Everyman's England

by Victor Canning

  ‘Ay, they have a proper game with ’em over there. Shaive off their hair, all of it, they do, and then sit ’em in the ’lectric chair. By Gor, tes some game, I tell ’ee.’

  ‘It’s quicker than being hanged,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t knaw ’bout that. Tes more unnatural though, to be ’lectrocuted.’ He gurgled happily and began to set up the pins of the skittle-table. Games in public houses differ from county to county. In Kent there are always darts and in Cumberland dominoes. In this village the fishermen prefer table-skittles with their beer.

  The bar was dark from the shadow of the headland that protects the village from the channel gales. Just inside the door was a coloured plate of a blue-chequered racing pigeon and on the other walls two realistic engravings entitled ‘Horses in a Storm’ and ‘Groom and Horse.’ There was, I thought, little need for this last title, for although the picture was bad there was not the slightest chance of anyone mixing up the horse with the groom or the groom with the horse. I only had to count their legs to be sure which was which.

  The landlord shook his head and pursed his lips as I asked him about the winter.

  ‘Purty bad, it’s been. There’s been a tidy few gales and the boats hav’n been out more ’n a score of times since September. Ess, tes been tidy bad for some of the men.’

  He was not exaggerating. Gales keep the boats locked in the harbour and while they idle there the pots are swept away from their moorings and lost. Only men of stubborn spirit could face such setbacks with fortitude. The men grumble but never despair, otherwise they could not wrest a living from the capricious sea.

  In a glass case on the counter were rows of little figures of pirates, jockeys and Long John Silvers. They were ingenious figures modelled in clay about the wishbones of chickens, the prongs of the wishbone forming the legs. The pirates with cocked hats and black patches stood in a bow-legged array above the brightly painted jockeys, and above them all stood a massive Long John Silver, made from the bone of a turkey, brass earrings, crooked smile, but no parrot. The landlord saw me looking at them and said:

  ‘There’s more money in that kind of thing these days, than in fishing. Feller in the village makes ’em up and sells ’em. He does quite well.’

  When I left him, I walked up the hill on the other side of the village and out to the sweep of cliff that runs back from the headland which protects the village. Here, beneath crimson-trunked firs and pines, over the short turf and dead bracken, was waving the gold of wild daffodils, a long, seething, billowing sheet of colour. On the rocks below, the sea broke in white foam and gulls went to and fro along the shore, crying, and beating the wind with their wings. Long streamers of soft rain swept across the sea, and as I watched there came through the mist the steady beat of a motor and slowly around the headland a dark shape moved across the tossing water and gradually disappeared into the murk. On board were three men, perhaps the three men I had seen in the store laughing. They were probably still laughing, though that would not make them careless of the work in hand. There were pots to be lifted, lobsters to be caught and sold, fresh bait to be set and nets to be shot… there was always something to be done, and in the end a man sitting in his room, fiddling with clay and wishbones, made a better living than they did with no part of their hardships…

  I walked back through the village, wondering if the day of physical courage was gone. Strength was no longer capable of earning a living for itself. These inshore fishermen were antiquated, working hard and making little, and helpless against the competition which came from an industry organised by men of brain and worked by giant trawlers and the latest scientific apparatus. They would have to go, already their sons were leaving the sea to become mechanics and clerks, to get themselves jobs which involved no great dangers and brought them food and the comfort of contented minds. In some villages the change is nearly complete, fishermen have become landlords and their wives landladies, and their living is made during the summer by catering for visitors. Soon all the Cornish villages will be seeking to catch the visitor and make his fortnight by the sea feed them during the winter. But this village, I think, will be the last to make the change. Even now the summer brings a little more money, easier money, but fishing is in their blood. They never regard it in any heroic light. It is a job which they know how to do, and do. At the moment they want no other life. Why should they worry about the years ahead?

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