The Main Cages. Philip Marsden

sea, he would be forced to head for home. If he needed to talk about rabbits he called them sheep.

      Croyden’s ability at sea was not matched on land. As soon as he came ashore and left the quays, he was lost. People used to say: ‘Really there’s two Croydens, like they’s twins or something.’

      Even as Croyden began with the Good Heart, the days of seining were reaching an end. The pilchard shoals did not come as they once had and in 1918 the Good Heart was laid up for good. Croyden was offered a place on the Blucher, a drift-netter in Newlyn. He was given a sixth share in the catch and returned to Polmayne sporadically – either out of pocket or flush after a good splat of fish. To Tommy Treneer, Croyden’s position was a betrayal. It was the drift-nets alone that he blamed for robbing the coast of pilchards. ‘The devil’s own nets,’ he called them and refused to address a word to his son.

      But the Blucher did well. One moonlit night in December 1924, some ten miles south of Mount’s Bay, they struck a shoal of herring with such perfect timing that at once a total of 114 cran of fish caught their gills in the mesh. It took seven hours to haul the nets. While the others tired, Croyden found that the deeper the fish lay about his ankles the more vigorously he could haul. His share of the catch earned him more than £52. On board that evening, he leaned back on the Blucher’s frosty deck and felt he could stretch out his cutch-stained hands and rearrange the stars. Such dazzling high spirits lasted long enough to catch the eye of Maggie North whose mother ran Newlyn’s quayside tobacconist. Croyden returned that summer, in a borrowed boat, and after the wedding took his bride away from a harbour lined with waving well-wishers, back across Mount’s Bay and around the Lizard where, as they picked up an easterly swell, Mrs Croyden Treneer scattered the nibblings of her wedding lunch into the long arc of the boat’s wash.

      In the coming years Maggie grew to hate the sea and all it represented. In the early thirties both prices and shoals became ever more unpredictable. Expecting her fourth child, she said she could no longer tolerate his feast-or-famine work.

      ‘Fishing’s a gambler’s life, Croyden Treneer, and all you seem to do is lose.’

      Croyden came ashore. He bought his first pig. He worked his piece, planting potatoes and brassicas and using an old tuck-net to keep out the birds. He found a job on the roads – laying the first tarmac on Polmayne’s only approach road. When that came to an end, he spent a winter building one of the bungalows that were beginning to ring the town and every day he was reminded that he would rather be at sea. Working on solid ground to a clock and not to the tides, dealing with straight lines and right-angles, all contributed to a faint nausea. The truth was that labouring on land made Croyden seasick.

      Then under the Housing Act of 1930 a compulsory purchase order was placed on Cooper’s Yard and a dozen old cottages around it – ‘unfit for habitation … prone to flooding …’. A large site was excavated for new homes above the church. Before they were even completed these houses became known as the Crates. Suddenly in Polmayne there was work for all and Croyden found he was earning more than he ever had on the drift-netter.

      His father, Tommy, still refused to speak to him. He lived in Cooper’s Yard and now he was told he must leave. He had been born there. Croyden had been born there. Treneers had always been born there. Drift-netting was one thing, said Tommy, but at least it was fishing.

      ‘We was always seiners,’ he growled, ‘and now look at him – putting up bloody Crates so they can pack we away.’

      In early March 1935, Jack Sweeney spent a couple of days plumbing out at the Main Cages. There he stumbled on a small unclaimed area of rough ground. It ran for about fifty yards just south of the gap between Maenmor’s two peaks – the tunnel that he’d shot in his punt the summer before. It would be hard to work in any kind of a sea, but in the middle of the month came a spell of settled weather.

      On his first haul, he pulled seven good-sized crabs. Two days later he had five crabs and two lobsters. Within a week he had caught more than he had in the entire two months the year before. He began to make money – and on Parliament Bench they took to nodding at him as he came in. Once a week he gave part of his catch to Mrs Cuffe. Whaler told him about the lobsters he had seen the size of dogs and a crab in the tropics that would scamper up the palm trees and happily pick dates with his claws.

      One evening at the end of March a freshening westerly began to flick at the wave-tops of the bay. Put out your old pots March-time … Jack had put out the lot. He cursed himself as he pulled on his boots and ran out through the yard.

      Tommy Treneer shouted from the Bench as he passed: ‘Should take better bloody care o’ your gear!’

      At the Main Cages the seas were already large. He rowed round into the lee of Maenmor. His marker buoys were rising and falling on a long swell. He hauled the first string quickly. It was mid-tide and flooding. The line was heavy. It jammed tight against the gunwale as he pulled and the boat dipped with each tug. Then came the bump of the first pot against the boat and he hauled it in. He extracted a good hen from inside. From that first line of pots he had three crabs. He rowed over to the others.

      On the other side of Maenmor he could hear the seas breaking hard against the rock but for the time being he was sheltered. Through the tunnel came the roar of surf, and sudden white surges of water.

      The other string was even heavier. The first pot had a spider crab and he threw it back. The pots were mounting in the bows and the boat’s roll was growing wider. He knew he’d lose some pots now; he’d never be able to row them all back in such a sea. As the third pot came in, the boat slipped off the top of a wave and Jack fell. The line slid back over the side and he found himself eye to eye with a cock crab on the bottom boards. He tried again. As the pot came up, still beneath the surface, he could see the dark form of a lobster. It was a vast lobster. Unable to fit in the pot it had its thorax wrapped around the outside. Its claw was so big that it was that that had jammed in the spout. Jack balanced the pot on the gunwale. With one hand he flicked a series of running hitches around both pot and lobster, lashing to the withies the starry sky of the creature’s back, the boxer’s forearm of its one free claw. He then cut the rope and abandoned the rest to the storm.

      By the time he reached the quays, the water in the boat was slopping at his ankles. Within half an hour, a crowd had gathered to view the giant lobster. It was measured at 29 ¼ inches tail to claw and even Whaler, who came down to the quay and ran his fingers over its full length, admitted it was ‘a beauty’.

      ‘In Australia,’ he said, ‘I saw one like him, only –’

      ‘He was ten feet long, eh Whaler?’ teased Toper Walsh.

      ‘And wore spectacles,’ suggested Tommy Treneer.

      ‘Came up on our anchor chain and we measured him claw to tail at just over …’

      But no one was listening to Whaler. They were all looking at the lobster. Two weeks later it was mounted on a wooden board in the saloon bar of the Antalya.

      In the coming weeks, Jack’s luck continued. When he came in to the Town Quay, Tommy Treneer and the others would wander over from the Bench to see what he had. They never tired of hearing how he caught the big one – was it gurnard that got him, Mr Swee? Parlour pot or inkwell? Where d’ee say ’ee had him, near which of the rocks? Show us again how he was caught, how he was twisted round the pot and which was the claw he had hisself with, Mr Swee?

      Then all at once, the catches stopped. During the middle two weeks of April, while others were reporting good hauls, Jack pulled nothing but empty pots. He set the strings at different angles. He replaced the wrasse with gurnard and then the gurnard with mackerel. He tried a piece of shark but it made no difference.

      One morning Croyden Treneer came into Bethesda. Jack was sitting on the steps with his knots and Croyden came over and leaned against the wall beside him. He lit a cigarette. ‘You been having trouble with your pots.’

      It was a statement, not a question. Jack waited for the ‘I told you so.’ But instead Croyden pushed up his sand-coloured beret,