I have always regretted that I didn’t spend more time with Ben’s mother, Betty. She was quite old when I came into her life but still a headstrong, determined woman. When she married Edwin, she was disowned by her upper-crust family, who didn’t consider the art student turned professional boxer much of a catch. The fact that Edwin’s father was society artist Augustus John was not in his favour because Augustus was as celebrated for his bohemian lifestyle as he was for his paintings. As it turned it, Betty effectively brought up two children on her own and more or less separately, because Ben was eleven and away at school when Sara was born. Impressively, she educated Ben ‘on a tiara’ and wasn’t too proud to buy his uniform from end-of-term ‘outgrown’ sales.
My time spent with Betty was in concentrated spurts when we holidayed at the Fish Store. Occasionally she would stay with us in London. Betty’s social life in Mousehole revolved around the pub and she had her own stool there. She would wander down at lunch-time and again in the evening for a couple of gins before supper. In those days, the Ship was the focal point of the village and if you wanted to see someone, you’d be sure to find them in the pub at some point or other. Somewhere among the surviving photographs on the pub walls, of happy faces enjoying a sing-song with the Mousehole Male Voice Choir or dressed up after guise (pronounced ‘geez’: ‘Mowzal’ for disguise) dancing in the street, there is one of Betty.
Before Zach and Henry were born, Ben and I fell into a routine of collecting Tamsin, Jasper and Jessica, Ben’s children from his first marriage, from their holiday with their mother in St Ives and bringing them over to Mousehole to stay with Seagull Granny at the Fish Store. We’d spend the days swimming and sunbathing off the flat rocks, coming back for a crab lunch with Betty. Sometimes we’d take picnics of pasties and sandwiches made with fresh crusty bread and ham from the Mousehole shop with a big bag of tomatoes and fruit, and head off for Sennen beach. After a sun-baked day on the beach, it was bliss to come back to the cool of the Fish Store and eat saffron cake slathered with clotted cream and Betty’s home-made bramble jam. After supper, when sleepy children were tucked up in bed, Ben and I would amble down to the pub and end up in The Legion, drinking staggering amounts but bonding with all Ben’s old childhood friends. Many of the men were fishermen, working two weeks out at sea and two weeks on terra firma. Hardly a day went by without the gift of fish or a crab coming our way. The only appropriate way I could think of paying people back was by picking blackberries and making a blackberry pie. I began to feel really at home in the village.
By the time Zach and Henry came along, Betty’s health had deteriorated severely and she was living in a nursing home in St Ives. I was in charge of letting the Fish Store to cover its expenses, although a tenant continued to live in the studio. Various people kept boats, cars and fishing tackle in the garage below, so the comforting noise of the big wooden sliding door could be heard at random times.
Zach was born in June 1978 and it was a wonderful summer. We drove down to the Fish Store via Caspar’s house in Devon, where we stopped to show him the new baby.
‘Why couldn’t you have had a girl?’ was his grumpy response. ‘Girls are so much nicer and there are too many boys already.’
We sat in the garden and ate one of his delicious lentil soups with bacon and scraps of lemon zest. It was a baking-hot summer and we spent the early weeks of Zach’s life in a lazy haze. I had bought two long but flimsy white cotton nightdresses specially and have clear memories of the feel of the soft cotton as I sat in the armchair in front of my favourite window looking out across the night and early morning sea as I fed my new baby. I would walk him round the village in his carrycot and later across the rocks so that I could enjoy the sun and swim off the flat rock while he slept in the shade. It was a lovely time.
Soon after Zach was born, Caspar and Mary moved back to Mousehole, to a house at the other end of the village. By then Caspar, who’d been suffering from furred arteries which stopped the blood flow to his legs, had had first one and then the other leg removed. For a tall, independent man, used, by then, to living a quiet lone retirement, it was very frustrating. A special lift was installed in the house so that Caspar could go upstairs and he used to drive round the village in a smart motorized wheelchair, sometimes sitting little Zach on his lap.
There is a lovely photo of Christmas with Caspar and Mary when I was heavily pregnant with Henry. Mary cooked roast goose for Christmas dinner but forgot to turn the oven on, so everyone drank too much and three weeks later Henry was born two months early. Fortunately we were in London and although it was a dramatic and potentially fatal birth, Henry survived a month in an incubator, only to be back in hospital a week later for a stomach operation common to premature male babies.
Henry quickly recovered and was nicknamed ‘Limpet’ because he loved physical contact, particularly with his mum. One of my most treasured photos is of me lying on my back on the rocks at the bottom of the steps to the sea below the Fish Store with Henry fast asleep on my tummy as if he was still inside.
Zach was much more independent and very inquisitive. When he was quite a young toddler, he would let himself out of the sleeping Fish Store and visit Eia at Gurnick House, a large granite house overlooking the sea on the Gurnick down below the Fish Store. I don’t exactly remember the first time I saw Eia von der Flur, but the image of her sitting in her little garden or wafting across the narrow Gurnick road to her house is imprinted on my mind as if it were yesterday. She was an exotic creature by any standards who wore long dresses in bright colours with peasant embroidery. I thought they were probably Mexican. She wore her black hair in a long, loose style and it cascaded in thick waves over her shoulders down her back. Her bohemian husband wore black, which offset his thick white hair, and their children had unusual names like Ru. Eia’s children looked like blond fairies and wore old-fashioned clothes and played with home-made toys. I particularly remember a Victorian toy pram abandoned in the road outside the house.
A beautiful brass sun was nailed into the granite next to the always open door which gave on to a little portico and a second door into the house. In summer the couple would eat their meals overlooking the sea in the little garden across the road from the house. They ate from hand-painted rustic Mexican pottery and each plate told a story. The hare was the messenger from the moon, the humming bird a bringer of joy and the mermaid plate, sadly now broken and awaiting repair, symbolized allurement. Zach, like Eia’s children and, later, her grandchildren, loved this one best because it came with the story of the Zennor mermaid. You can see her famous carved bench at the church in Zennor, near St Ives. Check out the Wayside Folk Museum and Tinners Arms while you’re at it.
One summer, Zach turned up as usual to make breakfast bread rolls with Eia and a tall man answered the door.
‘What are you doing in Eia’s house?’ asked the indignant child, only to be told that it was now the tall man’s house. Eia had moved to a house opposite what was the butcher and still lives there, surrounded by her lovely, fascinating things. There is a scented garden and a birdbath for her beloved birds, and the Mexican pottery I remember from when Zach was a baby is still in use.
Eia was one of a stream of visitors who would pop in to say hello to Betty when Ben collected her from the nursing home and brought her back for lunch at her beloved Fish Store. There are lovely photos of Zach and Henry sitting on Betty’s frail lap, but much as she obviously enjoyed seeing this new crop of grandchildren, Betty’s eyes really lit up when Ben handed her a glass of Chablis and she saw that there was crab for lunch and Jelbert’s ice cream for pudding.
Another constant figure in life at the Fish Store is Royden Paynter. He was born in the village and by his own confession was filling time before he could leave school, which he did at fifteen, to go to sea at eighteen. After school he’d go crabbing, mackereling and long-lining for conger in his own little boat. Then, as now, fish landed for sale had to be taken to Newlyn Fish Market. In those days it was all pretty casual but now the market is a twenty-four-hour operation and it’s necessary to register to sell through a dealer – say, Stevenson, traditionally the big boy, or Harveys for shellfish.
By the time Zach was born, Royden was fishing full-time and kept a small boat in the garage or store, as he calls it, during the winter months. In his spare time he made crab and lobster pots to order while building up to 300 pots of his own. That’s where I first remember seeing Royden: in the bay every day, checking pots in Pandora, which was painted a bright yellow. Pandora was the boat that towed me in when I got stuck beyond the island on my windsurfer with rock-hard lactating breasts and a baby waiting to be fed. These days, Royden’s Berthing Master at the market and still makes pots in the ‘store’.