Philip Marsden - The Main Cages

On his first haul, he pulled seven good-sized crabs. Two days later he had five crabs and two lobsters. Within a week he had caught more than he had in the entire two months the year before. He began to make money – and on Parliament Bench they took to nodding at him as he came in. Once a week he gave part of his catch to Mrs Cuffe. Whaler told him about the lobsters he had seen the size of dogs and a crab in the tropics that would scamper up the palm trees and happily pick dates with his claws.

One evening at the end of March a freshening westerly began to flick at the wave-tops of the bay. Put out your old pots March-time … Jack had put out the lot. He cursed himself as he pulled on his boots and ran out through the yard.

Tommy Treneer shouted from the Bench as he passed: ‘Should take better bloody care o’ your gear!’

At the Main Cages the seas were already large. He rowed round into the lee of Maenmor. His marker buoys were rising and falling on a long swell. He hauled the first string quickly. It was mid-tide and flooding. The line was heavy. It jammed tight against the gunwale as he pulled and the boat dipped with each tug. Then came the bump of the first pot against the boat and he hauled it in. He extracted a good hen from inside. From that first line of pots he had three crabs. He rowed over to the others.

On the other side of Maenmor he could hear the seas breaking hard against the rock but for the time being he was sheltered. Through the tunnel came the roar of surf, and sudden white surges of water.

The other string was even heavier. The first pot had a spider crab and he threw it back. The pots were mounting in the bows and the boat’s roll was growing wider. He knew he’d lose some pots now; he’d never be able to row them all back in such a sea. As the third pot came in, the boat slipped off the top of a wave and Jack fell. The line slid back over the side and he found himself eye to eye with a cock crab on the bottom boards. He tried again. As the pot came up, still beneath the surface, he could see the dark form of a lobster. It was a vast lobster. Unable to fit in the pot it had its thorax wrapped around the outside. Its claw was so big that it was that that had jammed in the spout. Jack balanced the pot on the gunwale. With one hand he flicked a series of running hitches around both pot and lobster, lashing to the withies the starry sky of the creature’s back, the boxer’s forearm of its one free claw. He then cut the rope and abandoned the rest to the storm.

By the time he reached the quays, the water in the boat was slopping at his ankles. Within half an hour, a crowd had gathered to view the giant lobster. It was measured at 29 ¼ inches tail to claw and even Whaler, who came down to the quay and ran his fingers over its full length, admitted it was ‘a beauty’.

‘In Australia,’ he said, ‘I saw one like him, only –’

‘He was ten feet long, eh Whaler?’ teased Toper Walsh.

‘And wore spectacles,’ suggested Tommy Treneer.

‘Came up on our anchor chain and we measured him claw to tail at just over …’

But no one was listening to Whaler. They were all looking at the lobster. Two weeks later it was mounted on a wooden board in the saloon bar of the Antalya.

In the coming weeks, Jack’s luck continued. When he came in to the Town Quay, Tommy Treneer and the others would wander over from the Bench to see what he had. They never tired of hearing how he caught the big one – was it gurnard that got him, Mr Swee? Parlour pot or inkwell? Where d’ee say ’ee had him, near which of the rocks? Show us again how he was caught, how he was twisted round the pot and which was the claw he had hisself with, Mr Swee?

Then all at once, the catches stopped. During the middle two weeks of April, while others were reporting good hauls, Jack pulled nothing but empty pots. He set the strings at different angles. He replaced the wrasse with gurnard and then the gurnard with mackerel. He tried a piece of shark but it made no difference.

One morning Croyden Treneer came into Bethesda. Jack was sitting on the steps with his knots and Croyden came over and leaned against the wall beside him. He lit a cigarette. ‘You been having trouble with your pots.’

It was a statement, not a question. Jack waited for the ‘I told you so.’ But instead Croyden pushed up his sand-coloured beret, scratched his forehead and said: ‘Perhaps ’ee’d let me take a look.’

‘I’m going out tomorrow –;’

Croyden shook his head. ‘Tonight. Meet me on the Town Quay ten this evening.’

The moon rose plum-red behind Pendhu Point. The tides were working up to springs. Jack and Croyden rowed round to the darkness of Hemlock Cove and beached the boat. They climbed over the rocks until the shapes of the Main Cages appeared against the moon-bright sea. A light wind blew from the west. They sat down to wait.

It was two hours before they heard the sound of paddles. A small boat appeared underneath the point and headed out to the rocks. They could see the silhouettes of two men on board. The boat worked Jack’s pots and replaced them. The men had passed beneath them, had gone round the point before Croyden hissed: ‘Bloody Pig. Might a’ guessed it’d be the Garretts.’

Jimmy Garrett and Tacker Garrett were two brothers who lived together in a room above the East Quay. They kept apart from the rest of the town. To visitors they were well-known characters as in summer they ran the pleasure steamer, the Polmayne Queen. Tacker was the younger and many in the town thought him simple. Visitors never noticed because he was so adept on the Polmayne Queen and because he had a singing voice to break hearts. On summer evenings, returning home from Porth or St Mawes or Mevagissey, Tacker would stand in the stern and sing ‘The Streams of Lovely Nancy’ or ‘The Cushion Dance’ or ‘Three Sisters’ and bring tears to the eyes of grown men – but without his brother Jimmy, he was lost.

Jimmy was taciturn, bull-necked and bald-headed. He rarely came out of the Queen’s wheelhouse. He wore a constant frown as he was always calculating – tides and times and winds, or fuel costs and fares.

The Garretts had arrived in Polmayne as teenagers, without family or connections, and in the early days before the war Jimmy supported the two of them in a number of ways. One way was to go to wrestling matches in Truro or Bodmin where he invariably picked up the £5 prize. There was something rough and untamed about Jimmy but in those days he was more mischief than malice. One summer he took to wearing a pig’s trotter around his neck, and he knew that all he had to do was to open his shirt and people would back away from him. That was how he became known as ‘Pig’ Garrett. Others, who saw none of that, remembered a certain gentle charm and the endearing way he looked after his younger brother.

Jimmy went to war in 1915 and the following summer was reported Missing in Action. Tacker was found half-starved in their room beside the Fountain Inn and Mrs Kliskey took him on to help in Dormullion’s gardens. Three months later Jimmy returned from the dead. He had been wounded in the thigh and lain for thirty-six hours in no-man’s land. When he limped off the bus in Polmayne he went straight to see his fiancée Rose Shaw. Her mother told him she was in Penzance. Three days later he received a letter from her: ‘Dear Jim, You was missing a month so I married another. Rose.’

Those who had known Jimmy before the war said he came back a changed man. He was bitter, and more withdrawn than ever. Before, he had never fought in anger but now he got into scrapes and when he broke the arm of a Camborne man in the Fountain Inn, he was convicted of assault.