At the far end of the village, past the Methodist chapel, the road forks right up Raginnis Hill or left along St Clement’s Terrace. The last building on the left in the terrace is the Fish Store. It stands foursquare on the corner and was built in 1899 for storing and processing pilchards. It had fallen into disuse when, in 1939, my sons’ grandparents, Betty and Edwin John, bought it for £300, £600 less than it cost to build forty-odd years before. There are about half a dozen fish stores in varying states of repair dotted around the village and they date back to a time when Mousehole was a thriving fishing port. Other similar buildings were built as net stores, where nets were made, repaired and hung out to dry.
In Cornwall, particularly Mousehole, the local dialect is alive and flourishing. One turn of phrase I particularly like is ‘proper job’. It can be applied to anything from a particularly well-made Cornish pasty to a good catch of mackerel. It also refers to a job well done or a clever idea.
It required a huge leap of imagination, I’ve always thought, to spot the domestic potential of a smelly old fish store. It is a handsome, big, two-storey building made of large granite slabs with no structural internal walls. Only one thick pine pillar seems to support the entire roof, although another is hidden in a wall in what is now the bathroom. It stands at one corner of the inverted roof and appears single-handedly to link into the exposed ceiling beams which support the roof. It’s not obvious when you’re inside the Fish Store, but when you look down on it from, say, Raginnis Hill, you can see that the roof has a huge inversion in the middle. This was for collecting water for washing the fish. It passed down a central drainpipe hidden in the outside wall of the sitting-room. When it’s raining hard, the rainwater splashing through the middle of the house is a reminder of the Fish Store’s past life. The floors are made of thick, wide pine boards which slope very slightly across the width of the building towards the sea. Originally, the entrance to the upstairs area where the fish were pressed and packed was through a trapdoor from the store down below and you can clearly see the hole where the floorboards were replaced. The main entrance was on the ‘weather wall’ of the building, on a sloping road 60 yards from the sea. The store, on the ground floor, or garage, as it’s most often known these days, housed twelve 13-foot-square concrete tanks. This is where the pilchards were stored in salt, which drew the liquid out of the fish, for a month before the 15–20 tons of fish came up through the trapdoor to be pressed and packed for export to Italy. The fish were hauled up in baskets and packed in barrels, laid out in traditional fashion like a star. The full barrels were covered with hessian and fitted with a screw-clamp lid, rather like an old-fashioned printing press. The lid was held in place with huge granite loadstones suspended from a pole which slid through special holes in the lid. One of them sits on the wall outside the Fish Store.
Fortunately a builder lived opposite. Curiously, he had the almost identical surname of ‘Johns’. Jimmy Johns, whom I can remember and whose son Alan and grandson Duncan have subsequently worked on the house, was instructed to remove a corner of the building. The effect was exactly the same as cutting a corner slice from a square pie, giving street access to the upstairs of the building and a small front yard. Walls were built in line with the structural ceiling beams to divide the loft into a three-bedroom flat with a studio. The tanks down below were filled with rubble. By Mousehole standards, the main living-room – always known as ‘the big room’ – was huge. Downstairs became an excellent indoor space to have boxing matches and a feisty young Ben aped Edwin’s boxing prowess, taking on local boys in a ring they rigged up themselves. Ben had his own pair of boxing gloves and probably fancied himself as the next middleweight champion of England, as Edwin nearly was in the mid-1920s, making it to the last round before being knocked out by Jock McEvoy in a fight which sent his tooth through his lip.
It was his aunt, the painter Gwen John, who persuaded Edwin to give up boxing and become an artist. He had trained at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly and at the time, in early 1936, was living in Paris with his wife Betty and their young son Ben. Later that year, when the threat of war became serious, they left France for England, settling first in Somerset and then in Mousehole a couple of years later. They had chosen Mousehole because Edwin’s best friend, George Lambourne, Ben’s godfather, was already established as an artist in the village. They had wanted to start up a drawing school in what is now the Cornish Range restaurant, which, coincidentally, was also originally a fish store, but the outbreak of war put a stop to that. Edwin, who was bilingual, volunteered for the Intelligence Service. Being tall and strong, he later joined the Royal Military Police, becoming a Redcap. After the war, he came back to Mousehole and continued his artistic career, capturing the rocks, in particular, the harbour and the timeless countryside in and around Mousehole. In 1939 Edwin’s aunt Gwen died and left him her entire estate, including her house at Meudon, just outside Paris, which had remained empty throughout the war. Edwin returned to Paris, signalling the beginning of the end of his marriage. He returned briefly, between 1944 and 1946, and the result was Ben’s sister, Sara, born in 1946, when Ben was eleven.
Ben was four years old when they arrived in Mousehole and spoke only French. He became known as ‘French Ben’. During the war years the harbour was full of big fishing boats – many had guns mounted forward – and the boys would play cricket and rounders between them at low tide, collecting balls from under the hulls. There were also several Belgium boats belonging to families who had escaped from mainland Europe. The boys all had nicknames – ‘Big Boo’, ‘Shonolly’, ‘Strom’, ‘Jinx’, ‘Wackers’, the two ‘Nabos’ – and Ben became ‘Ben banger’.
Farmers would come down to the harbour after a storm to collect seaweed and load it on to a horse and cart. The slippery cargo would be trundled through the village and up Raginnis Hill, to be spread over freshly dug fields. Like horse manure, which was collected regularly, seaweed is a rich fertilizer for the soil of market gardeners. Farmers would also gather up the heads, bones and guts of filleted fish, which provided nourishment for the earth. In those days the fishermen were glad to get rid of the stinking debris, although most of it was dumped at sea. Today’s farmers buy their bone meal in dried, sanitized form.
The boys used to collect limpets and cook them on a metal sheet over a fire on the rocks when they weren’t fishing for whistlers and bull cats in the rock pools. One November, they weren’t allowed to light their bonfire on the rocks because it was thought there was a German sub in the bay and no lights were permitted. At all times the Germans were trying to find and destroy the cable station at Porthcurno. They never succeeded, but they would drop their bombs anyway.
Inflatable lorries were lined up in rows to fake troop activity and the fields were sometimes covered in silver paper, dropped by our side to simulate large aerial build-up on German aircraft radios. All the fields up Raginnis were covered in the stuff: people would see silver fields all around when they went blackberry picking or looking for watercress or to fetch a black-market chicken from one of the farms.
The John family is notably artistic – famously Augustus and Gwen John, but there are other artists, including Sara, Ben’s sister; Rebecca, his cousin; and Henry and Tamsin, his children – but Ben’s uncle Caspar made a name for himself in the Navy, eventually becoming First Sea Lord. Whenever it was practicable and he was in Mount’s Bay, Caspar would visit Mousehole. He would often have supper with Betty at the Fish Store. He was also partial to a Guinness or two (called ‘moon milk’ by Edwin, Caspar and their brother David, after The Man in the Moon, their local in Chelsea) in the Mousehole pub, the Ship Inn. He was friendly with many of the local fishermen. He would wear a dark navy coat over his uniform, covering up the gold braid on his sleeves. Later, his wife Mary and their three children, Rebecca (who became a close friend when we worked at Time Out and introduced me to Ben), Phineas and Caroline, lived in the Salt Ponds, very close to the Fish Store. Mary used to drive an old London taxi. By then, in 1951, Caspar was Rear Admiral, stationed at Plymouth, and Ben was fifteen. On one occasion he steamed into the bay in command of HMS Vengeance, an aircraft carrier, accompanied by a flotilla. Caspar had decided to christen his three children on board, by upturning the ship’s bell as an impromptu font. A small group of family and friends, including Betty, Ben, four-year-old Sara and Jimmy Madron, who owned the fishing boat The Renovelle, were duly taken aboard by liberty boat. After the ceremony, they went to the admiral’s quarters, and Caspar, by way of a deprecatory joke, said to his Flag Officer, ‘Oh, Flag, I’d like you to meet Jimmy Madron. He owns his own boat.’ An overawed Jimmy beamed from ear to ear.
Childhood friends like Barry Cornish, who later became the village postman, remember how unconventional the food and lifestyle were at the Fish Store. The house was always full of actresses and actors, writers and painters.
Betty would grind fresh coffee every day and cook mussels marinière-style as well as other continental, exotic-seeming dishes such as stuffed cabbage and kidneys in red wine. Even sophisticated friends like the artist Rose Hilton, who met Betty when she and her husband Roger came to live in Cornwall in the early sixties, found Betty’s cooking impressive. She made her own ice cream, which no one else did, and had shelves of herbs in bottles, which Rose had never seen before. Fishermen were generous with their spoils and would leave fish on the doorstep or give Ben a big crab to take back to Betty. She would make mayonnaise to go with the freshly boiled crab and cook egg custard rather than rely on Bird’s instant to go with stewed plums or a fruit crumble. Ben remembers creamy macaroni cheese for tea, and her simple but delicious vegetable soups made with sorrel from the hedgerow and spinach from the farm were appreciated by everyone lucky enough to sit at her table.
Betty didn’t cook much when I came to know her in her last years before she needed full-time nursing and moved to a home at St Ives. It was obvious, though, from the way she shopped and organized her kitchen and the pencilled notes in her cookbooks that she was the best kind of inquisitive self-taught cook. She liked things done properly, responding to the seasons and adapting her cooking to what was available and whom she had to feed. This style of cooking and eating, when everyone mucks in and the preparation is just as convivial as the eating, had a huge effect on me and it is the essence of the Fish Store cookbook. Now, that’s what I call a proper job.