There is something about Cornwall that gets under the skin and hooks you for life. I’m not sure when the association with St Agnes in north Cornwall started on my father’s side of the family. I know they holidayed there when he was a boy and that by the time I was aware of anything very much, his youngest sister, an art mistress in London, had bought the count house of a deserted tin mine on Mithian Downs, just outside the village. When she retired, she moved there and by that time another aunt and her husband had downsized their rare-breed chicken farm in Surrey and bought land near by to augment the chickens with pig farming. Then another uncle followed suit. So it felt as if I’d grown up with strong Cornish connections. It’s not true, of course, because the Cornish don’t tend to accept someone new as being part of the fabric of a place. I remember one aunt telling me that she’d lived in St Agnes for over thirty years and still felt like a newcomer, or emit, as they call ‘visitors’ down here.
My father introduced my mother and her family to Cornwall and when my siblings and I came along, we’d holiday en masse, with relatives dispatched to different farms and Granny lodged in a B&B above the post office. Somewhere I have a photo of my paternal grandmother on the beach at Chaple Porth wearing a navy blue and white forties-style cotton dress made by her youngest daughter, my Auntie Kitty (or Aunt Kate, as she once announced she would prefer to be called), which I own and which fits me perfectly.
My relationship with St Agnes and Chaple Porth was really only as a holidaymaker. Sure, we got to know the butcher, the greengrocer and the baker and my mum bought eggs and sometimes milk from a farm, but they were holiday relationships. Our friends were people we met on the beach who, like us, came year after year. When I was in my early twenties, I met my future husband there. He had grown up in Cornwall, in a place called Mousehole, somewhere I’d heard of but never visited. His mother, Betty, still lived there, on her own, with a lodger in the ‘studio’ once used by Ben’s father, Edwin, an accomplished water-colourist like his aunt, Gwen John. Ben rarely went to stay. He had transferred his Cornish allegiance, as I was about to do, when he met his first wife, whose family had a holiday home in St Ives.
I can’t exactly remember the first time Ben brought me to Mousehole. I do recall the journey, though, and how odd it seemed to be going past the turn-off for St Agnes, which was ‘my’ part of Cornwall. You get the first promise of Mousehole when you round the corner past the railway station at Penzance and drive along the Promenade towards Newlyn. Newlyn sprawls up and away to the left and peters out along the road which links it to Mousehole. We probably stopped at Jelbert’s for an ice cream before swinging past the butcher (now baker) at the bottom of the Coombe on the right and Newlyn’s Fish Market and the Tidal Observatory, where Mean Sea Level is calculated daily, on the left. As the road turns up past the pier, you almost turn back on yourself and come parallel with the harbour, where you can see the fishing boats docked up along the quay.
In those days there was a working quarry at Penlee on the road between Newlyn and Mousehole. I remember how white and dusty the road was as we drove past, looking down to the works below on the shoreline. They seemed very Heath Robinson to my inexperienced eye. There was a little railway that ran directly to Newlyn’s south pier, taking away the stone and gravel, although the actual quarry was on the Paul side of the road, hidden from view. The quarry closed in the eighties, leaving behind a huge gaping hole from all the dynamiting and a prime piece of real estate by the shore. In the distance you can clearly see St Michael’s Mount and beyond that the Lizard peninsula is close enough to see waves crashing on the shore and the shapes of the fields.
Ben pointed out the slipway from the Penlee Lifeboat station. This is where the Solomon Browne lived, the lifeboat which, years later, on 19 December 1981, put to sea to assist the coaster Union Star and never returned. It was every little boy’s dream to grow up to be a member of the lifeboat crew and eight Mousehole men were lost on that fatal occasion. Ben grew up with most of them and, like everyone else in the village, was absolutely devastated when the news was phoned through to us in London. We had already planned to come to Mousehole that Christmas and the misery of the village – no family was untouched – was palpable.
Once past the first sighting of St Clement’s Isle, which sits right in front of Mousehole, you come to the Old Coastguard Hotel and moments later the road turns sharply left and immediately to the right, in an awkward dogleg, bringing you face to face with one of the loveliest harbours in Cornwall. I’m ashamed to admit that I can’t remember whether the sun was casting a spell over the place, making the sea sparkle and lighting up the granite buildings, or whether I saw Mousehole for the first time without rose-tinted glasses. I know I was impressed by how compact it seemed and how picture-postcard beautiful it looked. You can see virtually the whole village in one sweep of the eyes from this vantage point, past the village clock, the (now gone) Lobster Pot Hotel, right up Raginnis Hill and out of the village. If you know what you’re looking for, you can just make out the Fish Store.
At least six people greeted Ben as we drove the short distance to the house. ‘You!’ someone yelled and ‘All right, boy?’ said another. I expect they wondered who I was because, looking in my direction, someone said, ‘Hello, maid, where you to with Ben banger?’ as in ‘Hello, female person, where are you going with Ben?’ (One of his childhood nicknames was ‘Ben banger’, because he was always getting into fights.)
Mousehole couldn’t have been more different from the Cornwall I knew. This was a proper village centred round a pretty little harbour with fishing boats and seagulls. I was used to beach games on sandy beaches and big waves for body surfing, but there’s no beach to speak of here. To be fair, there’s been an attempt to rectify that and to a certain extent it works. In the past, lorry-loads of sand have been shipped in from Hayle (‘Three miles of golden sand’) and elsewhere and emptied at either end of the harbour to make little beaches known locally as the ‘old’ quay beach, referring to the old quay (originally built in 1393 and extended seawards in the early part of the eighteenth century) at the Fish Store end of the harbour, and the ‘new’ quay (started in 1837) at the other side. When the tide is in, you can swim in the harbour and jump from the quay into the deep, cold water close to the sea beyond. On the Newlyn side is the so-called ‘new beach’. Here the rock is smooth with jagged edges and almost black, with coarse, grey ‘sand’ reminiscent of the volcanic Canaries. Spurs of rock from the stony beach jutting into the sea make excellent diving boards, but a large, entirely safe natural swimming pool has been built into the rocks and fills with seawater with the tides.
The shoreline on the other, main side of the village is covered with rounded boulders which are collectively known as ‘the rocks’. These were repeatedly painted by Ben’s father Edwin when he lived here. They have a mesmerizing appeal both for the way they are lodged together and their range of colour through pale grey to tawny and dark brown. Years later, when Zach was four or five, he lost an expensive American trainer while playing on the rocks. It never turned up, but two years later someone was fishing in one of the rock pools and – surprise, surprise! – there it was: one nearly new red trainer, instantly recognizable by its distinctive ankle star. The rocks are a child’s playground of rock pools and great hiding places for rock hide-and-seek. There’s a definite knack to walking with confidence across the rocks at Mousehole. It comes with experience, so lots of visitors never discover the bigger, flatter, more sunbathe-suitable rocks below the Salt Ponds, at the far end of the village. There is one rock arrangement that we love which forms an almost perfect little semi-private sun-trap. I took to the ‘flat rock’ like a duck to water. Hardly anyone ever goes there and it’s next to Dicky Daniel’s, a rather lovely cove which is the best ever place to swim.
My strongest memory of coming to Mousehole wasn’t the undeniable beauty of the place, it was the relentless screeching of the gulls. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. One bird would start up, gently at first, then build to a crescendo which triggered more and more gulls. If you happened to be close by, it was deafening. In the distance it wasn’t too bad, but there was no doubt that the gulls competed with each other to squawk the loudest. I couldn’t imagine how anyone got any sleep. I immediately understood why Ben’s mother Betty was known as ‘Seagull Granny’.
As we made our way along the narrow, twisting road, past the flower-decked, granite fishermen’s cottages, and I absorbed the timeless sights and sounds of Mousehole for the first time, I had no inkling what an important part in my life this lovely, typical, small Cornish village was destined to play. I didn’t realize it then, but the Fish Store was about to change my understanding of cooking seafood. I would learn how to prepare and cook a munificence of mackerel and monkfish, red mullet and soles, sea bass, squid and scallops and, most memorably, crab.
I can look back now and see that the Fish Store is a treasure trove where some of my most intense memories are locked.