Tramps, gypsies, coastal walkers and artists, it was not (frankly) always easy to discriminate one from the other. One month they were as penniless as the mice in the church or borrowing off each other; then the news went round that someone had sold a couple of pictures in Bond Street or had an exhibition lining up in Penzance and they all somehow made ends meet – or, more likely, they went mad on the proceeds. So life was never dull. That was what felt so very good about being down here in that far-flung corner of England, a place people came to punt away their previous existence, rather appropriately (Gilbert thought), as the tip of Cornwall was like the boot at the end of a long leg.
For many years Newlyn had been the focal point. Stanhope Forbes (‘the Professor’) and his wife Elizabeth had attracted a large number of young art students from London, indeed from all parts of England. Then Samuel John Birch (soon to be called ‘Lamorna’ Birch) settled four miles away from Newlyn in Lamorna, in his house just up from the cove – and what a view he had! Other artists followed. One, two, three … became a trickle, then a small stream, and now (as the Colonel implied) the floodgates were open.
‘Lots of painters,’ the Colonel said, ‘but not a decent carpenter in sight.’
That was another of his little jokes.
Apart from the locals, Gilbert Evans was just about the only one who wasn’t an artist. Down at The Wink playing skittles the other night he heard a man grumbling away that Lamorna ‘weren’t Cornwall any more’. The trouble with comments of that nature, quite apart from the fact that they made Gilbert feel unwelcome, was that he was not entirely sure what was meant by ‘Cornwall’. By ‘Cornwall’ did those in The Wink mean windswept, deprived inland farms and poor fishermen risking their lives? Did they mean people who spoke with impossible accents? Maybe they did. But was there not room enough in that strange vast county for all of them, artists and writers and fishermen, even for the occasional army officer turned land agent?
Laura Knight put it rather well over supper. Gilbert, a regular guest up in their long low cottage, was lighting their paraffin lamp and Laura, as usual, was talking.
‘Cornwall isn’t like anywhere else, you see, so it’s no use trying to compare it to your previous experiences. Take Nottingham, take Yorkshire, take Holland, take Paris, they’re all so different. Isn’t that right, Harold? We’ve always found that, haven’t we? … Harold?’
Harold went on reading, his glasses on the end of his nose.
‘Harold, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘What I just said.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that all you have to say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, honestly.’
‘You haven’t stopped for half an hour. You’re as bad as the bookie. Why don’t you let Gilbert say something?’
Laura laughed a nervous, vulnerable laugh. Gilbert turned from the lamp to face Harold.
‘Who is the bookie?’
‘Laura’s new friend, down at the mill. Mr Modesty.’
‘Oh? Oh, Munnings, you mean?’
Laura smiled bravely and encouragingly.
‘Gilbert’s been helping him settle in, haven’t you?’
‘Not only me,’ Gilbert said. ‘The place was a shambles, it really was, so we all rallied round, the Colonel gave me a day off … well, half a day.’
‘Jolly … good,’ Harold added slowly, after a pause.
‘He’s a tremendous painter,’ Gilbert said, ‘not that I’m any judge.’
‘Turns out a lot, the bookie, does he?’ Harold asked.
‘Stacks,’ Gilbert nodded approvingly. ‘He’s always out and about, I see him everywhere. In all weathers.’
Harold stirred with distaste but remained looking at his book, and only at his book.
‘Gilbert sees the best in people,’ Laura said, ‘don’t you, Gilbert?’
Though she often added that Gilbert should not try quite so hard to be decent, nor try quite so hard to make everyone like everyone, because marriages were marriages and life was life, wasn’t it, and some people preferred Sennen Cove to Lamorna and some preferred Lamorna to Sennen Cove, and what could you do about that? She filled Gilbert’s glass to the brim.
‘So tell us what you think of Alfred Munnings, Gilbert. We all know what Harold thinks; when he doesn’t call him the bookie he calls him the ostler. Don’t you, Harold?’
Harold exhaled, just loudly enough for it to rate as more than an unconsciously necessary function, slowly put down his book on the side table, made a steeple of his fingers and looked into the grate. There was a silence, which Gilbert did not fill.
‘For example,’ Laura said, ‘do you like him?’
‘I don’t really know him yet,’ Gilbert said. ‘I wouldn’t like to say … just yet. Ask me when I know him better.’
Laura whooped and clapped her hands.
‘Marvellous! You are the soul of tact. Isn’t he, Harold?’
‘Have you been invited to his party?’ Gilbert asked. ‘On Friday?’
‘Who hasn’t?’ Harold said gloomily.
Laura stood up.
‘Everybody has, the whole village, Joey, Dolly. The Birches. He’s planning to have a party every week, every week, think of that, he’s so generous, isn’t he? And let’s face it, not everyone would invite Dolly, would they? I mean you wouldn’t, Harold, would you? … Harold?’
Lieutenant-Colonel Camborne Haweis Paynter, JP, or Curl-and-Painter as the local lads called him, owned most of the land on the harbour side of the cove, that is west of the little stream which divides the Lamorna valley – all the land from there right over to Boskenna and a bit beyond. On the other side, the east side of the steep valley, strewn with huge chunks of overspilt granite, you have the quarry. The quarry side of the valley was owned by Lord St Levan. The footpath to the east runs round from the cove past Half Tide rock, Carn Du and Kemyel Point, with the sea always in sight, to Mousehole. Keep going and you reach Newlyn (and the painting school, where Joey Carter-Wood was a gifted, if reluctant pupil) and then the wide promenade to Penzance.
Gilbert was responsible, then, for a sizeable area of sloping fields dotted with farms and outbuildings, sloping fields full of flowers and vegetables, and for the rent and upkeep of all the properties. You could say he ‘ran’ the place. If a roof was damaged in a gale, if the water failed, if there was a crisis, ‘The Captain’ was called. Gilbert liked to feel he was ‘responsible’. ‘What I am not responsible for,’ he said with a smile in The Wink, ‘is the behaviour of the artists.’
‘Why don’t you arrange a place of your own?’ Laura asked Gilbert. ‘You deserve one.’
‘Because I’m happy enough where I am. Thank you. Quite spoilt, as a matter of fact.’
Gilbert had rooms in the hotel: a bedroom – the bed narrow but well sprung – and quite a cosy little sitting-room which, with the kind help of Mrs Paynter, he was beginning to furnish. For the time being it looked rather spartan, the sort of room a sapper officer might settle on, with a small carpet, a chair and some curtains, a small writing desk and a small chest of drawers. There was nothing small, though, about the views from his window.
The wide, wide sea: from the Lizard round to Land’s End.
The hotel itself was something of an enigma. First of all the name needs clearing up. Cliff House, built in 1870, was not put up as a hotel, which explained why some of the older men in The Wink still referred to it as Cliff House. Then it became Cliff House Temperance Hotel, then Jory’s Temperance Hotel, or Jory’s Hotel, or simply Jory’s.
The name Jory’s was, however, anything but simple. That name introduced a range of complications because Mr and Mrs Jory ran rival establishments: Jory’s Hotel (let us settle for that), where Gilbert had his rooms on the first floor, was run on a tightish rein and with the firmest and kindest of hands by Mrs Jory. Or, as she advertised it, ‘Mrs Jessie Jory, proprietress, furnished apartments (bathrooms), sea view and south aspect’. Mrs Jory prided herself on
providing a splendid breakfast and supper to which Gilbert could, and frequently did, invite guests (Joey Carter-Wood and Munnings, to name but two).
A hundred yards or so lower down in the village was The Wink. This inn was run on the loosest possible rein by Mr Jory, or ‘Mr Nicholas Jory, beer retailer’. The hotel and the inn were chalk and cheese, control and indulgence, thrift and forgetfulness. When he was returning on his bicycle from a long day at Boskenna, Gilbert could often tell his mood by sensing towards which place his wheels were drawn.
Mr and Mrs Jory were not on speaking terms. ‘As long as she do stay up there,’ Jory said with his pendulous bottom lip in his beer, and with his elbow on the bar, ‘and I do stay down here, it do suit. But if she do come down ’ere, I’ll be off faster ’n a fox and that’s a fact.’
Marriages, marriages, Gilbert thought.
When Jory did venture up the steep slope to the hotel in his pony and jingle trap – he was often hired to take guests or residents in and out of Penzance for trains and shopping expeditions – the husband and wife did not so much as look at one another. As Bess, the pony, clip-clopped off Mrs Jory would hiss, teeth clamped, point her indelibly inked finger at his back and say, ‘And good riddance.’ For his part, once out of sight, Jory would lift his left buttock and fart. This he could do to order.
Marriages, marriages, Gilbert thought: imagine not loving your wife, imagine not talking to her. ‘May God protect me from such a union,’ he said in his prayers.
After being thrown out of his temporary lodgings in Newlyn for excesses which his landlady did not wish to discuss and which he could not even remember, A.J. Munnings took the damp and deserted dwelling, a sort of studio and stable, not a stone’s throw from the mill. He had tried to find a place in Paul and Mousehole and Trewoofe before coming by chance to Lamorna, and as soon as he saw the mill nearby and watched the shutter being released so that the wheel could grind, as soon as he heard there had been a mill of sorts working there since the fourteenth century, he knew he was, in a sense, ‘at home’. Bowered in trees, near a mill. Here he would stay. Head bowed, he stood in front of the millstone wheel, a huge circle of local granite; then raised his eyes up at the water, diverted there from the stream at the top of the valley. All this, the drowsy sound of mill and plash, was in his family’s veins. The steady flow of water and the familiar sound of the cogs convinced Munnings that here was the hub of the village. Here he could paint! He must have it! And within a week, with Gilbert Evans’s practical help, it was more or less habitable. Then the parties began. By day Munnings worked outdoors till he dropped, and by night he roistered. His horses, Grey Tick and Merrilegs, were stabled beneath his studio. When he slept (if he slept) it was upstairs, on a mattress in his studio, or below in the hay with the horses, while Taffy, his terrier, travelled hopefully (sometimes fearfully) between his two beds.
During the long hours of roistering his studio was blue with smoke, blue with everything, some of it belching back down the chimney, which badly needed a good sweeping, but mostly from a variety of pipes and cigarettes. It was crammed tight with young people (including some of the faces seen by Laura in the lane) and anyone else A.J. had just bumped into. And they all brought candles, musical instruments, cakes, bottles and bits and pieces to make his cramped place more comfortable – cushions, for example, went down well.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he shouted at all and sundry, ‘in you come, whoever you are!’
His weekly parties started when the sun went down and only ended, according to the watching sabbatarians, when the sin ended. Everyone talked. Everyone drank. Most sang. Most talked art. They laughed, danced, swallowed punch, ate sausages and saw who could wear the most colourful clothes and use the most colourful language – seeing who could, in Laura’s phrase, ‘Be the wildest of the wild’ and ‘Something tells me,’ Munnings added, ‘it won’t be your husband Harold.’ Usually who-was-the-wildest-of-the-wild boiled down to a straight contest between A.J. Munnings and Laura Knight, although they were amongst the oldest.
The second Munnings party Gilbert attended, and the one which changed their lives, came at the end of an awful day. From dawn to dusk it had rained non-stop, as only Cornwall can, and to make matters worse Gilbert’s bicycle had a bad puncture at St Buryan, so he had to push the thing two miles in a steady downpour, encouraged only by the occasional lulls and respites. With the sky a regatta of fast storm clouds, only for those respites to be followed by sustained horizontal sheets of grey rain coming in from the Atlantic – well, such days left Gilbert looking forward more than ever to a party and the smack of drink.
By the time he turned down past the mill, just before nine, his socks wet, and the mill race a torrent, it was gusting a gale. So loud, however, was the din within the smoky blue studio that no one noticed the windows rattling, the downpipe gurgling, the roof groaning and Colonel Paynter’s responsible land agent standing there dripping on the edge of the circle of light.
Gilbert watched.
He had never seen a party like it.
He watched A.J. Munnings, this much talked-about life-force, rapidly moving around the room, loving it all, the world of laughter he had created, the bustle and the storm within so great the storm without passed by.
Gilbert watched.
Had he ever, at school or in the army, in Wales or in the Boer War, ever met a man like this? Had he ever heard a man who spoke such sentences?
No.
Suddenly seeing Gilbert Evans dripping at the door, Munnings threw his arms triumphantly in the air in celebration, pushed his way over, shouting his helpful friend’s name at the top of his voice:
‘Ev!’
‘Hullo, A.J., quite a night.’
‘Come here, man, come here, you look drowned.’
‘I’m all right, really, I’ll dry out in a—’
‘Come and meet Everyone. Every-one,’ he bawled, ‘meet Captain Evans, soldier and gentleman. Ev, meet Every-one.’
‘Yes, thank you, A.J., but I do—’
‘The chimney needs sweeping! It needs sweeping badly.’
‘I know, I did tell you, and the downpipes need clearing.’
‘Can you arrange it, my friend? Can you?’
‘I’ve already told you I—’
‘Amazing chap’ – here A.J.’s volume increased to include all those within earshot – ‘he fixes everything for me, don’t you? Now that is what I call a friend. A friend.’
‘Ev’ was something of a new one, but if A.J. started to use it there was little doubt that ‘Ev’ would soon be his current name. On the matter of loud general introductions, Gilbert tried to explain quietly to A.J. not to bother, because he knew enough people in the room to be getting on with, thank you, and that once he had dried out a little by the fire he would be quite all right, but he might as well be bidding the ocean to cease because A.J. told him not to move a muscle, not a muscle, mind, until he brought him back a glass, a full glass of something guaranteed to warm the cockles of his soldier’s heart.
Gilbert peered through the blue smoke. ‘Lamorna’ Birch, with his clay pipe, nodded a greeting. A scantily dressed London model (he did not remember her name, though he remembered her smile) half turned and half smiled. A.J. was now heading back, elbows right out, with a jug of steaming punch, holding it in front of his face and shouting out above the hubbub:
‘Special Norfolk recipe, this, Ev, got it in The Swan at Harleston … or was it the Maid’s Head in Norwich, can’t remember for the life of me, who cares, whichever, it’s bloody good stuff so drink it.’
‘Your very good health, A.J.’
‘“A.J.’s Special” it’s called all over Norfolk, rum, brandy, sherry, shimmered – no, I’ll say that again – simmered cloves, lemon rind, lots of fruit and whatever else I feel like throwing in.’
And on his way Munnings went, leaning over shoulders with his steaming brew, nudging the young models, topping them up, encouraging more excess, dropping a filthy limerick here and a
filthy limerick there. It was hard for Gilbert to believe that this man had only been in Lamorna a few weeks: he behaved as if he, not Colonel Paynter, owned the place, if not the county of Cornwall.
Gilbert moved to join Laura and Joey Carter-Wood but within seconds of being with them A.J. was back there again, elbowing Laura.
‘More, yes, come on, Good God, Laura woman, don’t argue, lift it higher, I can’t reach down to your boots, can I?’
‘You’re a wicked man, Alfred Munnings.’
‘Of course I am, so lift your glass up.’
As she did so, Gilbert noticed Laura’s wide strong lips were already stained blue-red with the wine. Her eyes bulged.
‘Lovely, Alfred, that’s plenty, thanks, I said that’s plenty.’
‘Don’t thank me, Laura, thank the Leicester Gallery, thank the clients, thank all the buyers!’
‘I know, wonderful news, well done.’
‘Talent, Laura, talent, that’s all it is, and you and I have it.’
‘You have, Alfred, that’s clear.’
Munnings looked round the room.
‘Where’s your husband, he needs some of this, put a bit of life into him.’
‘He’s at home, I’m afraid.’
‘At home?’
‘Yes, still working.’
‘What’s wrong with the fellow, last time he had toothache.’
‘Well, you know Harold.’
‘Gilbert, you’re a man at least, have some more!’
‘No, I still haven’t—’
But Gilbert moved his hand just a fraction too late. His glass was brimful again.
Summer in February Page 4