Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  A mahogany grandfather clock in a small, wooden-floored study particularly attracts my attention. The clock’s face has a swirled design painted onto it and its intricate hands are slender and bronze. Above the clock face is another measure of time: a tidal clock, whose fat-cheeked moon with drooping eyes displays the time of high and low tide in Mount’s Bay. It was built in 1785 by Roger Wearne, a clockmaker who lived and worked in St Erth. The clock was not brought to the Mount for its ornamental value but as a necessary instrument for those living in a place whose route to the land is so often swallowed by sea. The measure of the tide is a much simpler form of time than hours and minutes: a high or low note, scrupulously observed by fishermen, who wait each morning for it to reach its greatest height before leaving the harbour, and once more for their return. It is a tangible sort of time too, changing the whole face of the coast, revealing at its lowest ebb hidden things like the top of the sunken Wherry Mine where Thomas Curtis made and lost his fortune in the eighteenth century. In London, I can go months without remembering that tidal time even exists – unless I take a slower route into town and walk along the Thames, which at low tide reveals a muddy flat land of dystopic, upended shopping trolleys.

  I continue in a daze through various bedrooms, studies and kitchen until I get to the map room, where I pause for a long while. Each wall displays an exquisitely drawn map of Cornwall. The one that intrigues me most is an illustration of Michael Drayton’s 1612 epic poem Poly-Olbion, which traces an imaginative journey through every county in England and Wales. In the map, a man with a shepherd’s crook is seated atop the Mount. The sea around the county teems with vast sail boats and sea monsters ridden by half-naked gods. From each tributary that snakes from the land to the sea, a Melusine rises with her arms held aloft. Melusines are spirits that physically resemble mermaids but are found in freshwater rivers and spring from a distinct folkloric tradition around France and the Low Countries. In one of her origin stories, Melusine is recorded as the daughter of the fairy Pressyne and King Elinas of Albany. Her tale unravels in a series of failed marriages. Each time she promises to marry her suitor only on the condition that he will not look upon her in the bath. But, predictably, each new husband disobeys her request, peeping into her bathroom to find his wife transformed into half-woman, half-fish. Elsewhere, Melusine is recorded as the descendent of the whale that swallowed Jonah. Strangely, too, the Melusine also crops up in contemporary consumerism as the split-tailed image on the Starbucks logo. I follow the imagined space of the map. The fantastical image of Cornwall first envisaged in the Poly-olbion does not feel improbable to me. It echoes the way in which the sea that surrounds the land draws oral myths and adventures to it, while the wild landscape itself is infused with ancient folk tales.

  After a morning spent wandering through the many rooms of the Mount’s castle, I decide to wait for low tide to walk back along the causeway. I check how soon it will be on the tidal clock, imagining the fishermen at sea running their fingers down the tidal calendars, which they each keep in the wheelhouse, to learn when they will be able to come home again. I watch from the high gardens of the Mount as the sea slowly reveals the path, like a curtain pulling back.

  As soon as it is exposed enough to cross, the causeway swarms with people. Around me families and couples incessantly snap photos, thrilled at the novelty of standing on something that only moments ago was submerged under the sea. I stand for a while in the middle of the seaweed-encrusted causeway while the crowds throng past me. Since I have no other plans and time seems to be dragging especially slowly, once across I pass the bus stop and head down onto the beach to make the long walk back to Newlyn.

  Everything is muted this afternoon. Even the train to London slips past without breaking the air. The usual crash of waves softens to a gentle hush. It begins to rain lightly. The sea, drawn out to its lowest ebb, leaves a mirror glaze across the sand, reflecting the clouds so clearly that it feels as though I am walking among them. In an essay penned when she was just nineteen, Elizabeth Bishop wrote: ‘In being alone, the mind finds its sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds.’ It is not, I don’t think, that this sea disappears while you are amongst others. Rather the colours and noises of the shore hold your attention, allowing you to forget for a while that this great, silent thing is behind.

  Today I face the sea. Occasionally the sun cuts through and highlights the lines of activity upon the distant waves. These lines appear like the letters from an unknown alphabet or, as I discover later when re-examining my rough, looped sketches of these shapes upon the water, like Lissajous curves – the mathematical figures of eight Alfred Hitchcock uses for the opening sequence of Vertigo, spiralling out of a woman’s dyed-red pupil – and I remember the elderly woman with the recorder those months ago, conjuring words out of the sea with her solemn music.

  As I walk down Long Rock beach, its large rusting pipes leaking out into the sea like gape-mouthed seaworms, I think of a newspaper report I read in the Newlyn Archive about a sperm whale that was found washed up upon this beach in February 1990. Grainy, indistinct pictures of the whale accompanied the article in the Cornishman. From these unhappy images, it is hard to believe that the whale had ever been alive – that this slab of rotting flesh, this dark, beached blot, had once moved with tremendous power and grace through the deepest parts of the sea. The whale, the report noted, was 47 feet long and weighed 30 tonnes. Fascinated tourists came from miles around on a similarly wet, colourless day to take pictures of this thing that should never have been wrenched from the water. We are drawn to the images that horrify us, as if they were magnetic.

  Sperm whales can live up to seventy years. These days more of them are dying earlier from manmade activity than ever before. Several were found dead recently on the Californian coast; their stomachs were opened up to reveal over a hundred kilos of net fragments, lines and plastic bags twisted around their insides. It is not known how the Long Rock beach whale died, but the article notes that experts assumed it had happened years ago, its long-deceased body washed up by gales. Torn from the depths and beached upon the sand, this is what death looks like in its plainest form, shown in the bodies of magisterial creatures from the seas, beings which ought not to be seen in death, and which even to see in life seems an otherworldly event as if we have slipped into myth. I learn later that the undignified term ‘beached’ is also used for retired fishermen. I picture them laid out upon the sand beside the whale, their hair dripping wet, their eyes wide, their hands still working through imagined lines of nets, as people gawp and take photos of them.

  The article goes on to pose a question faced by the council. What is one meant to do with something so vast and lifeless? In a place that must remain beautiful and untouched to ensure the tourists keep coming, the council could not let a huge creature from the sea just fester there to be pecked at by seagulls until its cathedral-arched ribcage shone white on the sand. Worse still, as the gases in dead whales’ bodies build up, they have on occasion, been known to explode. Dead and stranded whales have turned up before at Long Rock: in 1911 eight or so whales washed up on the shore, many of whom were still alive. Onlookers tried in vain to stop them from dying, pouring water over their backs and attempting to pull them back out to sea. A group of young men though, the Cornish Telegraph noted, were caught hacking at the tails of the trapped whales and carving initials into their thick skins, as if they were the latest beach attraction and not sentient, intelligent beings.

  This time around the council’s first idea was to bury the dead sperm whale right there on the beach, twenty feet under the sand. I imagine the hundreds of bare feet crossing the sand each day, not knowing what lies underneath but for the occasional smell of rot mixing in with the sea salt. In the end, the sand burial fell through. Instead, a lorry came to transport the whale to a landfill site, to dump it amongst other detritus and unwanted things. When the council workers arrived, they realised that the whal
e was too large to fit in their vehicle. In a final act of undignified violence, the men had no choice but to chainsaw the whale’s body in half.

  During my first stay in Newlyn I watched the controlled explosion of the Excellence, an old trawler that had been slowly sinking under the scummy harbour waters, damp stains blossoming around her body. Often if a boat is no longer seaworthy, owners will just abandon her in a harbour or sell her on to another owner for a penny so that they do not have to bother with the effort and expense of having her broken up and extracted from her watery grave. Unlike the other great beasts of the sea, these boats cannot quietly sink down to the seabed to decompose gracefully. Man cannot just vanish away the things he has brought into the world. A crowd gathered along Newlyn’s harbour walls to watch the vessel’s execution. I looked down at her, noticing the way the parts of her now submerged had grown flabby and amorphous through contact with the waters. The explosion came with a crack of thunder, splitting her into hundreds of splintered pieces. The audience let out a collective gasp as she broke. We did not stay to watch the crane lift her into the truck that would take her to the dump, crushing her until every vestige and sign left by her past crew would be lost forever.

  ‘It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,’ begins ‘A Graveyard’ by Marianne Moore. ‘But you cannot stand in the middle of this:/ The sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.’ The speaker’s vantage point must be the very edge of the land, looking out at the black hole of the sea like a mourner before the cut-out oblong of a grave. The day the whale washed up on the beach that grave was violated: ‘You cannot stand in the middle of this’ – and yet, that is exactly where fishermen go each day. It shifts the way I think about the water when I am next at sea, picturing our boat suspended above a grave within a place of mourning. ‘That ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink–/ In which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness,’ the poem goes. Though sunk, the sea did dig this one dropped thing back up.

  I continue my walk back home towards Newlyn, imagining the body of a great whale buried deep below my feet, landlocked for the rest of time. The palette today is so unlike that of my very first visit to Newlyn in spring – a washed-out watercolour, where before it was painted in thick oils. There is barely anyone else out walking: the day is too without substance to attract the casual walker; only a few dogs’ noses investigate the shoreline, their owners pressed close to the side of the beach nearest the road. And in the distance I can just see a group of rain-coated figures, their backs curved as they gaze down at the sea-slicked sand so that from afar they look like small, grey crowbars sticking out of the beach.

  I reach Penzance promenade. With the tide this far out, the backbone of the old harbour wall that once ran along from Penzance to Newlyn, that for generations protected homes from being swept away by sea storms, is just visible. I pass the bronze fisherman’s statue, staring out across the bay. There he stands before the graveyard of the sea, waiting for his fishermen to come home, and silently remembering those who never will.

  22

  STORMS DO COME

  If you trace the curve of the bay past St Michael’s Mount, past the almost-grave of the Long Rock sperm whale, forever newspaper-print coloured in my mind, past the fisherman’s statue, past Newlyn town, the rows of houses start to thin out, the hedges thicken and eventually you will come to the old Penlee lifeboat station. The negative space of the station marks Mount’s Bay as powerfully as the Mount itself, a lacuna in the coastline. It comes up in almost every conversation I have while I am in Newlyn, a fissure in the town’s communal history. I think of the life class teacher who told us bodies emerge on paper not by our sketching out limbs and skin, but by attending to the parts of the frame empty of the human form. So too can a place’s present shape be better understood by discovering what has been lost from it.

  I pass the old lifeboat house most mornings on my sunrise runs along the coastal path towards Mousehole, which are timed so that I arrive back in Newlyn just as the harbour is lit by the new sun and the last of the day-boats slip out through the gaps on their way to fish beside Wolf Rock. The station itself lies just below Penlee Point, where the coastline pushes out into the sea. As you approach it by foot it resembles a break in the landscape – a false end to the bay, which can only be reconciled as part of its wider curve if you are on a boat looking back at the land. From the sea, all of the coast’s difficulties, its blemishes and pockmarks, smooth right out into one undifferentiated line of land.

  The current Penlee lifeboat station, found above the small boats’ pontoon at the back of the harbour car park, holds a central position in the town. Its many crew members pass back and forth through its doors each day, drinking coffee and eating cake together, yarning about the sea and discussing any recent distress signals they have answered. Apart from Patch, the lifeboat’s coxswain, its crew are all volunteers – members of the community who join out of a shared understanding that the environment just beyond their homes can be treacherous and that those who face it day after day need protecting from the storms it brings. The number of people who join the lifeboat crew speaks again to the ardent belief felt throughout the town that you ought to do things for the place you live in, a fellowship that is dying out elsewhere. Those who become crew are akin to family. Cod tells me that, after his illness, while he was not well enough yet to go to sea, the lifeboat is where he would come to feel part of things.

  I arrive late back at Penzance train station following a day spent in Falmouth to catch a meeting being held at the Penlee lifeboat house. The wind scrapes the air clean. Figures along the platform blow on their cold pale hands; illuminated only by the tall lamps casting stripes of light down the platform, they appear disembodied, each pair of hands rubbed together in a circular motion. The wind has picked up and, as I rush along the darkening prom, sea spray comes flying up over the low wall. Reaching the lifeboat house, I try to open the door into the poky building – set to be torn down and rebuilt with two floors and a visitor’s centre in the new year – but it does not give. I push harder and hear a yelp come from the other side.

  ‘Hang on!’ comes a chorus of voices. There is some shuffling and grumbling and then the door opens just wide enough for me to squeeze through. The room steams with people. Every person I have ever met or seen in passing around Newlyn seems to be lined up along the edges of the room like a tin of sardines. I settle on the floor cross-legged to listen to the impassioned voices discuss the evening’s agenda, while outside exhausted fishermen drag boxes of crab up from the pontoons in the settling dusk. Strewn across the table at the centre of the room are countless drawings and photographs of a traditional counter-stern fishing boat – a kind of lugger whose aft overhangs above the waterline – as well as an elegant glass bottle containing a perfect replica of her. The name painted on the side in curly letters is Ocean Pride PZ134. Tonight’s meeting has been set up to initiate the lengthy process of locating and bringing her back to Newlyn, where she had spent most of the last hundred years working with Newlyn crews, until all trace of her was lost at the start of the last century.

  The Ocean Pride was built in 1919 at Peakes shipyard in Tolcarne, an almost identical vessel to the Rosebud. There is a photograph of her mid-completion, the lines of her wood-carved ribcage fluent and feminine, each suture polished down until it would be hard to believe she was ever comprised of distinct parts. Every time a new boat was built at Peakes the villagers would drag her down the slip – a task sometimes requiring over a hundred people – coaxing her into the harbour waters like some part of a baptism ritual.

  There is nothing half-hearted about community projects in Newlyn. If there is a case one person believes in, it rapidly becomes a town-wide concern – especially if it has anything to do with the sea or fishing. Most of the people at the meeting have some connection to the Ocean Pride. Each articulates how their parents, grandparents, friends, husbands fished on her or repaired her w
hen she needed care. She was ‘a lovely boat’, ‘a happy little thing’, they say, one after another.

  Every fishing vessel in Newlyn holds within it a remarkable chain of lives – intricate family trees contained within their sea-marked hulls. When I return late and see the lights of the boats in the harbour, I hear their hulls rocking mysteriously, their sails murmuring and parts clinking. I imagine these ancestors of the town telling one another stories about the places they have been, the things they have seen, like narwhals narrating their sea journeys to one another through the clashing of their horns.

  It was the Brownfield brothers of Mousehole who originally commissioned the Ocean Pride. Nim, one of the original shipwrights who worked on her, tended to her lovingly throughout her time in Newlyn. As such he knows her every part, intimately. Her bends and keel were elm; her deck yellow pine; other parts besides were pitch pine, the type of wood for which shipwrights created the saying: ‘If it lasts twelve months, it’ll last a lifetime’; the rest of her locally grown oak coming from perhaps as nearby as the woods at the edge of Newlyn. These old luggers, built from natural materials sourced from the surrounding area, were as Cornish as the men who fished on them.

  For the first years of her life she worked with a crew of six out of Mousehole as a long-liner and pilchard-driver – luggers designed to catch pilchards by drawing a net all the way around the shoal, similar to how Danny on the Golden Harvest fishes for them now. In 1937 she changed hands and was bought by George Pezzack of Mill Lane, Mousehole, and Mary Ann Tripp of Gulval. In 1948 she returned to the Brownfield family once more, bought by Joseph Brownfield, her skipper, and a Mrs Jean Herds.