Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  The Rosebud mission in 1937 to deliver Newlyn’s petition to Parliament continued a long tradition of popular protest in Cornwall. In 1497, a rebel army had marched on London with picks and crowbars to protest against Henry VII’s suspension of Cornish Stannary privileges (legislation brought in by King John in 1201 to protect miners and mining towns, many of which were in Cornwall). There would be four further revolts in the county before the end of the seventeenth century – each time Cornishmen crossed the Tamar to protest against their mistreatment. During the English Civil War, the Cornish played an especially active role as a royalist enclave after the few Cornish Parliamentarians were defeated in Launceston in 1642.

  The early modern historian Mark Stoyle regards these rebellions not as isolated events but part of a determination to protect the Cornish identity from assimilation into Britain. In his Survey of Cornwall, published in 1602, the Cornish translator and historian Richard Carew expressed his frustration that though some West Cornish inhabitants understood English, when he tried to speak to them they would answer uncooperatively: Meea navidna Cowzasawzneck (I can speak no Saxonage; Stoyle corrects Carew’s translation; it is closer to: ‘I will speak no Saxonage’). Indeed, a specific Cornish identity can be traced all the way back to the founding myth of Britain. The aspect of it most recalled today is that of Brutus arriving with refugees from Troy to colonise Albion, naming his new land the kingdom of Britain and splitting England, Scotland and Wales between his sons. But there is another, often forgotten, branch of this legend. A second group of Trojans, led by Corineus, a legendary fighter of giants contemporaneous with Brutus, landed in another region, part of the same landmass as Albion, which he named Cornwall.

  This divergent creation myth has coloured how many Cornish perceive their nation up to the modern period, choosing to look to a mythical origin story as their county increasingly found itself suppressed and absorbed into a purely English narrative of the past. In fact, the West Britons in Cornwall fiercely defended their land against the Saxons and were not brought under British rule until ADE 838. And even after this period, the Cornish both considered themselves and were regarded as distinct from the English. The Italian scholar Polydore Vergil wrote in his 1535 Anglica Historia that Britain was divided into four parts: the English, Scottish, Welsh and ‘the fowerthe of Cornishe people, which all differ emonge themselves, either in tongue, either in manners, or ells in lawes and ordinaunces’.

  The year 1648 in the English Civil War marked the last and most hopeless revolt of the West Cornish. A force of men from Land’s End rose up in the name of the king and occupied Penzance, where seventy Cornish royalists had already been killed, calling upon men from the Lizard to support them. But, by the time the men from the Lizard arrived in Penzance, the Land’s End men had already been defeated. It is recorded that the rebels did not simply give up after this revolt, but ‘joyned-in-hands’ threw themselves into the sea, ‘a desperate expedient on that rocky coast’.

  Such determined resistance reflected a larger sense of loss in Cornwall – that of its language. By 1660, traditional Cornish was already in decline; by 1750, Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole, said to have been the last Cornish speaker in Cornwall, was dead and interred. With their private language forgotten, the fierce lines drawn between Cornwall and England started to fade. What must it mean to know, if you met them somewhere after this life, that you would not be able to commune with your ancestors – to know that the words you have learned for each part of the landscape, were not the original names given to it, not the first words the land had heard to name itself? And yet, across Cornwall today the old language is gradually being rediscovered and reintroduced.

  To me, Cornwall has always felt like another country, more certain in its perimeters than other parts of England. This has something to do with its shape: the tapering foot of the UK, which in maps seems longing to wrench itself away from the body of England and step out into the water. There are high places in West Penwith such as Trencrom, a Neolithic tor that was re-appropriated as a hillfort in the Iron Age, from where you can see the sea pressing against both coastlines at once. This must mean something – to have one’s land so determined by its encounters with the sea. In 2014 the Cornish were granted minority status, a promise to recognise and protect a distinct Cornish identity. Some of the friends I made in Newlyn tell me when they have to fill out nationality forms, they add their own box ‘Cornish!’ It is something of a joke, but there is also a seriousness to their actions, a desire for their home to be acknowledged, its past autonomy remembered.

  Back in 1937, the beginnings of an idea for a bold stunt that might save their town spread around Newlyn, inspired by the history of the Cornish revolts, this time in the form of a protest to London – not across land, but over the seas. A crew of nine upstanding Newlyn men came forward ready to set sail for Westminster: Cecil Richards, W. (Swell) Richards, skipper, J. S. (Jimmy Strick) Matthews, Ben Batten, J. P. (Sailor Joe) Harvey; W. (Billy Bosun) Roberts (a preacher), J. (Jim) Simons, J. H. (Jan Enny) Tonkin and W.H. (Skinny) Williams. The Rosebud, owned by the Richards’ brothers, was to be the chosen vessel.

  Three days later the Rosebud was steaming down the Thames carrying a vial of water from the sacred Madron Well in West Cornwall and a petition declaring: ‘We the undersigned inhabitants of Newlyn and district wish to protest respectfully and strongly against the wholesale destruction of our village. This ruthless appropriation of private property involves, in most cases, the loss of a lifetime’s savings and the means of a lifetime.’

  On their arrival in London the men were amazed to find throngs of supporters and press packed along the banks of the Thames. As the lugger moored up, Penzance MP Alex Beecham made a mealy-mouthed speech to the crowds at Westminster Bridge: ‘I am delighted to welcome the fishermen of Newlyn who are arriving in such a romantic manner, because it is well that the citizens of London should be conscious of the existence of these fishermen who, I am sorry to say, are encountering very great difficulties in making a livelihood.’ Frustrated by the MP’s evasiveness, Newlyn preacher Billy Bosun bellowed back: ‘The Cornish boys are here to fight for their homes!’

  The crew of the Rosebud were quickly ushered into the offices of the Ministry of Health to meet with Conservative minister Sir Howard Kingsley Wood, who had laid on the sweetener of a proper Cornish tea, sent all the way from Looe, comprising pasties, clotted cream, splits, and saffron cake. Sitting in the smart wooden-panelled room, the creams teas before them, the fishermen laid out their demands. ‘When I put my hand into that of Sir Kingsley Wood,’ wrote Billy Roberts, optimistically, ‘I knew this was the hand of a friend and a strong man. Sir Kingsley would have made a great fisherman.’

  The next day, the headline on the front page of Cornish Evening Tidings was ‘Newlyn Saved’, while the Daily Mail declared: ‘Newlyn gets respite, revels all night, boat pilgrims saved 94 homes’. Such pronouncements were, however, premature. Over the coming days news emerged that, despite their very best efforts, over half of the Newlyn cottages earmarked for demolition were to be pulled down – Cecil Richards’s home amongst them. When informed of this, he told the Western Morning News: ‘As a fisherman I know there is a big difference between seeing a shoal of fish and actually getting it into the nets.’ The battle for their homes lost, the people of Newlyn began the process of carrying their possessions up the road to the new estates.

  The Rosebud resumed her daily duties as a fishing boat, before ending her days as the Cynthia Yvonne, abandoned in the muddied estuary between Lelant and Hayle. A few years ago, a note in the Cornishman announced that the lugger was finally set to be broken up and that those who wanted a piece of her and her history should go down to Lelant Saltings as soon as possible. Many members of the community have fragments of her in their homes today, hanging above doors and on mantelpieces, reminding the people of Newlyn of the message the Rosebud fishing boat carried up to London: ‘Fight the Good Fight’.

  19

&nbs
p; DROPPED THINGS

  By Friday morning on the Filadelfia, my ties to home have begun to unloosen, and I let the boat be the only place left in the world. From here on in, I learn not to count the days, not to think of my bed or my parents or my unbounded cross-coastal walks, or the reassuring sound of the surf coming into contact with the land. Instead, I start to think of our fishing boat as the centre of the universe, all life reduced to the single disc of sea surrounding us, like she is the attraction trapped in a snow globe. I imagine each boat in this way, solitary baubles floating over the seas, thirty miles out from the land.

  I wake early and tear myself straight away out of my sleeping bag. My dreams have been coloured with yesterday’s grey and I am keen to greet this new morning with as much energy as I can muster, casting from my mind the anxious thoughts I wake with: I cannot believe we still have three more days of fishing left… I wonder if mum knew I would be gone this long… How long would it take me to find out if something had happened back on the land?

  It is still dark enough to make out the stars through the bathroom porthole. Each time I find myself out at sea overnight, my eyes are always drawn to a small, faint constellation low in the sky. The dim points of its stars draw out the two loops of an eight, but the lines do not quite cross over to finish the number and the upper loop is slightly distended. Perhaps it is because of light pollution, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this lasso-shaped cluster of stars from the land. I begin to associate it with the sea: a guiding constellation for fishermen. Back home, I scour endless star charts of the Northern hemisphere on the internet to find my fisherman’s constellation, but none of them seem quite to resemble it. Perhaps it was the Pleiades or Seven Sisters to the south, or was it Cassiopia or Cepheus or even Ursa Minor to the north? I am almost glad not to find it. That way it remains a secret of the sea, one that is inaccessible to those on land.

  I head out onto the wheelhouse balcony. Where we were alone at sea for the first few days, there has joined us now the dotted lights of Cornish trawlers at every compass point along the horizon line, adding grammar to its otherwise uninterrupted perimeter. Every skipper I have ever spoken to, including both Don and David, is perennially convinced that all the other boats nearby are stalking them. They tell me that since they themselves are one of the best skippers in Cornwall and know where the big shoals of money-making fish are (which, in truth, no one can absolutely know), the other boats follow them. Whenever they set off, the area will inevitably be congested with local fishing vessels a few days later.

  The wind is not as harsh as it usually is this morning. There is a touch of warmth, an almost balminess to its breath. I look up. The figure of eight and all other traces of stars have already fled in preparation for the unfurling of the day. A pink haze, emanating from the east, spreads out in both directions until it has stained the canopy of the sky. Then, the lowest streaks of cloud begin to glow from below. The clouds grow hotter until they appear gilded all over like burnished metal. At last, from under the sea, there comes a sliver of blazing light. And then the round ball of the sun appears in a way I have never seen before. It is not yellow or gold, but arrives in a bright, lime-green instant.

  A few days earlier, the crew had told me about the elusive green flash. They occur when sunlight separates out into different colours as it meets the atmosphere, working like a natural prism. As the sun slips into or out of the sea, the spectrum of colours that make up its light disappear or appear one at a time; at sunrise, green is the first colour to materialise, at sunset, the last. On a perfectly clear afternoon, the ideal conditions for a green flash, Kyle stood with the crew of the Joy of Ladram waiting in anticipation for the sun to turn green as it hit the horizon. But it never happened, the sun disappearing behind the world without so much as a glimmer of colour. After that, Kyle lost faith in the validity of the story, relegating the green flash to mythical status. Don says he has seen it just once in over thirty years of fishing.

  In that second, however, alone outside the wheelhouse, I witness the green flash. I raise my camera up to capture it and in the second between my seeing the flash and placing the viewfinder up to my eye, the sun is its ordinary white-yellow. I continue to stare right at the sun until it gets too bright and I must look away, the dark spot it leaves on my retina sliding across my sightline like a fly.

  While en route to the Brazilian port of Santos in 1943, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss reflected on the difficulties of producing the rising and setting of the sun, as seen from a ship, into adequate expression. ‘If I could find a language in which to perpetuate those appearances, at once so unstable and so resistant to description, if it were granted to me to be able to communicate to others the phrases and sequences of a unique event which would never recur in the same terms, then – so it seemed to me – I should in one go have discovered the deepest secrets of my profession,’ he wrote.

  There are rarely words good enough to describe the very best things, as there are few appropriate for the very worst. It is not impossible to describe a green flash at sunrise, as it is not impossible to articulate a tragedy at sea. But our words miss something. Language can only ever be a metonym for the universe, evading our absolute description of it, as the sea evades absolute containment by man.

  The new sun sends a beam of light across the water towards our boat, a bright line connecting it to us. An hour later and the sky is a clean November blue: a paradise of light unobstructed by a single cloud. During the first gut, this brilliant light seems to surge through all of us, an electric static that makes the work faster and more thrilling.

  As they empty out the insides of fish with sharp, fluid strokes, the men get to talking about what they’ll make for breakfast today. For Kyle this is usually some form of Pot Noodle, of which he has a stash of next to his sleeping bag. For Andrew it is a sausage sandwich or fresh fish. This morning, Stevie says he fancies cheese on toast.

  Pleased to find an opportunity to be useful on the boat, I race through my monkfish-packing and head up to the galley to make Stevie his cheese on toast before he finishes checking the engine. I put two pieces of buttered toast on the hot plate and cover them with slices of weak-looking processed cheese. After five minutes, it looks nothing like the advertisement image of a glorious melting toastie with bubbles of oozing cheese I had envisaged. The bottom of the bread is black and charred, while the anaemic rectangle of cheese is still cold. While dithering over how I might save the situation, the engine-room door bangs open and Stevie emerges, rubbing his oily hands down his tracksuit bottoms. I present the cold cheese on burnt bread to him with a deflated ‘Tadah!’

  ‘You haven’t made cheese on toast before, have you?’ Stevie says with a grin, accepting the plate and concealing my failure under an equalising sea of HP Sauce.

  I join Kyle in the wheelhouse for our usual morning yarn. The windows and doors of the wheelhouse stand open, disturbing the usual layer of fog so it swirls and dances about the room. As soon as he hears me climb up the stairs Kyle, holding a thick length of nylon rope out to me, announces: ‘Right, its knot lessons day.’

  We begin with the bowline knot – used for mooring since it never binds or slips. I watch Kyle bend the rope into a loop, take one strand and pass it through, then thread it through another loop created by the twist of the first and pull the knot to. The movements seem logical. I could do that, I think. But when he passes the rope back to me, I gaze blankly at the long piece of rope, with no sense at all of how to transform its long extent into a single knot. He takes the rope back and patiently shows me again. As he twists and contorts the rope, he tells me how long it took him to learn to tie knots back when he was a decky learner. He’d spend hours in the wheelhouse practising, his fingers growing raw and shiny from the friction of the rope’s rough edges. After about four attempts with Kyle’s careful supervision, I make a messy version of the original knot he showed me.

  ‘Great. Untie it and start again,’ Kyle instructs me. The rope holds no
ne of its former shape and once more I stare at it dumbly, urging my muscles to remember the motions they had just made. Slowly, I start to get the feel for how the rope should bend and twist in my hands during each complication of its parts. I tie it and undo it, tie it and undo it, recreating the shape of it until my hands act without my brain.

  Next, Kyle shows me the double sheet bend. Two separate pieces of rope are knotted together in such a way that they should never come undone, if tied correctly. I watch Kyle lace two ropes together, drawing them together into a tight embrace. I try to copy the movement, but somehow miss the loop so that when I endeavour to pull the knot through, one piece of rope falls slack to the floor. After multiple attempts, I hold in my hands a single, intertwined length of rope; I try to unravel it, but the knot holds fast.

  In maps of the stars, the sharp points of the Pisces constellation, visible from the northern hemisphere and seen most clearly in autumn, trace out two fish swimming in opposite directions tied together by a single star where their tails meet, creating a V shape in the sky. This star was first given the Arabic name Al Risha, meaning the knot or cord. In Greek mythology, the Pisces constellation is aligned with the story of Aphrodite and Eros, who transformed themselves into sleek-scaled fish in order to escape the serpentine monster Typhon and attached their tails together in a knot so they would not become separated from one another. Observed with the naked eye, Al Risha appears as a single star, one of the dimmest in its constellation, but it has recently been discovered that Al Risha is in fact a double star. While from earth these stars merge into a single point, in truth they are as far away from one another as our sun is from Pluto.

  Looking up at the dark blue silence of the night sky from another boat, in another world, our solar system, too, would fold in to become nothing more than a blot of light, each planet barely distinguishable from the rest. I imagine these two fish swimming in alternate directions when I think of Newlyn: the fishermen who face the sea each week and those back on land, who try to hold on tightly to their men, even as they disappear, amphibian-like, behind the horizon. They are two ways of facing the sea, two stars orbiting the same centre of gravity that is the projected centre of the town, two knots tying together two fish.