Three big windows look out to sea from the Fish Store and they are all in the main living-room. The moment you open the front door, your eyes are drawn out of the window towards St Clement’s Isle and beyond. One window lines up very neatly with the polished granite-topped cooking island which stands between the dining-table and the oven. This means that when I’m cooking, I look up to see the sea. The window-ledges are deep enough for a cushion and wide enough to stretch your legs. In fact, I fit this window-ledge perfectly, and sitting here watching and listening to the sea and its constant comings and goings is one of my most favourite things.
Mousehole houses are built in a series of terraces spiralling sideways and upwards from the harbour, intersected laterally by less than a handful of narrow roads and vertically by a series of alleys and courtyards. When I crane my head to the left from the window on the left, I can see beyond two sides of the harbour wall and right to the end of the village. My view is partially obscured by the slanting roofs and chimney pots of the back of the houses below on the Gurnick. Fortunately for us, the houses directly in front are smaller and lower than those to the left, so our sea view begins above the orange ridge tiles of Morwenna Cottage and Seacrest. Gurnick houses all have yards behind them and some, including those below us, have back extensions or outbuildings which have been built on to the backs of houses in St Clement’s Terrace, where we are. This always makes me think of Moroccan riads built round a central courtyard. Sometimes, when it is completely dark and the moon is bright enough to pick out the pale grey of the roof slates, the view can look entirely Arabian.
This mixture of slanting and flat roof-tops with chimney stacks at either end is a favourite resting spot for the gulls. They stand on their spindly legs, shake their black spotted tails and suddenly fan their wings before walking a few paces, pausing and then repeating the whole procedure. They might swivel their heads without moving their bodies to have a good look round before taking a quick peck at the roof and flying off. In the summer there are usually several geeky grey baby gulls plonking around, waiting to be fed. Sometimes a pair of shaggy black birds hop about on a chimney. Unlike the gulls, who point their beady yellow eyes out to sea, the black birds always look inwards towards the land. There is a constant display of aerobatics from the gulls as they swoop down and across in front of the window. Best of all is when they glide in slow motion, freeze-framing every few seconds, and then, whoosh, they’re gone. Single gulls fly purposefully to and from the island a few hundred yards away but they often travel in gangs, hovering above the sea as if on an invisible bungee jump, floating up and down on a warm thermal. The gulls tramp about on the roof of the Fish Store, shrieking their heads off as they pace up and down. Sometimes they urgently tap and scrape the Velux roof windows with their beaks, as if they’ve got something important to tell you. Unexpectedly they seem to get bored with all the palaver and then they’re up and off, filling the sky, swirling around in different directions before inexplicably arranging themselves in a diamond shape in front of the island. This could mean they’ve spotted a shoal of fish or, more likely, they’re tidying up, so to speak, where an old effluent pipe comes out in the sea. Despite all their noise and carry-on, the gulls add to, rather than detract from, the peace and tranquillity of the village. Occasionally, when they have young to feed, they do wake light sleepers during the night. Locals barely notice them and visitors soon adjust.
Cats often slink across the roof-tops in front of our window. Sometimes they mew at the window but most often they’re on course, doing their own thing, on patrol, checking out who’s been doing what, where and when.
The seagulls love St Clement’s Isle and take refuge there in droves. In some lights, when they’re roosting towards the end of day, they look like crusty sugar, the sort that sits in little clusters on top of certain cakes and currant buns. Wherever you are in Mousehole, when you look out to sea, the island is right in front of you, following like the Mona Lisa’s eyes. Its shape changes slightly as you move. When you come into the village it looks deep and interesting, but from our windows it’s long and thin and a bit like a badly flattened croissant. The island isn’t much of an attraction these days. No one goes there and there’s no reason why anyone would, because it’s just a craggy irregular lump of rock inhabited by gulls. It’s said that the island was originally one piece of rock but now it’s two, divided by a bomb which didn’t go off but which had a huge impact. It used to have its own chapel, more probably a monk’s cell, but no trace remains. Zach and Henry and their friends, and Ben and his friends before them, used to swim round it and I was once becalmed trying to windsurf round it, but years ago people would row out there for picnics. It was far grassier then, quite lovely in fact, and the nearest place to go for an expedition. Barry Cornish, the postman here for thirty years, remembers how a couple of families would make up a picnic, take ages to get ready, then his father would row them out and land at the little shingle beach on the north side, where you can bring in a small boat. When it was time to come back, his mother would wave a towel towards the harbour and the old man came out in a rowing boat to fetch them back. The island belongs to the Bolitho estate, once one of the biggest landowners in the area. At one time, you could walk from this parish to Land’s End without leaving its property. The fishermen call the highest point of the island the Pepperpot and use it as a guide. A few years ago, when a big storm tossed the Pepperpot into the sea, several of them went out and searched for the big piece of granite. They found it lodged on some rocks and used their fishing chains to pull the 300 cwt slab back up into position.
The shape of the island is echoed by the Lizard peninsula beyond, known locally as the eastern land. Its long slim shape is almost always visible but its clarity changes with the weather. On a clear night it’s possible to see the lights twinkling in the distance but when the sea mists come down it disappears completely. When the light is fading on a dull sort of day, the distant land, sea and sky all merge into a series of shades of grey, as if someone has taken a giant paintbrush and dipped it into very watery ink. At other times, when the sun goes down leaving big, bold strokes of deep, pink crimson, it looks like a long dark sausage – or lizard – floating in the distance. The mornings can be even more dramatic. The sun rising over the eastern land moves round quickly behind the island, striking the sea at a sharp angle and turning it into shimmering, molten gold.
Sea and sky are constantly changing, often in breathtaking ways, so much so that it can be extremely hard to drag yourself away from the window. The light down here is famously special and it often gives our sea-and-sky view an incredible 3D effect. Stormy weather can be the most amazing. As I write, the sky is split in three distinct parts, with dull grey rising from the distant Lizard giving way to big, sloping, fluffy grey-tinged clouds topped with a dark grey band with changing pockets of the brightest blue. The sea is choppy and moving with gentle undulation, seemingly pulling in several different directions. Every so often, these currents clash into frothy bursts of spray. The colours, too, are changing by the second, alternating through shades of petrol blues and greens. Small, fierce waves are crashing up and over the island and a cluster of seagulls is sheltering in the middle of the green-hued rock. Further still, the sea has a luminescence from the strobes of sun piercing through the clouds. Minutes later I look again. The sky has cleared, the entire sea is bright and covered with small white horses which in the distance look like chips of ice. I glance up again and the sun has disappeared completely and the sea is swelling as it rolls past the island. It looks bleak and beastly. It’s a beast all right, but a compelling and beautiful one.
There is some sort of sea-going craft out on the water at most times of day. When Zach was a baby, it was a treat to do the night feeds looking out of the window, watching the green and red lights of the fishing boats as they headed out to sea. If I happened to be there again as the light was coming up and the sun shining on the water, I’d need sunglasses, it was so dazzlingly bright. My favourite boats are the one- or two-man punts, as they call them round here. They look like rowing boats. Alan Johns, whose father carried out the original work to convert the Fish Store, used to have a particularly fine one. It was made of wood, clinker-built, the separate planks clearly visible and highlighted by a clear varnish so there was no doubt that it was a wooden boat. It had a pleasingly old-fashioned look about it. It was kept down at the harbour. From March, when the baulks are lifted to open the harbour to the sea, until November, when they go down, it was tied up afloat, ready to go out to sea. The rest of the time she (boats are always she) lived out of the water on the ‘hard’, by the side of the beach next to the harbour car park, in front of the house which has shells for sale with a slot in the door for money. Years ago the little table would be set out with empty, spike-free sea urchins, some green, some pink and, best of all, some white, presumably caught by the owner. I have several in my bathroom in London, brought back for me by the boys from childhood holidays. Alan and others like him would finish work at five, have their tea and then go out line-fishing for sea bass. You see the boats drifting downwind with a pole out with its line attached. Line-caught bass fetches a better price than net-caught.
I also like the traditional shape of the inshore fishing boats, dinky little boats they look as they chuff past our window. Their cheerful colours, such as bright yellow or postbox red with chimneys painted a contrasting colour, make them clearly visible from the window. With the help of the binoculars which hang at the ready above one of the windows, it is possible to make out their PZ (for Penzance) registration number. Sometimes it is someone we know. I’ve come to be quite fond of the look of the bigger boats, the beam trawlers or beamers, so called because they trawl the fish – flat fish and scallops – from the bottom of the sea, disturbing the sea-bed as they go. You see them all lined up in the harbour at Newlyn. The outstretched arms of their derricks or beams which haul the nets from the sea always remind me of giant grasshoppers. It’s a bit of a thrill if they come by on this side of the island – which happens when the boat is manned by a Mousehole man – because they are so big and powerful. They’re just getting up a head of steam by the time they go past Mousehole from Newlyn and sometimes they stretch their beams like grasshoppers do when they’re about to take a leap. In reality they are setting out their beams to calm the roll of the boat. There’s usually a flutter of seagulls screeching and diving in their wake, circling overhead, rubbing their metaphorical hands at the possibility of a stray fish coming their way. Some of the boats have kith or kin in Mousehole, so they give a honk on their deep foghorn as they go past. Sometimes, when they’re on the way home, it sounds a bit like ‘Time to get my tea on’.
In the summer you can check the time by the Scillonian, the ferry to and from the Scilly Isles which steams out of Penzance at 9.30 a.m. and returns sometimes close to seven in the evening. I love this ship. It looks like a mini ocean liner with a hint of Art Deco about it and is innately glamorous. Its big creamy-coloured funnel juts out of a glossy white hull with the Cornish flag painted aflutter on both sides. It always lets rip with a deep, throaty roar as it passes the Mousehole harbour. Another, newer, familiar sight in summer is the divers’ boat which zips back and forth from Lamorna with people in wetsuits and a cargo of air cylinders, just like something out of a James Bond movie.
It seems strange that the Fish Store never had its own boat. A couple of years ago, egged on by Zach and Henry, now in their twenties and keen sailors, Ben bought a small sailing boat. I’m the only one who can’t sail, so I am often left behind. As I watch them zigzagging out towards St Michael’s Mount and back across the bay into the wind towards Lamorna, I know that they will come back hungrier than usual.