FISHING VILLAGE LIFE
Cornwall is famous for its colourful fishing harbours and pretty settlements. But what is it like to live in a place where residents depend on the sea, and have done for generations? To find out, Lamorna Ash spent three months in the port of Newlyn
Lamorna Ash immersed herself in Newlyn’s close-knit community, where locals rely on the sea for their livelihood.
By naming me Lamorna, my mother unwittingly bound me to Cornwall, the county in which she and my grandmother grew up.
As a child, I visited Lamorna Cove with my family every holiday. Standing on the rocks below its crumbling quay, I would look up at its precipitous granite cliffs and experience an inexpressible affinity with this unpredictable stretch of coastline.
This is how a land enters your psyche.
Newlyn is just on from Penzance, along the sea road towards Land’s End. Its population, coupled with that of neighbouring Mousehole, is small at around 4,400, but the town boasts one of the UK’s largest and most profitable fishing ports. And it has five pubs, all within walking distance of each other.
Fresh from university and struck by that distinct feeling of rootlessness experienced by so many who live out their childhoods in an ever-changing metropolis, I decided that this town, sustained by the sea for generations, would be as good a place as any to start my adult life. After a few calls, I found a couple in Newlyn with a spare room: Denise and Lofty, a fishmonger and a ship’s chandler respectively, who, luckily for me, turned out to occupy a central role in the town, and to be two of the kindest people I’ve ever met.
From the upstairs window of Denise and Lofty’s cottage, you can just make
out the sea. That first night in Newlyn, I sat in the bay of the window and stared out at the tall masts and derricks of fishing boats glimpsed above the high-ceilinged fish market that stood at the edge of the harbour. I imagined every other resident of Newlyn doing the same, the town like a theatre auditorium with the houses as rows of seats sloping down towards the stage that was the harbour – a grander version of the open-air Minack Theatre a few miles further down the coast. The line between sea and land delineates Cornish experience, reminding its inhabitants that there is always something out there that is bigger than them.
Until the 16th century, it was not Newlyn but Mousehole that was the principal fishing port in the southwest. In 1595, a Spanish naval squadron landed at Mousehole and sacked it, burning down almost every building, before continuing their violence upon the coast in Newlyn and Penzance. Mousehole never quite recovered from its destruction and Newlyn’s port, from where boats could come and go at any hour uninhibited by the passage of the tide, soon assumed dominance.
The first time I saw Newlyn and Mousehole from the water was at dawn on a crabbing vessel. The shape of a coastal community makes more sense when viewed from the sea, like seeing a cross-section of a tree’s roots below the ground and only then understanding how it can be so strong. The skipper, a young fisherman called James, told me his grandparents had recently sold their cottage in Mousehole, where they’d lived their whole lives. They were desperate to sell to a Cornish person, but the price was too high for anyone local, so they had to settle for a holiday-let agency. James’s grandad was so upset he couldn’t speak for a week.
In Newlyn, I often noticed a rage levelled at those from upcountry, whose arrival in the summer months simultaneously pushes house prices up and locals out, and who decide the laws that govern fishing rights from a landlocked distance.
If Newlyn’s beating heart is the fishing industry, its soul is in the pubs.
Most evenings, I would stroll down to The Star, Denise and Lofty’s favourite drinking spot, or The Swordfish, the fishermen’s pub, for a pint and a story. It was here I met Ben Gunn (his nickname taken from the Treasure Island character), a retired fisherman with a look about him that suggested he had seen all ends of the earth. Since leaving fishing, Ben had occupied his days with painting the seas – messy stroked canvases that he stuck up around the town: outside pubs, above shops, in the twisting alleyways of Newlyn’s fishing quarter, The Fradgan. When I asked Ben if he missed the sea, he replied: “Why would I? It’s all right here with me in the pubs.”
SHOREBOUND LABOUR
“For every one man at sea,” the Newlyn saying goes, “that’s five men on land.” One night, Nicky, a close friend of Denise and Lofty, invited me to join him in grading the fish before the morning auction. At 8pm I met him before the cavernous market building. Inside, five white-coated men worked in silence at various humming machines. The mood was particularly low among the graders this evening, Nicky told me, since the previous night a quarter of a million fish came in off the boats and it took them until 6am to finish sorting and pricing them.
“This is a bad job, Lamorna,” Nicky informed me, breaking the hush after several hours spent sending frozen fish down the chute. “It’s a bad job.” He was a fisherman for most of his life, but as you get older, the strain the job puts on your body eventually catches up with you. Working as a grader seemed the only way to avoid losing his connection to the industry.
Don is the barrel-bellied skipper of the Filadelfia, PZ542, a 79-foot beam trawler built in the late 1970s. When I asked him if he’d take me out to sea, I assumed he’d say what I was warned
“If Newlyn’s beating heart is the fishing industry, its soul is in the pubs”
the fishermen of Newlyn would say if some girl asked to go out on their boats: “Not on your life!” But he shrugged his shoulders and replied, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, “Don’t see why not. How’s next week?”
For eight days, I spent my nights rocked to sleep in the maroon-carpeted cabin of the Filadelfia, 27 miles from the coast. During each haul, I was taught to gut a new kind of fish, the crew painstakingly taking me through the various knife motions needed to disembowel lemon and megrim sole, monkfish, cuttlefish, hake, turbot and various species of ray.
While the work on a trawler is precarious and unremitting, the men never become impervious to the wonderful, strange sights the sea can afford. During my trip on the Filadelfia, our nets brought up lumps of amber, a great barnacled anchor and a whale skull. On our penultimate day at sea, the sky was a blistering November blue: a paradise of light unobstructed by a single cloud. “Even days when you catch bugger all,” the men told me, “it’s so bloody beautiful out here you don’t really mind.”
On shorebound evenings in The Swordfish, I was told countless tales of those who never came back from fishing trips. Tragedy seems woven into the fabric of the place: it is too easy for the nets stroking the seafloor to snag on some rusted wreck below and drag the whole boat under, or for a strong wave to reach up and pick a man right off the deck. But this proximity to disaster equally holds the community together. “No matter what,” one fisherman told me, “when you lose someone to the sea...” He pauses.
“Well, you just gotta look out for each other after a tragedy like that.”
In the years since I stayed there, I have thought of Newlyn often. Those months I lived with Denise and Lofty changed my conception of Cornwall, forcing me to confront the image of gleaming beaches and quaint villages I had constructed with a tourist’s eye as a child. Instead, I discovered the intimate combination of parts that make up a fishing community: the grit and blood and bones, the exhilaration and comradery, and the difficult, thoughtful heroes who work upon and beside the sea throughout their lives. Lamorna Ash is a writer and education worker.
Her book Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town (Bloomsbury, £16.99) is out now.