The Main Cages. Philip Marsden

that poor wretched colonel’s left talking to an empty hall.

      ‘In they days the boat was the Eliza Jane – pulling she was, just paddles and a pair of great heavy drop keels. Couple of the launch crew heaved open the doors and the noise hit us with the wind. I never heard such a noise. The sea against the piles of the slipway and some bloody howling easterly and a biting wind with thick snow in it. The crew was picked and we checked the gear and got on board, ten of we oarsmen and the cox and a couple of others and still none of us saying a word. So we’re sitting there and each of us takes hold of the gunwale and there’s snow all around and we’re sitting waiting for the launch.

      ‘Cox was Sam Tyler and he was standing in the stern looking out over us and listening to the wind and trying to get the seas and it’s still not too late for him to stop. But we saw him nod to Joshua Ball and take his seat at the helm.

      ‘That time the slip was new, roller-slip built just six months, and Joshua Ball was on the hard below us. He took away the strops and looked down at the surf. Once he’s knocked that pin out the chain drops and there’s nothing you can do. That’s the moment you dread – once you’re gone you’re gone but it’s the waiting that gets to you and it’s his decision when to launch. Someone asks where the service’s to and Tyler says in from the Cages and we’re all thinking what’d that be like in an easterly like this.

      ‘Josh knocks out the pin and the boat starts on her rollers, slow at first and then faster and all of we waiting for the bows to strike. We faced astern and that night I could see old Josh at the top of the slip getting smaller, with his hammer and the chain on the ground by his feet. He had the face of the hangman watching us go out in that.

      ‘Well we hit the water and pulled like hell. Got through the short seas into deeper water. Wasn’t too bad in the bay. There was great big swells but long and they weren’t breaking and we soon forgot the cold pulling as we were. Once out of the bay we hit the wind full on and the seas right above us. The very first one of they seas pushed up our bows and we was looking down on the cox, then the next he was up above us like we was on a bloody seesaw.

      ‘At night in a sea you never know the one that’ll break and swamp you. You don’t see it – but you can hear it. At first he’s distant – then he comes full and heavy above the noise of the wind and you can hear the size of him in the sound. Then one astern, and one abeam and you never know which one’ll get you. We got one going out, broke just as we came into it, steepened up ahead of us and then the noise of the crest breaking right above us and we knew he was a big one. We lost the bows and would have gone over if the starboard crew hadn’t backed their oars. Wave washed clear over us and no one stopped pulling but the cold afterwards – you could feel every inch of yourself that was wet and our fingers locked tight around the oars so we couldn’t let go even if we wanted – and we just thought of the seamen and the ship on the rocks and we pulled harder.

      ‘By the time we got to the ship the snow’d stopped and there was a moon. She was already well down by the stern, and with her stern under, the seas was breaking against her mizzen and washing up the decks. One of the deckhouses was breaking up and her bowsprit pointing up towards the cliffs and up there was the land crew come from Porth, but it was too far and in that wind their rockets were a bloody waste of time.

      ‘We looked around for survivors but there was no one on the decks. There was already timbers and bales of jute and debris and the Lord alone knows what swilling about in the water. Wasn’t a soul on deck or in the water and we thought, they’ve all gone already we’re too late and all that pulling for nothing. Then someone pointed up and we saw them – clinging to the mast and the yards and hanging on to the halyards.

      ‘She’d struck with her starboard bow and we had to get in leeward of her. We came in under their stern and along midships and one of their crew came down and you could see him waiting on the ladder ’til he could get across the decks between waves – the decks was awash one minute and then they was clear. We came in alongside and threw a line and it dropped on the deck and he jumped down but the next wave came and he had to get up in the rigging. We threw the rope again and this time he got a hold of it but the whip fouled and he had to leave it. Then we dropped in a deep swell and for a moment we lost her and went round abeam, thought we was about to broach but we got her round and dropped in again. We got three aboard that time, each coming down on deck and jumping and two of our crew hauling their weight. The tide was dropping and the deck was clearing and we had two more off no difficulty and each was so cold they could hardly speak when they came aboard.

      ‘Then we heard a noise, a groaning noise from in her hull and we knew she was starting to break up. Every time one of they waves pulled back it sucked more out of her hold.

      ‘First crack frightened the hell out of us. Like a gun. Then there was another crack and soon it was like a bloody battlefield. We didn’t know what it was and some of us was ducking and the cox was shouting, Keep her up, for Chrissake! Then one of their crew pipes up it was her rivets he says and we all knew then she hadn’t long to go.

      ‘Cox sent Giles Penna aboard, see ’em down out of the rigging and they came down one by one with each of we at our stations and watching them come hand over hand and slow with the cold and the seas rising and falling below. And we was each saying to ourselves – come on now, boy, one step now. The noise was terrible – the surf on the rocks, the cracking of they damned rivets and then the cries of the poor beggars still in the rigging. The bowman was shouting out, trying to get us to hold her steady and then a wave picked us up and we lost the bows again.

      ‘We was struggling to get back in when the first of the topmasts went – four of them in the rigging and the topmast goes and they hung on until it was half down and then they fell, away over the stern.

      ‘Could do nothing for them and there was another dozen or so in the for’ard masts so we went back in and one came down and we got him on board and Penna shouted up to the others to come down. He was shouting but on the wind they couldn’t hear. We was finding it difficult keeping steady. The snow was starting again and we could see they last ones up there clinging to the yards. The ship was going. Her back was broken and she was sliding off the ledge into deep water. We was all shouting to them and trying to stop them being afraid and they was too terrified to move. Then one of the survivors on board he took Tyler’s arm and says: “You won’t get them down now, my friend, they’re frozen to the shrouds.”’

1

      

      

       CHAPTER 1

      When Jack Sweeney arrived in Polmayne in May 1934, he brought with him several bundles of letters, his mother’s diamond ring and a small, oak-framed painting of a bird of paradise. He was twenty-eight.

      Behind him was a farm in Dorset which had been owned by Sweeneys for three hundred years and probably a lot more. He himself would never have needed to farm if his elder brother had survived the shrapnel shard which sent him face-first into the Flanders mud. Nor would he have been left in charge so young if his father had not succumbed to pleurisy in the winter of 1925. And he may have come to keep the farm, to make it prosper, even perhaps to love it, had he made some provision for the upheavals that took place in the early 1930s.

      But in truth farming had never appealed to him. As a child he resisted a practice which made narrow enclosures from the land and planted each one with a single species of plant. Nor could he feel a part of anything that made such a mockery of the beasts – the lumbering cattle, the confused sheep, the swollen pigs. He had already built his own pantheon from the world and its virtues were diversity, rarity, independence; the farm seemed opposed to all three. He bred rare hawk-moths,