Cornish Short Stories

by Emma Timpany

  At my back, the tower of St Mary’s Church, staunch upon the hill. It’s a year now since you passed away. Back in winter I dreamt you stood there, lost, waiting. Cold earth. Sometimes I allow myself to imagine us together. If I had been braver, stronger. Twist and turn the past this way and that.

  Things are different now.

  May had brought a heatwave, drawing hot dust from Algiers, Granada, Cadiz, tracing ancient trading routes. That day, a turning point. Too bright to stay inside and work.

  I climbed down to Pedn Vounder, the beach curling into the cliff. The morning tide tight upon the sand, a line of mist riding low upon the water, an offshore current sweeping invisible across the bay. I swam out fast until the blood left the surface of my skin. Lines of sunlight piercing the haze to open up small glinting pools, and I drifted between them, closed my eyes, trusting, buoyant. Water soft as velvet.

  I stumbled shivering back across the beach. Sunbathers dotted across the sand, angled towards the sun. A figure lounging on a beach towel near to mine. My hands and feet numb. An offered flask of tea. We talked of books and films and art.

  Morning turned to afternoon. The outgoing tide opened up shallow lagoons and we waded and swam out to the sand bar late in the day. So shall we see each other again? Bold, direct, cards placed upon the table. I traced my fingers along the line of his collarbone and rested them there. His sun-warmed skin. Eyes iris blue.

  David. I waited for him to finish work for the day at the library in town. A book picked at random from a shelf lay open on my lap, unread, and I watched him walk across to me, tall and lean, angular, shirt and tie, goatee beard.

  It’s easier now, three months in. We walk to Newlyn and beyond. Passing glances, curious eyes. His fingers thread into mine, still holding the nakedness of a lazy Sunday afternoon. His jacket pegged up in the porch, dishevelled pillows on the bed. More comfortable in my skin.

  And we walk home, along the strand. The sea, the town, the church, the pool. My love, the light of day.

  ON THE BORDER

  TIM HANNIGAN

  THE VALLEY was rapidly losing the light. Somewhere beyond the little church town of Luffincott, where a no man’s land of soggy fields lay between twin banks of woodland, I laid out my bivvy bag at a bend in the Tamar. A pair of herons lifted lazily out of the fields and flew away to the north in the twilight, dropping a cushioned yard between each slow beat of their broad blue wings.

  The mud at the water’s edge was a Rosetta Stone of animal prints: the spiny Cyrillic of small wading birds, the rosebud pictograms of a fox, the sharp cuneiform slots of a deer and the spidery hieroglyphs of a mink.

  I fell asleep to the uneasy rhythm of the river, right on the border.

  The first people to cross the Tamar – when it was nothing but a river running between two granite moors, and when maps were held only in minds – came somewhere far back, beyond even the first wisps of myth-smoke. They had walked overland from Europe when there was no water in the way, and they passed me in the damp darkness as I slept: small, fur-clad groups of light-limbed Palaeolithic travellers, coming down out of the eastern woods with chipped chert hand-axes and withy staves, seeking the shallowest bend of the river and wading across, bare feet feeling for the stones in the murky shallows, clambering up the western bank with muddy legs and then fading like deer into the forest. They moved lightly, some ten thousand years ago, glimpsed in the uncut wildwood. They built nothing that would last longer than it takes wood and hide to rot, and left no tally of their numbers. They came meandering along streams and skirting the deeper woods, picking along seaweed shorelines, and overturning slabs of slippery black stone in search of shellfish. They edged back and forth with the shifting seasons, and at least one small group made it to the very end of the peninsula.

  One day, on the final slab of level ground between Land’s End and the western moors, one of their number mislaid a hand-axe: a cream-coloured hunk of stone, tapered to a crude point. Maybe it was left behind by mistake when they broke camp and moved back east. Maybe a rawhide binding snapped as they loped in file through the willow thickets and the loss was only spotted an hour later, as they began to drop down the southern slopes towards Mount’s Bay – with bitter recrimination and a frantic retracing of steps, for there was no stone that they could chip to a cutting edge in this country, and they would have to do without for the rest of the season. Or maybe the owner went out alone to gather firewood and met the Beast.

  Either way, the axe-head was lost for ten millennia before it came up with the old season’s potatoes behind the plough in a field just off the Land’s End road in 1959.

  I slept on undisturbed as more moving bands waded across the shallow stretches of the Tamar. These Mesolithic groups were bigger and better clad, and they carried bundled babies and baskets of the black flint they had gathered on the south coast of Devon to cut into new tools as they travelled. Some of them camped out on the high ground in the summer months alongside Dozmary Pool and, sitting cross-legged on the shore outside hide shelters, they chipped arrowheads and knives. One or two of the broken blades fell into the pool and were lost in the cold, peaty waters.

  The night rolled over me and the sheep settled on the far bank and the river slithered on to the south, and more and more figures were moving westwards out of the trees as the fifth millennium BC gave way to the fourth. They stepped lightly over my sleeping form and splashed down into the river with wolfish dogs loping at their heels and spears over their shoulders. A little way upstream a family group drove a trio of bellowing, coarse-coated cattle through the shallows. They were small, slight men and women, these Neolithic travellers, with artists’ fingers and thin faces. But once they had climbed the far side of the Tamar Valley and fanned out in groups along the length of the peninsula – searching now not for a one-night campsite, but for some high defensive hill or a patch of level land with good grazing – they began to do something entirely new, something that bound them in a wordless bond to every stonemason who followed, and that fixed their culture in the landscape forever: they began to move the granite around.

  On the hills – never at the highest point, always a little way off to the side – they raised monstrous megaliths that none of their successors would ever see fit to challenge. And then, when these cromlechs were ready, they filled them with burnt bones.

  I woke once in the deepest part of the night. The sheep were silent, and something – the mink which had visited this spot before I arrived perhaps – went into the river with a plop. I opened my eyes and saw the Plough, hanging Damoclean in a squid-ink sky, just above my head. As I turned on my side, hitched the hem of the bivvy bag up over my shoulder and went back to sleep, the clock was creeping towards 2,000 BC and an ever-thicker progression of figures was flowing to the crossing point.

  These were thickset, ugly men with blunt noses, heavy brows and short-barrelled forearms. They went thundering across the river dressed in coarse cloth, and pressed on through the trees along what was now a well-trodden trail. Most of them still carried the stone axes and flint arrowheads of the earlier centuries – better worked, perhaps, but little different in form. But, where a larger group came through, the leader might carry somewhere on his person a blade or a brooch or a bangle made of a new material, the colour of a ballan wrasse’s scales, worked with chiselled lines and stained a little with verdigris at the edges.

  They pressed west, up onto the high sweep of Bodmin Moor and out into the land beyond, and they went wild with the granite. They upended menhirs in broad circles and laid the first net of fields over the land in patterns that would last forever. And if the Dartmoor–Tamar–Bodmin ramparts were not yet a kind of border, then they must at least have begun to take some shady shape in their mind-map, for by now there were people heading back out of Cornwall, a two-way traffic churning the river and treading the banks around me to a slippery mush. Those heading eastwards were carrying tin, raised as black cassiterite fragments from the granite gravel of the moorl
and streams, and others were bringing it back westwards, smelted with lead and copper and beaten into leaf-thin moons of bronze for the necks of high-born ladies.

  The night was moving into its final hours now. The sheep were starting to shift again, and there were yet more people coming down out of Devon along what could almost be called a road. They had finer cloth and harder swords. Their ilk had filled much of Britain and they belonged to the edgelands of a wider tribal culture that stretched across the great levels of old Europe, a loosely linked mass of peoples whom the reporters of Ancient Athens, far to the south-east and hunched over their writing desks between Doric columns, called the Keltoi.

  They went past me in deep conversation, driving herds of oxen and pigs, and once they were over the moors they went away left and right, south-west and north-west, shouting out new names for headlands and hilltops in their own language – names which, with a little luck, a twisted vowel here and a crushed consonant there, might just make sense to those with a few words of Cornish two and a half millennia later.

  It was almost dawn.

  I woke in a rainstorm after a sleep of centuries. The raindrops were popping like gunfire against my bivvy bag, and I hitched the hood over my head and lay there, shivering. Eventually the pace of battle eased, and I wriggled out into a morning of funereal darkness. There was no wind, and the banks of conifers on either side were black. The immobile sky was the colour of an old mop, and the hedgerows were waterlogged rucks. Everything was utterly sodden, and the river was running with quiet fury.

  I shook the water from the bivvy bag, ate a few slices of cheese and stale bread, tugged on damp boots, and walked away to the north, into the eastern strip of woodland.

  I had not been walking for more than a couple of minutes when I came upon the house. It was a sturdy, two-storey cottage with a couple of outbuildings, deep in the wood. It was abandoned. Brambles had welled up out of the garden, blocking the way to the door in wiry rolls, and ivy was beginning to take the mortar to task. The trees seemed to be closing in on it, shuffling an inch or two closer on bound footings each night, readying for a final, crushing rush. The house had not been empty for long, for I could still see the odds and ends of domestic life amongst the long grass: a spare tyre, a wheelbarrow and a pair of red gas canisters, leaning against one another for support beside the kitchen door. But the woodland was urging it all swiftly to dereliction. The thought that I had slept little more than a field away made my scalp prickle. There were no curtains in the upper windows and I tried not to look at them too closely. I hurried on at the panicky top gear of walking pace.

  In the grim witch-light, this stretch of country felt like it had been abandoned in the wake of some medieval ill-fortune. The wet fields were uncut, the paths untrodden and the flocks ungathered.

  I came out of the wood onto a rain-scored yellow track between high hedges. Gust after gust of crows came winging over the hawthorns in an irate cacophony. There were dozens of them, turning, sweeping back on themselves: a portentous infestation of tar-black feathers in a seal-grey sky.

  At the top of the rise the hedge gave way to a dew-beaded fence and I saw what had brought the birds here. A flock of waterlogged sheep were shivering miserably in a long field, nervous black heads turned towards me. In the middle of the field, away from the huddling herd, was the carcass of one of their number. I could see a red ribcage rearing from a mush of wool and blood. The crows – there must have been a hundred of them at least – were turning over the field in a murderous vortex. I wondered how the sheep had died and why no one from the farm had collected the carcass, and a brief vision of the worst-case scenario for the cause of a lost Palaeolithic hand-axe formed behind my eyes. Again, thinking of my nearby camping spot, a pulse of unpleasant electricity ran over my scalp and down my forearms.

  I hurried on. When I had gone a hundred yards I glanced back without stopping. The crows were falling out of the sky like black snow.

  NOTES

  TALK OF HER

  Dorothy Pentreath (Dolly), a Cornish fishwife who lived in Mousehole, gained the reputation of being the last native speaker of the Cornish language. Her portrait was painted by John Opie and can be seen at St Michael’s Mount. Dolly died in 1777 and was buried in Paul Church, just outside Mousehole. A granite memorial stone was erected for her in 1860 by Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, nephew to the French emperor and a keen linguist. This memorial was later thought to be in the wrong position and was subsequently moved.

  THE SIREN OF TREEN

  The epigraph is taken from Franz Kafka’s short story ‘Silence of the Sirens’, 1917, published in The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections (Schocken Books: New York, 1946).

  I TURN ON MY OWN AXIS

  In June 2014, this story was recorded as part of Audiotor: Minions Lament, an immersive storytelling experience on Bodmin Moor.

  A BIRD SO RARE

  In April 2015, this story was published in Takahē 84 and Over the Dam (Red Squirrel Press: Morpeth, 2015).

  TOO HOT, TOO BRIGHT

  A coffin drop is a hatch in a ceiling through which a coffin can be passed in a house where the staircase is tightly angled.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  We were very fortunate in being able to feature the work of two accomplished local artists in this book. The four exceptional woodcut illustrations were created by Angela Annesley to reflect the following themes: Cornishware, Enchantment, The Heart of the Storm, and Sailors’ Knots. Vita Sleigh, a graduate of Falmouth University’s celebrated BA Illustration course, designed the book cover with both sensitivity and bravura. Further details about both Angela and Vita can be found in the list of contributors. We could not be more proud of their work.

  The editors would like to thank Faisel Baig; Adam, Iris and Lauren Drouet; Patrick Gale and the North Cornwall Book Festival; Nicola Guy, our Commissioning Editor at The History Press; Pete Hamilton at St Michael’s Mount; Ron Johns at The Falmouth Bookseller; Nigel Owen, Head of Illustration at Falmouth University; The Society of Authors and everyone at Telltales for the help and encouragement they have given us.

  THE CONTRIBUTORS

  PHILIPA ALDOUS

  Philipa has lived most of her life in Cornwall. Her childhood was spent roaming the dunes and windswept cliffs of the Atlantic north coast. She now lives near Falmouth.

  ANGELA ANNESLEY

  www.ravenstongue.co.uk

  Angela is a printmaker based near Land’s End. Her hand-printed woodcuts capture the elemental forces of the southwesterly winds that sculpt the land, sea and skies of Cornwall.

  CATHY GALVIN

  Cathy published her second collection of poems, Rough Translation, in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Listowel Poetry Collection Prize in 2017. She has been awarded a residency at the Heinrich Böll Cottage, Achill Island and a Hawthornden Fellowship.

  ANASTASIA GAMMON

  Anastasia lives close enough to Bodmin Jail to hear the ghosts. She has a degree in English and Creative Writing and promises she’ll finish a novel one of these days.

  TIM HANNIGAN

  Tim was born in Penzance. He is the author of several narrative history books about Southeast Asia and is currently working on a PhD at the University of Leicester.

  CLARE HOWDLE

  Clare lives in Falmouth where she runs a copywriting business. Her short stories have been published in newspapers and international journals and she’s currently working on her first novel, set in Cornwall and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

  ADRIAN MARKLE

  Originally from Canada, Adrian is a writer, editor and tutor now based in Falmouth, where he is working on his Creative Writing PhD with the University of Exeter.

  TIM MARTINDALE

  www.timmartindalewriting.com

  Tim is a writer, living and working in West Cornwall where he was born. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths College and is a graduate of the Creative Writing Programme, Brighton. Currently he is working on a book about home, belonging and
wayfinding.

  CANDY NEUBERT

  Candy’s work has appeared in OUP and Virago anthologies, New Welsh Review and on Radio 4. She is the author of the novels Foreign Bodies and Big Low Tide (Seren) and a regular poetry contributor to The Spectator.

  FELICITY NOTLEY

  Felicity lives in Falmouth. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA, where she was awarded the Seth Donaldson Memorial Trust Bursary. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2015.

  SARAH PERRY

  Sarah grew up in Cornwall and is interested in personal stories of health and wellbeing. She has been experimenting with short story writing and enjoys reading at Telltales live literature events.

  S. REID

  S. Reid grew up in West Penwith, settled in Scotland and New Zealand, and currently lives in Falmouth.

  ALAN ROBINSON

  Alan is a writer and blues musician, festival performer, author of short fiction, short film, community theatre works, radio and stage drama. His novel, The Studio Couch and the Sand-Dancer Blues, is available online.

  VITA SLEIGH