by Tim Pears
The man Arnold was heavyset, unlike his brother, and it seemed to take him a considerable effort to stir from his reading. He tried but could not turn his body much and so was obliged to stand, and twist his chair, and sit down again in order to behold this unlikely visitor.
‘Do not mind my brother and his contentious manner of speaking,’ he said. ‘We can find you some odd jobs, boy. For you and your horse.’ He rose once more, took a deep breath, and steadied himself. ‘I’ll show you round.’ He turned to his elder brother. ‘You stay there, Captain. Do not stir yourself. I’ll show the boy around.’
Leaving the colt outside the office, Arnold Mann escorted Leo Sercombe on a tour of the mine. He explained that theirs was an industry in decline. Tin had been the great product of this moor but when their buyers could purchase cheaper ore from Malaya all did so. It was the same with copper. ‘Fifty years ago more than half the copper used throughout the world . . .’ the large man stopped and turned to Leo, spreading his short chubby arms ‘ . . . the world,’ he repeated, ‘came from west Devon and Cornwall. But then it came cheaper from elsewhere.’ He shook his head. ‘Abroad. So much for the Empire, eh? Does it help us?’
He showed the boy the smithy, the carpenter’s shop, the dressing house. In one or two places a man pottered, retainers waiting for work to be brought to them. In the engine house the air was oily. A steam engine pulsated. It raised the tubs of copper ore to the surface, Arnold Mann said. Recessed in the solid walls were bearings for thick axles to turn huge cable drums. The boy had never seen such massive machinery. The metal cables ran over pulley wheels above the pit, for raising and lowering the cages. ‘Back in the old days, the men climbed down the shafts on ladders,’ Arnold Mann said. One man looked after the engine, his face smudged where he’d wiped the sweat of his brow with an oily hand. The boy was not being shown jobs he might do but given a history lesson. A metal flue from the engine ran through the large shed on its way to the chimney stack. There were wooden racks around the walls. The mine owner asked the boy what he thought they were for. Leo shook his head. ‘For the miners to dry their wet clothes.’
Arnold Mann and the boy followed men who pushed trolleys along the tramway, to the crushing and sorting sheds. Here the ore was washed and separated on noisily vibrating tables over which water flowed. Back outside again, they walked uphill, the corpulent man stopping every now and then to get his breath back. He smelled of snuff. He said that a great problem here was water, inundating the sub-terrain, flooding the mines. He asked Leo with what did their clever predecessors solve the problem?
The boy did not know.
‘With water!’ said Arnold Mann. They built waterways, or leats, bringing water from up on the high moor to turn waterwheels that powered pumps that pumped water out of the mines. ‘Was that not clever?’ he said. ‘All before the age of steam.’ He was proud of his ancestors as another might be of his children. ‘There are miles of shafts and tunnels underground,’ he said, stamping his foot upon the earth. ‘Beneath us, all around.’ He opened his arms wide again. ‘We have maps,’ he said, as if the boy might not believe him. ‘Our deepest shaft is over two hundred fathoms.’ He sighed. ‘Closed now, of course.’
Leo followed him back down. Arnold Mann said that what men there still were at the mine lived locally or lodged with families roundabout. In the old days many had kipped in the bunkhouse. He did not know how many did so now. Naturally they had a stable but he could not remember where. He and his brother, who was the captain of the mine by virtue of being the eldest and no other reason, lived in the Counting House.
Arnold Mann returned to the office, leaving Leo with no advice or instruction. He untied the colt and led it round searching for the stable but could not find it. Perhaps the owner was mistaken and there never had been one. He found a shed with two dozen bunks. It smelled of old wood and stale sweat. The stove was cool to the touch. All was covered in grey dust. Leo went back outside and walked the colt out until some way distant they found a patch of new wet grass and he let the horse graze. He broke a branch and stuck its sharper end into the ground as a stake and tethered the colt to it. He climbed further up the hill. From a height he looked down upon the mine. There was something strange about it and now he could see what that was. Nothing grew there. Grey stone buildings, ground of cinders or gravel, heaps of black waste.
3
There was no work for the horse. Leo left him in the bunkhouse. There was no food either. Men brought their own and at crib time took pity on the boy, each giving him a morsel of their own, until the Mann brothers had their housekeeper make him pasties. Both the proprietary brothers and the miners treated the boy as a curiosity or mascot. They sent him on errands so that he could exercise the horse. A miner needed matches from the shop in Mary Tavy, paid for with mine tokens. Captain Mann needed a book returning to his friend William Crossing.
On the third day they put him to work in the refining of mundic or mispickel, known also as arsenical pyrites. It stood around in waste heaps. Now arsenic was in demand, for weedkiller, insecticide, medicine, the manufacture of paint. No longer despised. More profitable than tin or copper. On the dressing floor he learned to wash and separate the mispickel from ore.
On Saturday afternoon the men knocked off early and received their wages in the Counting House. They walked out from Wheal Friendship and set off in various directions. Leo was given four shillings and sixpence. He rode the colt out. At a farm he purchased hay and a bag of oats. Back at the mine he poured oats into a bin he’d found. The hay he separated into what he estimated were mouthfuls for a horse and the rest he laid on the floor of the bunkhouse.
On Sunday the mine was silent. Leo left the colt to feed and walked over to the Counting House. The Mann brothers came one after the other out of the front door as he approached. Leo took off his cap.
‘We are going to church, boy,’ Arthur said. ‘You are welcome to join us.’
Leo regarded the two dissimilar men. Perhaps one resembled a fat mother, the other a thin father. Or vice versa. They were dressed as on every day in dark suits, coloured waistcoats and ties, white shirts. But these were clean and pressed, their boots shining. He looked down at his own dusty suit. He raised his head and shook it.
‘You see, brother,’ said Captain Mann, whose first name was Ernest. ‘As I’ve told you, mining makes heathens of men.’
Arthur ignored his brother. ‘You are not inclined to take Holy Communion?’ he asked.
Again Leo shook his head.
‘A mere lad,’ said the captain. ‘Been here a week.’
‘He’s not even gone underground,’ Arthur said. He began to walk along the lane out of the mine. ‘I thought you said it was proximity to the infernal regions that caused their nihilism.’
Captain Mann carried a stick, which he did not appear to need for walking since he raised it and used it rather in the manner of Miss Pugsley the boy’s old schoolteacher, pointing at script on her blackboard, though in his case it was at something in the air only he could see. ‘Perhaps he climbed down a shaft in his spare time. Driven by curiosity as foolish people have been ever since the very first.’ He followed after his corpulent brother, speaking all the while, emphasising his points with his stick, until the words were lost, and soon the brothers too vanished around the first bend in the lane.
Leo knocked on the door of the Counting House. There came no answer. He knocked again, more loudly. Perhaps the housekeeper had gone to chapel. Or like the miners went home. Could he munch hay? He turned the handle and pushed the door open and went in. Doors gave off the hallway to an office and the counting rooms. The brothers’ living quarters were upstairs. He walked quietly along the hallway to the kitchen. It was silent, clean, tidy. There was nothing out of place. No dirty pans or plates or cutlery. The sink was empty.
There was a doorway the boy had seen the housekeeper come out of carrying food. He surmised it led to the larder. He opened the door and stepped inside a narrow room illumina
ted only by a small square window at its far end. This window was slightly open, pivoting from hinges along its bottom rail, but wire mesh covered the opening anyhow. The larder was much cooler than the rest of the house. Along the two walls were wooden shelves stacked with jars and tins and bags of food. Upon a long granite worktop stood four plates, each displaying a joint of meat that was protected by a wire-mesh hoop or bell put over it: ham, beef, chicken and pork.
The boy returned to the kitchen and found a carving knife. He sharpened the knife with a steel and returned to the larder. He carefully sliced a thin strip off each of the cold joints. Back in the kitchen he cleaned the knife and used it to cut two slices of bread off a loaf he found in an enamel bin. Between these he laid the four slices of meat. The sandwich was too large to fit in a jacket pocket so he cut it in half, put one half in each pocket, cleaned the knife and put it back in the drawer in which he’d found it. Then he took a single carrot from a rack of vegetables and left the house as quietly as he had entered it, as though despite his certainty that it was empty yet someone watched him all the while.
*
Leo rode the colt up onto the moor. He found a track and nudged the horse in the flanks with his heels, just hard enough to let him know that he could go as fast as he wished to now. The white colt cantered across the bleak terrain. He gave the impression that he could happily gallop if only he had a reason to, was a horse in search of a race.
The damp air smelled of peat. There was some bird or birds hidden in the heather, cheeping persistently. They rode beside a leat, perhaps the same one Arnold Mann had shown the boy. In its bed were grey stones stained brown. As he sat the horse gazing around, a lone sheep came floating along. It looked clever, and smug to have found a novel way to travel from one place to another, saving its frail legs as no other sheep ever had. The ewe lay on its side. Perhaps it was asleep and would at any moment wake up and clamber out of the leat, shake the wet from its wool and totter off. Then Leo saw its eyes were open and realised he was wrong. The ewe had drowned.
Again they came across wild ponies. He stood the colt and watched them from on high make their way down a shallow valley. He counted nine. They paused to graze. One ate thin grass, another chewed gorse, a third pulled sedge from the water’s edge. Such was their varied menu. After a brief feed they moved on. They had to be tough to live up here all year round. Leo reckoned the white colt would not last a single winter. The boy watched the Dartmoor ponies until they disappeared. Browns, greys, nondescript, differing yet not easy to distinguish one from another. He rode down to the same stream and dismounted. While the horse drank, Leo dislodged stones from the bank and used one of them as a tool to mix up black mud. This he took up in handfuls and plastered across the hide of the white horse, speaking to him as he did so, explaining the need for disguise since he was such a singular creature and the Orchards would not rest until he was theirs once more.
There was little wind. It was so quiet on the moor the boy thought he could hear his own heart gently beating. Leo walked the horse up to a tor and tethered him in the weak sun for the mud to dry, then climbed the rocks until he found a perch on which to sit and eat the lunch he’d taken. He opened the bread and pulled loose a thin slice of ham, rolled it into a tube and chewed it. The taste and the texture burst upon his tongue like the revelation of some truth that a wise man might express in words but was given to him by this other sense. It was not the Holy Communion of wine or wafer, but it did seem to him like the sacrament of some other ritual, once practised but since lost in time as all things were. He ate the meat and bread, crouched upon the rock in his fine suit, and beheld the horse below and knew not whether he was blessed or cursed. Wealthy or poor. Free or bound. Joyful or desolate. In time he might discover.
The boy looked around. He knew the tors were long-extinct volcanoes. He imagined them centuries ago waiting for God to light them like fireworks. Then the explosions of stone. Around the hills below them were strewn heavy grey boulders, most of random shape yet some perfect headstones or obelisks. A leat ran like a thread of grey steel around the contour of a hill. He looked out to the west. The land lay in ridges, like the ridge and furrow of the old agriculture, as if a Cornish giant farmed out there. On a promontory of land stood a church like a proud outcast of some schismatic sect, to add to the Baptists and Methodists, the Plymouth Brethren, Salvation Army, and doubtless others the boy had failed to ever comprehend the point of.
When he climbed down, Leo walked away from the rocks, then turned abruptly in order to look upon the horse as a stranger might. It was a feat of magic, no less. The elegant beast had been replaced by a scruffy, uncared for, unremarkable cob. Though his form was unchanged, really. Leo approached. The colt looked mournful, like one standing in the rain, head down, unnaturally still. Downcast, miserable.
‘How can you know what you look like?’ Leo asked him. ‘What do you care?’
The horse would not look at him. The boy shook his head. He peered up at the sky as if beseeching the clouds for assistance, then back at the horse. He threw up his hands. ‘I hear you,’ he exclaimed. ‘You damn beast. I hear you.’
The boy rode his muddy horse down off the high moor, descending some way south to where he’d that morning ascended. There at the edge of heathland he discovered further mine workings. These were entirely abandoned. The roofs of buildings had begun to collapse as the wooden beams rotted. Doors and windows were disintegrating. Grains of soil had accumulated on gravel and spoil; seeds of wild grass or weeds had sprouted therein, giving the landscape a watery wash of green like a first thin coat of paint. A ramp ran down into a large pool. Leo pulled loose some tufts of scratchy heather. He removed his jacket, shirt and waistcoat, then his trousers, and laid them on a rock. He led the horse into the water and stood him there while he brushed and scraped the once again wet mud off, apologising for whatever insult he’d inflicted. The water was horribly cold. Leo shivered as he worked, naked but for his boots, standing in the water up to his waist, his boots drenched but necessary to protect his feet from the horse’s hooves. When the white colt was once more clean Leo pulled on the clothes over his damp skin. He rode the horse out of the quarry, trying to eat the carrot he’d taken despite his chattering teeth.
Back at the bunkhouse Leo gathered wood for the stove. The Mann brothers were back in their house and he begged a light. Arthur gave him a box of matches. He lit the stove and hung his wet boots and damp clothes all around to dry, and sat wrapped in a musty blanket close by, watching the flames. The horse too stood there, warming himself, perhaps lost in the fire’s display as the boy was, with the same vague ruminations. Who could say?
*
On Monday morning the miners returned to work. None said a word but moved warily, with eyes half closed. No man worked harder than he had to. Leo did not know whether they suffered hangovers still from Saturday night or had drunk on the Lord’s day too.
Three men did not turn up so they put the boy to work in the ovens. These were huge stone-built calciners where the mispickel was roasted. Vapour passed through a huge flue, condensing upon its surface. The men covered Leo’s hands and feet. They padded his mouth. They blocked first his nostrils, then his ears. He was given a metal scraper and a bucket, and sent into the metal flue-pipe. He spent that day working hard. They told him that he would be paid three times as much as he had the week before. His eyes stung. When he took the plug from his nose he could smell the sulphurous odour. He looked at the men who worked there and understood that those who did not escape were dead men.
On the morning following, the boy rose before first light. Rain drummed upon the roof of the bunkhouse. He gave the horse the remainder of the oats and when he had fed led him out of the mine. With the sack of hay tied upon his back like a rucksack, Leo headed west.
4
In the driving rain Leo walked on the leeward side of the horse, using the beast for protection. Still, he was soon soaked. A road curved south around the moor from Okehampto
n. The boy did not wish to be seen upon it and so kept to back lanes and tracks. Peter Tavy church had four knobbly decorated points at the top of its tower, like the crown of some comical king. A black crow spread its ominous wings and launched itself from the tower as if performing an act of great bravado.
The boy and the colt walked through the sodden land. At a dip in a lane, a run-off of water flowed from a field of red soil and swilled like a pool of blood. They splashed through it.
With no sun Leo had nothing by which to guide the way save for the road to his right and the moor on his left-hand side. The boy soon began to doubt his instinct. When he came to a mine he thought at first it was Wheal Friendship and that he had navigated a convoluted circular route back there, but it soon became apparent that this was a different one, abandoned. He found a shed with its roof intact and took shelter there. He broke up an old cupboard and lit a fire with the matches Arnold Mann had given him, which had kept dry in an inside pocket of his waistcoat.
Around midday, though the sky did not clear, the rain ceased and they set out again. Leo mounted the horse and rode. The sound of water running downhill, along streams, in underground drains and riverlets, accompanied them. The sky was grey but that single word did not begin to describe it. The boy let the colt plod and splash through the puddles in the lanes and studied the sky above him. You could dismiss the firmament as overcast or you could look at it. He did not have the vocabulary to describe the fluctuating shades of grey where the sun tried to shine through thin cloud here or rain-filled thick clouds there. He saw charcoal grey, pewter, ash. He saw slate, granite. But granite itself was not uniform. Neither were the cold ashes of a dead fire. A man would need a thousand words to describe all the varieties of colour upon which he gazed. Only a fool would say the sky was grey.