support once they can no longer go to sea who are in the greatest danger of becoming lost.
To prevent himself from becoming entirely adrift from the industry, Simon is studying at the Seafood Training School to become a fishing instructor, one of the people who will help teach novices like Harry to become fishermen. Unfortunately the dropout rate after the three-week course is extremely high. To find oneself confronted with the whole sea is something that no course can adequately prepare you for. Simon’s role is to keep the trainees going, to say: ‘If it doesn’t work on that boat, then try something else: try crabbing, try day-boats.’ He remembers when he returned to fishing aged thirty, after taking a few years out. ‘It nearly killed me,’ he says. ‘I lost six stone in two weeks – even though we were eating like kings. One day, I was sweating my eyeballs o
ut, and the skipper came up to me, patted my back and said “Go on, you’re doing all right lad.”’ It is such moments that mean everything, when an older fisherman whom you respect at last notices you aren’t completely hopeless.
On his last ever trip out gill-netting there was phosphorescence in the water, Simon tells me. Dolphins and rays were weaving through it all night as they steamed back to the harbour, creating curling, luminous trails like streamers. It was hard not to believe, he says, that at least in some way the show was for him, a parting gift from the sea. ‘They were like red arrows, or’ – he pauses, trying to think of a more apt description – ‘one of them sights that words cannot describe, you know?’
I don’t hear back from Harry after his trawler trip. I soon forget that I made him promise to let me know how it went, and go home to London. It is only a few weeks later, when I return for a single, final weekend before the New Year, that I see Harry again. It is perhaps three in the morning: a few of us are drunkenly heading back with chips from Rami’s kebab shop after a night dancing to cheesy music at Rumours nightclub in Penzance, and I spot him on the opposite side of the road. Noticing he is unsteady on his feet, as I am, I do not want to go up to him and ask how it went on the trawler. I fear he might tell me that it had not worked out after all, that the transition into fishing has been too much for him. The next morning I send him another text. He does not reply. I repeat to myself what I had written in my diary after I first met him – ‘Fishing can kill you, but it can also save your life’ – and try to make it true by saying it out loud.
In the Rings of Saturn, which I read while on the Crystal Sea, the version of the East Anglian coast that emerges out of Sebald’s hallucinatory prose is perpetually on the verge of ruin. The decay of past grandeur is described with relish, fishermen are ‘dying out’ – as though they themselves are some ancient species destined to be forgotten. In Dunwich, once a prestigious port, every building ‘one after the other, toppled down the steadily receding cliff face’. I didn’t want to hear this while I was curled up in the wheelhouse of a Cornish fishing boat. I didn’t understand how the collapse of an industry could be rendered beautiful in writing. Newlyn is fighting its future destruction every day. That fight can be loud and messy and misplaced, at times. But it is also hopeful and active. Though 20 per cent of the fleet has been decommissioned in Newlyn, contrary to Sebald, there is no such beauty to this potential ruin.
15
BEATEN COPPER
Thursday is my hardest day at sea. The shore feels thousands of nautical miles and years away than it has done in the days previously. A close friend, who had been away on her first solo adventure while I was making mine in Newlyn, later asked me what was my most frightening episode at sea. After considering it for a while, I realised that there was no climactic instant on the Filadelfia, no moment I could isolate and say: ‘Yes, here. I was afraid for my life here.’ But all that did scare me was contained in that one grey Thursday.
Once dressed, I shakily make my way up into the wheelhouse, mumble hello to whoever is on watch and head straight out onto the balcony, hoping that the new morning will burn away the heaviness that has descended over me during the night. And yet the day provides no opening; the sun never rises. Instead, the greyness leaks across the sky, washing away every last blotch of colour until the world is the exact same pallid shade that you find under the eyes of a hospital patient in terminal decline, like that cheery line in Woyzeck, by the German playwright Georg Büchner that was left unfinished at his death: ‘A nice solid grey sky. Makes you want to knock a nail in and hang yourself.’ There is a Cornish dialect word for the sky that describes it exactly: wisht – pale and ill. I notice what I have not on the previous days: that there is no green, no thing with roots as far as the eye can see, except for Don’s money plant bobbing beside me. And it is not just that there is no colour. There are no shadows either. Today the light is too weak for them. Annie Dillard writes that we need shadows in order to understand the world. ‘They give the light distance; they put it in its place.’ Without shadows, there is nothing to hold on to.
I find it hard to write about difficult moments. I tend to leave out sadness from my diary for fear of crystallising those feelings or allowing them to seep into other memories. Perhaps this is dishonest. But eight days is a long time on a boat and the concentration required to keep thoughts of home relegated to the nether regions of your brain can drain a person right out. I become Simone Weil’s squirrel in a cage, turning around and around within the work of gutting, finding no chance of making headway. That day I shift between locations and activities on the boat as if unconsciously. Time progresses in a blue-lit blur like the droning screen in the galley as Don flicks between airport reality shows, The Chase, the news, and Deadly Women, an American true-crime show.
The monotony becomes annihilating. The mixture of intoxicating fumes, drifting through the cabins, sits right on top of me and the tightness of space makes me want to cry out. My resentment of the Filadelfia swiftly turns inwards. I feel embarrassed at my own redundancy, knowing that however much I try to participate in the work I am always, at base, a passenger here. The world becomes more blurred and I find myself unable to answer a single question on The Chase, which feels hugely important at the time. While the other crew do their usual jeering at contestants and yelling out of answers, it is as if it the world has switched to another language and I can make out none of it.
In old English, the compound úht-cearu translates as ‘early-morning cares’: those tiny worries that you can flick away like horseflies by day, but which gather at night and transfigure during the sleepless hours before dawn into weighty demons pressing on your skull. Cares similarly balloon on board trawlers to such a size that they obscure one’s vision, preventing you from engaging with other beings. I remember Nathan telling me that this is a particular danger he associates with being on watch. If you are unhappy, your mind can start to unravel in those lone hours spent staring at the bare ocean.
Across the years I have accumulated a range of methods to cope with the undefined sadness that comes over me some days, sometimes lasting weeks – calling friends and family or finding ways to distract myself by visiting galleries and museums, anything to avoid having to listen to my own head. Unsurprisingly this is not possible on a boat in the middle of the sea. Over lunch, Don watches me slowly make my way through a colourful packet of crisps while half-slumped over the table. Without warning, he slams his hand down, shaking me up. ‘I dunno why you’re tired. You’ve been sitting on your arse all day!’
This feeds straight into my self-consciousness. In my heightened state, I am unable to take it lightly. I start trying to apologise for being useless, for being a dead weight, but soon lose my train of thought and lapse into silence once more. Don shakes his head and goes back to work. That day, Don continues to slam tables, doors and mugs of coffee whenever he sees my unfocused gaze, the noise becoming a beat that drills through me more violently than the engine below us or the sea outside.
In the cottage in the Fradgan, a blush of evening light skips across a pair of copper cats hanging on the living-room wall, which are perfect replicas of Teggy and Izzy. Lofty made them at the Newlyn Copper Works, which is run by Mikey Johnson.
Copper does not behave like other materials, Mikey tells me when I visit his workshop behind the Strand one lunchtime. Most become more malleable the more force that is exerted on them. The glass and plastics that end up in the sea are battered and whirled by the waves until their sharp edges are softened right down, their old forms barely recognisable. But copper starts out pliable. Coppersmiths continue to strike and beat upon the metal until its orderly particles become disordered, rendering it brittle and hard. With every piece of copper, there comes a point at which it can be worked upon no longer, when your ringing contact with the metal fixes its shape.
In 1888, a designer called John Drew Mackenzie moved from Scotland down to Newlyn. After some time spent living amongs
t the locals, he grew concerned about the effect erratic work patterns were having on the fishermen’s wellbeing. Before the advent of mechanised trawlers, the men were completely at the mercy of sea conditions, sometimes losing a whole season without work. Hoping to provide fishermen with a productive secondary craft that would keep them occupied and provide an income during off-seasons, Mackenzie established the Newlyn Industrial Class Copper Works. Within a few years, his workshop was crammed full of fishermen spending their days hammering copper into intricate designs and learning refined techniques such as repoussage, where a sheet of copper is hammered from one side to create an image in relief on the other.
The copper works fell into disuse, until 2004 when Mikey moved into the town and set about re-establishing them. Like his predecessor, he began encouraging land-locked fishermen to come into his treasure trove of a workshop behind the Strand. Here French jazz can be heard dripping out of speakers like honey, rising above the sounds of hammer striking metal, while fishermen spend their days fashioning strange and wonderful objects as they wait for the seas to quieten. Mikey sees the two industries – fishing and art – as akin to one another, both requiring skill and close attention, while always being ‘tangible, always gritty and real’.
Fishermen often come up with the most honest responses to Mikey’s work, too – never appealing to his ego or trying to guess at what he wants to hear. When Mikey presented a new abstract piece he had been working on to a day-boat owner, the fisherman took it from his hands, turned it over a few times, then handed it back to him with a shrug: ‘Pig’s ear. That’s the shape of a pig’s ear.’