Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  It takes time to learn another person’s ways. This is the beauty of fishing. You can move beyond a simple, two-dimensional understanding of those around you, discovering that, of course, we each harbour deeper emotions than can be spoken. I think back to the first day when I asked Don what he felt about heading out to sea and he replied, ‘I’m blank’. Like me telling myself ‘You’re tough’ in the toilet earlier, these kinds of statements are just a kind of self-preservation, a thing we say to stop ourselves from breaking. Finally, Don announces in a slightly choked voice that he has to turn Adele off because it’s making him too sad.

  These difficult openings breached, Don and I talk freely about most things. He becomes my confidant, the two of us forming a bond that lasts well beyond our return to the harbour. His son once worked on the Filadelfia, he tells me; he was a wild youngster for a while, and Don was the only skipper who could manage him. His daughter is a wonderful photographer and has a collection of pictures of him skippering the Filadelfia back to Newlyn, the setting sun right behind her proud deck. A few years ago she bought him a St Christopher which he keeps on his person while at sea. When we watch someone on the telly talk about grief, he announces gravely: ‘I know those feelings. I ate my way through my dad’s death.’ And I think back to the boy on the bus, who sat apart from the other children talking to the driver, eating crisps from both coat pockets. A few years ago, with the help of a close friend, Don tackled his health problems; he got himself in shape, stopped getting kebabs every evening he was back on land, started taking more care of himself. I quietly tell him that I survived my own teenage unhappiness through not eating. He nods but asks no more. In this way, we find an equivalence between us, a meeting between sea and sky at the horizon line.

  ‘Goodnight, sweetheart,’ Don calls back to me as I turn to leave the wheelhouse. ‘Sleep well.’

  The brittle shape you hammer copper into is not necessarily permanent, Mikey Johnson told me as I was leaving his workshop. There is a process called annealing that alters the metal’s properties, making it soft once more – like a way of rubbing out – and allows for mistakes, for changes of heart.

  16

  LOCAL

  It is early autumn now and I have been away from Cornwall for a while, missing the summer months with its mad heat of people.

  The seasons have taught me not to trust the validity of memory. Every time a season comes around again after a year of absence, the experience comes as a complete surprise to me. I never remember it right, or I never remember it enough, and this makes me think about other memories too. If I can’t accurately picture what it is like in summer to lie with a friend in a park drinking beer until the light finally departs around nine, unless I am actually there in that moment, cracking open a second tinny as the shadows chase us over the grass, then how can I really say I remember what it was like to have loved a particular boyfriend, to have felt so unhappy I could not leave my room, to be afraid of the dark?

  Maybe you’re not supposed to trust memories. If they were so good and true that we could play the past back like a film, we’d stop facing forward, stop reaching towards new moments to transform later into imperfect, hole-ridden memories.

  To return to a place that has settled in one’s mind as good, solid and finished, scares me like nothing else. Since childhood I’ve had a tic of dividing experiences into discrete halves. Once I get through the first half of something – be it a term of university, a holiday or a single date – and nothing terrible has happened, a tension that I did not even realise I was holding passes out of my body and my shoulders relax. In this way, I am able to seal off memories and place them in glass jars. Then, at a later stage, I can hold them up to the light and see the words shine across them: ‘This was a good time in your life.’ The last note I wrote in my diary heading home on the train after my first visit to Newlyn is a perfect example of this: ‘Remember that you have been happier and felt more solid here than you ever did in London. Remember that this cannot and must not be the end of your time in Newlyn.’

  And yet, despite my best efforts neatly to sum the place up, once home I was unable to confine my time in Newlyn into one of my glass jars. Its difficulties refused to be resolved or forgotten. Instead it continued to intrude upon my daily life, coming with me to the pub and round to friends’ houses for dinner, the noise of it blocking out what people were saying. Like an image hitting a retina and being upturned, each new experience I had after leaving that first time got reformed somehow, feeding into and deepening my understanding.

  When Synge returned to the Aran Islands after some time back home on the mainland, he wrote: ‘This year I see a darker side of life in the islands. The sun seldom shines, and day after day a cold south-western wind blows over the cliffs, bringing up showers of hail and dense masses of cloud.’ The sun still shines on my return to Newlyn – if anything, the October light is brighter and cleaner, the skies and landscape wind-rent. In the same way that once your love for someone moves beyond those first blinding sparks of obsession you are able to notice their flaws and they yours, this light also reveals to me Newlyn’s fault lines. At first I don’t want to see them, but to keep one thing gleaming in your field of vision would eventually damage your view of the rest of the world. This recognition forces me to confront what I had written, respond to myself with: ‘No, it did not simply make you happier and more solid. It is not that easy. Think harder. Allow it to be more than that.’

  Newlyn has its inconsistences like anywhere else. It is the most loving place. Every person is noticed: if you are struggling, you will not be left behind. When Cod lost his legs through septicaemia, the community grouped together to pay for his prosthetics so that he could fish once more. ‘I think life is that way,’ he tells me in the Star one evening after returning from a day of catching squid. ‘People saw I was in trouble and they saved me.’ He believes his illness has done the rest of the town good, too. ‘They looked at their lives and thought he’s still having a great time, what’s wrong with us then?’

  But it also has its demons. There is an anger and insularity here, which is mostly levelled at the land beyond the Tamar. When I tell people I’m from London, I often get responses like: ‘There’s too many people. It’s filthy. And no one speaks to you; no one speaks English, even.’ The first time I stayed in Newlyn, I would nod. London is dirty; it is too full, too broken; but it is also pretty extraordinary. On my return, I want to say more about my own place, to describe what it means to me to live somewhere filled with people from across the world, how miraculous it is that we all take the same tube together each day and breathe the same polluted air.

  Before my second stay in Newlyn, I visit Lelant for a few days with my family. On a cold, still morning, Mum and I head down to the beach, as we have done a thousand times before.

  Virginia Woolf could see the slim line of Lelant beach across the bay from her holiday home in St Ives, and describes it in her diary of 1905, when she was twenty-seven:

  At ebb tide in the evening the stretch of the sands here is vast & melancholy; the waves spread themselves one over lapping the other in thin fan shaped layers of water; so shallow that the break of the wave is hardly more than a ripple. The slope of the beach gleams as though laid with a film of mother o’ pearl where the sea has been, & a row of sea gulls sits on the skirts of the repeating wave. The pallor of the sandhills makes the scene yet more ghostly, but the beautiful sights are often melancholy & very lonely.

  There are times when Lelant beach is the exact image Woolf describes: blanched days, when the flat sea has pulled right out and the sand lies like a dust sheet over all life. Viewed from jaunty St Ives, as Woolf would have, it somehow seems the unhappiest of all the beaches in the bay. But there is joy here too, when the sea flies right up to meet the dunes, snapping at their heels, just as the first light comes pink and orange from behind the cottage-dotted cliffs at Hayle, when the sandpipers hop in and out of the foam left by departing waves, when the water is s
o inviting that it seems to call out: ‘Come and meet me here! Come all the way out!’ and you cannot help but strip off and race straight into it.

  This day the beach is more like Virginia Woolf’s sombre portrait. There is an exclusion of light, the sky and sea bloodless. Mum reminds me that when I was a toddler, as soon as my short pink legs touched the sand, come rain or shine, I would pull all the clothes off that she had painstakingly dressed me in, and rush towards the water, bare-skinned and free. When her mother first placed her before the sea at a similar age, Sylvia Plath ‘crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels’. Plath wonders what would have happened if her mother had not stopped her: if she’d just kept going on and on, right through the skin of the water.

  In Newlyn, I ask people questions about their lives, their families’ lives, their work, their ancestors, their Cornwall, but as we walk side by side over the landscape of my mother’s childhood, I realise that I have never thought to ask my own mother about her memories of this place. Tell me your Cornwall, I say to her.

  Mum’s father died when she was eleven. In the wake of his death, her mother moved the family from St Helena, a tropical island in the South Atlantic where her father had been a doctor, back to Lelant, the village she herself had grown up in. Mum describes her first memories of Lelant, staying in a now-demolished bungalow opposite St Uny’s church, as an unending series of grannies – ‘hundreds of grannies: Granny Ball, Granny Buchanan, Granny Frieda, I mean hundreds of grannies. Everyone was a granny.’ She remembers her first time on the beach, what it felt like just to run and run with no end in sight. She remembers coming back from ballet school during holidays to eat endless pasties and saffron buns, to play folk guitar and sit reading down by the slipway.

  As soon as she was old enough, Mum said goodbye to her Cornish home and moved to London to start acting in the West End. ‘You can love a place more than anywhere in the whole world,’ she says, ‘but that doesn’t mean you can stay there.’ Once acting, she could not come back to Lelant as often as she would have liked, in case she missed auditions. That severance is not easy, it is not a clean break, she tells me. You feel bereaved when you know you have no choice but to leave somewhere, as you would feel leaving a loved one. When she did come home, she would go straight down onto the beach. ‘I don’t know how to explain it,’ she says when I ask her what that return was like. ‘I felt relieved, like I could breathe again. It’s the stretching of the eyes; it’s looking out at the horizon again.’

  ‘The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of the healing powers of nature. ‘We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.’ Mum and I continue walking purposefully along the beach, feeling ourselves open up, becoming more malleable, more forgiving of one another. Now and then we break from our conversation to acknowledge the extraordinary things the sea has done since we were last here: the jagged rocks by the estuary we had seen last spring have been hidden by a layer of sand, the shell line has been replenished and a large tree branch has been blown back by the wind so it arcs back into the sand as graceful as a dancer. I ask whether her experience of Cornwall changed as she grew older. ‘It got less magical,’ she says. Her answer surprises me. ‘Once you’ve got people who depend on you, you can’t go out into the dark world in your head so much.’

  I ask her what she means.

  ‘It was because of my mother. Cornwall was an escape for her after my father died.’

  When they first came to Lelant, my grandmother discovered that it was no longer the joyous, social village that she remembered from her youth. The people she had known had moved away or become old. Mum watched as Cornwall become more muted for my grandmother, never quite fulfilling the fantasy she needed.

  My own relationship with Cornwall had never been one especially preoccupied with reality. Since I was a baby, Mum has taken me on frequent pilgrimages to the bare church of Zennor, St Senara, which has occupied the same desolate site since the sixth century AD. Zennor is a village set on a high, lonely stretch of the north coast – far rougher and less concerned of human lives than the port towns of the south. Here, under the stone arches of the church, Mum would recount to me the folk tale the Mermaid of Zennor and show me the ‘Mermaid Chair’, a wizened old pew thought to be six hundred years old, which has a mermaid regarding herself in a mirror carved into its end. As I got older I would spend hours standing before the sea at Lelant, waiting for a mermaid to reveal herself, never wholly able to detach myself from the story of Matthew Trewella, the best singer in Zennor, who one day, without speaking a word to his family, disappeared off the cliffs and into the sea in pursuit of the mermaid, never to return to land again. The mermaid’s tale is indelibly written into my childhood – this half-woman, half-fish being, whose gravitational pull was so urgent that it pulled a man right over the edge of the world. When we visited her pew, Mum and I would crouch down to etch her outline onto paper with a piece of graphite, the same question repeating over in my head: why did you take him; why was it him you chose?

  Staying in Newlyn was the first time I was forced to question the fantastical image of Cornwall I had spent my childhood constructing – to view Cornwall with an adult’s eye, populating its landscape with other humans with their own lives for the first time.

  When we reach the cliffs marking the end of the beach, from where a stream with a red copper line running through it trickles down into the sea, I admit something that has been worrying me. I tell Mum that, able to think more clearly about my relationship with Cornwall now, I realise I have used this place as an identity that doesn’t really belong to me. It has grown into a big part of what I say I think I am, I say, even though I don’t live here.

  ‘But that’s the thing about Cornwall,’ she replies. ‘Everybody goes from it at some point, but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel Cornish. I’m a great believer in “You are what you feel you are”.’

  I want so much for this to be true. You are what you feel you are. It is a statement that speaks to my mother’s unremitting optimism. Her joy drove me mad as a child; I could never quite believe in it – her love for every film, TV show, play and book she has ever seen, every person too. As I get older and become, reluctantly, like every other daughter, more similar to her, I begin to understand this better. Her seemingly boundless compassion for the world is part of why I was able to fall for Newlyn. While there, I would ring Mum most days, even if only for a few caught minutes, to fill her in on my Cornish adventure: people I have met, places I have seen, boats I have been on. I show her the Cornwall I am finding for myself, the self I am starting to find amongst it.

  Through this place, Mum is able to touch parts of her old life again. ‘You feel family around,’ she says, ‘those no longer with us, knowing the dog is here, my mother, my grandmother, my brothers. They’re all here.’

  The day before I move back to Newlyn, my dad and I head to Stevenson’s to call in on Denise and buy some fresh fish. On our way in a fisherman passes me, dragging a box of sloppy monkfish tails just purchased at the auction. Laid out on the three front counters are lemon and dover soles, fat orange salmon fillets, pink gurnards and glistening shellfish with sprigs of parsley artfully arranged between the various fish. Above is a large blackboard with the mornings’ prices for crab sandwiches, whelks, cockles, prawns and mussels chalked up. I cannot see Denise, so bound over instead to Elaine, who runs the shop.

  ‘Elaine, hello! How are you? How’s the shop?’ I say, breathlessly.

  She looks at me, her eyes squinting. ‘No, sorry,’ she says at last. ‘I can’t place you, my love.’ My arms fall to my sides and I look back at my dad sheepishly. We buy our fish and head back to Lelant, dad laughing at me all the way across the coast.

  We want to know places. When we begin to, we believe such knowing will be reciprocated, that our indentations on the landscape will hold so that those in future generations will continue to see tr
aces of us upon that land. Through Newlyn I learn there is value in being forgotten. Though the town felt a huge experience for me, I was a blip, barely even that, in the long lives of most of its residents: a kid with a smart London accent who stuck out like a sore thumb, who asked a few questions and then left again. The town went on without me. Of course it did. But, somehow, naively, I thought it might not have.

  A few days later I drop my unnecessarily large suitcase off at Lofty and Denise’s for the second time this year. Before joining them at the pub, I take some time to refamiliarise myself with the cottage and to greet their cats, who regard me with the utmost suspicion – yet more Newlyn residents who can’t place me. I walk slowly through each downstairs room, noticing again the many shells and paintings of the sea, including one by Ben Gunn, a jar of sand on the mantelpiece, the cats that Lofty made at the Copper Works… The place hasn’t changed an inch; it is as warm and welcoming as the day I first arrived. On the side of the fridge, my name and number are still written on a whiteboard with the words ‘Student, might stay?’ written beside it. I put on the fleece that I never took off while I was on the Filadelfia and head down the road to the Star.

  Its windows have steamed right up, but I can just make out the shadows of innumerable bodies behind the glass and hear the roars of laughter that pass through the door and roll out towards the harbour. I draw a nervous breath in and pull open the door. I’m hit by a warm, golden light, the Beatles ringing out on the jukebox and a cry of: ‘All right! Welcome back!’ from the nearest wooden table, around which are sat Lofty and Denise, Jolan, and Ben Gunn and his wife Jackie (both of whom later admit they couldn’t remember my name or who I was either and were just joining in with everyone else). They are all here. I didn’t dream the thing up.