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  We turn off the main road to snake our way through the alleyways that make up Newlyn’s fishermen’s quarter and park alongside a small front garden decorated with potted plants. Through a low doorway, under which Lofty has to duck, is an immaculately kept cottage with a living room that opens out onto a patio garden facing the harbour. From the sofa, two of the biggest cats I have ever seen eye me with suspicion as Lofty and I strain to drag my huge case up the narrow stairs to my new room.

  That night we sit together in the lounge, trays piled high with buttery baked potatoes balanced on our laps, engaging in uncertain, polite chatter in the silences between the soaps playing on the TV. Worn out from the journey and my mind’s ruminating doubts about the coming stay, I finish as much of the meal as I can and head up to bed. Out in the darkness below my window, I hear the low clunking of heavy machinery, as crates of fish are unloaded from boats to be weighed and prepared in the market for the dawn auction, and a couple of nocturnal seagulls squawking over fish guts. A strong wind picks up and whips through the alley. Above it all I hear the sea, raging against the harbour walls.

  2

  WAY DOWN TO LAMORNA

  I wake to the same muffled booms coming from the harbour that had lulled me to sleep the previous night. The spare room is pale green, the duvet patterned with geometric fish, the tail of one becoming the body of the next. On the wall opposite the bed there is a blue imitation of a captain’s wheel, the interior spokes replaced by a small, round mirror. The smell of cooked bacon rises up the stairs and I dress quickly to join Denise and Lofty for breakfast.

  My entrance startles them, as if they had momentarily forgotten the stranger they had accepted into their home the day before. It is not until I see them again – Lofty’s head slightly bent so he can fit under the low ceilings, Denise by the stove and their two round cats, Teggy and Izzy, lolled out across the sofa – that I am entirely certain it is real, either.

  Over our bacon sandwiches Denise tells me that today, Good Friday, happens to be the day of the ‘Lamorna Walk’, and might I like to go, as it’s always ‘a right laugh’. The Walk is a long-standing Newlyn tradition, I find out, that involves almost the whole town taking the coastal path up to Lamorna Cove for a rowdy piss-up at the Lamorna Wink pub, before everyone, much merrier than they’d been on the journey there, unites once more to kick a football back to Newlyn. No one seems to know the walk’s origins, but it accrues more ridiculous elements every year.

  As my first day in the town falls on the same day as a traditional walk to my namesake, it feels serendipitous and too good an opportunity to miss. I grab my coat and head out towards the harbour, agreeing to meet Denise and Lofty in the Star after, where the festivities will continue late into the night.

  I take the sloping Cliff Road that leads up to the outskirts of the town, passing along the perimeter of the bay, and join the flowing crowds heading to Lamorna Cove. After just a few miles the coastal road draws you back down into one of the prettiest villages on the south coast. My parents would often take me to Mousehole as a child. We would sit together in the Old Coastguard Hotel which looks out over St Clement’s Isle: a hermit was once said to have lived on the isle, though what kind of hermit would choose to place himself so near to the temptation of the land I cannot imagine. My mother would read The Mousehole Cat to me, its swirling blue, purple and green illustrations still so evocative: the cat’s storm-striped paw taunting the fishing boats; the quiet fishing hero, Tom Bawcock, going out alone to catch fish for his starving village when no one else will risk heading out in such fierce conditions; every inhabitant of Mousehole waiting with bright torches along the harbour walls to guide Tom’s red-sailed fishing boat home to safety and, finally, the whole village coming together for a triumphant fish feast crowned with the Cornish staple of Stargazy Pie, decorated with fish heads and tails.

  Mousehole looks exactly how you would paint the idealised fishing village. And yet, in the smoothing brush strokes the artist has applied to it, it seems all the messiness of life has been wiped from it. There is none of the clamouring unruliness that I am immediately confronted with in Newlyn: no rough edges, no tangled nets or thumping machinery, and rarely do you actually see the fishermen walk by in their fish and blood-smeared oilskins. When boats do leave Mousehole’s harbour they can be seen dolling – a Cornish word used to describe boats moving idly up and down the sea. One of the Newlyn fishermen, ‘Cod’, lived in Mousehole for a while (I ask about his nickname, expecting some dramatic fishing tale, but he simply replies that as a youngster he wore a jumper emblazoned with ‘Cape Cod’ and the name stuck). He tells me that nowadays Mousehole has become so flat, so without life, that once an American couple in matching shorts, flip-flops and baseball caps came up to him and said ‘Do they pay you guys to be here, or what?’ The cottages are perfectly quaint but when you look closely, most have signs in the windows indicating which Cornish cottage website they can be booked from.

  The tidal harbour has been drunk dry this bright Good Friday morning, leaving the boats naked, barnacles exposed, their tapering rudders driven into the mud; it feels almost rude to stare at them in this state, without the sea protecting their modesty. Up until the sixteenth century, Mousehole, not Newlyn, was the principal fishing port in the Southwest. In 1595 a Spanish naval squadron landed at Mousehole and sacked it, burning down almost every building, before continuing their violence upon the coast in Newlyn and Penzance. Mousehole never quite recovered from its destruction and Newlyn’s port, from where boats could come and go at any hour uninhibited by the passage of the tide, soon assumed dominance.

  I leave the village and cut up towards Lamorna. The single-decker Mousehole bus, bright pink with a cartoon mouse painted along its side, careers past me on its way back to Penzance. The landscape becomes harsher the further you travel towards Land’s End, the cliff path climbing up and up until the glimpsed sandy coves look little more than fingernail clippings; lavender-coloured spring squill, heather in blue and green bushes of every shade, and pink tufts of thrift, erupt from the cliff side. And, opening out in the distance, Lamorna Cove itself – a recess cut back so deep into the coast that the precipitous granite cliffs surrounding its crescent of sea look out of scale. On clouded days the cove can feel like one of the most foreboding places on earth, as the land and sea turn black and the many boulders left high up on the cliff face from previous rockfalls look ready to descend to the Atlantic, taking the few seaward cottages with them. But today, with the sun gleaming, the whole cove is lit up, rendering the sea a deep, vivid blue and the carpeted cliffs a verdant green. The cafe is filled with visitors enjoying chips and ice creams and watching for the occasional scuba-diver breaking the surface of the deeper water out beyond the rocks.

  At the beginning of the Second World War a London-born constructivist artist, and one of the founding members of the Abstraction-Création association in Paris, fled France on a tanker and found herself in Lamorna Cove. This was not the first time that Marlow Moss had run away to Cornwall. While studying at the Slade School of Art in London she had suffered an emotional breakdown and escaped westwards for her recovery. It was after this retreat that she replaced her given name Marjorie with that of Marlow and moved to Paris to start a Bohemian life there, living amongst a group of avant-garde artists that included Piet Mondrian. That second occasion Marlow Moss came to Cornwall, this time as a result of global rather than personal turmoil, she did not leave again. She found a cottage and a studio in Lamorna and remained there for the rest of her life, the village gradually becoming accustomed to the androgynous figure she cut – with cropped hair, riding breeches, silk cravats. After she died, her ashes were sprinkled into the waves at the edge of the cove.

  Moss chose Lamorna for herself. My connection to the cove was established before I was even born. It is strange finding yourself in the place you were named after, experiencing some inexpressible affinity with such a wildly unpredictable stretch of coastline. In her decision to name me
Lamorna, my mother unwittingly bound me to Cornwall. I think it was her way of retaining a link to the place of her birth once she had dug her seventeen-year-old roots from the sands of Lelant and replanted them in the cracked pavements of London. My name has defined the way I conceive of myself. Every time I meet a new person and they say: Wow, sounds exotic! Is that Italian/French/Spanish…? I am asked to acknowledge and, in doing so, reaffirm the ties between myself and this part of Cornwall, explaining to blank nods of encouragement: Actually, it’s a small cove in far south-west Cornwall – near where my mum’s family is from. This is how a land enters your psyche.

  It was my mum who first taught me Cornwall. She showed me how to let it become an antidote to unhappiness and an opening leading back to one’s childhood. When I used to look out across Lelant beach – a few minutes’ walk from the cottage that had once been my great-grandmother’s, next to the bungalow where my mother grew up and my grandmother lived out the last years of her life – my mind would plunge below the sea to find imagined monsters and mermaids. I would put my ear to the cliff cracks, split open by time, and listen to the dull hammering of the Cornish Knockers – malevolent, cave-dwelling spirits, ‘three-feet high with squinting eyes and mouths from ear to ear’, who would fold back into darkness any time a tin miner tried to catch one of them in the act of bringing the walls down around them. And each time I returned to London, I would feel the absence of that ancestral land sitting deep in my body for weeks, a sense that nothing looked quite right, that the light was wrong somehow.

  The day before I left London for Newlyn, I had sat down with my family to examine our Cornish ancestry via various old documents and letters that Mum had kept stuffed in a cabinet in our living room. It is a genealogy that grows uncertain in its backwaters: great-grandmother Ginna, who played bridge at Lelant golf club and dressed in long slacks in the style of Marlene Dietrich while the other elderly ladies of the village were still in long dresses and shawls; generations before her, brewers who made beer in Redruth and sold the company to St Austell Ales; prior to that, hazily drawn figures wandering along Mousehole’s tightly wound harbour, who we both like to imagine may themselves have been fishwives and fishermen. They are all there, sprinkled across the west of the county, waiting for the next member of the family to find her place along the Cornish archipelago.

  As I approach the Lamorna Wink, a hum of voices echoes towards me and, beneath it, the unmistakeable sound of an electric guitar. Once at the pub’s car park, I see that a stage has been set up and on it, a rock band is playing Eagles covers to a small gathering of grey-haired men and women, and a few smoking teenagers partially concealed behind a white van. Next to the stage is a marquee serving beer to the overflow from the pub, from where a queue is snaking all the way down the lane. Every few seconds bursts of laughter erupt from various groups arranged around the pub garden, their faces rosy, their pints spilling onto the grass unnoticed. Be brave, Lamorna, I tell myself. You’ve come this far; you can get a pint on your own.

  I find a sunny spot to lean against the wall with my Doom Bar ale and tap my feet to the music, growing more confident with each sip. A few feet away from me I notice a tall boy wearing a pair of round glasses who seems to be staring right at me. I tap my feet harder, pretending to be immersed in the music. A moment later he comes over. ‘This may seem strange,’ he says, ‘but are you Lamorna?’

  I grin apologetically at the boy as if to say: That’s me!, reckoning that agreeing yes, I am Lamorna, in the Lamorna Wink pub, in Lamorna Cove, on the Lamorna Walk will probably be the most absurd declaration of identity I’ll ever have to make. The boy tells me that he is Isaac, a friend of a friend from university, whose family have been Newlyn fishermen for generations and who was informed by our mutual friend of my coming. I’ve only recently arrived, I tell him, and don’t know a soul in Newlyn apart from the couple I’m staying with, who I met for the first time yesterday. Isaac, I soon learn, is one of the most generous, non-judgemental humans on the planet. Without a second’s thought he pulls me over to introduce me to his circle of friends, who riotously call back: ‘All right, Lamorna!’ and in the same breath tell me I have a lot of catching up to do, so I better down that beer and buy another.

  The afternoon passes in a spin of drinks, the sixties and seventies classics played in the background providing our score. I learn the lives of those around me through snippets of half-shouted conversation. Almost all of this gang, and most of their close friends too, left Newlyn for university, proceeded to get jobs outside Cornwall and are only back now for the Easter weekend. It becomes a recurring motif; every person my age who grew up in Newlyn expresses a deep sense of longing when they tell the tale of their unavoidable migration from Cornwall, like birds for whom the necessity of chasing new, more suitable lands does not make leaving where they were born any less painful. Each time you come back, they tell me, you are slightly less like the rest of the town. Your accent is that bit softer, your views more at odds with those of the people you knew in school who have still never left Newlyn and probably never will. ‘I’m Newlyn. That’s all I am,’ one boy announces proudly, his foot raised up on a bench. And then, almost mournfully, ‘But I can’t stay here.’

  Still, this continues to be your home. Where else, they ask me, could you find a place with a tradition like this one; where the whole town gets together for no good reason other than to drink, dance, laugh wildly and enjoy the landscape they have grown up in?

  A pint or three later and I too have given myself up to the joyousness of it all, slipping into a warm haze that carries me along with the revels. We admit that not one of us feels steady enough to join in with the football-kicking back to Newlyn part of the ritual, so one of the boys, Taylor, calls his nan to see if she will give us a lift. A few moments later, Taylor’s nan – a tiny, feisty woman – arrives to take the delinquents back home without batting an eyelid at the state of us all. I linger at the back of the group, uncertain if there is space for me, ready to say: Don’t worry, I’ll walk…, but the gang looks back and waves me over: ‘Come on then, Lamorna!’ I put down my empty glass and squeeze into the car after them. This is it now, I think, I’m in for the night.

  Taylor’s nan races along the steep country roads, winding down the window and shouting ‘Cheers ’n’ Gone!’ – an old Cornish phrase apparently – at those unsuspecting cars who politely stop for her and, when someone dares to pull out in front of her, she screeches ‘CHEERS ’N’ DEAD!’ We throw our heads back and bellow ‘CHEERS ’N’ DEAD!’ to the countryside. It becomes our battle cry for the night.

  As evening comes, I find myself in Newlyn’s Swordfish Inn for the first time – the Swordy ever after. I am met with an onslaught of drunken joy, the whole town crammed into this hot blur of a pub. Bodies teeter and thrash to a jukebox in the corner of the room, turning through an eclectic mixture of hits. Newlyners, no matter their age, do not discriminate between music genres, equally roaring along to Ed Sheeran, Queen, ABBA, the Animals, Madonna, Katy Perry and everything since and in between. I take a seat at the bar to steady myself and gaze up at the mosaic of old photographs stuck up on the walls: there are men with long beards and missing teeth, the t-shirts under their oilskins rolled up to reveal countless tattoos; groups with their arms draped round each other wearing outrageous fancy-dress outfits and posing lewdly, and individuals with traffic cones on their heads dancing on table tops. All of the images have saturated and gone foggy at the edges and so it looks as if they are all from the same time. Following my line of sight, Isaac points out some of the jolly faces in the photos: most of them are old friends of his dad, each of whom has his own rich stories attached. They’re almost all dead now, he tells me, but, when not out at sea, these men were the poets, singers, writers, intellectuals, artists and cross-dressers of Newlyn. There is no one quite like them left anymore. And yet they are remembered here in the Swordy.

  I soon reach that level of drunkenness where journeys are truncated and you seem
to shift from one location to another without having to move at all. I am head-banging with a middle-aged woman in a miniskirt and bushes of thick curly hair; I am outside in the cold, looking out at the black water of the harbour; I am in the Swordy’s smoking booth, gazing up at a painting that appears to be stapled onto the roof of the hut. ‘You like it?’ comes the grizzliest voice I have ever heard. It sounds ancient, like it had to travel a long way through time to reach me. I peer into the depths of the dingy hut. The speaker who emerges from the darkness equally has a look about him that makes me think he has seen all ends of the world.

  ‘I painted it,’ the man tells me and I notice the other boys regard him reverentially. ‘I’m Ben Gunn.’ He lifts his elegant Stetson to me briefly, saying his name with such conviction that I feel I ought to know who he is. The name sounds familiar, too, and when I tell my mother about him on the phone later she reminds me that Ben Gunn is the name of the character from Treasure Island who is left marooned all alone on the island for three years. The two men blend into one in my imagination, Ben acquiring the hollow, wounded look of the abandoned sailor with his straggly white hair and tanned face.

  This Ben, the real Ben, is a retired fisherman, who gained notoriety in a TV show called The Toughest Pubs in Britain, in which the Swordy was, impressively, ranked second. A much younger, less gruff Ben tells the camera of the time when a Frenchman dared to set foot in his pub and threatened the Cornish fishermen with a knife drawn out of his boot. Ben and two friends turfed him out the pub, breaking the door down as they kicked him through it.

  Ben’s daily routine as an artist is to smoke, stick Creedence Clearwater Revival on his record player and then paint fifteen or so rapid, messy-stroked canvases – usually seascapes, ‘but don’t ask me which way up they go afterwards’, he adds. He spends most of his time painting, putting his finished pieces up around the town, sticking them outside other pubs, above shops, in alleyways. ‘I’ll paint anything,’ he tells me proudly, ‘if it stays still long enough.’ When I go to his house a few weeks later I discover this includes every wall and ceiling, slapdashedly splattered with bright paints, and also a few harbour rocks he can see from his living-room window – ‘I just fancied it one afternoon’ he says – and they are now bright blue. I take one last look up at the messy strokes of blue above our head, before I feel myself being pulled away with the tide on to the next pub.