“They dont know bloody nothing from bloody nothing,” said Trevose. “We’ll go lower.” And we sank a shaft to the two-hundred-and-forty-fathom level far out under the Atlantic Ocean.
My father, visiting the mine out of interest, inquired politely if we had met with any success.
“Not yet,” I said defiantly, “but it’ll be very soon now.” But in the darkness of a hope strained to unbelievable limits my own faith began to waver. Those months exploring the mine and searching fruitlessly for a new lode had made me realize how ignorant I was, how little I knew in comparison to Trevose. I was merely an inexperienced boy thrust by circumstances into a position of authority. The more I worked with Trevose the more convinced I became that I knew nothing. I had been wrong about the extent of my knowledge, I thought in despair; perhaps I had been wrong too about the mine.
There’s tin here,” said Trevose one morning in 1915. “I can smell it.”
Above the ground it was raining and a clammy mist was blowing in from the sea, but down at the two-forty level it was as hot as hell and we were all naked to the waist. The dust from the previous explosions had settled and we were back drilling holes for the next fuses again. Our mechanical drill had developed a fault, and so we were relying once more on the traditional method of beating an upper with a seven-pound hammer. Trevose, like any other miner worth his salt, was ambidextrous in this skill, but I found it hard enough with my right hand to wield a heavy hammer for minute after minute in a hot underground hole far below the sea. In most of the mines around St. Just a miner wields a hammer and turns the drill rods single-handed, but this takes practice and I was inexperienced, so I turned Trevose’s borer while Trevose himself focused his attention on wielding the hammer. Even though I was comparatively inactive sweat was pouring off my body and dust was pricking my nose and making me uncomfortable. But at last when the holes were deep enough Trevose called for dynamite. The charges were packed, the fuses left dangling; having made sure that all was in order, we packed our belongings together and retreated from the stopes while Trevose was left behind to fire the charges. That day there were six of us in our “pare,” or working party. Trevose and I and four “hard-rock” men, two of whom had come from Botallack, which had closed at last a few months ago; the other two were Zillan men who had been subsisting on part-time employment at South Crofty after the unsuccessful attempt to reopen Ding Dong mine in 1912.
Trevose was flicking the sweat from his face; we stood there, the others swarthy, I fair-skinned, all of us covered with dust, and seconds later after the distant roar of the explosion hot air blasted down the gallery like a breath from the devil’s furnace.
“Now you bloody hell of a mine,” said Trevose, “give us that tin or by God I’ll blast you into the House of Water and flood you to the bloody adits.”
We had to wait a long time for the dust to settle and then we went back.
It was a mess. Rocks and rubble were piled high. We groped our way forward just as a tram arrived to cart away some of the debris. The dust prickled again in my nose and made my eyes water.
Trevose said, “I smell tin.”
I stared around. There was so much sweat and dust in my eyes that I could hardly see. I sniffed but I could smell only the acrid fumes of dynamite.
“Can you see anything?” said Trevose.
I looked at him, but he was gazing around vaguely at nothing in particular.
I stared and stared until I thought I would go blind.
And then I saw it.
I stumbled forward over the rubble, and the breath was rasping in my throat and my heart was hammering in my lungs. I tripped, fell and arrived on all fours by the chunk of rock which had attracted my attention.
And there it was. It wasn’t much, just a dark rock with flecks of white in it, but to me it was more valuable than a bucket of gold. For the flecks of white were white quartz stringers, the plainest indication that at last we had stumbled on wealth, and as I stared at that magic rock in my hands I knew already that the lode would be an enormous lode, vast, mighty and fabulously rich.
“Hey!” yelled Trevose, having made sure that I was the first to discover it. “It’s here! We done it, boys, the bloody lode’s here! Come see what the boss has turned up for us! If we ain’t at the beginning of a bloody champion lode as big as a bloody church I’ll be hauled up in the skip and stamped with my own bloody hammer!”
They came running. I said in a voice that didn’t sound like my own, “It was you who found it first, not me.” But he wouldn’t hear of it.
“No,” he said at once. “It was you who found this lode, sonny, make no mistake about that. You knew it was here long before I’d ever been near Sennen Garth. If it wasn’t for you we’d none of us be here today, and if that’s not a bloody fact I don’t know what is.”
But I was dumb by then, wanting to laugh and shout aloud with joy, yet struggling to control my tears, so I could not argue with him. I just stood there, overcome with emotions too deep to understand, and the candlelight from my helmet shone steadily into the darkness and onto the tin I had come so far to find.
3
St. Just was in an uproar. It so happened that my discovery coincided with payday at the Levant and everyone set out to drink to the new lode at Sennen Garth. The mine captain at the Levant stood me a drink and shook me by the hand; everyone wanted to buy me ale or cider and shake me by the hand, but I had no wish to get drunk, so after I had accepted drinks from the mine captain and Trevose I paid for a couple more out of my own money so that I wouldn’t feel obliged to keep pace with those around me. Egged on by his friends and by several glasses of draft cider, Trevose launched into the first verse of the “Furry Dance” while old Granddad Penhellick rushed away to get his fiddle. The barmaid, Jared’s renegade daughter Charity, was so excited that she kissed me on both cheeks and pulled me outside into the square so that we could dance together. I was too happy even to be embarrassed by such attentiveness. As I was protesting my inability to put one foot in front of the other in time to music, wives and sweethearts came running up the streets to the square to find out what was going on. Soon everyone was dancing. Even the children were joining in. At the climax of the celebrations I was carried aloft around the square amidst a host of cheering people, and when I had rescued myself from the undeserved tribute, I found Charity Roslyn again at my elbow.
With a hospitality that William Parrish would have deplored, she invited me to her cottage for a bite of pasty and a mug of beer. Not being hungry and preferring to drink with my friends at the pub, I declined. She then declared herself mortally insulted and asked me why I didn’t like beautiful raven-haired barmaids who lived up to the name they’d been christened.
“And I’m charitable to you tonight, Mr. Philip,” she promised. “Everything free, all secrets kept and no questions asked—”
“William Parrish would have a question or two to ask if he could hear you!”
“William Parrish!” sniffed Charity, tossing her black curls. “He don’t have as much to say with me as he likes to think! If he’d marry me it’d be different, wouldn’t it, but powerful set against marriage he is, even with those girls who be good enough for him, let alone those that ain’t. And if he won’t marry me I’ll not answer to him as if I was his wife. I’ll do as I fancy.”
But I did not feel in the mood for anyone’s charity that night when I had so many other more exciting things on my mind, so I eluded her as tactfully as possible and returned to the bar. The celebrations continued so long that it was very late when I rode into the yard of my mother’s farm and unsaddled my horse in the stable.
My mother was waiting up for me, not knowing what had happened to delay my return.
“We did it!” I shouted as I ran across the yard toward her. “We found it! We struck the lode!”
My shouts rang out over those silent moors. It was as if I were calling to the ghosts of long ago, the generations who had worked in Cornwall since time out of m
ind, but I wanted to call all tinners everywhere. I wanted to shout the news to the whole world, because my mine was alive again, my mine had come back from the dead, and my mine was going to be the mightiest mine in the history of the Cornish Tin Coast.
4
Jared Roslyn, meeting me the next day in St. Just, invited me to his farm for a glass of wine, and, not wishing to offend him, I accepted. I found his house gloomy and his unmarried daughters oppressively eager to draw attention to themselves, but I liked his son, Simon Peter, and thought that even though he was puny for a boy of twelve he had a sharp intelligence and seemed genuinely interested in mining. I was about to leave when Joss Roslyn arrived with his wife, a fat, gray-haired, sullen-looking woman, and the atmosphere of hospitality at once degenerated into awkwardness.
“So you made your peace with the Castallacks, Jared,” said this obstreperous and thoroughly dislikable man. “Well, it’s your business who you allow to cross your threshold, and your business who you allow your daughters to be acquainted with.”
“There’s nothing wrong with young Mr. Philip,” said Jared at once. “If it hadn’t been for him there’d still be out-of-work men leaving the area to save their wives and children from starvation. Say what you will about his parents, but he’s an honest upright young man and there are others who’ll say the same thing. He doesn’t get drunk and he keeps the Commandments and he goes to church on Sundays, and if that kind of young man isn’t fit company for my girls I’d like to know the kind that is.”
“I don’t care what kind he is,” said Joss Roslyn with his talent for demonstrating that his mind could only travel along a single track, “but there’s bad blood in his family, that we all know, and bad blood always tells.”
I wasn’t going to let that pass without comment. One good blow below the belt deserved another, so, I did something I wouldn’t normally have done and used the unfair weapon of my background against him. “My dear Mr. Roslyn,” I, said in my best public-school drawl, “you surprise me. I would have thought you found bad blood attractive since you took such painstaking care to marry a Penmar.”
The man went scarlet with rage, but I noticed his wife gave me a bitter smile before I turned my back on them both and took my leave. She had been an adopted daughter of my father’s predecessor at Penmarric, but Joss Roslyn had taken advantage of her penchant for working-class lovers and had managed to marry her, money and all. The marriage had produced one child, a girl who was now about seventeen, and for some time Hugh had been exercising his compulsive need to flirt with danger where women were concerned by carrying on a secret intrigue with her. The one girl in all Cornwall any Castallack should have avoided was Joss Roslyn’s daughter, so to Hugh of course she was totally irresistible.
“I hope Hugh does manage to marry Rebecca,” I said angrily to my mother over the kitchen table that evening. Although I enjoyed Hugh’s company from time to time I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with his taste for fornication, fabrication and general deviousness. “He’s exactly the kind of son-in-law that bastard Roslyn deserves.”
But my mother did not like this slight on her darling Hugh, who was always so charming and devoted to her, and said tartly that any child of Joss Roslyn’s was the last person she would ever choose to have as a daughter-in-law.
My mother clung especially to Hugh at that time because she was frightened he would choose to enlist. He was eighteen now and had finished his schooling at Harrow that summer.
“Will you enlist?” I asked him bluntly when he arrived home from school at the end of July. “Or will you go up to Oxford?”
“I don’t know,” mused Hugh, suave as ever. “It’s a tricky situation, isn’t it? If I go up to Oxford everyone will immediately point a finger at me and call me a coward idling my time away in peace and leisure while my contemporaries are dying for their country, so the temptation is to enlist. However, it’s better to be alive and a coward than dead and a hero, so I might go up to Oxford after all. If only there was some convenient middle course!”
“Well, if there is,” I said, “I’m sure you’ll find it.”
He did. He had a friend at Harrow whose father was a colonel who knew someone who knew someone else who … It was interminable. The upshot of it all was that he was promised a safe little ADC job well away from the front lines if he enlisted then and there, so he decided to take the plunge and volunteer for the army.
“Compulsory enlistment is only a matter of time anyway,” he told me. “Even if I did go up to Oxford I might be hauled down by force or else recruited as soon as I was due to leave. Then I’d probably end up in the trenches and once you’re in the trenches you’re as good as dead, as far as I can gather.”
It was 1915. By this time everyone was realizing that this was an entirely new kind of war in which there was no limit to the catastrophes that could happen, no precedent for the total involvement of civilians as well as soldiers, and no end seemingly in sight. The casualties already staggered the imagination. In May of that year Asquith had reconstructed his Government in an attempt to reorganize matters at home to cope with the hideous crises abroad, and now there was a new ministry, a ministry of munitions headed by Lloyd George, and the talk was all of manufacturing munitions quickly enough to keep pace with the need of the army in France. But soon concern for supplies at home began to rival concern for supplies abroad. The Zeppelin raids had been too sporadic to have widespread effect, but the German blockade of the British Isles meant that food became scarcer and poorer in quality. Even in Cornwall we noticed the difference and I felt glad we lived on a farm and were not entirely dependent on the shops for our supplies.
But we were well off in Cornwall; across the sea the disasters continued, the Dardanelles and Gallipoli at the other end of Europe, the unending bloodshed of the trenches nearer home. Adrian was in the trenches. So was Marcus, although the two of them weren’t together. Every day I would get hold of a newspaper to see if any major disaster had overtaken their regiments, and every day I fully expected never to see either of them again. It was then that I was filled with guilt that I should still be at home even though by that time I had no reason to feel guilty. I was needed at the mine. I was doing a vital job producing tin to use against the enemy. If compulsory enlistment came I could obtain an immediate exemption.
Yet still I was aware of guilt.
William Parrish was obsessed with it. Whenever I met him in St. Just he would say how inadequate he felt not being able to do anything useful in the war.
“You’re seeing that twice as many crops are grown on the Penmarric estate, aren’t you?” I pointed out to him as if in stemming his guilt I could also stem my own. “Someone’s got to devote time to the country’s agriculture to see we don’t all starve! Besides, could you help having diphtheria when you were thirteen? It’s not your fault you’re unfit for service.”
But it was no use. He was embarrassed by his safety and was pining for the reek of stinking trenches and the ragged roar of guns.
When Hugh went away in the autumn of 1915 William was the only one of my father’s sons still at Penmarric. Jan-Yves was away at school, and when he returned he did not come to church at Zillan with William and Alice any more but accompanied my father to church at St. Just as consolation for the others’ absence. That meant my mother and I never saw him—not that I cared, for he was a sullen, disagreeable little brute, but my mother was saddened by his stubborn hostility and spent long hours regretting it. Why she should have felt this way never ceased to surprise me. Jan-Yves had been an unwanted child, and she had suffered so much during the pregnancy and birth that when he was born she had taken an understandable aversion to him. Since he was technically in my father’s custody she had seen little of him until he was six years old, but from the very first moment that she saw him again after the long interval her aversion disappeared and was replaced by a most irrational obsession. It made no difference to her that he was ugly and rude. He was her child and she loved him
and she was filled with regret that she had played little part in the first six years of his life. My mother was a very maternal woman, devoted to all her children, and so she was all the more upset that an aversion resulting from a difficult pregnancy could have caused her to act out of character where Jan-Yves was concerned.
Fortunately although Jan-Yves never visited us, my younger sisters traveled to Zillan every Saturday to have lunch at the farm. Jeanne was nearly sixteen now and liked to practice cooking in the farm kitchen. Elizabeth tried too but was seldom successful. Her bread was soggy, her scones as hard as bullets and her cakes sank in the middle.
“Never mind, Lizzie,” said Jeanne, who had an inexhaustible repertoire of feminine platitudes. “Think how clever you are at your lessons. You can’t be good at everything.”
“Phooey!” said Elizabeth, aggrieved. “What does it matter if the cake sank in the middle? It still tastes the same.” She tossed back her pigtails, a round little girl with a face like a currant bun. “I don’t care.”
“Poor Lizzie,” my mother would say to me afterward with remorseless regularity. “So plain.”
Jeanne was plain too, although I did not say so. Her hair, fair in childhood, was now brown and she was too tall for a girl. She had a pleasant face and a bright smile, but she was no longer as pretty as she had been as a child.
“Sixteen is an awkward age for a girl,” said my mother, still hoping Jeanne would recapture some of her former glory one day. “She’ll look better later. At least she has excellent features and isn’t grossly overweight.”
Mariana, on the other hand, was still as good-looking as ever. She was widowed in 1916, her husband being one of the twenty thousand men killed in a single day’s fighting during the blood-bath of the. Somme, and arrived at Penmarric in swaths of black crepe to recuperate from the shock. I was prepared to make a nominal effort to be sympathetic when she arrived at the farm to see my mother, but she refused all gestures of sympathy.
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