Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  The room descends into a reverential hush, broken now and then by a gasp or burst of laughter let out in between punchlines. We allow each heroic moment from the Filadelfia to swell outwards like oats in water. I find I am no longer speaking as myself, but my alter ego Raymundo, as I viciously slash through fish with a great sword. Don wrenches a great ship’s wheel around, which has been transported from its position in the warm wheelhouse to the rain-lashed deck, in hot pursuit of a shoal of turbot. The Filadelfia, our girl, responds to his every touch, nimbly galloping over the waves. The spectators drink in our adventures greedily, remarking on our boldness, our bravery and demanding more.

  The pints flow, the three of us seeming almost to glow like gold saints as the evening draws on. The old days of fishing are not lost yet, I think; narratives of brave men returning from the wild, running seas with a bounty to feed the village persist. Of the ‘grey poteen’ drink that one could not avoid among the pubs on the Aran Islands, Synge writes it ‘brings a shock of joy to the blood’ and ‘seems predestined to keep sanity in men who live forgotten in these worlds of mist’. Our drinks in the Star that night have a similar palliative effect. We step out of the sea of mist, letting its cloak slip off our backs, and recover the parts of ourselves that we had left behind us. We relax once more into the world. And yet, we are fallible heroes, our tales rambling sideways as the drink takes hold of us.

  At last Kyle appears. He does not rush over but lingers there in the doorway as if deciding whether or not to break through some invisible barrier that separates him from us. We draw up a chair for him, hooting his name and clapping him on his back. Everyone waits, but the wide grin that had brought a certain lightness to hard moments at sea does not break across his face. Instead, he looks solemnly into the pint that has been pushed in front of him.

  ‘Drink up, lad! You earned it!’ someone shouts.

  Kyle sips slowly, lost in thought, seeming not to notice us at all. When he finally speaks, all he says is: ‘Weird day’, repeating it several times and shaking his head. None of us presses him after that. Those monosyllables are words enough to articulate the way that the troubles of the present can rush back over you the moment your feet touch solid ground, often coming to a head as soon as the men step back through the front door. Kyle leaves after only an hour, making a short, muttered apology.

  Drink can never really be the cure to keep ‘sanity in men who live forgotten in these worlds of mist’ that Synge imagines. At the most it is a perfunctory painkiller, another cloak of mist that we temporarily cover ourselves with. Most men of the sea have families to support and responsibilities to take care of that are far more urgent than attending landing-day pints with the crew.

  And then, without my quite realising it has happened, there is a round of tequila shots before our now depleted number. Andrew insists we all down them immediately. I check the time on my phone – 6.30 p.m. It is suddenly very apparent that this will not just be a ‘couple of pints and call it a night’ kind of celebration. I don’t check the time for the rest of the evening. The hours wheel frenziedly, while we sway through them. Other fishermen just back from sea trickle into the Star to join us. The slightly older couples leave, seamlessly replaced with Andrew’s girlfriend and a younger crowd who share our desire for a big Tuesday night. We all squash around the table, pints and spirits piling up around us like tower blocks. In Newlyn, whoever is there, regardless of their age or walk of life, becomes your crew for the night. Whatever happens, you support them loyally, downing shots together, arms around shoulders, proclaiming soppy, meaningful statements about friendship into their ears. The one requirement is that you’re ‘up for it’. This speaks to a larger value system that pervades the whole town – no individual is too old, too drunk, too unhappy to be shut out from the goings on of the place.

  The latecomers tell their own stories as the night grows darker. Andrew’s girlfriend teases him about the self-assured, Lothario status he likes to cultivate. She didn’t grow up in Newlyn but has lived here for years now. It is because of nights like these, she tells me, when the fishermen come home and bring life to the pubs, that she has stayed so long in this place – ‘On a Friday or Saturday night, the pubs might be empty as anything, but you get a rogue Tuesday like this and they’re the most alive places in the whole world.’ Fishermen are still Newlyn’s spirit, its faith system, its beating heart. If the fishing industry were to collapse, I wonder what would happen to these pubs. There is a young woman who came to Newlyn on a whim as a teenager, and has never left; a middle-aged man with a long beard who has travelled the world multiple times, but always finds himself back here somehow; an elderly ex-fisherman whose voice is so husky I couldn’t tell you any of his life story, but his gesticulations and expressive eyebrows suggest it was filled with many twists and turns of fate.

  Eventually, Debbie has had enough of our rowdiness and turfs us out so she can close up, and we pile along en masse to the Swordy. This is a regular osmosis in Newlyn; once you’ve got drunk in the Star, you stagger a few doors down to the Swordy with its slightly rougher atmosphere that is more appropriate for later nights.

  Once in the Swordy, our gang of reprobates get more shots in at the bar, and someone turns the jukebox on. Sensing that the party is finally kicking off, Andrew jumps up on a table, and is instantly asked to get down again by the bar man. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say enthusiastically, ‘that was still awesome.’

  We form a sweaty bunch in the middle of the room, stomping our feet and spinning each other about the room headlong. Don and I jump up and down to ‘Hotel California’, a song we had listened to together back on the trawler. We yell along to each song – old, new and everything in between – pints sloshing over the floor together with the more vigorous arm movements. It no longer matters that most of us have never met before. In the heat of it all we are together – one stumbling, teasing, shoving gang, getting our well-deserved thrills on a Tuesday night.

  The first few rousing chords of a folk song come on and a huge cheer reverberates about the pub. I ask what song it is and am met with shock. ‘You don’t know “Fisherman’s Blues” by the Waterboys?’ someone asks. ‘This is the song of Newlyn.’

  The crowd sings the words to ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, with such conviction that I feel each line belongs to Newlyn, their lives plainly expressed in lyrical form. The narrative of escape – wishing to leave it all and become a fisherman – promised by the song is especially pertinent this night. Its longing plea echoes the shared amnesia experienced by the Newlyn fishermen, who after only a few days on stable land seem to have forgotten the harsh nature of their work and start to crave the purifying waves of the sea once more.

  By its third rendition, I know ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ well enough to join in, tunelessly, and we bellow the words louder and louder until you can no longer hear the music beneath our hoarse cries. Andrew takes my hand and we do a rollicking jig together. ‘We’re friends now,’ he shouts into my ear. ‘Doesn’t matter how long it is until we see each other next. Could be a year, could be ten years. You and me will be friends still, right?’ We shake on it and the bell for last orders goes. ‘It’ll be the same.’

  We grab one last shot each, play ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ a final time, and pull each other into passionate hugs goodbye as the barman shuts the door behind us.

  Outside, we are met by darkness and the brackish winds racing down from the harbour. There is a moment of hesitation, as if the night might go further if only someone were to take the lead, before each of us slinks off into the night. I am no longer scared, as I was the first few months in Newlyn, to walk home along in the extreme blackness, so unlike the shoplit nights of London. It can be dark in Cornwall, yes, but it is the same darkness that you see when you shut your eyes, knowing that, when you open them again, it will be light once more.

  When I see any of these figures again before I leave Newlyn the following week – queuing at the Co-op, waiting for a bus, walking along the prom
– we give each other a brief nod and a smile, remembering that Tuesday night when none of us could have been closer.

  28

  HOLLOWAYS

  The Filadelfia is set to cleave the men from the land once more only a few days after our return. That afternoon I make my way along the Strand and up to the bench that sits above the harbour, from where one can see its several quays and pontoons growing out from the town like weeds. Nestled between two other rusting Stevenson’s trawlers I can just make out the Filadelfia sitting low in the water, her aged body leaning heavily in towards the harbour wall. After scanning her for signs of life and finding none, I check my watch. It’s five, the time Don had texted me to say would be call time this voyage around. I hear Andrew in his mocking tone: ‘But is that Don Time, or actual time?’ – my Don, Father Time, whose time does not correspond to the rest of ours, but is tidal time, is a whole wilderness of time beyond the comprehension of us landfolk. And then, from my elevated position, I see the Filadelfia’s floodlights blaze on, casting galaxies across the black harbour water and illuminating several pairs of glistening oilskins rushing about the deck and readying the gear. I hear her engine growl into life, see more lights flashing on, off, on, and the oilskinned men taking their positions at the front of the boat. One fisherman told me he never looks back as the boat leaves the harbour. He won’t turn around until the land is a line too far away to make out.

  I track the Filadelfia as she makes her way along the row of sleeping trawlers and out through the Gaps. How can they be doing it again so soon, when they’ve only just come home? And then, a pang that I had not expected to come brings with it another question: how could they have gone without me?

  ‘As we get older,’ my friend Isaac writes in one of his letters to me in Newlyn, ‘I think we learn to say goodbye to places and people less dramatically.’ When we’re young, we shake off the past like wet dogs until only a few droplets remain clinging to our skin, those last glimmering fish scales glued to a fisherman’s jumper. It is only as we grow older that we learn to look back at people and places while we walk away from them, saying: ‘See you soon. I will come back to you.’ Perhaps we teach ourselves to greet places with more grace as we get older, too.

  When I first arrived in Newlyn, I tried desperately to mould the town to my shape, to make it fit as a place I could imagine I had come from – my own creation myth. And yet, the more I come to know Newlyn, the more I recognise that smothering a place with admiration does not make it yours. I cannot keep wishing to have been born to Cornwall, to Newlyn. That desire, by its very nature, forces a kind of flattening onto the place. Instead, I try to notice Newlyn’s ways, discovering more bits of it every time I come back and, in doing so, letting it become a place, not to which I belong exactly, but that feels like a friend I can return to. In his letter Isaac continues by telling me he’s planning to return to Newlyn, the home he has said goodbye to many times now, for a longer stint than usual this summer, working full-time as crew on his father’s fishing boat. His father may retire soon, he writes, and if he does not learn the family trade soon, generations’ worth of knowledge passed from father to son through boats will be lost. To know himself, to know the place he comes from, he must follow his ancestors out into the seas.

  The Filadelfia steams off without me, her yellow bird wings folding down once more. The darkness seems to lead from the sea outwards as she passes beyond Penlee Point and into the arms of the ocean, the halo of light just beginning to show around her almond-shaped body. I imagine the crew climbing down below to dream their last land-touched dreams, while Don, at her helm, cigarette in mouth as always, begins the tiring process of wiping himself blank once more. Near the end of Moby Dick, Ishmael wonders more broadly what will happen to the whales of the world in future generations: he asks ‘whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.’ Over a hundred and fifty years later, the whale is an endangered species, hunted almost to extinction in the first half of the twentieth century. I worry how the sea’s shape will change over the next 150 years, what impact the changing climes will have on it, and whether there will still be men like Don battling against its remorseless waves, just keeping their heads above the water.

  I stay on the bench overlooking the harbour a while longer, saying goodbye and see you again to each part of the bay, now and then allowing my eyes to drift back out towards the Filadelfia as she readies herself to plunge below the horizon line. I try to hold in my head what my time on the Filadelfia was. And yet, fishing, like the sea itself, is not one thing. There is not some illusive kernel that, when got at, will open up to reveal its essence. It is the staccato rhythms of the physical work at sea, pulling glistening guts out of unsuspecting fish and scattering ice upon their bodies; it is every shared meal, every unusual thing pulled up in the nets; it is the music from Don’s sound system, the sea dreams, the gulls doggedly following us; it is in the sparks of intense joy and closeness felt between the crew, as well as every melancholy note of loneliness; it is the stories we tell afterwards, the yarns we drew out in the warm interior of the Star amongst a forest of half-drunk pints; and it is my own retelling of my experiences to friends and family back in London, too. Somewhere amongst all that, along the scummy tide mark left on the shore that fishermen call the seech, I begin to catch a sense of what it is to be at sea.

  Much of the past comes to be replaced with cardboard cut-outs. We don’t notice it happening at the time: the budgets get smaller, the set designers swapping whole vistas with backdrops and flatpack buildings. When we return years later to a memory that matters, we find we can no longer look at it the whole way around. And yet, while many of the events from my time in Newlyn start to loosen from my mind, like the sound of waves in a seashell that you know is really only echoing the blood pumping in your own ear, the rhythms of the town and the sea beyond it stay with me somehow.

  Once home, I listen to ‘Fishermen’s Blues’ on repeat as I lie in bed beside my half-unpacked suitcase on top of which are many of the keepsakes I’ve brought back from Newlyn: the fistful of rough amber dragged up from the seabed by the Filadelfia and given to me by Kyle, speckled rocks from Newlyn beach collected with Roger, a toy trawler with tiny silver fish dangling below it that flicker and cast torn light across my wall, which Denise and Lofty gave me for my birthday, and the crumpled sugar-paper life drawings of the man who may have been a fisherman, through whom I had first come to see how you might be able to understand a place like Newlyn. Like items washed up on the seech, these are the things I have gathered along the line between Newlyn and London. They are ways through; they are holloways.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Most of the works referenced in this bibliography were read contiguously with the writing of Dark, Salt, Clear. Many of the authors listed here – such as Joan Didion, John Steinbeck, Elizabeth Bishop, Barry Lopez and Virginia Woolf – have helped me understand how it might be possible to bridge life, observation and imaginative thought.

  PROLOGUE

  For John Steinbeck, see Cannery Row (London: Penguin Classics, 1945, 1994). Every few months I return to its first pages with a new student, and each time it opens itself up to me in new and surprising ways.

  END OF THE LINE

  For Virginia Woolf’s childhood visits to St Ives Bay, see her diary of August 1905 in A Passionate Apprentice: the Early Journals 1897–1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Vintage Books, 1992, 2004).

  WAY DOWN TO LAMORNA

  For Marlow Moss, see Sabine Schaschl, Lucy Howarth and Ankie de Jongh-Vermeulen’s Marlow Moss: A Forgotten Maverick (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017). One of the few images of Moss is a photograph taken c.1937, around the time she first moved to Cornwall. She is standing below a signpost indicating ‘Lamorna 1 [mile]’; her pose is strong – left leg forward, gloved hand on hip, her sho
rt hair slicked back. She does not look towards the camera but follows the direction of the sign pointing across towards Lamorna Cove.

  VESICA PISCIS

  For Paul Valery, see Sea Shells (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995). For Herman Melville, see Moby Dick: or, The Whale, (London: Penguin Classics, 1851, 2003). For Maggie Nelson, see Bluets (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009). For Joseph Conrad, see The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: A Tale of the Sea, ed. A. H. Simmons, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897, 2017).

  GUTS

  For W. G. Sebald, see The Rings of Saturn, trans. M. Hulse, (London: Vintage, 1995, 2002). This book was recommended to me by Isaac. Before reading it, I hadn’t known you could make a kind of non-fiction that was so strange and rich, and trod a path so close to the realm of fiction. Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus (1658) is quoted in The Rings of Saturn. For Barry Lopez, see Arctic Dreams (London: Vintage Classics, 1986, 2014).

  THE SING OF THE SHORE

  The Morrab Library is an extensive archive of specifically Cornish writing; several of those who work there study the Cornish language, preserving it for future generations. For R. Morton Nance, see Glossary of Cornish Sea-words (Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, 1963). The words included in this slim volume have more life to them than any English ones I have heard: Lagas-awel – ‘the weather dog, a fragmentary rainbow’; Skubmaw – ‘splinters of wreck in pieces’; Zawn or sawan – ‘deep fissure in the cliffs caused by the wearing away of softer rock’; muzzicky – drizzling (a word especially common in Newlyn, Nance tells us); Durks – ‘the period where there is no moon’.