The Main Cages. Philip Marsden

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СКАЧАТЬ rocks made the water. It ran smoothly among their low summits, made eddies over those that remained just below the surface. The long swells rose and fell against them.

      He drifted in among the rocks and came to the place where a channel ran between the two parts of the largest one, Maenmor. With each swell, the water sluiced through the gap and Jack held the boat off for a moment. The gap at its narrowest was about six feet wide, perhaps thirty feet long. He looked at it a long time, holding the boat still against the tide. It was dark between the rocks and he squinted to see in. He then spun the boat round, took two swift strokes and shipped the paddles. The bows shot into the gap. They did not swing but with the weight of the boat kept true. The sun was blotted out by the high rock above and the air was suddenly cool. The boat slowed and he felt the brush of weed against the hull. Then the bows started to swing and the stern nudged the rocks. He leaned over and his hand came up against the wall and he pushed off and all at once was out again, into the sun and the warmth and the still water.

      He started to row again. He spotted a smooth patch in the water and shipped his paddles again and leaned over the side. The sun’s rays haloed his head and he could see down into the water, through the dust-motes of plankton, to the shadowy form of a rock. Oarweed flopped about beside it, swaying as the swells passed over it – back and forth, back and forth. And that is the image that remained with him from his early days in Polmayne – of his own lone figure suspended over the side of a boat, staring down into the water, while from below rose the half-hidden shape of a rock.

      That August Jack Sweeney bought his own boat. He sold his mother’s diamond ring, gave Mrs Cuffe four months’ rent and walked up the Glaze River to Penpraze’s yard. He had already discovered the place on his wanderings. Just beyond the church was a pair of black tarred sheds and on the larger one a sign: ‘P. PENPRAZE, SHIP, YACHT & BOAT BUILDER, BLOCK & SPAR-MAKER & SHIPSMITH’.

      Inside, years of sawdust and paint-chippings had been trodden down to form an uneven, hard-packed floor. The roof was hung with wrights’ moulds and assorted spars rested on the beams. Peter Penpraze blew the dust from a varnished half-model and told him: ‘Fourteen foot six, grown oak frames, timbers of pitch pine, oak garboards, elm keel. Whatever thwarts you like, Mister, and a good locker astern. Lovely little boat, steady as a rock in a blow, pound a foot.’

      Three weeks later, on a cloudless afternoon, Jack rowed between the Gaps and moored his boat in the inner harbour for the first time. That evening Whaler tap-tapped his way along the Town Quay and Mrs Cuffe drained a bottle of stout over the boat’s stem, saying: ‘Blessed be this craft, and blessed be all her crafty tasks.’

      Over the coming days Jack brought out the lines he had been preparing – the eye-spliced painter, the stern-line, the rope fender, and a few he had made up for good measure. He bought a small galvanised grapnel and spliced that on too.

      He began potting. Whaler put him onto Benny Stone, a cousin of sorts, and a man half-crippled from twenty years of crabbing. From Benny Stone, Jack acquired a set of inkwell pots – ‘Woven from best Penpraze withies, Mr Swee, three seasons’ use’ – and a great deal of advice: ‘Haul at low water … use shore crabs to catch the wrasse, use the wrasse for the lobster … put out your old pots March-time, save the new for better weather … find a pitch round the Cages and ee’ll not go wrong.’

      Rights to the potting grounds were divided up along complicated lines of allegiance, decided either by ties of blood or by any one of a dozen tacit fraternities. Jack rowed around the grounds and on an old Admiralty chart shaded in where he saw other pots. He ringed the other places marked ‘R’ (rocks) and ‘ST’ (stones) and on fine days took out a greased lead and plumbed the water, recording where sand was stuck to the grease, and where it came up clean.

      But his early potting was not a success. He experimented with different sites – west of Kidda Head, down towards Porth, east of Hemlock Cove. In three weeks his efforts yielded little more than spider crabs, velvets, devils, a few small lobsters and a number of conger. He lost a third of his pots in a gale, and another string from leaving too short a head-rope at springs. When he rowed back through the Gaps the men on Parliament Bench watched him with their cold, omniscient stares.

      In late October the weather came in and he stored his pots and kicked his heels around the town. On Armistice Day he saw the luggers leave Polmayne for Plymouth and one afternoon on the East Quay he met a young woman from Devon called Alice. She had red-brown hair the colour of fallen leaves and was working in the kitchens of the Antalya. He took her out rowing and she showed him the slate grotto of St Pinnock’s holy well. Alice said the waters were known in the town to cure barren women. In bed she would sing softly as he held her, and her eyes fill with tears.

      In the middle of December, Polmayne’s luggers returned from Plymouth; they loaded the herring nets and went back east for several more weeks. Jack found a note under his door: ‘Dear Jack, it’s lonely here even though you’re kind. I gone back home to my people. Goodbye, Alice.’

      That Christmas Jack accepted an invitation from his great-aunt Bess to spend the week in Bridport. He passed a few days in her hot and over-decorated rooms. On the third night he went into town and got drunk and fell asleep fully clothed. In the morning mud stains covered the foot of the counterpane and he told his aunt Bess he was leaving. She said Cornwall was not the place for him. ‘You’re a Sweeney, Jack, this is where you belong.’

      January swept in over Polmayne with its two-day gales and its grey, restless seas. Squalls dashed around Pendhu Point, driving the water in the coves into chest-deep scuds of foam. Along the front, shop signs swung and squeaked in the wind. Jack brought his boat into Bethesda, upturned it on two sawn-off barrels and rubbed it and primed it and re-glossed its clinker hull. He went to see Benny Stone with an armful of withies. His first pots looked less like inkwells than doughnuts but in time he produced something serviceable. He counted off the days until March. He was running short of money.

      One morning in late January he was walking on Pritchard’s Beach. It was a bright morning and the beach was scattered with the detritus of another storm. Squinting into the sun he spotted a figure pushing a wheelbarrow up the strand. The man was struggling to keep it going through the shingle. Jack recognised his black smock and the sand-coloured beret – it was Mrs Cuffe’s nephew, Croyden Treneer.

      Setting the barrow down, Croyden caught his breath. ‘That’s some bloody heavy beast!’ He bent to light a cigarette and tossed away the match.

      ‘What is it?’

      Croyden pulled aside the weed on top of the barrow and Jack glimpsed beneath it a stretch of leathery skin. And he smelt it. He put a sleeve to his nose.

      ‘Dolphin. Put him in under my potatoes and they’ll come up lovely.’

      Croyden leaned on the front of the barrow and shuffled the pebbles with his boot. ‘Started potting yet?’ he asked.

      ‘Not yet.’

      Croyden said nothing but stood for some time smoking in silence. Then he flicked away his cigarette, picked up the barrow and said, ‘You won’t get nowhere with it! I was you, I’d go back to England.’

      

      

       CHAPTER 2

      Croyden СКАЧАТЬ