Before the end of my last stay in Newlyn I wake to a text from Nathan. It says he’d come back to land unexpectedly during the night and would be free for an hour on his boat before they head off again, if I wanted a last chat before I go home to the city. I dress quickly and sprint down to the harbour to meet him on the Resurgam – ‘I will rise again’.
After days dissolved in sea mists, Newlyn harbour is shot through with sunlight this morning. Only the thinnest belt of soft cloud hangs above the horizon line. The water gleams and the fishing boats’ colours glare as if brand new – reds, blues and greens. They move differently in weather like this; each vessel seems to be propelled along with the sea, rather than fighting against it as they do in choppy seas. The suspicious looks I get from engineers and fishermen as I dash past no longer bothers me, as I leap over an upturned red crate on my way to the North Pier. There is no one on deck when I arrive at the Resurgam. I wait a while and then give an awkward yell, ‘All right?’ The heads of several sleepy-looking fishermen pop up from behind windows and out of wheelhouses on nearby boats, ducking back down again as soon as they realise the shout was not for them. A moment later, Nathan sticks his head out of the Resurgam’s galley, wearing a grey knit jumper and holding a mug of coffee. He waves, calling down to me – ‘All right, jump on board and have a cuppa’ – before disappearing again.
The boat is moored further away from the harbour wall than I am used to and I’m not sure I trust myself to make the jump. I close my eyes, uttering a silent prayer as I fling myself towards the birdshit-varnished deck. Somehow, I make it onto the narrow bar of the rail that rounds the boat and grab a hanging rope to stop myself falling over the side and into the muddy waters, before finally jumping down onto the deck. In the homely galley I find a new crew sitting around the table, each with a huge mug of milky coffee before them. The stench of rolling tobacco transports me straight back to the Filadelfia.
I have never before gone for tea on a trawler in the harbour at eight in the morning and find myself privy to that period of quiescence just before the men leave the harbour, when they feel themselves no longer quite on land or yet at sea. Some of the men read, others scroll glumly through phones. Nathan passes me over a pint of coffee. Up close, I see he has that knackered look that all fishermen carry for the first few days back on the land.
‘I didn’t tell you last time, did I, that my old man was a fisherman?’ he says, pouring milk into my mug. ‘You probably don’t remember anyway, you were pissed!’
Nathan’s father moved down to Newlyn from Grimsby along with many other northern fishermen in the 1970s seeking better fishing grounds. But, unlike many of the other fisherman fathers who trained their boys up to join the family business as soon as they could walk, Nathan’s father forbade him from even hanging around the harbour when he was young. ‘He didn’t want me following the same paths through life that he did,’ Nathan says. ‘He thought the fishing industry was too hard a way of life.’ As a result of this ambivalent relationship with the sea, Nathan’s father devised a plan to leave fishing and find a less precarious job, like trucking. And then, in early November 1997, a few weeks before he planned to hand in his notice, a message was received by the coastguard that the twin-beam trawler Nathan’s father was working on, the Margaretha Maria, had sunk fifty-five miles off the Lizard. When the wreck was discovered near Lizard Point, underwater surveys reported that there were four tonnes of shells and sand caught in her nets, suggesting that she must have capsized after her derricks heaved up such a weight. The whole crew went down with her. Nathan was eleven when it happened. His father was never found, but the remains of the skipper’s body were picked up by chance three months later in the nets of another fishing boat.
Before the advent of technologies such as AIS, during stormy weather fishermen’s wives would climb up to the top of a hill overlooking the town known as Mount Misery, the highest point in Newlyn. From there, they would watch for sails arriving over the horizon and pray one of them would be their husbands’ boat. Somehow, I have never noticed Mount Misery before. When I look back towards Newlyn from the sea, my eyes are drawn first to the harbour and behind that the mouth of the town with its many rows of crowded teeth. Even further back Mount Misery looms behind, a dark green shadow haunting the town, the one place that has not been built upon. I imagine the Newlyn fishwives in their long skirts, necks craned and hands shielding eyes from the morning glare, holding each other together on that sloping hill.
Almost every person I meet in Newlyn has lost someone to the sea. Each fishing death reshapes the social fabric of the town, causing ruptures in the family lineages that most residents can trace back for generations. Told years later, the twists of fate leading to these tragic events grow yet more pronounced, their impact on the rest of the town fanning out like concentric rings from an object dropped in a lake. Reweaving sea tragedies into prophetic tales becomes a way of challenging their arbitrariness. If Nathan’s father had quit fishing just a few weeks earlier, his death may have been avoided, and perhaps Nathan would never have become a fisherman. Ben Gunn tells me one such tale. One morning his late wife had woken up in a cold sweat. ‘You must promise me not to go to sea today, Ben,’ she begged him. Surprised by her vehemence, he agreed and they spent the day in the Star together. That night, the news came that the vessel Ben had been destined to sail on that morning had foundered without warning on its way out to sea and all those on board were lost.
When Mike Dyer was still a boy, his father left the fishing industry to start coasting, conveying oil or coal from port to port around Europe. At school one afternoon, his teacher passed around forms for students to fill out detailing which of their parents were coming to parents’ evening the following week. Mike recollects clearly thinking to himself: ‘Well, my da’s not coming; I’ve only got my mum.’ As soon as that thought crossed his mind, Mike wondered what had prompted it – his dad was meant to be back from sea by then, why was something telling him it would just be his mum? Barely an hour later, a hall monitor came into his classroom and told Mike to go to the headmaster’s office. The headmaster did not even lift his gaze from his papers, Mike remembers. ‘You better go home boy,’ he said. ‘Your father’s died at sea.’ Mike sped back home, pedalling his bike all the way up Paul Hill.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes a sensation she calls ‘the vortex effect’, whereby any chance mundane event might trigger particular memories of her lost loved ones. These vortices from the past overwhelm her, like a camera whose back falls off and the entire length of film spools out onto the floor at once. Didion tries to avoid all possible places that might stir up painful vortices but it is almost impossible: every place, person and object contains some trace of her family.
Without quite meaning for it to come out, I hear myself asking Nathan how someone would go to work in the same industry and same environment that was in some way responsible for their father’s death. Surely the sea would be the most consuming memory vortex of all? ‘I cannot imagine being able to face the water after that,’ I say.
‘Nah, I had to find out.’ Nathan breaks off with a laugh and looks away. ‘It sounds stupid now, but I had to find out what was out there beyond that horizon in case it was him – in case he was still out there somewhere.’
A pause. His words seem to shimmer and hang there in the galley, mixing with the plumes of smoke from the men’s cigarettes. ‘To find what was out there beyond that horizon.’
‘You know, hope and all that crap.’ Nathan has a way of expressing the most poignant thoughts with a shrug, as if they were the most mundane sentiments, as if they meant nothing at all and, if you are not paying attention, you might miss the underlying truth in them.
The border of a black hole is called an event horizon. Events occurring beyond this boundary line can have no effect on an outside observer; nothing that occurs inside the black hole can impact the future events of the space outside it. It is a point of no return, the shell surrounding the region whose gravitational pull is so great that to escape from it is impossible. There is no coming back, no selkie’s coat or avian transformation from mythology that might let it be undone. If there is an astronomical equivalent to the Christian heaven, it is surely this: the one realm we have not been to and the one we cannot return from. When I try to imagine what happens after we die, I see where the sky meets the sea, where they greet each other, these two great regions touching cheek to cheek. I think that is hopeful enough.
After his father’s death, Nathan says, ‘the only thing I could do was go out there and make a man of myself – see what it was like for my dad’.
By discovering those same things your loved one saw out there in the water, these men tell me, you are able in some way to stay with them, to know them beyond their death.
Nathan laughs again. ‘Course, first week out there it was a force 10 and I soon realised all that was a load of bollocks.’
That first week at sea changed him, altering the composition of his body in some way he could not quite articulate. Still a teenager, he had never worked so hard in his life before, and, while still angry about his father’s death, it became an energy that he found he could harness at sea. It was this same anger that spurred him on to get all his skipper’s tickets at such a young age. ‘I know he’d be proud, but he’d be pissed off because he didn’t want me to do it. He wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor, and I was like, “I haven’t got the grades for that shit, dad!” – I did A levels and everything, but it just wasn’t me.’
Mike, too, knows his father would never have wanted him to go fishing: ‘He would’ve wanted me to be like my brother, go to university and all,’ he tells me, ‘but I’d sooner be mucking around with boats.’
The compass point to which young men in Newlyn are sent is always the sea. Over the years Nathan has become better at expressing his emotions, the way his own father was never able to do. ‘I know so many fishermen who are pretending to be strong. I kind of get the idea that every fisherman is a screaming boy inside, wanting to talk to somebody, and the alcohol is just masking all these problems.’
The image of the hyper-masculine, unwaveringly solid fisherman has only been bolstered over the years by the various literature and reality TV shows that have appeared about trawlermen. Just like Weil’s squirrel’s cage that traps man within work, this rigid characterisation of fishermen can be a poisonous prison. Nathan’s father dealt with such strain the way many fishermen do: by retreating to the pub once back on land. ‘I don’t blame him for it,’ Nathan tells me. ‘I don’t resent him for it. He did what he had to. But I’m going to tell my son everything, every feeling.’
You become reflective while out on a fishing boat: finding yourself alone in the midst of an empty ocean in a great chasm of silence. When you look into the water, sometimes it is hard not to believe that it holds everything within it – the whole past and future of the universe. Just before I leave the Resurgam, I see The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman’s prequel to His Dark Materials, poking out from under someone’s thick, knitted jumper. I ask who the book belongs to, as I am reading it myself. Nathan says he’s just bought it because he was a fan of the other ones – ‘Slicing into all those other worlds with that knife and crazy animals with wheels for feet… What the fuck, you know!?’ He and his crew read tonnes at sea. There’s never the time on shore, but out there with all those vacant stretches of time on watch, they can get through many books in a week, he says. Another of the crew, whom Nathan calls ‘a bit leftfield’ and who has travelled around the world twice, is reading a holographic-covered book on trances and out-of-body experiences.
I clamber up the harbour wall while the crew are still conspiratorially discussing where they should fish for the next few days and guessing what the rest of the Newlyn fleet will be up to. I think about the absolute quiet Nathan will find on the Resurgam, in which grief cannot be blanketed as it is by the noise and glare in cities. If you stare at it long enough, fishermen tell me, you can see anything. Alone at night, during the Dog Watch, thoughts fly out across the sea. Dark shapes in the water refigure themselves into vague human forms and the shadowy clouds above swim with memory.
The vortex Didion comes back to again and again is that memory of her and her husband swimming in the cave below the Portuguese Bend in California. ‘The tide had to be just right,’ she writes. ‘We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right.’ I return to imagining the men at sea checking the time on their tidal calendar for when they can go home and the fat-cheeked moon on the tidal clock at Michael’s Mount. I think of my grandmother, who had not observed the tide closely enough when out with her young children and all these years later, my repeating of her error. Returning to that moment one last time, Didion writes: ‘If we are to live outside ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water.’ She continues – the abstract ‘them’ turning, as always, back to him, back to John: ‘Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.’ I think of all those fishermen and the families of fishermen, who have gradually learnt how to let go of their loved ones in the water, to accept that they are gone to that ‘great wheelhouse in the sky’, as Larry puts it.
Back on land, I reread His Dark Materials. Leafing through The Northern Lights, I find a passage about the voyage to the north in which Lyra’s daemon, Pantalaimon, distracts her from her seasickness by becoming first a storm petrel and then a porpoise. I catch myself wishing I could have had a daemon to combat the menace of my own seasickness. While at sea, a seaman tells Lyra of an old sailor he knew, whose daemon had settled as a dolphin. Because of this, he could never go ashore again. ‘He was never quite happy till he died and he could be buried at sea,’ Pullman writes. There is always a danger of giving yourself too much to the sea, of leaving a part of yourself out there in the water.
After my pint of coffee on the Resurgam, I join Paul, a police sergeant who moonlights as a birdwatcher and whose excursions with tourists I found advertised online during a hunt for rare spoonbill wading birds across the coasts. My uncle was an avid ‘birder’. When with us in Lelant, he would spend most of his days watching the skies. Now and then as a child I would go to sit with him above Hayle estuary and look out for birds, growing bored as our tea cooled, while he insisted on staying for several more hours to look – just to look, I would think, the exasperation barely disguised from my young face – out at the marshy, colourless flats around which a grey B-road now runs.
What I found most torturous about my uncle’s hobby was that he did not seem to mind what he saw: he was just as delighted at observing eighteen black-headed gulls as he was a kingfisher or a purple sandpiper, or an unexpected exotic bird escaped from the nearby bird sanctuary. I did not understand then the uncomplicated joy of observing: to observe the world, not in the sense of watching it, but of practising, of upholding, maintaining just through witnessing its variation, not to impress upon it, not make any contact with it, just to count it. One seagull, two, three, eighteen …
The wind rips across the harbour and down the Strand, causing plastic bags to rattle like loose teeth. People are reduced to dark outlines, as much of their skin covered as they can possibly manage, heads bent. I hurry over to the market car park to meet Paul. His online blog is called ‘Ornitholosism II – It’s a Religion!’ Paul, wearing khaki and a baseball cap, comes to shake my hand and ask if I have brought my own binoculars. I ashamedly reply no and he tells me he has several spare pairs anyway, his look somewhat disappointed, as if recognising that his latest client has faltered at the first hurdle and is not a true bird enthusiast. We head straight down towards Jubilee Pool, set just above the sea, with sloping white tiers like a jelly mould and fronted by a wrought-iron gate, and gaze out at the revealed rocks where birds tend to sit when the tide is out. I cannot help but let my binoculars wander from the algae-bluish rocks and out towards the horizon, trying to decipher the blurry registration numbers and what they’re catching and how the swelling winds might be affecting the boats just returning to harbour.
‘If any word could be found engraved around my skull, just above the ears and eyebrows,’ Ted Hughes writes of growing up in Yorkshire, ‘it would probably be the word “horizon”.’ As Paul watches for birds, I watch that sloping line, which is not actually a line at all but the empty, undrawn moment where two regions of being meet, and I realise that this is my addiction now. Though back on land, I cannot bear to look away from the horizon. Hughes imagines the horizon between the moor and the sky as ‘the outlook of a bottle floating upright at sea’: its faded-plastic perspective of the world ‘consists of simple light and dark, the light above, the dark below, the two divided by a clear waterline’. The horizon is nothing more than a contrast of shades, simple light and simple dark, but this makes it no less seductive.
Paul has birded since he was a child; he does not remember a time when his life was not devoted to winged creatures. Any moment he can get away from the police station in Falmouth, he races off in his car to follow the birds. At night he likes to stand out in his porch and watch redwings, his favourite birds, migrate to the UK for winter from Russia and Scandinavia. You can hear their wings like pages of a book leafed through by the wind’s fingers and occasionally see the flash of red on their bellies picked up by a street lamp. He tells me that though he forgets the details of everyday life and the things he has read, he has a photographic memory for birds and remembers perfectly every bird he has ever seen and where. There is a sky map in his head, a constellation of feathers.
Along by Jubilee Pool we see purple sandpipers and turnstones. The origins of bird names tend to be satisfyingly straightforward; the little turnstones spend their days turning stones over, searching for worms. Their wings are mottled brown and their legs bright orange. Purple sandpipers are not purple, and have puffed-out bodies and stride about importantly, much like little bird policemen I think, but I do not tell Paul in case it offends him. Paul, who does not express his excitement with exclamations or flutters, but through more concentrated looking through binoculars and bringing his weight forward as if to get as close as possible to the bird he is watching, spots a kingfisher. Even I know this is a significant sighting. I wave the binoculars around frantically but cannot seem to find the bird. They do not wait to be noticed, flitting away as they please with little care for who sees them and who does not. Paul once more carefully lines me up and at last I see it. Their turquoise bodies seem to glow, bright against the milk-stained white sky and shore. Their bodies possess a marmalade colour that shadows around their eyes too. I have just a moment to take him in before we lose him. He does not fly away, I don’t think, but seems to melt from the air.
Then we are off in Paul’s Chevrolet across the headland to Hayle estuary. I keep my hands wafered between my thighs, trying desperately to warm up. Paul tells me that Cornish birders seem to him particularly competitive and often won’t declare their sightings. It maddens him, as he has an egalitarian approach to birding, constantly posting sightings. Like hurricane-chasers, these khaki-wearing, deep-pocketed, floppy-hatted men and women speed off in their cars as soon as they hear the news of something special.
Once we get to the estuary, we pass a man tending to his hedge. As we walk past, he shouts out through the wind: ‘Looking for her again, are you, Paul?’ My eye darts across the estuary and down to Lelant beach below. A spasm passes through my chest as I realise it has been almost exactly two months since I’ve seen my mother, the longest I have ever been away from her.
‘There she is!’ Paul jabs his finger towards the low waters along the estuary where once my uncle would look out with his tea. The spoonbill is a large, fluffy white bird, like the inside of a punctured pillow. Her legs are dark and dainty, her dark elongated bill opening up into a perfectly round disc, which she hypnotically sways from left to right, scanning for food amongst the shallows.
Driving back towards the south coast, Paul points out Hell’s Mouth, a group of cliff faces between Hayle and Pentreath whose cavities look like an enormous paw has ripped away parts of the coastline. Hell’s Mouth was once a notorious spot for smugglers. Now, Paul tells me as we observe the dark shadows it casts over the sharp rocks below it, it is better known as a suicide spot, a place policeman dread to receive emergency calls from. ‘I don’t know why they don’t just change the names of places like that,’ he says. And yet, I don’t think it can be that simple. It is not the name that draws those who are unhappy towards it, but something larger and more profound, which is to do with the geography of the place. Mount Misery, too, does not retain its footprint of sadness because of its name, but because the mount is the highest place in Newlyn, from where fishermen’s wives could look out, hoping to see their husbands’ boats returning through the storms.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 234 people took their own lives in Cornwall between 2014 and 2016. That works out as sixteen suicides for every 100,000 people, the third highest rate in the country, behind only Middlesbrough and Corby. When I tell my friends back home how prolific suicides are in Cornwall, none of them can believe it. We find it hard to imagine death in beautiful places. I ask Paul why he thinks there is such a high number of suicides in Penzance in particular. ‘It’s the end of the line, isn’t it?’ He replies. ‘The very last place you can come to.’
We stop one last time just past Penlee Point to follow the hedged path down into Sandy Cove. The foliage knits above our heads, creating a subway of thick, heavily scented greenery that seems to cut out both light and sound. I’ve passed through undergrowth like this before in Cornwall, on my cross-country trips from one coastline to the other. Once in them, there is no opportunity to stop, to doubt the way, you can only go onwards. I tell Paul that when I’m in these tunnels I feel like I’m being carried through dimensions, right out of time itself. There should be a name for them, I say – these tunnels that take you between worlds. ‘There is’, he replies. ‘They’re called holloways.’
For the final flourish of his tour, Paul gets out his iPhone and starts to play recordings of bird calls, a modern-day Pied Piper sounding them out from their hidden nests in the thick foliage beyond Newlyn’s edge. Dusk comes at the same time they do: goldfinches, firecrests, black-tailed godwits, their arrival signalled by a cacophony of chirrups.