Free The Main Cages by Philip Marsden Page A

had borrowed money and bought a set of used nets from a man in Porth. In Plymouth they began to recoup some of their losses.
    By mid-December the winter pilchards came to an end and Jack asked the crew if they wanted to go back to Polmayne. None of them had anything to go for, so they agreed to stay on for the herring.
    There were three of them now – Jack and Croyden and a man named Harry Hammels. Crew was hard to come by in Polmayne that autumn; six new houses were being built and the sea-wall was being extended, but Croyden told Jack: ‘There’s always Hammels.’
    Indeed there was. ‘Yes, please, Misser Swee, I come Plymouth!’ Harry Hammels was something of a mystery in Polmayne. In December 1931 people first started noticing his quick, light-stepped walk along the front, his grinning presencein the coalyard where he found a job. No one knew where he came from. His accent some thought was Spanish, some more Greek-sounding. He himself gave no clues to his past except to say that he had no nationality because all his life had been spent at sea.
    Off Plymouth that December the herring were scarce. It was only a year since a group of boats had trawled Bigbury Bay and fished out the spawning stock. Day after day went past without a fish being caught. Croyden moped around the bars of Plymouth. Hammels carved from pieces of driftwood his wooden ‘warriors’ – which he then sold at the entrance to Hoe Park.
    Jack had started a ‘Fishing Diary’. In an oilcloth notebook he recorded the weather, details of catches (time, place of shooting and hauling, quantities) and various anecdotes. He had also, since September, been having a lively exchange of letters with Anna Abraham. She had told him that she ‘needed news of Polmayne’; he in turn enjoyed explaining to an outsider the ups and downs of his fishing, the goings-on in the town. To begin with, he had held back on details, but she told him: ‘I want to know Every Thing, Mr Sweeney, you don’t imagine how I miss Polmayne.’ And he found himself anticipating with ever greater impatience the delivery of her replies, the particular lilt of her faulty English and her wry descriptions of the artistic milieu of Hampstead.
    On 15 December, the
Maria
V struck lucky. In a single night off Start Point they caught fifty-eight cran of fish and earned a total of £160. For almost a week they successfully fished the same spot. They returned to Polmayne in funds. Hammels bought a new French penknife. Maggie Treneer allowed Croyden back into his cottage, but only on condition that he kill one of his pigs. He agreed, but each day found a different excuse to delay the slaughter.
    ‘We are rich,’ wrote Jack to Anna Abraham. ‘Well, richer than we were – at last we have had some good fishing. This is my second winter here in Polmayne and this morning it issunny and the harbour is quiet and I cannot think of anywhere in the world I would rather be …’
    It was the week before Christmas. The town had settled into its midwinter hollow. On frosty mornings the sun rose above the mists of the Glaze River, made a quick dash across the sky and sank back into the sea. They were still days, windless days, and at sundown the water was covered in a rusty light and the gulls came in and settled on it and briefly the whole bay shone orange-red and twitched in the breeze. It looked like the flank of some great hibernating beast, waiting for the spring.
    That Christmas, his first Christmas, Parson Hooper proposed holding an ecumenical carol service on Polmayne’s Town Quay. He wrote to his fellow ministers: ‘When better to unite the congregations of our parish than in this Christmas season?’ The United Methodist minister thought it a ‘splendid idea’, but the Bible Christians insisted that if they were to take part it should be billed ‘A Festival of Carols’, and the proposed sermons be in the form of a New Year Address.
    23 December dawned grey. Soggy clouds hung over a