Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  ‘Gogogogogo mother fuckers!!!!’ he bellows down below.

  The crew throw their down burgers mid-mouthful and rush out to the stern of the boat.

  Danny is no longer sitting but hopping from foot to foot. ‘Now, where did you just come from?’ he addresses the bright pulsing organism before us. We readjust positions and they disappear momentarily on the sonar: ‘No, come on, don’t you fade away on me!’

  Without realising it, I am on my feet too, shouting at the screen together with Danny as if we were watching a tense football match.

  ‘Yes!’ we yell, stamping our feet and punching the air, as the mark materialises once more. ‘That’s better, okay, okay, okay!’

  Danny jumps over to peer out the window again: ‘Is it cold out there, boys?’ He laughs. ‘Yeah, yeah, mate. I tell you what, Lamorna and I are feeling a bit of a draught up here ourselves, aren’t we girl?’

  He teases the boat forwards, deftly shifting her into the perfect position.

  ‘That’s the baby, that’s the baby…’ he croons. ‘Come on, come on.’ His voice rises to a crescendo. ‘Come on!’

  The first time I read Nance’s Glossary, the collection of fishermen’s words did not conjure much. That night on the Golden Harvest, the water below us dense with fish, the words drove back to the front of my head, providing me with a new vocabulary to express the miraculous events unfolding around our boat:

  Cowl rooz! – shoot the net

  clyne, a feast of seabirds, indicating a shoal below the water

  scrawled or ascrawl, fish swarming together in a living mass.

  At last Danny screams, ‘Oy, oy!!!!’ and I hear a much older fisherman, his voice more thickly Cornish, bellowing Cowl rooz!!!

  This is the cry the men have been waiting for. The metal rings rattle and clang against one another as the men unravel bits of net and frantically ready themselves to shoot it out around the shoal. With the bright light of the boat behind them, they appear as silhouette cut-outs, their raised hoods rendering their shadowed outlines cartoonish, misshapen. A heavy rain pours down from unseen dark clouds, pelting the men’s oilskins. When caught in the hard light of the boat it looks like a million sharp needles coming for us.

  I hear the steel rings come off the boat one after another and fly into the water with a clunking noise. We draw the lasso of weighted net in a wall around the fish, which stands up vertically in the water due to the strong corks tied to the top of it.

  ‘Halfway!’ the crew cry out to Danny in the wheelhouse.

  I hear the grinding of more rings slipping out behind the boat.

  ‘Three rings left!’ they yell again and then, a moment later: ‘Last ring!’

  The hunt is over, lasting a matter of minutes at most. I sprint out of the wheelhouse and onto to the starboard side of the deck to take a look at the top of the net floating all around us in the water. Outside I am met by a gaping black stillness, as if the air itself were letting out a large exhalation of breath to recover from the scene it has just witnessed. I stand on my tiptoes to try and catch sight of the pilchards swarming below in the water. In the gloom, I can see almost nothing, but fancy I sense the presence of a great hive-mind teeming below us.

  Out of the aircraft hangar of silence comes a single screech like a crack of lightening. The sound intensifies until there blows through the night a whole chorus of screaming. It sounds like insanity, how I imagine madness would speak. And then, there appears out of the darkness a clyne in the form of what must be tens of hundreds of seagulls heading right for our nets like a flight of kamikaze pilots. The surging welter crash-land into the sea right beside us, sending shock waves through the water. They do not settle but rocket back up into the air to crash down upon the water from a great height again and again, their talons outstretched in an attempt to snatch at the prized silver fish wriggling just below their grasp. They repeat this performance as many times as it takes them to meet their mark. As soon as they’ve swallowed their prey, the hunt begins again. The sea froths. The sight of it is dizzying. Their calls sound angry and desperate, close at times to a human scream, but somehow distorted, as if played backwards.

  The sky is white with gulls now, everything taking on a frightening pallor as though the world has been switched to negative. They churn the air up into a rage. The boat’s floodlights illuminate their pale feathers as the birds go wheeling past. Danny sees the shocked look on my face, my pupils dilated, and reassures me that it is a good sign; you can trust the birds to know when there are a lot of fish.

  They get everywhere, landing on the head of the fishermen as they tug the net back up onto the boat, on every piece of rigging and patch of sea. At one point, Ed lets out an almighty torrent of swearing and rushes back into the galley, spitting and running his hands over his tongue. Breaking from the work, the crew and I gather around him, waiting for some explanation. He spits once more, takes a swig of an energy drink. ‘Seagull shat in my mouth,’ he shudders, causing us all to burst into hysterics.

  The ropes of the net bag are contracted right in like the strings of a purse, forcing the pilchards into a smaller area. I see them now. First, it is just their scales that appear, flaking away from their bodies and shimmering through the water like the sequins you find pressed into the cracks of the roads after a carnival. Then the fish themselves rise up to the surface of the water and boil as if being burned from below, their reflective skin catching in the lights of the boat like licking flames.

  Once the fish are in a tight mass, ascrawl beside the boat, a hoover-like machine sucks them out of the water and down into a chute. From here, they tumble down into a large metal bath on the deck so that they can be scooped out, packed into boxes and sent off to the processors waiting back on land. I watch them cascade in a chaos down the metal slide into the metal bath on the deck. They keep coming and coming, these perfect, tiny fish, as if the entire sea were being emptied of them. The bath is alive with their dancing, slamming against its sides with a sharp, almost metallic noise that the crew call ‘Snap, crackle and pop’.

  I stare at the writhing tank, letting my tired eyes become unfocused so that the whole bath appears animated. Danny tells me that the numbers are unfortunately deceptive and that it was actually a pretty meagre haul – only one tonne, when usually they want three or four. This means we’ll keep hunting for more shoals tonight.

  ‘Dunno what the seagulls got so excited about,’ one of the crew says, kicking the tank disappointedly.

  Scattered amongst the thousands of polished, silver pilchards are a dozen or so blue-sheen-backed anchovies, which are worth much more than the boat’s target species. Tom picks one out of the bath and hands it to me to keep, telling me they are delicious fresh for breakfast fried up and eaten on toast. They are elegant fish, slender, silken to the touch, and complete with miniature rows of sharp teeth. There is something mechanical about their motion and the neatness of their scales, like they have been sculpted by a great craftsman. Their eyes are perfectly spherical, with shocked black pupils right at their centre. Sebald writes that ‘once the life has fled the herring, its colours change. Its back turns blue, the cheeks and gills red, suffused with blood.’ Like the herrings whose colour at the moment of death is brighter than when living, the little blue anchovy in my hand is so extraordinarily bright that I cannot quite believe it will not spring back to life again.

  The night has gone a deep purple. We set off once more around the bay, the blind eye of the radar feeling out for the hint of a pilchard shoal. The neon lights of the Penzance arcade still flash in the distance. Life on land continues as usual, the inhabitants of the villages along the bay oblivious to the sensory overload we have just experienced. Occasionally we spot the slightest trace of movement on the sonar, but as it gets later, the men tell me, pilchards tend to disperse into much smaller groups. Eventually, Danny decides to give up and head back to land with our small catch.

  As soon as they know they’re heading in, the crew’s mood grows
lighter once more. While Ed is fixing up equipment on deck, the other two pour half a bag of sugar into Tom’s water bottle (they couldn’t find salt). Meanwhile Danny grabs someone’s sandwich and chucks it into the microwave, blasting it until it sinks into a soggy pulp. After Danny puts his own pizza in the microwave, he has to keep darting out of the wheelhouse to check no one has messed with it. ‘Would we do that to you, Skip?’ Tom asks with an evil grin. ‘You’re getting paranoid!’

  As we near the lighthouse, Danny says to me: ‘Right then, are you landing the boat?’

  I laugh, assuming he is joking. ‘Yep, sure.’

  ‘Cool.’ He gets up and motions for me to take his seat. I dither for a second, before clambering up into it and eyeing up the intimidating number of buttons and levers on the dashboard. But Danny stands right beside me, carefully instructing me which levers to pull and when, how to change the course of the boat by making only the slightest of turns at a time. We thread our way through the Gaps, my hands shaking slightly as I feel the million-pound boat judder beneath my control. We move along the silent channel of towering trawlers towards the market, where the buckets of pilchards are levied up and driven along in forklifts onto the waiting vans, bypassing the auction.

  The last few fish are sloshed out of the bath and raised into the air. ‘That’s the last I see of the things, thank god,’ Danny says, as the van doors slam close.

  Pilchards were once emblematic of the way that fishing connected the lives of Newlyn’s inhabitants to one another. Long before the Golden Harvest’s radar technology, a man would stand on the cliffs above the bay, armed with a huge furze bush, straining his eyes while he watched and waited for the distinctive shadow sliding through the sea which would announce the arrival of the pilchards. The purse seine boats stayed anchored on their sterns from dawn to dusk, waiting for the huer’s call, their crews sheltering under a makeshift tent called a tilt, where they would yarn and smoke while drinking coffee from portable stoves. At this point the huer would wave the bush frantically and shout ‘Hevva!’, signalling to the fishermen below to race into their boats to capture the shoal below.

  Once back on the shore, the pilchards would be loaded up in cowals – woven baskets that women and children would carry on their heads – and taken back to the pilchard palaces to be salted in a process called baulking: forming large piles of pilchards on paving stones in alternate layers of fish and salt. Men, women and children would work in the candlelit palaces late into the night, before taking the outside stairs to their living quarters on the floors above. Once salted and left for three weeks to procure, the pilchards were known as ‘fairmaids’ and packed into hogshead barrels to be sold. At the dawn of the twentieth century, women working in Newlyn’s pilchard palaces were paid thruppence an hour, and a glass of brandy and a piece of bread with cheese every sixth hour. There are still traces of old pilchard palaces around Newlyn; the stones once used for baulking are now ornaments in gardens, while the oil that ran from the pilchards has stained the cobbles that wind up the Fradgan dark brown.

  After the crew has sent the pilchard vans on their way, Danny turns to me and says: ‘Right, are you ready to moor her now?’

  I sit back in Danny’s chair and with him calmly guiding me, slowly ease the Golden Harvest to her usual docking space at the end of the Mary Williams Pier. A few of the crew’s friends are sitting on the quayside with beers, and I think of the seventeenth-century Newlyn fishermen lolled out about the harbour, joking and yarning, waiting for the huer’s cry.

  After we moor up, the men call out to us: ‘Come on! Let’s go for a pint, then!’ and we all head off to the Star – Danny tells me he tends not to be able to sleep until the early hours after the thrill of ring-netting anyway.

  We settle down with a few other fishermen just in from sea: Richard, the ex-army man from the Joy of Ladram gill-netter, her skipper and an Irish fisherman I’ve never met before, who has a glass eye because a crab pulled out his real one. Our table soon grows crowded with pints, Danny triumphantly telling anyone that will listen: ‘You know what, this girl landed my boat this evening!’

  I look down and remember I haven’t changed out of my gumboots yet, realising that this is the first time I have gone straight from the sea to the pub. I sit back in my chair contentedly, listening to the men nestling their pints and prattling, the whoosh of the evening wind careening down the Strand. All of our shirts are caked in scales – or golowillions, another from Nance’s Glossary: the shining scales of herring or pilchard left on clothing after the cleaning of fish.

  Later, back in the cottage, I feel something slimy wetting the inside of my pocket and pull out the anchovy Tom gave me earlier. I hold it in my hand. Its scales are no longer luminous but have faded to a matt grey.

  18

  ROSEBUD

  The most striking image I have seen of a Newlyn fishing vessel is not of a trawler raging against a storm, but of an old lugger making its way down the River Thames, the Houses of Parliament half hidden in a smog layer behind it. If you look closely at the black and white photograph, you can just about read the boat’s name painted in white on its bow: Rosebud, PZ87.

  The Rosebud was a long-liner (a vessel designed to shoot from its stern a long line strung with baited hooks), built in 1919 from Cornish oak, out of Joseph Peake and Son’s workshop in Tolcarne, a family-run shipwrights famed for its sleek fishing vessels. On 19 October 1937, she set off for London carrying a petition signed by 1,093 Newlyn residents hoping to save their town from demolition. As she entered the bay, ‘Fight the Good Fight’, a favourite hymn in Newlyn, could be heard through the crashing of the waves as the whole town gathered around the harbour to send the crew on their way.

  The problems had begun in 1935 when Penzance Council sent their medical health officer, Richard Lawry, to Newlyn to determine which of the town’s cottages were ‘slum dwellings’ with a view to them being torn down. The criteria for unfit homes included those that lacked basic structural and safety features, were unhygienic, overcrowded or badly ventilated. Crucially, the specifics of this criteria were created in reference to city slums, where such issues were more likely to lead to life-threatening conditions. Though many of the cottages in Newlyn had no running water, they drew pails from chutes around the town; though they had no toilets, their enamel buckets were regularly emptied into soil carts (Penzance boys used to joke you could tell a Newlyn boy from the red rings around their backsides and called Newlyn girls ‘ring doves’); their cottages were not well ventilated and tended to smell of fish from the pilchard palaces in their cellars, but just beyond their doors was the cleansing breath of the sea and untouched stretches of countryside.

  Checking off each of these unfit conditions on his list as he entered each begrudging Newlyn resident’s household, Lawry declared all of the hundred cottages he visited to be ‘slum dwellings’ and plans were drawn up to construct a new estate up on the hill behind the town for those whose homes would be knocked down – Gwavas Estate, named after the sunken lake below Mount’s Bay. Meanwhile, Navy Inn Court, previously a pub and at the time containing at least twenty-nine inhabitants squeezed into separate flats, was the first to be condemned and torn down.

  The serious threat that Lawry’s report posed to the town was not truly recognised until 23 September that year when a document was circulated describing which homes were to be demolished. In these plans it was not just the few slum dwellings that were earmarked for destruction, but whole stretches of streets along the Fradgan, right down into Tolcarne. The council announced that since so many of the buildings were structurally dependent on one another, there was no other option but to bring down all homes adjacent to those condemned. Worse still, while the owners of these non-slum cottages would be offered some small remittance for their destruction, the tenants living in them were to be given nothing at all.

  In an emergency service held at Newlyn’s Methodist Chapel a sermon reflected the sense of impending doom: ‘Our little world seem
s falling about us. We are bewildered and in severe distress. We beseech thee in thy infinite mercy that some means may be found to save these homes and preserve the villages of Newlyn and Mousehole.’ There was a shared belief that the new, neatly divided, private homes up at Gwavas would signal the end of the communal way of living that the families of Newlyn had enjoyed for so many generations.

  News of the crisis soon found its way into the national press, with various figures from London turning up to see the slums of Newlyn for themselves. A journalist from The Times was surprised to observe: ‘A visit to more than a dozen of the condemned cottages revealed them all as spotlessly clean and attractive as hard-working women with limited means can make them,’ and cited one resident who stated: ‘People don’t die here; after a certain age, we have to shoot them.’ Elsewhere, Newlyn resident Mrs Bessie Strick was quoted as saying that the last person to die in her home on Lower Green Street had lived to the age of 101 – a far cry from poverty and disease-ridden homes that the nomenclature ‘slum’ suggested.

  This all seemed to bode well for the village’s fight, but there were greater complexities to come. Though many loudly protested the loss of the rustic and shambolic charm of the village, some younger residents welcomed the move to newly furnished and well-heated homes up in Gwavas. A petition from the ‘Younger Residents’ stated: ‘We the young people of Newlyn are no longer going to endure the filthy and insanitary conditions in which we live … We say that Newlyn is no longer a fishing village – granted a few elderly men and a few out-of-date boats … They will soon disappear. The sons of these men are not going-fishing.’ There was similar division amongst men and women, with fishermen wanting the stability of remaining in those places they knew and loved once they came in from sea, while many of their wives longed for better living conditions.