As the days move winterwards, Denise’s battle against the seagulls staining her washing transforms into a war against the weather. While the roast lunch to commemorate my last day living with them cooks inside, we cautiously pin her laundry up on the line, keeping one eye on the ominous sky. It becomes a game. For every pair of trousers or sheet hung, the clouds provide us with a spit more of rain, daring us to continue. We freeze, share a worried look and then, as soon as it stops, resume the pinning with greater urgency.
‘Are you going to be all right all on your own?’ Denise asks me as we each take one end of a bed sheet to pin. I will be moving out into my own rental cottage until Christmas: for a reason I still can’t articulate, it feels important for me to be on my own for at least some of my time in Newlyn. I tell her I will be, but I’ll miss staying with them. Lofty helps lift my heavy bags up the Fradgan and I hug them goodbye at the door.
I miss them almost as soon as I have shut the rental cottage door behind me, though they live barely minutes away. The sensation is similar to that of moving out of my parents’ home for the first time – a sense of oneself coming of age in some way.
I take my shoes off and pad around my new home, opening cupboards and flicking through books. Everywhere there are small painted boats and stock photographs of the sea; in the fridge I find a pack of splits – closer to white bread rolls than scones – and travel-sized jars of jam and clotted cream. The cottage is a one-up, one-down affair, its wooden floors white-washed, light blue shutters across its two windows looking out on a narrow street with even smaller, more chaotic alleyways of cottages branching off it.
I barely sleep the first night in Orchard Cottage. It is, I think, a hangover from childhood: a mixture of trepidation and excitement in a place not yet known, even one as gentle and unassuming as the last cottage on the cobbled street with its turquoise door and matching bench that leads up from the harbour. The rows of slanted cottages that make up the Fradgan always put me in mind of ancient couples, hunched and leaning against one another for support. I imagine the yarns and long-held secrets kept within their rafters, which once housed so many of the town’s fishing families. I check my phone to find a message from Denise saying, ‘Good morning hope you slept well xx have a great day xx’ – and almost burst into tears.
I often embark on solitary adventures after sleepless nights. The indoors feels oppressive and my mind, like a splinter of wood on a doorframe, catches on things and is unable to let them go. When I am outside, the world feels anew. My somnambulist state changes the way in which I see things; the notes in my diary and saved on my phone take on wild, unexpected turns. Returning to them weeks later, I cannot quite recognise the person who wrote them.
This morning, I decide to take the bus over to Marazion, from where one can board a motorboat to St Michael’s Mount. I have taken long walks across the whole perimeter of Mount’s Bay and looked back at Newlyn from every point along its crescent-moon curve, but I have never taken the punt or walked across the twice-daily sea-drenched causeway that leads onto to the Mount itself. When I tell friends who have lived in Newlyn their whole lives that I am finally going up the Mount, many of them admit they’ve never made the trip themselves. It reminds me of the relationships of Londoners with Big Ben or the London Eye. Their permanence on the skyline ensures that no local feels any pressing desire to visit them. It is only the tourists with their rapacious desire to know a place, to drink in every aspect of it in only a week or two, who tend to frequent these places.
And yet, for all those who live in Mount’s Bay, the Mount, whether consciously or not, is a sea mark that binds together the disparate villages lined up along the coast. It provides them with a common name, regardless of the feuds and long-held bitternesses between ports. According to folklore, the Mount (its old Cornish name is Cara Clowse in Cowse – the Hoar Rock in the Wood) was built by a giant called Cormoran with the help of his wife Cormelian. Together they carried chunks of white granite from the cliffs along the Cornish coast across into the bay at low tide. While her husband was sleeping, Cormelian substituted granite with greenstone (another kind of igneous rock) in her apron because it was easier to transport. Waking to see his wife ferrying the wrong kind of stone to his new Mount, Cormoran boiled up into a great rage. He lunged at his wife, dragging her under the waves and causing the rocks to fall from her apron. Cormelian’s body sank into the sea and was feasted on by fish, while the fallen rocks formed Chapel Rock, which rises from the sea midway between Marazion and the Mount.
The afternoon I arrive in Marazion it is cool and pale enough almost to be mistaken for a moonlit night. A few tourists and I wait at the water’s edge for a boat to take us across the glassy water to the Mount. Over time, Cormoran’s tale has grown foggy. Elements are displaced or condensed, re-emerging in stories written many years later. Leaving from his lonely, new mount, Cormoran was said to have spent his nights sneaking onto the mainland to rustle the Cornish folk’s cattle. It is here that the tale merges with another – Jack the Giant Killer. In early chapbook versions of the story, the giant is at last slain by a farmer’s boy from Penzance: ‘I am the valiant Cornishman/ who slew the giant Cormoran.’ Another story asserts that Cormoran is in fact a bastardisation of Corineus, the founder of Cornwall. According to Geoffery of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Corineus destroyed a giant called Gogmagog. Finally, the legend has entered the realm of history. Folklorist Mary Williams wrote in the 1960s: ‘When visiting the Mount some years ago, I was told that when excavations were being undertaken there, the skeleton of a man well over seven feet tall had been unearthed.’ This giant man was allegedly found in a deep vault below the chapel, dug into the granite rock. The Chinese-whispers element intrinsic to folk tales allow figures to slip under the fabric of yarns, appearing entirely reformed: slayer becoming slayed; giant metamorphosed into man.
The day I choose to visit the Mount turns out to be the last day of the tourist season. Tomorrow, the castle and grounds will be shut off to the public for the winter and the St Aubyn family, who have owned the Mount since the seventeenth century (though they now share ownership with the National Trust) will return for Christmas. As such, there is a note of sadness amongst those working on the Mount, which diffuses through its many rooms and leaves each visitor with a somewhat sombre impression of the place. There seem to be many of us exploring the castle alone today, quietly following the designated tourist route. We take it in turns to linger at each impressive window that either looks back towards Newlyn, where the largest trawlers are just visible in the harbour, or out at the white sea and sky – a view that paradoxically feels unfinished without the Mount itself in it.
A mahogany grandfather clock in a small, wooden-floored study particularly attracts my attention. The clock’s face has a swirled design painted onto it and its intricate hands are slender and bronze. Above the clock face is another measure of time: a tidal clock, whose fat-cheeked moon with drooping eyes displays the time of high and low tide in Mount’s Bay. It was built in 1785 by Roger Wearne, a clockmaker who lived and worked in St Erth. The clock was not brought to the Mount for its ornamental value but as a necessary instrument for those living in a place whose route to the land is so often swallowed by sea. The measure of the tide is a much simpler form of time than hours and minutes: a high or low note, scrupulously observed by fishermen, who wait each morning for it to reach its greatest height before leaving the harbour, and once more for their return. It is a tangible sort of time too, changing the whole face of the coast, revealing at its lowest ebb hidden things like the top of the sunken Wherry Mine where Thomas Curtis made and lost his fortune in the eighteenth century. In London, I can go months without remembering that tidal time even exists – unless I take a slower route into town and walk along the Thames, which at low tide reveals a muddy flat land of dystopic, upended shopping trolleys.
I continue in a daze through various bedrooms, studies and kitchen until I get to the map room, where I pause for a long while. Each wall displays an exquisitely drawn map of Cornwall. The one that intrigues me most is an illustration of Michael Drayton’s 1612 epic poem Poly-Olbion, which traces an imaginative journey through every county in England and Wales. In the map, a man with a shepherd’s crook is seated atop the Mount. The sea around the county teems with vast sail boats and sea monsters ridden by half-naked gods. From each tributary that snakes from the land to the sea, a Melusine rises with her arms held aloft. Melusines are spirits that physically resemble mermaids but are found in freshwater rivers and spring from a distinct folkloric tradition around France and the Low Countries. In one of her origin stories, Melusine is recorded as the daughter of the fairy Pressyne and King Elinas of Albany. Her tale unravels in a series of failed marriages. Each time she promises to marry her suitor only on the condition that he will not look upon her in the bath. But, predictably, each new husband disobeys her request, peeping into her bathroom to find his wife transformed into half-woman, half-fish. Elsewhere, Melusine is recorded as the descendent of the whale that swallowed Jonah. Strangely, too, the Melusine also crops up in contemporary consumerism as the split-tailed image on the Starbucks logo. I follow the imagined space of the map. The fantastical image of Cornwall first envisaged in the Poly-olbion does not feel improbable to me. It echoes the way in which the sea that surrounds the land draws oral myths and adventures to it, while the wild landscape itself is infused with ancient folk tales.
After a morning spent wandering through the many rooms of the Mount’s castle, I decide to wait for low tide to walk back along the causeway. I check how soon it will be on the tidal clock, imagining the fishermen at sea running their fingers down the tidal calendars, which they each keep in the wheelhouse, to learn when they will be able to come home again. I watch from the high gardens of the Mount as the sea slowly reveals the path, like a curtain pulling back.
As soon as it is exposed enough to cross, the causeway swarms with people. Around me families and couples incessantly snap photos, thrilled at the novelty of standing on something that only moments ago was submerged under the sea. I stand for a while in the middle of the seaweed-encrusted causeway while the crowds throng past me. Since I have no other plans and time seems to be dragging especially slowly, once across I pass the bus stop and head down onto the beach to make the long walk back to Newlyn.
Everything is muted this afternoon. Even the train to London slips past without breaking the air. The usual crash of waves softens to a gentle hush. It begins to rain lightly. The sea, drawn out to its lowest ebb, leaves a mirror glaze across the sand, reflecting the clouds so clearly that it feels as though I am walking among them. In an essay penned when she was just nineteen, Elizabeth Bishop wrote: ‘In being alone, the mind finds its sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds.’ It is not, I don’t think, that this sea disappears while you are amongst others. Rather the colours and noises of the shore hold your attention, allowing you to forget for a while that this great, silent thing is behind.
Today I face the sea. Occasionally the sun cuts through and highlights the lines of activity upon the distant waves. These lines appear like the letters from an unknown alphabet or, as I discover later when re-examining my rough, looped sketches of these shapes upon the water, like Lissajous curves – the mathematical figures of eight Alfred Hitchcock uses for the opening sequence of Vertigo, spiralling out of a woman’s dyed-red pupil – and I remember the elderly woman with the recorder those months ago, conjuring words out of the sea with her solemn music.
As I walk down Long Rock beach, its large rusting pipes leaking out into the sea like gape-mouthed seaworms, I think of a newspaper report I read in the Newlyn Archive about a sperm whale that was found washed up upon this beach in February 1990. Grainy, indistinct pictures of the whale accompanied the article in the Cornishman. From these unhappy images, it is hard to believe that the whale had ever been alive – that this slab of rotting flesh, this dark, beached blot, had once moved with tremendous power and grace through the deepest parts of the sea. The whale, the report noted, was 47 feet long and weighed 30 tonnes. Fascinated tourists came from miles around on a similarly wet, colourless day to take pictures of this thing that should never have been wrenched from the water. We are drawn to the images that horrify us, as if they were magnetic.
Sperm whales can live up to seventy years. These days more of them are dying earlier from manmade activity than ever before. Several were found dead recently on the Californian coast; their stomachs were opened up to reveal over a hundred kilos of net fragments, lines and plastic bags twisted around their insides. It is not known how the Long Rock beach whale died, but the article notes that experts assumed it had happened years ago, its long-deceased body washed up by gales. Torn from the depths and beached upon the sand, this is what death looks like in its plainest form, shown in the bodies of magisterial creatures from the seas, beings which ought not to be seen in death, and which even to see in life seems an otherworldly event as if we have slipped into myth. I learn later that the undignified term ‘beached’ is also used for retired fishermen. I picture them laid out upon the sand beside the whale, their hair dripping wet, their eyes wide, their hands still working through imagined lines of nets, as people gawp and take photos of them.
The article goes on to pose a question faced by the council. What is one meant to do with something so vast and lifeless? In a place that must remain beautiful and untouched to ensure the tourists keep coming, the council could not let a huge creature from the sea just fester there to be pecked at by seagulls until its cathedral-arched ribcage shone white on the sand. Worse still, as the gases in dead whales’ bodies build up, they have on occasion, been known to explode. Dead and stranded whales have turned up before at Long Rock: in 1911 eight or so whales washed up on the shore, many of whom were still alive. Onlookers tried in vain to stop them from dying, pouring water over their backs and attempting to pull them back out to sea. A group of young men though, the Cornish Telegraph noted, were caught hacking at the tails of the trapped whales and carving initials into their thick skins, as if they were the latest beach attraction and not sentient, intelligent beings.
This time around the council’s first idea was to bury the dead sperm whale right there on the beach, twenty feet under the sand. I imagine the hundreds of bare feet crossing the sand each day, not knowing what lies underneath but for the occasional smell of rot mixing in with the sea salt. In the end, the sand burial fell through. Instead, a lorry came to transport the whale to a landfill site, to dump it amongst other detritus and unwanted things. When the council workers arrived, they realised that the whale was too large to fit in their vehicle. In a final act of undignified violence, the men had no choice but to chainsaw the whale’s body in half.
During my first stay in Newlyn I watched the controlled explosion of the Excellence, an old trawler that had been slowly sinking under the scummy harbour waters, damp stains blossoming around her body. Often if a boat is no longer seaworthy, owners will just abandon her in a harbour or sell her on to another owner for a penny so that they do not have to bother with the effort and expense of having her broken up and extracted from her watery grave. Unlike the other great beasts of the sea, these boats cannot quietly sink down to the seabed to decompose gracefully. Man cannot just vanish away the things he has brought into the world. A crowd gathered along Newlyn’s harbour walls to watch the vessel’s execution. I looked down at her, noticing the way the parts of her now submerged had grown flabby and amorphous through contact with the waters. The explosion came with a crack of thunder, splitting her into hundreds of splintered pieces. The audience let out a collective gasp as she broke. We did not stay to watch the crane lift her into the truck that would take her to the dump, crushing her until every vestige and sign left by her past crew would be lost forever.
‘It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,’ begins ‘A Graveyard’ by Marianne Moore. ‘But you cannot stand in the middle of this:/ The sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.’ The speaker’s vantage point must be the very edge of the land, looking out at the black hole of the sea like a mourner before the cut-out oblong of a grave. The day the whale washed up on the beach that grave was violated: ‘You cannot stand in the middle of this’ – and yet, that is exactly where fishermen go each day. It shifts the way I think about the water when I am next at sea, picturing our boat suspended above a grave within a place of mourning. ‘That ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink–/ In which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness,’ the poem goes. Though sunk, the sea did dig this one dropped thing back up.
I continue my walk back home towards Newlyn, imagining the body of a great whale buried deep below my feet, landlocked for the rest of time. The palette today is so unlike that of my very first visit to Newlyn in spring – a washed-out watercolour, where before it was painted in thick oils. There is barely anyone else out walking: the day is too without substance to attract the casual walker; only a few dogs’ noses investigate the shoreline, their owners pressed close to the side of the beach nearest the road. And in the distance I can just see a group of rain-coated figures, their backs curved as they gaze down at the sea-slicked sand so that from afar they look like small, grey crowbars sticking out of the beach.
I reach Penzance promenade. With the tide this far out, the backbone of the old harbour wall that once ran along from Penzance to Newlyn, that for generations protected homes from being swept away by sea storms, is just visible. I pass the bronze fisherman’s statue, staring out across the bay. There he stands before the graveyard of the sea, waiting for his fishermen to come home, and silently remembering those who never will.