Dark, Salt, Clear Page 3
Where the Swordy is the fisherman’s pub, this second pub, a mere block away along the front, is the central sun (or the Star, in this case) around which the rest of the village, particularly those slightly older residents, revolve. I spot Denise and Lofty at the bar and rush over to introduce them to my new friends. Denise grins at me before straightening herself up to play the role of my new guardian. ‘Who are you, then?’ she says sternly to the boys in our group. ‘And what are you doing with Lamorna?’
After that, Denise propels me round the pub, introducing me as: ‘This is Lamorna, she wants to know about fishing’, which prompts a wide range of responses as people helpfully give me a quick lowdown on the industry: ‘It’s a great equaliser, the sea … I don’t think at sea, I go blank … You better watch yourself for seasickness out there, I know people who’ve got so dehydrated with it, they died … That’s not true … It is: they had a heart attack … But that’s not the seasickness, then … Yeah, but I bet it didn’t help … We’re the last of a forgotten species … Not like it was, though … You wait for that pull, girl. You won’t be able to leave this place … EU’ve fucked us … Haddock quotas pitiful … Bloody Frenchies … It’s a relief when he goes out to sea, he becomes a right nightmare if he’s on solid ground too long … You’re not planning on going out on one of those trawlers yourself, are you? It’s dangerous out there …’
The pubs of Newlyn are places of refuge for bleary-eyed fishermen just returned from sea. ‘When you first come in,’ one called Nathan later tells me while we drink coffee together in his galley, ‘you literally do not know what to do with yourself. And you’re tired; you are just so bleeding tired that the easiest way out is to go to the pub and turn your brain right off.’
Seeking sanctuary in the pub becomes a way of numbing yourself within an environment that itself does not feel quite of the land, more an extension of your time at sea – filled with gum-booted men straight off their boats who retain the strong aroma of fish. When I ask Ben Gunn if he misses fishing, he says: ‘Why would I? It’s all right here with me in the pubs.’ He can enter into any conversation and immediately feel himself re-immersed in the world of fishing. On Ben’s business card for his art, in lieu of an address, it simply says: ‘Meet me in the Swordfish’. Fishermen can linger here, letting the time of fishing be drawn out and recreated through colourful renditions of tales from sea – that is, until their wives or partners come marching down the road and drag them home before they can spend their entire week’s pay packet on beer.
Somehow, we have returned to the Swordy without my noticing. The mood has altered since we left. The children are gone and an uneasier spirit pervades the place. In every night out there exists that ineluctable shift towards darkness from which, try as you might, you cannot return. This particular darkness is the colour of most of my memories in the Swordy – a dim, melancholic tint washed over its interior. A woman ordering a drink next to me announces to the bar that, generations ago, before it was a pub, this was the home of a very severe woman called Granny Jenkin who was a staunch Salvationist. ‘You better hope she isn’t looking down at her old place now,’ the woman leers, spilling her pint onto the already beer-soaked carpet. Only a few figures are left dancing, but it is not really a dance any longer, more an absent-minded swaying performed in isolation by each figure. A group of dead-eyed men, whom I am sure had not been there earlier, are slumped along the bar below the cheery photographs of departed fishermen. I watch as one of the men’s eyes drift up the wall to focus on a particular image, which in the gloom does not look wholly unlike the man himself. Perhaps these are lost fishermen, the ghosts compelled to haunt the bars they knew when living.
Not wanting to go to bed just yet, our group forms a plan to continue the revelries at a club in Penzance. We pick a cab up from Newlyn Bridge, taking with us a fisherman who has inexplicably lost both of his shoes. When he offers to pay for the taxi the boys refuse: ‘You’re a fisherman, mate. You’re not paying.’ Though the times may change, fishermen retain their status as heroes of the town – complex and at times difficult heroes but heroes nonetheless. As the taxi sets out towards Penzance, we wind the windows down and howl ‘CHEERSSS ’N’ DEAD!’ into the night.
Time flips forward again and we are at the armpit end of the night in a sweaty Penzance club. It plays cheesy chart music while, perplexingly, at the same time projecting music videos of nineties songs onto a large screen beside the bar. We stomp about in trainers, still muddy from the Lamorna Walk, amongst girls tottering in high heels and lads in rugby shirts competitively downing beers.
A moment later we are stumbling back along Penzance promenade to Newlyn, each of us cradling a bag of curry sauce-smothered chips. My new friends skim rocks out into the sea and chase each other in and out of the broken waves pulling up the beach. I imagine an alternative adolescence in which I would have done this drunken journey every weekend, scuffing my feet along the pebble beach and letting the sea spray clear my booze-fogged head. It seems far more magical than the anonymous night buses I took home through sleepless London.
At the border between Penzance and Newlyn, in front of a giant, bronze statue of a fisherman staring out to the sea, we cheerily hug one another goodbye. And, after a few false starts along seemingly identical, unlit cobblestone lanes in the Fradgan, I manage to get myself to Denise and Lofty’s front door and tiptoe up to my room. I go to sleep thinking of Marlow Moss’s ashes scattered out from Lamorna Cove – wondering how many other people have requested that their ashes be thrown into the sea, to swirl ever onwards, each atom dispersed across the oceans. If we could track down those burned pieces, perhaps we would find that they do not swirl randomly at all. Instead, their place in relation to one another, blown through the waters, would comprise a vast, complex constellation, the ultimate map of their life expressed by the waves.
I find it hard to think of my time in Newlyn as contingent in the way the word has come to mean – fortuitous, down to chance, disorderly. If it is contingent, it is in relation to its scientific terminology – an affinity of nature, a close connection. The contingency I encounter while in Newlyn simultaneously acts upon everyone else in the town, drawing us one to the other. It was this that drew me towards the Lamorna Walk, to which Isaac was also pulled, to which the whole community was lifted up and borne along together, and towards which my mother’s thoughts were similarly pulled when, approaching her forty-first birthday, she discovered she would be finally having a baby, and began to rack her brain for names. The physical world informs the pattern of our lives and we give ourselves up to it, marvelling always at the things it brings us.
3
VESICA PISCIS
Before I arrived in Newlyn I was told time and time again that to secure a berth on a working trawler would be nigh impossible – no fisherman would want some girl getting in their way, or worse, ruining the whole trip if her seasickness got so bad she had to be taken back to land. Luckily for me, the first fisherman I speak to, David, one of two St Ives brothers who take it in turns to skipper the twin-rig trawler the Crystal Sea, is known for letting scientists, artists and students come out for trips on his boat – ‘Even if you’re sick everywhere, livens the trip up a bit’ – and agrees to my coming along for a week. I only learn after my trip of the rivalry between Newlyn and St Ives fishermen, the latter referring to themselves as Hakes, while the Newlyn men, who harbour a long-standing resentment towards the uppity north coasters, give them the more offensive nickname: Scaly Backs.
My first trawler experience is, however, cut short to a four-day trip due to the arrival of force 8 gales that batter the Crystal Sea from all angles as we head home. Despite its brevity, I feel content with my first experience of deep-sea fishing, proudly telling people I have done trawling. But fishing is more addictive than I imagine and the desire to go out to sea once more spreads like a rash across my body. This time I want to be out for longer, I want to get more involved, maybe with a more roughly hewn, typically
Cornish, crew, on one of those rusting crafts I eye up on afternoon strolls around Newlyn harbour.
Months later, around dusk sometime in late November, I bump into the Filadelfia’s barrel-bellied skipper, Don, outside the Star pub. I know Don a bit already and reckon he and his boat fit the criteria for my second trawler trip perfectly.
‘Don,’ I ask, trying to make my request sound casual. ‘Do you think there’s any way I could come to sea with you?’
‘Don’t see why not,’ he shrugs, scratching the grey stubble under his neck that he leaves unshaven when he’s out at sea. ‘When’s good?’
‘Next week?’
‘Yep, sure, my darling.’ He finishes his cigarette and heads back into the pub, calling back over his shoulder: ‘See you next week then, Lamorna.’
And just like that the date is set, as if we were only going for a beer.
The next Monday I am walking down Newlyn’s North Pier carrying a bag of wellies, several fleeces and a thick winter sleeping bag. There is a sharp bite in the air, which feels far more foreboding than the balmy morning that I headed out on the Crystal Sea back in May. The vague shape of the coming week on the Filadelfia looms before me, arresting and intimidating.
Each time I go on a new boat, I feel it is like meeting a stranger unwilling to give anything of herself away, just yet. I learn that the Filadelfia (PZ – Penzance – 542), is a 79-foot beam trawler. She was built in 1969, the same year man felt the Moon beneath his feet for the first time and, like Apollo 11 she is a voyager, transporting man away from familiar landscapes into the unknown, protecting her crew from the mysterious waters existing just outside her thick, steel, yellow-painted shell. It is often said we know more about the entirety of space than we do of the oceans whose ebbing borders touch our earth, as if it were more natural that the human eye be trained upwards through telescopes than down into the world’s depths. The partial nature of our knowledge of the sea feels almost a relief to me: there exists somewhere still that we have not mapped, whose every intimate part we have not inspected and dissected.
Originally worked by fishermen in Holland, the Filadelfia was not carried across the seas to Newlyn until 1987, along with three other fishing vessels hammered and riveted into existence in the same Dutch boatyard. While we are out at sea these sibling vessels stay close to us, their lights ballasts in the otherwise formless nights.
Your boat is much more than your office. It is where you sleep, eat, work, brush your teeth, smoke, laugh, watch telly and wait to go home. Each vessel becomes a figure to whom the fisherman feels deeply connected for the rest of his life. Before I set out on the Filadelfia, Perry, her previous skipper, tells me that if I go into the third bunk on the right-hand side of the sleeping cabin and look up, I’ll find his name scored there, upon the ceiling. Like love hearts etched into tree bark, the impressions fishermen leave on the boats they have worked on throughout their lives is proof to future generations that they too once knew and loved them. In the French philosopher Paul Valéry’s meditation on seashells, he distinguishes between a shell carved by a man, which must be carved from the outside in, so that it always bears some sign of its creator, and the mollusc, which ‘exudes its shell’, the two forming together, equally necessary to one another. Day by day the metal armour of each fisherman’s vessel grows around them, the outside world less able to perforate it as they are enveloped more deeply into the folds of their shells.
Don stands on the raised wheelhouse balcony smoking, leaning right over the bulwarks while the Filadelfia spits out inky fuel into the harbour waters. As I watch him from under the shadows of the covered part of the harbour, Valéry’s mollusc comes to mind – a creature of the sea, half-exposed from his protective casement, blinking up at the unfamiliar sight of the world outside his shell. Don spots me and yells out to sling my bag aboard and climb on over. I throw the bag, remembering mid-chuck that it contains my camera and wince as it lands on a coil of ropes on the deck. Before I follow it I take a moment to push my heels into the ground, holding on to the sensation of solidness, letting it steady me one last time. At last I jump down, missing the last few rungs of the harbour ladder, check my camera is still intact, and enter the galley.
The compact design common to almost all trawler interiors is uniformly satisfying. Tables are built into the walls, drawers fold away, fridges are tucked into corners and every door is kept from bursting open in rough seas by hinges locking them in place. In their streamlined sleekness, trawler galleys are a bit like Frankfurt Kitchens – the world’s first fitted kitchens, devised in 1926 by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, and designed to take up as little space as possible in order to fit in the small German apartments of the inter-war years. On fishing boats, appliances and cupboards hug the walls and handles are barely visible: each part of the galley is able to fold right in on itself like a person who is self-conscious of their body and manages to collapse themselves away into the corners of spaces. In the trawler galleys I have seen, tables are covered with sticky blue mats to prevent plates from sliding around and have racks fixed on top of them with holes to place mugs (these usually accumulate multiple packets of baccy and crucial condiments like mayonnaise during the week at sea). Benches lift up to reveal additional storage space for spices and multi-pack crisps. Ovens are usually dinky, with two hotplates on the stove, and this is kept scalding hot while at sea, so as to keep the whole space warm. Finally, each galley has a TV fitted above the doorway that stays on night and day, providing an unending background burble.
Considering our call time of 9 a.m. is fast approaching, I expect to see the crew rushing about unwinding ropes and checking gear on my arrival. But there is only one other person in the galley, rolling a fag and cradling a steaming mug of coffee. He doesn’t seem remotely surprised by my arrival. I ask him where everyone is and aren’t we meant to be heading off any moment now, while at the same time trying to match the fisherman to the names Don’s provided me with. There is Kyle, the youngest member of the crew with bright red hair and beard; Scottish Stevie, and the mate, Andrew – ‘the Lothario’, so Don tells me. The man rolling a fag has a shining bald head, salt-and-pepper stubble around his jawline, a Cornish accent and the flirtiest smile I’ve ever seen. This must be Andrew. There is also something disconcerting about his appearance; he is the first fisherman over the age of forty I have met who does not have a beer gut. I regard his slim figure suspiciously as he looks out of the grubby porthole at Don, who is chatting to another fisherman on a boat nearby.
‘When Don asks what time we’re meeting,’ Andrew explains, ‘you always have to ask him “is that Don Time, or actual time?”’ – ‘Don Time’ being a good hour behind Daylight Saving Time. I’d already experienced this warp in time in which Don operates. When we first met, back in April, he was an hour late and began with the excuse ‘I don’t believe in clock changes – what have the farmers ever done for us?’, before jovially admitting a few minutes later: ‘Nah, I was just hanging big time.’
I clamber down below to deposit my things and take a look at where I’ll be sleeping for the next week, wanting to keep myself busy to prevent my nerves from catching up with me. At the bottom of the ladder I find a large cabin with maroon carpets and no portholes, darkness seeming to gather around its edges like excess material. There is an inveterate shabbiness to the cabin. Along its edges are six discrete cubbyholes, each the size of a bus window: these contain our bunks. There is also a larger, more conventional bed covered with a squashy pink duvet that awkwardly juts out into the middle of the room. Andrew informs me that this bed was built especially for Don because the other bunks were too small for him and hurt his back. Several of the cubbyholes have shiny curtains draped part way across them, while others have makeshift equivalents – towels or old t-shirts tucked into them. Each contains a pillow and sleeping bag from which some of the more personal items spill out: a few thriller novels, an extra jumper or two, a couple of Lion bars.
I duck my
head under the third and final bunk on the right-hand side and see etched into the ceiling ‘PERRY X’. Between Perry’s old bunk and Don’s superior sleeping arrangements is an empty bunk with no modesty hangings at all, which I assume must be mine. It is nothing like the luxury skipper’s bed I was given on the Crystal Sea, which was separated from the crew’s main sleeping area. Since no one is about, I squeeze myself into the bunk to get a better sense of the space. It is like being inside a coffin, but one in which the relatives of the dearly departed have massively undercalculated the length of the corpse and have folded the legs up in an undignified manner.
Curled up in the foetal position, I flick on the light switch directly above my head. It has the same two settings as the cabin lights in the Crystal Sea: either a clinical white or a seedy blue. I lie there for a while inside the Filadelfia’s dark stomach and listen to her groan slightly as she grinds back through her long memory of the changing crews and times in Newlyn.
Fishermen tend to speak of past time in terms of fish – from the pilchard days of the eighteenth century to the mackerel years of the 1960s, before pilchards were virtually wiped out, to the decades of cod wars with Iceland, through ling, hake and bass. When she first arrived in Cornwall in the late 1980s, the Filadelfia would have experienced the tail end of the heady days of British fishing. It was during this period that the excesses of the seventies – when fishermen across the globe were practically unchecked in their ravaging of the seas – came back to bite them with the resultant collapse in fish populations. After this, stringent quotas were brought in to regulate the amount of fish that could be caught: each country was given a yearly total catch limit based on a scientific assessment of the seas’ resources, which was then divided amongst ports and the number of fishing boats in each port. This gave a maximum quantity of fish that a boat might catch yearly, though owners have been able to buy up more quota where available. In the 1990s, the Filadelfia would have heard her crew silently praying in their bunks for better times, as they despaired over the lack of fish and money to be made in fishing, which many thought spelled the end of the industry. Over 29 per cent of the UK fleet has gone since then. More recently she would have noticed the weary, furrowed brows of her men relax slightly as the graphs of fish stocks curved up once again. She carries the cares of all those who have slept in her cabin, who have dreamt the strange dreams you dream at sea.