Philip Marsden - The Main Cages

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.’

Croyden Treneer had once been a fisherman but now he worked ashore. He picked up jobs on building sites. He grew vegetables on his ‘piece’, one of the dozen or so allotments cut out from the gorse-cleared slopes above the town. He also had two pigs which he kept in an old quarry behind his house in Rope Walk. The pigs ate barley flour and scraps and lived beneath the upturned halves of a sawn-in-half dinghy. Their names were Three and Five. One and Two had been killed in previous years but in the autumn of 1934, when it had come to killing Three, Croyden couldn’t do it. He was still a fisherman at heart and killing Three was bound to bring him bad luck. He killed Four instead.

The Treneer family had always been in Polmayne. They had been boat-builders, ropemakers and sail-cutters, huers, blowsers and triggers. They had gone to sea in drift-netters, long-liners, crabbers and shrimpers. Some had dispersed to Plymouth, America, London, taken jobs on ships and sailed to Odessa, Genoa, Bombay, Panama. They had made new homes in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, lost their lives in the Bay of Bengal, the Menai Straits, Mount’s Bay. Three Treneers had been Coxswain of Polmayne’s lifeboat. The most recent was Tommy Treneer who was not yet Cox but crew when the Adelaide foundered in the winter of 1891.

Croyden was his second son. The eldest had gone to buy a pony at Bodmin Fair in 1913 but couldn’t see one he liked, so he went to America instead. When he failed to return, Tommy marched down to the board school and took Croyden away. ‘What he don’t know now,’ he told the headmaster, ‘he don’t need to know.’ He was twelve.

Croyden worked with his father on the Good Heart seine and took to long-lining and potting when the pilchards weren’t running. At eighteen he became the youngest-ever member of the Polmayne lifeboat crew. Though small in stature, he developed enormous strength and agility. He could pull a four-foot conger from a crab pot without flinching. He could bait up a boulter line at an astonishing speed. He knew the sea bottom, the underwater valleys and peaks, the sandy plains and rocky outcrops, as if he could see it all with his own eyes. He acquired the useful faculty, when fishing, of being able to wake in his bunk precisely at the turn of the tide.

But whatever his skills as a former fisherman, Croyden had always set much greater store by a set of well-moulded rituals and beliefs. He would mutter blessings as the nets went out, always eat a fish from tail to head, not let a priest near the boat, and refuse to load gear on a Friday. Above all he would never utter the word ‘rabbit’ either on board or ashore – and if he heard anyone say it at sea, he would be forced to head for home. If he needed to talk about rabbits he called them sheep.

Croyden’s ability at sea was not matched on land. As soon as he came ashore and left the quays, he was lost. People used to say: ‘Really there’s two Croydens, like they’s twins or something.’

Even as Croyden began with the Good Heart, the days of seining were reaching an end. The pilchard shoals did not come as they once had and in 1918 the Good Heart was laid up for good. Croyden was offered a place on the Blucher, a drift-netter in Newlyn. He was given a sixth share in the catch and returned to Polmayne sporadically – either out of pocket or flush after a good splat of fish. To Tommy Treneer, Croyden’s position was a betrayal. It was the drift-nets alone that he blamed for robbing the coast of pilchards. ‘The devil’s own nets,’ he called them and refused to address a word to his son.

But the Blucher did well. One moonlit night in December 1924, some ten miles south of Mount’s Bay, they struck a shoal of herring with such perfect timing that at once a total of 114 cran of fish caught their gills in the mesh. It took seven hours to haul the nets. While the others tired, Croyden found that the deeper the fish lay about his ankles the more vigorously he could haul. His share of the catch earned him more than £52. On board that evening, he leaned back on the Blucher’s frosty deck and felt he could stretch out his cutch-stained hands and rearrange the stars. Such dazzling high spirits lasted long enough to catch the eye of Maggie North whose mother ran Newlyn’s quayside tobacconist. Croyden returned that summer, in a borrowed boat, and after the wedding took his bride away from a harbour lined with waving well-wishers, back across Mount’s Bay and around the Lizard where, as they picked up an easterly swell, Mrs Croyden Treneer scattered the nibblings of her wedding lunch into the long arc of the boat’s wash.

In the coming years Maggie grew to hate the sea and all it represented. In the early thirties both prices and shoals became ever more unpredictable. Expecting her fourth child, she said she could no longer tolerate his feast-or-famine work.

‘Fishing’s a gambler’s life, Croyden Treneer, and all you seem to do is lose.’

Croyden came ashore. He bought his first pig. He worked his piece, planting potatoes and brassicas and using an old tuck-net to keep out the birds. He found a job on the roads – laying the first tarmac on Polmayne’s only approach road. When that came to an end, he spent a winter building one of the bungalows that were beginning to ring the town and every day he was reminded that he would rather be at sea. Working on solid ground to a clock and not to the tides, dealing with straight lines and right-angles, all contributed to a faint nausea. The truth was that labouring on land made Croyden seasick.

Then under the Housing Act of 1930 a compulsory purchase order was placed on Cooper’s Yard and a dozen old cottages around it – ‘unfit for habitation … prone to flooding …’. A large site was excavated for new homes above the church. Before they were even completed these houses became known as the Crates. Suddenly in Polmayne there was work for all and Croyden found he was earning more than he ever had on the drift-netter.

His father, Tommy, still refused to speak to him. He lived in Cooper’s Yard and now he was told he must leave. He had been born there. Croyden had been born there. Treneers had always been born there. Drift-netting was one thing, said Tommy, but at least it was fishing.

‘We was always seiners,’ he growled, ‘and now look at him – putting up bloody Crates so they can pack we away.’

In early March 1935, Jack Sweeney spent a couple of days plumbing out at the Main Cages. There he stumbled on a small unclaimed area of rough ground. It ran for about fifty yards just south of the gap between Maenmor’s two peaks – the tunnel that he’d shot in his punt the summer before. It would be hard to work in any kind of a sea, but in the middle of the month came a spell of settled weather.