The Main Cages. Philip Marsden

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СКАЧАТЬ inner harbour and each wave coming through the Gaps and spreading out inside and up onto the road. There was still more than an hour until high water.

      The first of the boats had long since risen into view and he had been watching the rogue seas among them. He knew the yard would flood because it was just three days since new moon and now this south-westerly would drive the spring tides in even higher. Knowing the yard was going to flood gave Tommy a satisfaction of sorts when it did, when he looked through the arch and saw the first waves rise and flop their water onto the road.

      The others had all left. The cottages around Cooper’s Yard were empty. It was now some days since the Stephenses and Mrs Moyle and the other Treneers had gone ‘up the Crates’. For weeks before they had been packing up, but Tommy would have no part of it. He spent the time on Parliament Bench, or wandering the town, or in the lifeboat station. Sometimes he sat on his stool outside the cottage and showed a contemptuous indifference to all the activity around him. ‘Sorry about Tom,’ Mrs Treneer apologised for him. ‘Just he’s gone back-along.’

      She herself spent those days going through the cottage room by room, packing the trunk with the clothes she no longer wore, the lace and embroidery she had been given for her trousseau, her Bible wrapped in untouched silk and her well-used copy of Old Moore’s Almanack. She took down the framed picture in their bedroom of Moses viewing the Promised Land. Croyden and Charlie came to collect the bed, the wardrobe and the boxes and they too took no notice of their father as he sat and scowled in the yard.

      Mrs Treneer had now been a week at the Crates and she liked it. She liked the flat’s new smell and the blood-red linoleum floors and the sunlight it received for most of the day. She tried to convince Tommy to join her. ‘It’s lovely up there, Tom. We got a tap.’

      ‘I’d sooner die here,’ he told her.

      Now they had all gone and he sat on his stool in the gale. Dusk had come early. He did not look at the empty buildings above him; he ignored their lampless windows. He saw only the grey-black shape of the water that formed a channel beneath the arch. He looked beyond it to the flooded road and out into the inner harbour and through the Gaps to the open sea. All his life he had been gazing at the sea and now it was here and he was alone with it. It had reached his boots and crept in under the door behind. The yard was submerged. He sat there muttering and scratching his forearm and scowling and still there was another half-hour until high water.

      In the morning, small clouds drifted in the pale blue sky. The sun sparkled on the water. A barnacled bottle crate, stamped with ‘ST AUSTELL BREWERY’ and containing the snapped-off leg of a china doll was jammed in under the steps of Eliza Tucker’s general store. In the churchyard the roots of an old Monterey pine had prised open a newly-dug grave as it fell. The Reverend Winchester stood over it, horrified.

      The good news was that a large section of sea-wall had collapsed beyond Pritchard’s Beach and it would keep four men busy for at least a month.

      In Cooper’s Yard a thin layer of sediment lay over the cobbles. Pools of water remained on the slate flags inside; a brown line three inches up the wall marked the height of the flood. There was the soft smell of sewage.

      Croyden found his father in the old kitchen. He was sitting on his stool, scratching his forearm. He looked up at Croyden with watery eyes. He stood slowly, and without a word brushed past his son and made his way up the hill to the Crates.

      ‘Maria Five!’

      Jack and Croyden were bringing the Maria V in through the Gaps, and on the end of the East Quay Jack recognised the man he had rescued from the rocks. He was waving.

      ‘Ahoy there! Maria Five!’

      Beside him was the woman in the sky-blue headscarf. Jack nudged the boat in against the quay wall, and as Croyden took a line ashore the man came up and thrust his hand over the gunwale towards Jack.

      ‘Abraham,’ he said. ‘Maurice Abraham. And my wife, Anna.’ He looked up and down the boat’s length. ‘Look, Mr er –’

      ‘Jack Sweeney.’

      ‘Mr Sweeney. I was wondering, could you take me out next time you go? I wouldn’t get in your way – just need a corner to sketch. I’m an artist, you see.’

      Jack told him to be there tomorrow morning at five-thirty.

      Croyden watched them both go, merging back into the quayside crowd. He shook his head. ‘Damn boxies.’

      

      

       CHAPTER 6

      Above Penpraze’s yard and above the withy beds, the Glaze River narrowed and there was the old crossing-point for the ferry. In years gone by, the ferry allowed smallholders to get over the river and take the twice-weekly boat to Truro market from Polmayne’s quays. Porth’s sea-captains, en route to ships in Falmouth, also relied on it. Until some years before 1914 a man named Crimea Trestain ran the ferry in a boat which, every Easter, he lovingly upturned on the shingle bar outside his cottage and painted pale pink.

      ‘Colour ’a maid’s ass,’ he explained. ‘Room aboard for eight men, six women, three sows – or a parson.’

      No one knew how old Crimea was. It was not clear whether he’d been born on the day the Crimean War broke out or the day it ended, or some other day entirely. Nor in the end could anyone remember whether it was him that gave out first or the boat, but by the Great War a new ferry – much less regular – had replaced it downstream. Crimea and Mrs Trestain disappeared up ‘Bodmin way’, the boat was laid up in Gooth Creek and the lease of Ferryman’s Cottage was bought by an artist from London. The artist was Preston Connors.

      Through Connors, the town of Polmayne and Ferryman’s Cottage began to acquire a certain status among painters and writers in London. A new strain of incomers sought out lodgings there. They spent their days perched on clifftops or sauntering thoughtfully through the creekside woods. In the evenings they crammed into the main room of Ferryman’s Cottage or gathered on the shingle beach outside. They had al fresco meals and made impromptu music. They talked. All were stirred by the remoteness of the place, and by the immanent beauty of the river and the woods above it. After his first stay in Polmayne the watercolourist Russell Flower wrote to his host: ‘You have found a wonderful place, dear Connors. The mystical buttress of Pendhu Point opens up mineshafts of perception in man …’

      It was at about this time that the first of Polmayne’s net lofts was converted to an artist’s studio. The people of Polmayne became used to coming across semi-circles of easels on the quays or around the holy well. The painters became known as ‘boxies’ for the wooden cases they carried. In the summers before the war, many of the town’s young men, including Croyden Treneer and his brother Charlie, learned that they could earn sixpence for stripping off and cavorting in the coves around Pendhu while L.J. Price – in velveteen coat, hobnailed boots and cravat – sat on the rocks and painted them.

      After the war, Preston Connors and Mrs Connors, now in their late fifties, moved up to Wicca House. The cottage continued as a haunt for artists. Throughout the twenties, an ever more colourful group СКАЧАТЬ