Penmarric (54 page)

However, there was no reason why I should have been a miner. First, I was born in the wrong class and second, the mine—my mine—had been closed before I was born. There were mines nearby certainly—the famous Levant was on the cliffs by St. Just, our nearest village—but my father did not own the Levant and there was no reason why I should ever have had any connection with the mining industry. My father owned two mines on the western reaches of the Tin Coast. King Walloe, which had become defunct in the mid-nineteenth century, was flooded to the adits, but next door, its passages making a honeycomb of the cliff, was Sennen Garth. There was tin there still but it was too expensive to get it out of the ground and the mine wasn’t an economic proposition any more.

Or so my father said when he closed the mine two years before I was born.

My father never cared about the mine.

But I cared. The mine called to me. It was dead, but its specter beckoned me across the forsaken landscape and the wind whispered to me as it swept through the ruined engine house. For almost as long as I could remember Sennen Garth was my cause, my life’s work, and in fighting for my cause I fought my father and stayed fighting him till the day he died.

All psychiatrists want to do, I discovered, is to ask questions about your childhood. But it wasn’t much good asking me those kind of questions, because frankly I hardly remember my childhood at all. It’s not that my memory is always bad. It’s just that it’s erratic. What I do remember of my childhood I remember with vivid clarity, but I remember so little that I can almost count my memories on the fingers of one hand. I have no intention of recalling those memories in detail, because, contrary to popular psychiatric belief, I don’t believe childhood plays an important part in shaping people’s lives and I want to talk about the more vital times after the outbreak of the war, I want to talk about when I was a man, when my life really began, when my cause came alive at last. So don’t expect me to indulge in lengthy reminiscences about the days when I was a small boy running around in short trousers. There are more important things to talk about than that.

However, I suppose I should briefly sum up the facts which are in some degree relevant to my later life. After all a miner doesn’t just show a stick of dynamite to a wall of rock and expect an explosion straight away; you have to drill the holes, pack the charges and light the fuses before you can expect to blast your way forward into the lode.

I was born in Cornwall and until I was nine years old I lived on the Cornish Tin Coast close to the mines which had made Cornish tin and copper a legend since time out of mind. That’s the most basic fact about me. Nothing else is as important as that, not even the fact that when I was nine my parents separated and I was taken away to Oxfordshire to spend my next seven years far from the Cornish Tin Coast. My father had decided to abandon my mother in order to live with his mistress and their two bastard sons, and since he was a man of considerable wealth and standing he had no trouble persuading the judge who legalized the separation to deprive my mother of the custody of all her children. This step was taken under the pretense that my mother wasn’t “good enough” for her children. She was a former farmer’s wife who had been born in a fisherman’s cottage in St. Ives, and although ever since I could remember her no one could have guessed she was other than a lady born and bred, there were always people who enjoyed reminding themselves and others of her origins. My father was one of those people. He stressed to the judge that he wanted his children to be brought up by a “lady” in a “gentleman’s household,” and the judge, who came from the same class as my father, naturally agreed that this was of vital importance. My father’s mistress was judged a lady and the estate in Oxfordshire where he kept her in luxury was recognized to be a gentleman’s household. Class meant everything; immorality, so long as it was conducted in a discreet and civilized manner, could be overlooked; my mother didn’t have a chance.

It would be easy to say I loathed my father’s mistress Rose Parrish and her two sons, my half-brothers William and Adrian, but it wouldn’t be entirely true. I did loathe Adrian certainly; he was the most pugnacious little bastard anyone could ever wish to meet and he was all the more dangerous because he looked like a cherub and was capable of the most sickening displays of piety whenever he wanted to impress his parents. I can still remember him kneeling by his bed and reciting devoutly, “God bless all the poor and suffering” while his mother watched with pride. But as soon as she was gone the prayers would be forgotten and he would be fighting me as soon as he had the chance. Why he had such an overwhelming urge to fight me I have no idea. He had so much and I had so little, only my memories of my mother and Cornwall, only my determination that as soon as I was sixteen I would leave the house at Allengate and never spend another night beneath my father’s roof again. But Adrian was determined to be enemies with me and so enemies we remained throughout all the seven years I spent in that abominable house. William I could tolerate; he never bothered me and spent most of the time with my brother Marcus. And Rose Parrish?

She was like a good nanny. At first I was rude to her and sullen and disagreeable as well, but how can you keep on being rude to someone who simply turns the other cheek? She was a good, decent, honest person whom my father had dragged through the mud. There! I needn’t have said that, need I? But it’s the truth, and if there’s one thing I despise it’s a man who twists the truth to suit his own ends.

However, I don’t want to dwell on the unhappy memories of my childhood. They’re over now, and best forgotten. There’s only one other person I want to mention in connection with my early years, and that’s my grandmother.

I disliked her at first because she reminded me of my father, but she took a deep fancy to me for some reason and at last I thawed toward her when I discovered she shared my love of Cornwall and the Cornish Tin Coast. I made this discovery during a weekend my mother and I spent in London when I was nine; since my mother was unwell at the time my grandmother took me to tea at Claridges and the next day invited me to lunch at her house in Charles Street There I found that she had several books on Cornwall, and so pleased was she with my. interest in them that she lent me her favorite,
A History of the Levant Mine.
I regret to say I never returned it to her, but she couldn’t have minded much because when she died a year or two later she left me all her books on Cornwall and the Cornish Tin Coast.

Afterward when I was savoring my legacy I thought how fortunate it had been that we had met in London that weekend, for there was no doubt I wouldn’t have been there at all if my mother and I hadn’t first met my father elsewhere under unpleasant circumstances. It had been my half-term weekend; my mother and I had decided to go on an outing to Brighton—a fine idea in itself, but the entire expedition was ruined when we happened by the most extraordinary piece of bad luck to choose a hotel room where, unknown to us, my father and Rose Parrish were staying with William and Adrian. There was a confrontation in the dining room. I’m sure it was all very dramatic but I don’t remember it well. The part I remember most clearly now is leaving the hotel afterward, catching the train back to London and the next day having tea with my grandmother.

My parents separated directly after that. For me Brighton was the beginning of the road which led to those seven years’ exile at Allengate, so it’s small wonder that I’ve never once been back there.

However, so much for family history. And now that I’ve got that out of the way I can turn to the beginning of my career as a miner—and to my earliest memories of my mine, Sennen Garth, my cause, my life’s work.

I remember the Levant mine, magnificent Levant, one of the greatest tin mines in Cornwall, and the last mine in the Duchy where copper was mined on a commercial scale. The Levant mine was high on the cliffs overlooking Cape Cornwall, and when I was a child the Levant beckoned me like some gigantic magnet pulling at a small pin. I used to slip away from home whenever I had the opportunity and fraternize with the miners’ children so that I could hear about mining at first hand, and soon I was learning from my friends about their fathers who worked at Levant, fabulous Levant, its main-shaft pole supporting its unique man-engine sixteen hundred feet from top to bottom, its galleries running fathom after fathom out under the sea, its immense wealth packed into enormous lodes of tin. Often I would walk down to Cape Cornwall and watch the water draining through the launders and out of the adits, and often the water would run red as blood from the ore in the rock. I used to hang around the engine houses which hoisted the ore and pumped the water. There would be men shoveling coal into the furnace, spinning machinery, the hiss of steam. The bucket, or skip, was raised from the galleries below and its load of crude ore dumped in a wagon which would take it to a floor where it would be pounded by sledgehammers. For the mine lived and breathed like some enormous animal; it was an entity with a life of its own, and when I realized this I looked at the deserted mines, the abandoned ones like Sennen Garth which had been left to die, and I wanted them to live again, to live as Levant lived, because there seemed to me suddenly nothing so forlorn and sad as a dead mine that had been allowed to die.

I remember the mine captain at Levant, the mine captain saying to me, “You can’t ride the man-engine to the bottom of the mine, boy, you’re too small. You’d miss your footing and fall down the shaft. You can’t go down the mine.”

“But isn’t there a lift?” I said, not understanding. “I’ll go down in that”

“A gig?” He broke out laughing. “This is the Levant, boy,” he said. I can still remember the way he said “Levant.” “This is the
Levant
,” he said, and it was as a believer might speak of Jerusalem. The miners go down to the levels on a man-engine.”

The man-engine was like some gigantic prehistoric monster. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the man-engine at the Levant. The captain took me to the edge of the shaft and explained to me how the mechanism worked.

The wooden rod plunges, see—up, down, up, down. Up twelve feet, down twelve feet. There are steps all the way down at twelve-foot intervals on the rod, and corresponding platforms—sollars, we call them—on the sides of the shaft. The rod comes up, you step on, grab the handle—see?—and then the rod plunges down twelve feet and off you get onto the sollar. The rod swings up again, you get on the next step, drop twelve feet, step off onto the sollar, wait, step on, step off—and so on. It takes half an hour from top to bottom.”

I was speechless with wonder, and when I found my voice I again pestered him to let me ride the machine. But he still refused.

“Not while you’re so small, Master Philip,” he said, “and even when you’re bigger I wouldn’t take you down without Mr. Castallack’s permission.”

I tried the mine at Botallack, but they wouldn’t let me down there either. It was then, to compensate myself for my disappointment and to satisfy my craving to go below ground, that I turned to the dead workings of Sennen Garth.

I found a shaft on the cliffs with a ladder stretching down into the darkness. After stealing a candle and matches from the Penmarric pantry I went down the ladder and took possession. I was seven years old then, too young to know how lucky I was that the ladder ran unbroken from top to bottom, or how fortunate it was that the shaft was a small one which could be descended by a child without risk of exhaustion. I reached the bottom. Far above me was an oval patch of blue sky and around me were damp rock walls and the black opening of a passage. Beside myself with delight, I lit the candle and set off undaunted into the death trap of the disused workings.

Although I had no idea where I was, I discovered later that I had been in the oldest part of the mine, the maze of the western reaches which bordered on the flooded King Walloe mine next door. The walls were damp, the smell odd, the ground hard but wet beneath my feet. I was hypnotized with excitement. Presently I came to a fork, chose the left branch and reached a place where the tunnel divided into three. As I took the left passage again I began to go downhill and suddenly I heard water, a great roar of water that seemed to grow louder and louder until, rounding a corner at last, I found myself in a huge cave where a large machine clanked without ceasing to channel the water into a launder.

With a leap of joy I thought I had discovered a man-engine, but it was only a water wheel, a primitive pump which went on draining the mine night and day even though there was no longer any need to keep it drained. For Sennen Garth, unlike King Walloe, was only partially flooded; the bottom of the mine alone was under water, and at that point the bottom of the mine was still many fathoms away.

For a long while I sat and watched the pump, but at last I glanced around more carefully and noticed an interesting rock at my feet. I stooped to pick it up. A second later I had dropped my candle, the flame was extinguished and I was plunged into darkness.

A great peace came upon me. I felt a quietness despite the roar of the water, a feeling that I had been in the place before—which was nonsense, because of course I hadn’t. My immediate reaction was: This is what it’s like to be dead and in heaven—or a spirit waiting to be born.

I sat there for several seconds in the dark. I still wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t that kind of darkness. When I became aware of myself again I felt around for my candle, relit it and returned slowly to my shaft to crawl back to the surface once more.

Later when I happened to mention to my friend the mine captain that I had begun to explore Sennen Garth, he nearly fainted on the spot.

“If you were my son,” he said grimly, when he recovered, “I’d beat the hide off you for that. Now listen to me, boy. You want to live to be a man, don’t you? Then don’t go down those old workings on your own! No miner goes into danger without a mate to help him, if needs be. Above all he doesn’t go into an area without anyone knowing where he’s gone. Supposing you’d slipped and broken your ankle down there? Who do you think would have found you? Supposing you’d fallen down a winze—a shaft linking one level with another? If you’re wandering along not looking where you’re going—well you’d never see the light of day again. Besides, those old workings are honeycombed like a maze—you could get lost in them and never find your way out. Those old galleries are unsafe too. Have you ever heard of a cave-in? Do you know what happens when timber supports are so rotten that one finger-touch will send them crumbling into dust? If there was a cave-in in the western reaches of that mine, do you know what would happen?”