by Lamorna Ash
Freddie started working at the Ice Works, an intimidating-looking building in front of Keel Alley, when he was twenty, the vacancy arising after an employee was found dead in the building’s toilets one morning. Before ‘R. R. Bath and Newlyn Ice Company’ was established in 1903, the ice used by the local fishermen used to come all the way from Norway in boats, hacked from frozen lakes. Once up and running, the Ice Works could create 30 tonnes of ice a day and hold 900 tonnes of ice a year. Freddie draws out multiple diagrams for me as he speaks: how the water was pumped to the factory from a nearby reservoir; a steam-powered compressor would then puff and whirr as it converted the water into ice, which after setting in blocks was crushed and hauled off onto fishing boats waiting in the harbour. Freddie knew every fisherman through working there. It was a good place to work, he tells me: you were in the midst of it all in the Ice Works.
The works was eventually abandoned for a newer, more efficient factory built down by the harbour. The old works has stood empty for fifteen years, a haunting, salt-grey building casting a shadow over the Fradgan and Freddie’s cottage with it. The wind through its walls is the only movement in the place, invisible hands raking through industrial equipment, long untouched. Ropes of moss run up its sides, blurring its architecture. Most of its windows are cracked and, inside, piles of rubbish grow towards the roof. ‘When I was in there working you wouldn’t even see a matchstick on the floor,’ Freddie says. ‘No one would smoke in there or nothing.’ He looks out of his window. ‘It’s all bloody changed now,’ he says. ‘I don’t know most of the people living here anymore.’ He points out a number of houses where his friends once lived that are now owned by strangers who never stop to say hello.
In the 1970s and ’80s shopkeepers in Newlyn such as David Barron, who for forty-five years worked in the newsagents J. Barron & Son, which had been started by his grandfather in 1920, noticed changes in the town. David said he could no longer trust the fishermen to pay him back for the cigarettes they took when they came back from sea, so he had to get rid of the borrowing book he had kept by the till for years and ask them to pay there and then. It was around this time, too, that his shop was burgled for the first time and he had to install a security system. The way of life in the town was changing – a new breed of young people appeared whose angry, impatient mode of existence David’s generation could not comprehend. Everything got noisier. Enormous fishing boats came down from Grimsby and Scotland to catch mackerel, and Russian, Romanian and Bulgarian factory ships started hoovering up the seabed. Shops grew larger, stocking strange and exotic things from around the world at such low prices that Barrons could no longer compete.
‘It was a marvellous shop,’ he sighs. I hear of its treasures from other Newlyners – how they would persuade their parents to take them there to buy individually wrapped sweets from big glass jars and collectable cards and toys. (When I tell Isaac I am meeting David Barron, he replies to my text saying: ‘I can almost smell the place now. I always used to drag mum in there with me to buy sweets. There was a delicious cocktail of smells: the smell of freshly pressed broadsheets and Fishing News mingled irresistibly with the smell of pick ’n’ mix.’) David tells me that his last week there was incredibly emotional. He had a goodbye party in the Yacht Inn and 240 of his former customers showed up. ‘No. I didn’t have customers,’ he corrects himself. ‘I had friends.’
Once the Co-op arrived in Newlyn, it mopped up most of the business enjoyed by the independent shops – all those butchers and bakers and greengrocers shutting their doors for the last time one by one, it was a tragedy, David tells me. The details he provides me with of his own life outside of the changes to shops are sparse, as if the two cannot be disentangled from one another: the shop’s success, his happiness; its demise, his tragedy.
‘Right,’ Pat springs up like a teenager, clasping her hands together, ‘shall we do the house tour now?’
Pat and her mother moved from the upstairs of the Fisherman’s Arms to the next-door cottage in October 1964, asking all the local chaps from the pub to come over at five in the morning to help shift all their possessions with a few free morning beers as an incentive. ‘It was a state when we first arrived, you should have seen it,’ she says. ‘It was all chocolate brown and dark green – like a rotting boat.’ But, Pat being Pat, she rolled up her sleeves, said, ‘Don’t you worry, mother’, and set about painting and wallpapering the entire cottage on her own. It took her five months because she’d constantly have to run back to help her mother in the pub. Her house-pride radiates out. In each room we go into, before I can say anything, she cries out: ‘In’it nice? It’s nice, isn’t it?’
Pat takes me through a side door and sits down at a piano that takes up three-quarters of the space. ‘This room makes me very happy,’ she says. Covering every wall are photos upon photos of Pat posing in a variety of colourful, sparkly evening dresses, surrounded by a satin suit-wearing band on a gleaming stage. ‘Of course, all my life I’d wanted and waited to go on cruises.’ In 1977 Pat saw a cruise advertised a bit cheaper than usual and with the encouragement of her friends in the village packed all her things and went off to Lisbon. Since then she has gone on a cruise almost every year – ‘twenty cruises all on my own’. She straightens her neck scarf and leaps to her feet in front of me. ‘It was wonderful, wonderful on the cruises. Wonderful! The number of friends I’ve made, the places I’ve seen, the entertainment, the bands.’ She points to a photograph of a smiling elderly man at a piano. ‘And that was my pianist. We were together and I adored him. But we could never live together because he was a dreamer and I’m a doer.’
Less than a minute after I have left Freddie there is a knock at Denise and Lofty’s door. Freddie is already saying – ‘And another thing that I forgot!’ while I am letting him in, arms clutching photographs, a diary belonging to his boss at the Ice Works, and some cuttings from the Cornishman – all relics he has been keeping over the years. Still in the doorway, he starts telling me more about the Ice Works, speaking with a sense of urgency now. ‘So, the water for the ice comes from a reservoir up near Paul, course it’s disused now’– and then his eyes light up – ‘Do you want to see it?’
Back in Freddie’s car before I have had the chance to say yes, we reverse, narrowly missing the bin once more, and start careening at great speed up Paul Hill. Freddie parks down a lane and leads me through a hole in the hedge that surrounds the reservoir.
There is no one else about to observe our pilgrimage. Freddie stands before the reservoir and enthusiastically re-enacts the various processes involved in checking on the water, while I, his single audience member, try to keep up. The building, made of old stone blocks and covered in weeds, resembles a dead thing whose internal organs are missing: wind whistles through its empty chambers making the same hollow sound as it does through the Ice Works. It is another leftover scar on the landscape. Once the performance is over, Freddie sighs, shrinking back into himself, and turns to look out towards Mount’s Bay far below us. Then, without warning, he pelts back towards his car with me following at a run.
Nearing the Fradgan we almost bump into another old man crossing the road. Freddie waves, echoing the gesture he made to me several hours earlier, and, with no hesitation at all, the man gets in the back. ‘All right,’ he says, once to Freddie and once to me. I introduce myself and find out that this is Lesley, whom Freddie has picked up at 11.30 every Friday morning for the past fifteen years and driven to St Just to get hot pasties that come out of the oven at twelve at McFadden K & D Butchers. ‘Best pasties in Cornwall,’ they add.
Freddie turns to me: ‘D’you want to come?’
I nod enthusiastically.
We travel cross-country, Freddie speeding along the sinuous roads up to north Cornwall. He tells me he makes at least three trips a day, driving to and fro around the town, ferrying fishermen friends to the sea, dropping off baccy and supplies with them and picking up old friends to take them off to buy their groceries. I lean
my head against the window, listening to the men chat weather, old times in Newlyn, and how Freddie used to be part of the now-disbanded Newlyn Pigeon Racing Club. One of his pigeons got all the way up to Leeds once, he remembers. Each time Freddie talks about a shop that was once in Newlyn, he shouts back to Les: ‘Wasn’t it, Les?’ To which Les gives either a simple yep or nope.
‘’Member them five bakeries, Les?’
‘Yep.’
‘’Member that daughter of the butcher on New Road, ’ey Les?’
‘Oh, yep.’
‘’Member that boy Warren, Les?’
‘Nope.’
A pause. ‘He’s dead now, anyway,’ says Freddie.
Penwith, bookended closely as it is by the two coasts, has always felt mysterious to me: at a remove from the sea, which facilitates industrial development and along whose shorelines have sprouted numerous working villages, the dense green patches of wood remain protected, untouched. We see almost no one on the roads as we travel through, save for one farmer walking muddily through a field, who blinks up at us as we accelerate past.
I had assumed that once we’d got our pasties we would find somewhere in the prettily bunting-decorated St Just, but as soon as Les has picked them up it is straight back in the car once more. The delicious aroma of pasties mixes with the slight damp smell of the car’s interior, as the men take up their remembering game once again. We arrive back outside Freddie’s house, give the bin one last friendly bump, and then Lesley gets out, handing Freddie and me our pasties. ‘All right, see you next week,’ he says, vanishing as quickly as he arrived in front of Freddie’s car barely half an hour ago.
‘Don’t you eat your pasties together—’ I ask.
‘Nice meeting you. If you’ve got any more questions about the Ice Works, you know where I am, like – know what I mean?’ He goes back into his house, leaving me standing in the road with my pasty, feeling completely bewildered by my morning.
‘I don’t go to the doctors,’ Pat tells me as I finish my coffee. ‘They always find something wrong with you. The one time I did go to get my blood taken, the blood shot right out because I drink whiskey.’ They told her she had high cholesterol, and she said ‘I knew this would happen! You were bound to find something wrong!’ Are you really ninety-one? the doctor asked her. And after she had proudly told him that yes she was, he asked what she did to keep herself so young.
‘“Sex and booze, doctor!” I told him,’ Pat cackles. ‘To which the doctor replied: “Well, keep at it!”’
She throws her head back and lets out a stream of laughter, even more wrinkles appearing in her bright foundation. ‘I’m terrible sometimes, I really am!’ she says.
Pat has been all the way around the world on her cruises, but she always comes back to Newlyn in the end, to the cottage where her mother died, next door to the pub she grew up in. I ask her if she’s ever thought about moving, about living somewhere else for a while, maybe where her parents came from?
‘You tell me,’ she says. ‘What more could you want than this place?’ The Duchess of Newlyn looks out over the harbour. ‘I see the sun come up over there and then the moon climbs out from the sea there each night. I see the men head out through there and then steam back in with their fish each evening. What more could I want?’
21
GRAVEYARD
As the days move winterwards, Denise’s battle against the seagulls staining her washing transforms into a war against the weather. While the roast lunch to commemorate my last day living with them cooks inside, we cautiously pin her laundry up on the line, keeping one eye on the ominous sky. It becomes a game. For every pair of trousers or sheet hung, the clouds provide us with a spit more of rain, daring us to continue. We freeze, share a worried look and then, as soon as it stops, resume the pinning with greater urgency.
‘Are you going to be all right all on your own?’ Denise asks me as we each take one end of a bed sheet to pin. I will be moving out into my own rental cottage until Christmas: for a reason I still can’t articulate, it feels important for me to be on my own for at least some of my time in Newlyn. I tell her I will be, but I’ll miss staying with them. Lofty helps lift my heavy bags up the Fradgan and I hug them goodbye at the door.
I miss them almost as soon as I have shut the rental cottage door behind me, though they live barely minutes away. The sensation is similar to that of moving out of my parents’ home for the first time – a sense of oneself coming of age in some way.
I take my shoes off and pad around my new home, opening cupboards and flicking through books. Everywhere there are small painted boats and stock photographs of the sea; in the fridge I find a pack of splits – closer to white bread rolls than scones – and travel-sized jars of jam and clotted cream. The cottage is a one-up, one-down affair, its wooden floors white-washed, light blue shutters across its two windows looking out on a narrow street with even smaller, more chaotic alleyways of cottages branching off it.
I barely sleep the first night in Orchard Cottage. It is, I think, a hangover from childhood: a mixture of trepidation and excitement in a place not yet known, even one as gentle and unassuming as the last cottage on the cobbled street with its turquoise door and matching bench that leads up from the harbour. The rows of slanted cottages that make up the Fradgan always put me in mind of ancient couples, hunched and leaning against one another for support. I imagine the yarns and long-held secrets kept within their rafters, which once housed so many of the town’s fishing families. I check my phone to find a message from Denise saying, ‘Good morning hope you slept well xx have a great day xx’ – and almost burst into tears.
I often embark on solitary adventures after sleepless nights. The indoors feels oppressive and my mind, like a splinter of wood on a doorframe, catches on things and is unable to let them go. When I am outside, the world feels anew. My somnambulist state changes the way in which I see things; the notes in my diary and saved on my phone take on wild, unexpected turns. Returning to them weeks later, I cannot quite recognise the person who wrote them.
This morning, I decide to take the bus over to Marazion, from where one can board a motorboat to St Michael’s Mount. I have taken long walks across the whole perimeter of Mount’s Bay and looked back at Newlyn from every point along its crescent-moon curve, but I have never taken the punt or walked across the twice-daily sea-drenched causeway that leads onto to the Mount itself. When I tell friends who have lived in Newlyn their whole lives that I am finally going up the Mount, many of them admit they’ve never made the trip themselves. It reminds me of the relationships of Londoners with Big Ben or the London Eye. Their permanence on the skyline ensures that no local feels any pressing desire to visit them. It is only the tourists with their rapacious desire to know a place, to drink in every aspect of it in only a week or two, who tend to frequent these places.
And yet, for all those who live in Mount’s Bay, the Mount, whether consciously or not, is a sea mark that binds together the disparate villages lined up along the coast. It provides them with a common name, regardless of the feuds and long-held bitternesses between ports. According to folklore, the Mount (its old Cornish name is Cara Clowse in Cowse – the Hoar Rock in the Wood) was built by a giant called Cormoran with the help of his wife Cormelian. Together they carried chunks of white granite from the cliffs along the Cornish coast across into the bay at low tide. While her husband was sleeping, Cormelian substituted granite with greenstone (another kind of igneous rock) in her apron because it was easier to transport. Waking to see his wife ferrying the wrong kind of stone to his new Mount, Cormoran boiled up into a great rage. He lunged at his wife, dragging her under the waves and causing the rocks to fall from her apron. Cormelian’s body sank into the sea and was feasted on by fish, while the fallen rocks formed Chapel Rock, which rises from the sea midway between Marazion and the Mount.
The afternoon I arrive in Marazion it is cool and pale enough almost to be mistaken for a moonlit night. A few tourists and I wait
at the water’s edge for a boat to take us across the glassy water to the Mount. Over time, Cormoran’s tale has grown foggy. Elements are displaced or condensed, re-emerging in stories written many years later. Leaving from his lonely, new mount, Cormoran was said to have spent his nights sneaking onto the mainland to rustle the Cornish folk’s cattle. It is here that the tale merges with another – Jack the Giant Killer. In early chapbook versions of the story, the giant is at last slain by a farmer’s boy from Penzance: ‘I am the valiant Cornishman/ who slew the giant Cormoran.’ Another story asserts that Cormoran is in fact a bastardisation of Corineus, the founder of Cornwall. According to Geoffery of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Corineus destroyed a giant called Gogmagog. Finally, the legend has entered the realm of history. Folklorist Mary Williams wrote in the 1960s: ‘When visiting the Mount some years ago, I was told that when excavations were being undertaken there, the skeleton of a man well over seven feet tall had been unearthed.’ This giant man was allegedly found in a deep vault below the chapel, dug into the granite rock. The Chinese-whispers element intrinsic to folk tales allow figures to slip under the fabric of yarns, appearing entirely reformed: slayer becoming slayed; giant metamorphosed into man.
The day I choose to visit the Mount turns out to be the last day of the tourist season. Tomorrow, the castle and grounds will be shut off to the public for the winter and the St Aubyn family, who have owned the Mount since the seventeenth century (though they now share ownership with the National Trust) will return for Christmas. As such, there is a note of sadness amongst those working on the Mount, which diffuses through its many rooms and leaves each visitor with a somewhat sombre impression of the place. There seem to be many of us exploring the castle alone today, quietly following the designated tourist route. We take it in turns to linger at each impressive window that either looks back towards Newlyn, where the largest trawlers are just visible in the harbour, or out at the white sea and sky – a view that paradoxically feels unfinished without the Mount itself in it.