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DEVIL’S TOENAILS
AND SNAKESTONES

I loved my father. He was the best father in the world. My mother was always too busy with the babies when I was growing up. She kept having more of them to replace the ones that died. I am the second Mary in this family, as I told you.

I never paid the babies much attention. They were always crying or screaming... or dying. Mostly dying. Then Mother would be wailing and refusing to eat. Father had a sad look about him for a day or two, but once they were in the ground, he’d be off to the cliffs, all alone at first but then, at long last, he started taking me and Joseph with him.

Joseph was born two years before me, but we were thick as thieves. We did almost everything together when we were small and I loved him nearly as much as I loved Father. Nearly.

Mother said it was a good thing that Joseph was so kind as to play with me because I didn’t have many friends.

The girls and boys at Sunday School were silly creatures. They didn’t work hard. They just laughed and skipped and wasted time. I couldn’t be doing with them. Once, one of the girls, Emmie, tried to tie up my hair in ribbons. She said I must try harder to be pretty or I would never have a husband. What a fool! I have never cared to be pretty. Better to be strong or clever, or strong and clever, and I didn’t need a husband for that!

I was about six, I think, when Father first took me hunting for dragons’ teeth and the like. Why would anyone choose to play with a doll or sing silly rhymes whilst jumping over a rope, when they could be finding treasure?

I had been wanting to go with Father ever since I could remember. The stories he told me when I was a little child! The treasures he brought back! Crocodile teeth, all white and sharp. Snakestones. Tiny serpents curled up in the rock, changed into stone by saints in days gone by and flung far out to sea. Father said if we got them wet they might wake up and wriggle away or bite us with their venomous fangs!

He let me hold them. I’d wrap my fingers round them as hard as I could in case they started squirming. Sometimes I thought I could feel them trying to squeeze through my fingers and escape but when I looked, there they were, imprisoned in their little rock.

Ladies’ fingers were hard and shiny, not like ladies’ fingers at all. Some folk call them thunderbolts but Father never did back then, maybe because he thought it would frighten me, reminding me of the lightning strike. But as I got older, he started calling me his little Lightning Mary when I was being clever, asking good questions about the treasures and such.

Then there were the Devil’s toenails... Now, you’d think they’d be scarier than ladies’ fingers, wouldn’t you? But I never minded them. They do look like a great, big white toenail, though! Ugh! I should think the Devil would have black toenails. Or maybe red.

When I was very little, these treasures were like magic to me and I wanted to find some for myself more than anything in the world. Father said I was like a puppy, snapping at his heels, begging for attention. ‘Persistent’, he called me. I liked that. I like persistence, so long as I get whatever I am persisting for.

Anyways, one day – a Sunday it was – my father jumped up from the table and announced that he was taking me fossicking on Black Ven. Mother straight off began to scold him. She was always trying to stop his ‘little expeditions’ as she called them. Usually she was cross because she thought he should be working to put bread on the table.

But this time it was different. She did not want him taking me to Black Ven. Even I could tell from the name that it was a bad place. It doesn’t sound like a good one, does it? Sounds like a place the Devil might hide, waiting for poor souls who stray from the path... especially on the Lord’s Day when they should be in church or praying or, where I should have been, at Sunday School.

‘It’s a dangerous place, Richard! You can’t take the child! Why, only a week last weren’t there two killed in a landslip? Besides, don’t you always say how important her learning be? Why take her away from school on the one day she can go?’ she pleaded.

I ignored the bit about school. I would have been very sorry to miss it usually, but Mother’s pleading had had quite the opposite effect. Two killed! I felt a shiver go down my spine but it wasn’t fear, I can tell you. Plain excitement.

Mother must have seen the look on my face because she started arguing harder than ever.

But my father wasn’t having any of it. He’d made up his mind to go, and go he would and take me with him, whatever she might say. She tried hiding my boots but Joseph found them and helped me put them on my feet before she could utter another word.

‘You coming too?’ I asked Joseph as he stood up and brushed the dust from his knees.

He winked at me. ‘Not I! Ezra, Nathan and I are off up the field to fly Ezra’s new kite. You can have Father to yourself for once!’

I felt another shiver of excitement. I pulled my bonnet on and wound a comforter around my neck, for it was a bitter winter’s day.

Father pinched my cheeks. ‘We’ll get a bit of colour in that pale little face of yours and more learning than in a whole week of school!’ he said.

‘If you don’t get her killed first,’ muttered Mother under her breath. ‘Seems like I am the only one God-fearing enough in this heathen household and tis left to me to pray for your souls.’

Father snorted and then tried to sneak a kiss from her but she shrugged him off. He chuckled. He knows her ways.

‘There’ll be time enough for prayers when we get home again, Molly. The good Lord don’t begrudge a man time spent teaching a child to marvel at His creation! Don’t you make no never no mind. I may even speak at Chapel this night, if the spirit take me!’

‘If the Devil don’t take you, more like,’ Mother said, for she liked to have the last word on a subject.

Father grabbed his special fossicking ‘hoe’ from by the door and then rummaged about in his sack of tools and handed me a tiny little hammer. I nearly threw it back at his feet, for it looked for all the world like something for a doll to me, but he caught the look in my eye and stayed my hand.

‘You’ll need it, Mary. Trust your old father. You’ll see.’

I felt as proud as could be to be going on an adventure with Father. Just me!

We walked through the town with our shoulders hunched against the cold. We met few folk, it being Sunday, but I saw more than one nosy old biddy peek round her shutters and shake her head in disapproval. Father made no mind of them. We cut through the churchyard past St Michael the Archangel. Any moment those bells were going to start up again, trying to remind us where we should be on the Lord’s Day but Father just started whistling in that jaunty way he had when he was off on an adventure. Father was a Dissenter. He didn’t hold with the folk in St Michael’s. Said they churchgoers were a lot of fancy folk who had forgotten about God and the Bible and were more interested in the rules made up by the church and that’s why we went to Chapel where they put God and Jesus first instead of themselves.

‘We’ll be at Chapel right enough this very eve,’ Father said, as if to reassure me but I was not in need of reassurance. The opinions of others mattered as little to me as they did to Father.

We walked over the turf to the path to Black Ven and Charmouth beyond. The sea lay to our right, a deep, forbidding grey. Sometimes it heaved like a great beast and spewed its foam onto the shore. Mostly it lurked as if it was in a sulk.

‘Wind’s going to get up a bit,’ my father remarked. ‘You scared, my little Mary? Scared ’bout what you’ve heard?’

‘Not I!’ I said, my words snatched by a gust of wind. ‘I am on an adventure and I would not miss it for the world!’

‘That’s my girl! My Lightning Mary!’

He gave me a swift hug and we picked our way along the path for a few yards before he stopped again.

‘Path’s getting narrower by the day, Mary! Time was, you could walk side-be-side along here but see how it’s fallen down onto the shore?’

He was right. I could see places where the ground had given way and gone tumbling down to the beach, taking the grass with it. The sea beast was dragging the land away into its giant mouth, dragging it in and spitting it out again.

‘Will the path still be here when we turn back, Father?’

‘Why?’ he smiled. ‘Are you afear’d? Do you want to turn for home now? It may be gone, tis true...’

‘It would be an adventure if it was gone!’

He smiled again. ‘You’re a brave girl, my little lightning streak! Everything’s an adventure to you, it seems! But your ma would roast me alive if anything happened to you!’ He looked a bit sad, most likely thinking of the first Mary, who did get roasted.

It was slippery. You do have to watch your step. I was too young to understand then, but later I learned how dangerous it can be and I became anxious when Father went off on his own – and with good reason.

Of course, some folk end up in the sea by their own choice. Old Mr Cruickshanks used to go fossicking with Father, and when he ran out of money and couldn’t even afford a bit of bread, he jumped off Gun Cliff and let the sea take him and his troubles. Mother said it could be Father doing that if he didn’t get his cabinet-making done. Without that work – making furniture for rich folk – there’d be precious little money coming in from the sale of ‘nonsenses’, as she called them!

Besides, cabinet-making wasn’t so very profitable in any event. Once a lady called Jane Austen called in at the workshop. She asked Father if he would give her a price to mend the broken lid of a box. He had to go round to her rooms to see it, for she was too grand to bring it to us. He gave her a fair price, five shillings, but she was too mean. She said that was more than all the chairs and tables were worth in the rented rooms! Father was most annoyed but he bit his tongue. She had no idea of the work involved to piece together the fragments and remake the little hinges! Father found out that she wrote books for rich ladies with nothing better to do than lie about reading nonsense and that she did not even put her own name on her books, so they must have been quite bad and maybe that was why she could not afford him.

Mother said he should have offered to lower his price, but Father wouldn’t hear of it. He always said that if you charge nothing for your work, people think it’s worth nothing. Mother muttered something about not telling him to mend it for nothing, but he wasn’t listening. He had a trick to close his ears when Mother complained and I think I have that same trick myself. It is very useful.

It wasn’t long before we reached Black Ven. To be truthful, it’s a dirty grey more than black. Blue Lias clay, Father told me. Not really blue, neither, but the Lias bit is right, though. Layers and layers. (Lias means layers! Did you work that out?) Different shades of grey with some little seams of bright ochre and rust. A bit of grass clings to its sides. That day, what with the dark clouds hanging over us and the blackness of the rock, I could think it a devilish dark place indeed... and that set a little fizzle of excitement in my heart, I can tell you!

My father crouched down and took my face in his hands. ‘Take a proper look at ol’ Black Ven,’ he said. ‘It in’t to be trusted. See this?’ He pointed to a slab of dark, sludgy rock. ‘That’ll be off down the slope and into the sea before you can think the word help, let alone speak it. There used to be fields up there and cattle grazing on the sweet, green grass. All came toppling down one day. Cattle drowned. Farmer’s life ruined. Lucky to be alive, himself. Used to be houses back along where we come, past the church. All gone. Swallowed by her.’ He tilted his head towards the great green-grey sea. ‘She’s had a lot and she’ll have more and she don’t care whether she swallows cows or land or gardens or children. And the land can’t be trusted to stay. It rushes to go back to her, to the sea... Won’t hardly give you so much as a whisper of warning. You must understand, Mary, the land is cruel and the sea is cruel and life is cruel and that’s the way it is.’

‘Why do you come here, if it is so very cruel and dangerous?’ I was frightened now, I will admit.

‘Because of this!’ He tapped a lump of clay. ‘All because of this box of treasures.’