by Lamorna Ash
My friend Jolan, who works on the Scillonian ferry shuttling queasy tourists to and from the Isles of Scilly, gets me a drink. He tells me he is not surprised to see me again. ‘People come back here,’ he says. ‘They always do.’
There is something about this place that draws people to it: a tangible, tactile rhythm, the tides, the patterns of life here that continue to echo through your own body long after you’ve left and ensure you cannot forget this place.
Isaac, who I’d spent many a drunken night with in the Swordy, or up at the Coastguard’s in Mousehole on my first visit to Newlyn, has himself left Cornwall by the time I return. We vow to write letters to one another – mine from Newlyn, where he grew up, his from Manchester where he is working, a city not unlike my own. It becomes a habit. I sit in Newlyn’s Duke Street Cafe and attempt to render my experiences of this place, his place, into letter form, while he tells me of the changes to his own life now he is in Manchester. When I ask him to write to me of the landscape he grew up in, he replies: ‘It’s hard to know where to begin. I think one of the first things I noticed about moving away was that many places in Cornwall – Newlyn, Tredavoe, Gulval – felt like ballasts for me. While I was, and in many ways still am, uncertain about almost all other aspects of my life, I’ve always felt so clearly my home, and my family there, to be the most essential to me.’
It makes me jealous when I read this. I hadn’t realised it was possible for someone my age to have a sense of self tied in a fast knot to a particular land. Over time I come to accept it is because the relationship between people and place in Cornwall is different to that in cities. In some ways the two are in indistinguishable here: people are place. They grow out of the land and the sea, every few days re-establishing that connection, dipping their feet into the water, pressing their palms into the sand.
I meet a woman that night at the Star who grew up in Newlyn and started her own family here but a few years ago moved up to become a landlady of a pub in Manchester. She has the same wicked sense of humour, which is instantly identifiable as bred in Newlyn – where jokes are the lifeblood of all conversation, repeated and added to throughout the night as the pints stack up across the tables. She tells me that her daughter misses Newlyn terribly and has given her a long list of things to bring back with her, including her favourite pasties from Aunty May’s just by Newlyn Bridge and ice cream from Jelberts.
‘I’ll always be from here,’ she tells me. When in Manchester people ask her what her local is she tells them, the Star.
‘Where’s that?’ they say.
‘Newlyn,’ she replies.
‘Come again?’
‘Near Penzance…’
This continues until she gets to Cornwall and they say: ‘Oh! God, all the way down the bottom?’
After a few drinks, Denise, Lofty and I head home together. Lofty makes us all bacon sandwiches and I take my usual place on the sofa to watch The X Factor with them. We chat about our summers, things that have happened in town since I left: the raft race to raise money for the harbour lights, the annual fish festival. We crack open the bottle I bought them as a thank-you-for-having-me-again gift. They have bought an extra-large tub of peanut butter for me so I won’t eat all of theirs.
I hug Denise and Lofty goodnight and head upstairs. They have done up the guest room since my last visit and it still smells slightly of paint. Lying in bed, listening to the booms from the market once more, I let the sounds wash over me. Not wash, break. All Newlyn breaks over me and I am back.
17
A FEAST OF SEABIRDS
In the same crepuscular glow in which the day-boats return to shore, the ring-netters are just preparing for their evening of fishing. Tonight I’m going out pilchard-hunting with Danny Downing and his three-man crew on the Golden Harvest. From the Fradgan, leading down towards the harbour, I take the blue-elvan cobbled path whose pebbles do not seem to have been laid in any sensible order, but rather, like water running through a rocky stream that finds itself constantly diverted and re-routed, shoot off in various directions.
As ever, I am nervous about meeting a new crew on one of their boats for the first time, but when I arrive there is no one about. The Golden Harvest PZ63 is a terracotta-coloured ring-net fishing boat moored at the end of the Mary Williams Pier. It is much smaller than the Crystal Sea or Filadelfia, and has a large wheelhouse and modified stern which opens up like a twin rig from where its nets are thrown out to capture shoals of pilchards. I check my phone to find a text from Danny saying he’s running a bit late but the other lads should be there shortly. I sit on an oil drum and swing my feet over the edge of the pier, noticing how the wind strokes across the harbour like a straw being blown through paint, sending it out in fans of activity. I look out at the horizon and see a few trawlers just visible, seeming to hang above the water through a sea mist.
Sure enough, a few minutes later I see three lads sauntering down the pier, swinging plastic bags containing their dinners. Once close I realise I recognise them all. Tom often frequents the Swordy and I’ve seen Ed about town. The third crew member is the son of the Star’s landlady Debbie. He shares with her the same quiet manner and large grey eyes.
When Danny turns up five minutes later, the other crew immediately notice the conspicuous bag of KFC nuggets in his arms. ‘You’re late because you went to KFC?’ ‘That better be for the whole crew!’
‘No bloody way!’ replies Danny, leaping nimbly from the last few rungs of the ladder onto the boat, introducing himself to me and climbing up into the wheelhouse in one movement. He leans out of the one of the oblong windows around the wheelhouse. ‘Well, come on then, you lazy bunch! You all just been sitting around waiting for me?’
As the men kick into action, he sticks his head out the window once more: ‘We’ve got a girl with us tonight, so act civil and no swearing.’ He winks at me. ‘You fuckers!’
He turns back to check his equipment, fill in the ship’s log and get the engine going, ignoring the cries from the deck of: ‘You’ve got the filthiest mouth of the lot of us!’
With the sun just sinking, we pass Newlyn Lighthouse for our night of pilchard hunting. The last light sits above the bay in a romantic purplish haze. The clouds are wispy and unfocused, the moon hanging low, its tendrils threading through the lines of the water. An old St Ives term for the crescent moon, when the evening star seems to follow at the moon’s heels, is ‘the ship towing her punt’. It was believed to be a sign of good weather to come.
Just clear of the harbour, Danny gets out his still-hot KFC chicken thighs from their brown paper bag. Just as he hands one to me, Tom comes up into the wheelhouse and begins an outraged torrent of abuse at Danny for never sharing his chicken with him. ‘All right, all right!’ He reluctantly slings one at Tom too, warning him not to tell the others.
Tom nods and immediately yells down into the galley: ‘Danny says he has loads of chicken he wants to share with us!’
Danny is immediately likeable. Though he messes about and teases the crew any opportunity he gets, he is a shrewd fisherman, retaining the absolute respect of the men with seemingly minimal effort. Before he got into ring-netting, he was apparently one of the best single-manned mackerel hand-liners fishing off St Ives, and after that he did his time on some of the bigger boats. The Downings are a respected name in fishing throughout Newlyn, and the Golden Harvest herself has been part of his family for over forty years, having been built in 1976, the year Danny was born. She began her life gill-netting but had almost fallen into disrepair. A couple of years ago, Danny, who is also trained as a shipwright, stripped her down and transformed her into a ring-netter, leading the return to pilchard fishing in Cornwall.
The moon slips down into the sea and it is really dark now. The men pull their oilskins up, ready for Danny’s command to throw the large ring-net out into the water as soon as he has closed in around the pilchards. From a distance, I can just make out the flashing colours of the amusement arcade down on the prom
at Penzance. It feels strange to fish so close to the land. I had grown accustomed to thinking of fishing as synonymous with disappearing from humanity for a while. Maintaining the land in sight makes the work feel more perfunctory – more like a job and less like an escape. There are two other ring-netters with us in the bay that night. Pilchards shoals are usually found quite close together, so the three Newlyn boats tend to follow each other round the bay and call one another up on the VHF if they get a whiff of anything. As we set off to the location where they found a huge shoal the previous night, Danny tells me that pilchard fishing is now an MSC-certified sustainable fishery. Since there are just three boats in Newlyn, only another six fishing out of Cornwall and no others at all in the rest of the UK, it is seriously good money. Ring-netting also has minimal environmental impact: there is little by-catch and the nets do not go deep enough to damage the seabed.
The pilchards’ fishery was once the lifeblood of Newlyn, with the majority of the catch being exported to feed Catholic areas in northern Europe during periods that required abstinence from meat. In the eighteenth century, a typical toast in Newlyn would be: ‘Long life to the Pope, death to our Best Friends, and may our streets run in Blood’ – ‘Best Friends’ being the pilchards, and ‘Blood’ the juices that flowed onto the cobbles after the fish were pressed and salted in the so-called pilchard palaces, repurposed cellars in fishermen’s cottages, that once littered the town. By the start of the twentieth century, pilchards had begun to be regarded as peasant food and the market for them fell into decline – compounded by several bad seasons of fishing in Newlyn. In the last few decades, however, there has been another glut of pilchards in the bay and the price of pilchards has risen once more. A lot of this present success, both in Newlyn and across the UK, is down to Nick Howell, who bought the Newlyn Pilchards Works in 1981 and got together with M&S to rebrand pilchards as ‘Cornish Sardines’, transforming them into a luxury item by selling them in pretty tins, and mixed with oil and lemon.
Unlike most forms of fishing, where there is no way of knowing what you will bring up in your nets, pilchard fishermen can see the target they’re stalking. It is a primal kind of fishing, we become hunters chasing our prey across the seas. Danny sits up in the wheelhouse, his eyes carefully trained on the full-circle sonar screen, watching for the dark red blotches that will indicate there is a shoal nearby. Every few seconds a line through the radius of the circle wipes across the screen, illuminating the very latest activity happening below the water. It makes for hypnotic viewing; Danny and I keep our faces right up to it, jumping every time a sliver of colour materialises on the screen.
When a huge red splodge of activity suddenly appears, Danny leaps into action. He yells down to the boys to ready themselves on deck and they wrench open the heavy door in the aft of the boat. An icy tunnel of wind rushes into the galley, causing cupboard doors to slam shut and a half-eaten packet of crisps to fly from the table. Danny turns the engine down low, carefully easing the boat around the moving shoal to prevent the pilchards from scattering before the net has surrounded them. The men wait, poised over the net. And then, at last, Danny gives a great bellow, signalling them to throw the net out.
There is a silence. We wait in anticipation in the wheelhouse, but nothing happens. The silence holds. There comes a flurry of swearing from outside. Danny and I look back at the sonar: it shows an empty, black sea; the pilchards have dispersed once more. Danny slams his hands on the dashboard, muttering under his breath. After a few seconds, he calls out to the boys: ‘What the hell happened there, then?’
‘The first ring got caught,’ one crew member shouts back across the raging wind.
‘A ring got caught?’ Danny repeats slowly.
The other men join in, trying to explain what happened.
‘A ring got caught,’ Danny says again, leaving a pause between each word, a note of threat in his voice. He turns to me. ‘These goats! Things like that should never, ever happen.’ He yells back at them again: ‘Next time when I say I’m ready to go, you check it, you double check it and then you triple check it, all right?!’ He sighs, shaking his head. ‘They were lovely marks, ’n’ all …’
We abandon the spot of our near miss and Danny pushes the Golden Harvest onwards to seek out other shoals lurking within the shallows of the bay. Pilchard fishing can be maddening. Every time we get close to a shoal, they split and scatter, the bright marks on the sonar vanishing as quickly as they appear. At other times, just as we are chasing a huge shoal, they’ll swim right into a load of rocks, where we cannot follow them without damaging the boat or ripping the net.
Danny tells me that sometimes he thinks the pilchards know exactly what they’re doing. ‘You can’t underestimate what you’re hunting,’ he warns me. Now and then, I hear him whispering to them under his breath: ‘You bastards.’
The more time we spend watching these smudges of activity, the more I do imagine the fish as cognizant, goading fishermen towards ever more treacherous rocky grounds at the peripheries of Mounts Bay like Sirens luring sailors.
‘You lads know the territory we’re in,’ shouts Danny out the window to his crew, who are leaning out over the water, their faces wet and their eyes glittering from the sea spray. ‘Sacrificial net, init? We got a spare…’
They nicknamed their previous net ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ because it suffered so many rips and tears over the years that by the end it was a patchwork of different threads and offcuts of old nets – almost beautiful in its tatterdemalion way. Each pilchard net takes three and a half months to make and costs a fortune. Their new one is worth over thirty grand and was made in Cornwall, but they have another larger that was made in Peru for £85,000. Every ring net is made of three parts: a central purse of fine, tanned webbing and two wings of coarser mesh. Each square of net is knotted together to form the almost invisible nylon blanket that hangs in the water, ensnaring the shoals within it.
In their local history, Newlyn Before the Artists Came, Pam Lomax and Ron Hogg write that after each new fishing vessel was built in Newlyn harbour in the 1800s, every member of the crew was obliged to contribute their own fragment of net to its overall composition. This completed net, a patchwork of threads joined in a reticular pattern, would remain part of the boat for its duration in service – a symbolic representation of the interweaving relations between the crew who would fish with it.
Danny tells me that the other two ring-netters have gone back in to land already, having caught a huge shoal within about an hour (‘jammy bastards’) but we can just about make out the other boat still, its lights blinking up behind St Michael’s Mount. We wheel and flick across the harbour, seeking latent shoals hiding in the bay’s dark folds, creating disorientating corkscrew patternations across the water. Anyone observing our zigzagging from the prom would surely imagine that the skipper had gone out blind drunk.
The crew get a message from their decky learner. He’s recovering back home at the moment; Danny accidentally ran over his foot with a forklift a few weeks ago while they were landing the pilchards. ‘Looks like you lot are going around in circles again,’ the message announces gleefully, sent from his warm bed on land. He must be watching us on the AIS, Danny tells me, a habit that many fishermen fall into when they are not able to go to sea for some reason – following the snaking trails of boats they once crewed and wishing they were out there with them. Once back home, I too found myself slipping into a daily routine of looking up the boats I fished with on the AIS. Sitting in a cafe in Haringey, my mouse would trace fishermen’s past voyages through the large expanse of unnatural blue that stands for the sea on the Marine Traffic website, following the faintest scents of some elusive pilchard shoal – watching the red, arrow-dotted line twist and turn back in on itself in real time, drawing conch patterns across the water. Its thread of movement remains emblazoned across the sea as a record of the trip like the trails of phosphorescence that followed Simon home on his last ever fishing trip with the Gover
nek of Ladram.
After almost an hour with no luck at all, Danny opens up the window again and shouts out dejectedly to the cold night: ‘Come in for a bit, boys.’
There is no response. He leans out the window further and finds only Ed on deck.
‘Have they left you again? Why is it always only just you, eh? I’ll have a word.’ Danny jumps down to find the other two crew warming themselves up in the galley and slumped around the table. The smell of their burgers and frozen pizzas heating in the microwave passes through the room. ‘You lot having a nice sit-down dinner, then?’
They grin up at him unapologetically.
As I head back to the wheelhouse with Danny, Tom shouts up behind me: ‘What are you doing to the fish, Lamorna? Knew a girl on board would be bad luck!’
While we wait for the elusive shoal, Danny and I get to chatting. He and his wife have three daughters, who he says definitely won’t go into fishing because they’re far too smart for that. He’s let the oldest steer the boat round the harbour though – ‘She picked it up in seconds,’ he tells me proudly. We speak more broadly of the changes that have occurred in the town during his lifetime. The Swordy’s a mere shadow of its past unruly wildness, he tells me mournfully. But sometimes, very occasionally, that spark returns and the pub becomes red hot once more, as it did that first night after the Lamorna Walk. Like many of the other fishermen with young families, they live outside of town now, the connection between the community and the fishing industry becoming thinner, more threadbare. Mid-conversation, Danny freezes, his eyes widening as he stares down at the sonar. It blooms red, the colour spreading outwards with each wipe until it’s covered the screen.