The Main Cages. Philip Marsden

      

      THE MAIN CAGES

      

       PHILIP MARSDEN

      For my grandfather

      JG Le NK and Zofia Ilińska

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Prologue

1 1934

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

       CHAPTER 8

       CHAPTER 9

       CHAPTER 10

       2 May 1936

       CHAPTER 11

       CHAPTER 12

       CHAPTER 13

       CHAPTER 14

       CHAPTER 15

       CHAPTER 16

       CHAPTER 17

       CHAPTER 18

       CHAPTER 19

       CHAPTER 20

       CHAPTER 21

       CHAPTER 22

       3 Saturday, 29 August 1936

       CHAPTER 23

       CHAPTER 24

       CHAPTER 25

       CHAPTER 26

       CHAPTER 27

       CHAPTER 28

       CHAPTER 29

       CHAPTER 30

       CHAPTER 31

       CHAPTER 32

       CHAPTER 33

       Epilogue

       About the Author

       By the same author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

      

      

      Main Cages – main, from maen, Cornish for ‘rock’; cages, possibly from Cornish kegys – ‘hemlock’ (on the coast east of Pendhu Point is a Hemlock Cove); or perhaps from cagal, Late Cornish for ‘the dung of sheep, goats or rodents’, and also denoting ‘clotted or spattered filth on the coats of beasts’, which, in certain lights, the rocks are said to resemble.

      

      

       PROLOGUE

      ‘The Adelaide? ’91. ’90 was the Prima Donna and the Bonne Julienne and a couple of others I don’t recall.

      ‘First few days of the year she struck, they dead days right after Christmas, been blowing two days straight, an easterly that come up the channel with a freezing mist before it. Saturday evening it veered south-east and freshened to a full gale. That easterly brought the first snow we had in years but the worst of the easterly’s always the run it brings. Damn swell you can’t do nothing with.

      ‘She was a big barque, the Adelaide. Steel hull and new built, headed up Liverpool with a hold full of jute. After fifteen weeks she come on land in a snowstorm. Imagine that – fifteen weeks in the heat and you come to land in a bloody snowstorm …

      ‘They was taking soundings when they heard the bell. They knew what that bell was. Not a man who’s sailed this coast don’t know the Cages bell when he hears it. So the master orders them round but he misses stays and in that wind and they seas he didn’t stand a chance of getting free. Just out from Hemlock Cove, they struck the edge of the reef square on.

      ‘We was all down at the hall that night, Freeman Rooms, listening to a speaker. Colonel’d been staying up Dormullion but the weather was so bad he couldn’t get back and he was telling us about Africa or someplace. Anyway that’s where we was when