by Lamorna Ash
Coastal communities are often both the most vulnerable to and conscious of these changes we cannot feel in the metropolis. When sea water rises, it is their homes that are flooded; when the seas are contaminated, it is their jobs that are lost first. In Newlyn, they see the exotic warm-water fish that now turn up in Mount’s Bay, they see the plastic washing up on the shore, intermingling with the line of shells. Perhaps this is why Penzance Council has taken one of the most active responses to the problem of plastic that is at last making it into the news headlines, becoming the first community in the UK to be awarded ‘Plastic Free’ status after large numbers of the community have taken part in whole-beach cleans and shops have reduced single-use plastics. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicts that by 2050, the sea will contain, by weight, more plastic than fish. David of the Crystal Sea keeps the plastic and throws it away later back on land – ‘It’s a small thing, but at least you’re helping somehow,’ he tells me.
After a dinner of sauce-drenched meatballs, I go outside to watch the last of the day. Colours fan out from the sun in concentric circles. The furthest regions of the sky are a milky lilac, while closer to the sun the colour shifts into a warm orange, the halo around the ball of the sun itself a dark crimson. It is exactly the same hue as a megrim sole’s heart I say out loud to myself – and realise, as I do, how days spent contemplating one thing can alter your psyche, changing the way the outside world filters through your consciousness.
The gulls weave through the sky unhurriedly, reflecting the sea’s calm. Their bodies transform from white to black as they pass in front of the sun and are reformed as shadows. A cargo ship cast in absolute darkness slips gently across the dusky horizon until it is right in front of the declining sun, creating a small ship-shaped eclipse in front of it.
All grows quiet and slow. Gentle colours sweep across the old empty world, readying it for black night and the renewal it will bring. The sun sinks down and is gone without a final encore. It is a firework display in reverse, every colour and flash and swirl flying back inwards to a single point before disappearing below the horizon. I stay watching the sky until there is one last streak of colour left across it: a pink haze, just as the day began.
20
SOME OLD RESIDENTS
I often spend my mornings in Newlyn leafing through old photographs and copies of Cornish newspapers in the newly renovated Newlyn Archive, once the old post office, at the harbour’s edge. The archive is loyally maintained by a team of volunteers who add to its contents daily; while in there you can almost feel the past encroaching on the present, each moment bagged and filed for posterity. In a ring binder of newspaper snippings, I come across a letter from 1926 which is signed by ‘Some old residents of Newlyn’. The letter proudly declares: ‘For twenty years, rain or shine, wagonettes have run between Newlyn and Penzance and the public has been glad to use them,’ before going on to decry the advent of motor buses, which were rapidly taking away business from the wagonette men. The letter flares out into a broader lament: ‘There is a sentence which one hears very often in these times; it is used to shelve many inconvenient and distressing subjects: “we cannot stop progress”. But we ask: is it progress to throw a number of hard-working respectable men out of employment and so make them and their families a charge on the community, when it can easily be prevented by protecting one mile of road?’
There is sense of hopelessness to the letter; its plaintive question seems to include within it the recognition that progress will continue and, whether they like it or not, the Newlyn these residents grew up in will slip away, sand-like, into the gaps between the cobbles.
The wagonettes may have gone from the town, but there always remain ‘some old residents of Newlyn’, those who look on mournfully as the places and people they remember from their youths disappear one by one. The passage of time blows these figures through the town each day, like lone leaves picked up and scattered by the wind. In the mornings, groups of elderly men and women sit on benches above the harbour, wrapped up in coats and scarves, as they discuss the things the sea has brought to them over the years. At the close of each day they are wafted home once more, as the first lamp lights in the town flicker on, to make tea on ancient stoves and tell stories of the past.
There is a sense amongst these older members of the community that the town was once joined by a single time, from which no one could fall behind or get lost outside of its passage. In his miscellany of Cornish folklore, Rustic Jottings, Edwin Chirgwin, born in Newlyn in 1892, writes of his childhood when the same routines governed all households. ‘At 9’o’clock every night all the village clocks were wound and soon the dim candlelight in the bedrooms faded and silence settled down upon the entire village.’ Throughout his adult life, first as a teacher in West Penwith, then with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry during the Great War, before returning to Cornwall to become a headmaster at St Cleer, Chirgwin studied the Cornish language, learning much about the old ways from his great-grandmother. Of his early life he remembers, ‘everything seemed to be beautifully planned and there was a timing set for everything’. Mondays were wash days, Tuesdays the dried clothes were ironed. Particular months had their order too: ‘In September, all the jam for the winter had to be made, butter salted away in galley pots and the pilchards laid down in salt in “bussas”.’ This framework has all but gone now and time hangs loosely off the town.
Pat lives in a white house with blue window frames on the lip of land above the harbour, next to the Fisherman’s Arms. When I call her to arrange a time to visit, she does not say hello at first, but forcefully shouts her number down the phone at me. ‘Is that Pat?’ I reply uncertainly.
She lets me know it is and that she was in fact waiting for a call from the London girl who is friends with Denise, adding: ‘I hear you want to learn about the history of the town from the Duchess.’
‘The Duchess?’
‘The Duchess of Newlyn,’ Pat tells me proudly, explaining that she is known as the Duchess about town because she knows everyone and everything there is to know about Newlyn. As such, her schedule is very full, but she agrees to meet me the following morning. ‘At coffee time,’ she says. ‘Well, okay, goodbye—’
‘Wait!’ I cry. ‘When’s coffee time?’
‘Ten-thirty, of course!’ The receiver snaps back down.
The inside of Pat’s house follows the same white and pastel-blue colour scheme of the front. On most surfaces sit china teapots – ‘I collect them, aren’t they lovely?’ – and every table shines, every carpet kept immaculately. Pat looks perfect, too, positioned on a plump blue armchair in the centre of her living room, facing large bay windows from which she can see the whole of Newlyn harbour. Her lips are painted a bright shade of fuchsia that matches her long fuchsia nails. She wears a hot-pink woolly cardigan with gold buttons and a light pink neck scarf with threads of gold woven through it that is tied fashionably at the side. She also wears a thick, slightly orange layer of foundation that fills up her wrinkles like tributaries. Pat pours me out a milky coffee and reveals a selection of tarts and chocolate-honeycomb biscuits from under a napkin with a flourish. Then she spreads her arms out like jazz hands: ‘Shall we begin?’
In another part of town, on another morning, just as I am leaving Denise and Lofty’s, I nearly walk straight into a whiteish car pulling out from a parking space. The elderly man inside waves frantically at me and I begin a rushed string of mouthed apologies, all the while trying to sidestep his vehicle. It is not until the man winds the window down that I realise he is not gesticulating angrily at all but beckoning me over.
‘All right, you’re Lamorna?’ He says in a thick Newlyn accent as I approach the car. ‘Get in.’
When this kind of thing happens in Newlyn, as it often does, you don’t question it. I get in the battered white car, noticing how layers of dust and moss climb up the inside of the windows like forests.
‘Lofty says you want to find out about the past.’
It clicks into place. This must be Freddie Matthews, the neighbour Lofty has been telling me about, who has lived in the same house here in the Fradgan since he was born.
‘It begins at the Ice Works!’ he announces, dramatically.
We reverse about four metres down the road and come to a halt with the sound of a loud crunch. Freddie and I turn in our seats to watch a wheelie bin teeter and then fall in slow motion behind his car.
‘I forgot that was there,’ Freddie mutters to himself. He gets out, moves the bin a fraction of an inch, gets back in, reverses a tiny bit more, just grazing the bin this time, turns off the engine and gets out without a word. I stare out of the window at Freddie, who is already unlocking the door to his cottage. He turns to me and mouths: ‘Come on, then!’
Once out of the car, I look down to the road at where our journey started – about seven metres up the road outside Denise and Lofty’s house – then follow Freddie into his childhood home.
Freddie’s cottage has not been maintained quite as immaculately as Pat’s. It has that slightly frowzy mustiness, common to the homes of many older people, which is not unpleasant but suggests that the scents have, over the years, settled deeply into the furniture. Everything in the kitchen is a scale of beige, the same colour that creeps into the hedgerows along the cliffs above Newlyn come autumn. On the table are stacks of old Cornishmans and a mug of half-drunk tea with a fly sitting on its rim.
Now settled at the table, Freddie tries once more. ‘It begins at the Ice Works!’ he declares, slamming his hand down on the table and causing the fly to jump into the air.
Both of these long-standing Newlyn residents, Freddie and Pat, launch themselves into their tales with a similar degree of urgency, as if aware that they are the last keepers of the keys to the town’s past. Neither has ever thought of moving anywhere else, neither are married or have children. For the two of them, Newlyn is the only world there is and their sense of its past can no longer be extricated from their own memories.
Pat and her family moved to Newlyn when she was just a girl, taking up residency in the rooms above the Fisherman’s Arms where her father (Pat pronounces father with a long open ‘a’, as in ‘faaahther’) was due to be the new landlord. He was the first person to bring dartboards to pubs in Cornwall, she tells me proudly, replacing the skittles mat that had taken up half of the bar. Fishermen had never seen darts before and chucked them ‘like spears’, which was terrifying if you were standing anywhere near the board, Pat remembers, or in fact really quite far away from the board too.
Pat grew up knowing all the fishermen of the town through the pub. ‘They were good,’ she tells me. ‘And I know they all get drunk and that. But they deserve it. It’s a very hazardous way of life. And I tell you what,’ she says, ‘they may be rough, but they’re gentle in their manner to women. Want a tart?’ She breaks from her chain of thought abruptly, ‘or a chocolate thing?’
Before moving to Cornwall, Pat attended a private school in Kent and when she arrived in Newlyn found herself miles ahead of the other children at the board school up the top of Old Paul Hill. They didn’t take to her for a while either – ‘being an emmet and all’. Though I find it hard to believe the self-titled Duchess of Newlyn was ever regarded as an emmet. She won the scholarship to the county school, but her father had to ask her to leave after only a year because they could no longer afford the bus fare or the books. At fourteen Pat set off around the villages on her bike to find a job. The first place she went to was Newlyn’s Gaiety cinema – now the Meadery restaurant, where vast plates of chicken and tumblers of Cornish mead are served by ‘authentically dressed’ barmaids in a space that sits somewhere between a school dining room and an impressive medieval banquet hall. Back in the 1920s, the Gaiety’s black and white features amassed large crowds of children and adults alike. Every day but Sunday there were queues reaching right across Newlyn Bridge, waiting for this new-fangled form of entertainment that came from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The biggest change to Pat’s young life was the coming of the war. I always imagined that Newlyn did not really feel the wars, but Pat describes the chaos of people and activity it brought with it. There was constant booming from Penlee Quarry, just up from where Pat lived, as stones were loaded on ships and taken off to Deptford and other parts of London to rebuild areas bombed in the Blitz. Pat remembers barrage balloons floating over the harbour – though a few stray bombs did land in Newlyn regardless. In the war’s latter stages hordes of GIs turned up in their shiny jeeps and took over the quarry, turning it into a weather station to find the best winds for the D-day landings. The wars brought Newlyn into contact with the rest of the world, with droves of strangers from across Europe arriving at Penzance station or mooring in the harbour. ‘Oh, it was seething with people down here!’ Pat tells me. As well as taking in many British evacuees and French refugees, multiple Belgian trawlers moored up in Newlyn harbour, bringing whole families to stay with them.
Freddie Matthews was just a boy during the Second World War. ‘We never had nothing like, know what I mean?’ he tells me. (Like, know what I mean? is added at the end of almost everything Freddie says.) Still, the war was not a bad time to be a child in Newlyn: they spent their days playing hopscotch and marbles in the street, having fights with the Penzance boys and messing about with the evacuee children on the boats down Keel Alley, which was once part of the harbour and has since been filled in. Two evacuee children from London were moved into the cottage opposite Freddie: Lenny and Peggy Marsh. Freddie tells me that he and Lenny have stayed in touch ever since. Five years ago Lenny finally came back to Newlyn on holiday and they got a photo together outside the home he lived in when he was an evacuee.
During the war, the Fisherman’s Arms was only open three days a week. It was on one of these days, just after blackout was called, that the most personal tragedy of the war befell Pat. Every night at ten, ‘the military men’ would come over and get all the men out the pub. But on this particular evening there was one local man left sitting at the bar. He seemed not to hear the door slam as the other men left or notice the blackout shutters drop down, his back to the door as he slowly sipped his pint. Pat watched her father, six feet tall and always quick to sense trouble, take his glasses off, put them on the counter and walk over to the man.
‘Look, I shall lose my licence if you don’t drink up this pint,’ Pat remembers her father saying. ‘Then the chap stood up, swaying, took a swipe at my father and, the way he landed, it snapped his spinal cord.’ Her brow furrows, creating sediment lines of foundation across her forehead. ‘He dropped dead right in front of us.’ She rushes over these last words, ending her story abruptly, as if skipping forward a few pages. ‘Oh, it was terrible. It was terrible. It was 18 July 1944. I shall never forget it.’
The man who hit her father was never charged because the attack wasn’t deemed premeditated. Pat and her mother suddenly found themselves the sole owners of the Fisherman’s Arms. The trouble was, Pat tells me, women weren’t allowed to own liquor licences in those days. ‘I was only seventeen,’ she says. ‘Very young, very young. I hadn’t really seen any life at all. We were sat at the bar and mum says: “What are we going to do now, Patsy?”’
It turns out Pat’s mother was too devastated to do anything much for a while. And so Pat went off alone to the licensing magistrates in court to explain what had happened and ask for a licence. After much deliberation the court agreed, making Pat’s mother the first woman in the whole country with a liquor licence, Pat tells me. And that was that – two women in charge of a fisherman’s pub at the end of the land in the midst of the war. As soon as word got out around the town that there were women running the Fisherman’s Arms, business picked right up. Many wives were left running their homes alone while their husbands were off fighting in the war and each evening they would head up the hill to see Pat and her mother in the pub, where they knew they could have a drink and feel safe amongst female compa
ny. These women sat together in the warm, wooden interior of the Fisherman’s Arms, smoking and playing darts together, whiling away the war. After closing time every night, Pat and her mother would allow themselves a healthy-sized gin and tonic each to make the cleaning up before bed go faster.
The phone rings and Pat comes out of the memory. She picks up the receiver and bellows her number at great speed down the phone. ‘Wrong number!’ she tells the phone. ‘You want Ted in Chester. He’s an old friend. Do you want the number? Good. Have you got a pen?’ Pat confidently recalls Ted in Chester’s number by heart to the person at the end of line. She hangs up and, seeing me look impressed, says: ‘I’ve got a good head for numbers, I told you.’
The phone number for Sylvia Plath’s grandmother’s house on the coast was ‘Ocean 1212–W’, the title of an essay she wrote about her sea-centred childhood. She describes how she would often ‘repeat it to the operator, an incantation, a fine rhyme, half-expecting the black earpiece to give me back, like a conch, the susurrus of the sea as there as well as my grandmother’s “hello”’. I wonder if the particular static transmitted through a phone tells you something of its answerer’s environment, whether, when I call home, the sea’s voice ascends up into space and races back down to my parent’s home in London, carrying with it something of its mastery.
Each person I speak to about Newlyn’s past condenses it into its simplest, cheeriest moments. ‘Everybody knew everybody and you never had to lock your doors,’ they say of the 1940s and ’50s. Even Lofty tells me the summers were longer and warmer in Newlyn when he was young. I sometimes get the uncanny sense that there is a film playing a little way behind my head where their focus lies – a black and white picture showing at the old Gaiety Cinema that every one of them has watched and rewatched a hundred times. I hear the same phrases over and again: ‘They were good days’, ‘Oh it was wonderful’, ‘Everybody knew everybody’, ‘It was simpler then, it was happier…’