Penmarric (57 page)

“What does your father think about all this?”

I tried to keep my temper. “Sir, my father’s not a miner. He knows nothing about mining and very little about Sennen Garth. That’s why I’m here.”

He smiled cynically. “Have you ever been down a mine?”

That was the moment when I nearly punched him on the nose. He spoke of the mine as one might speak of a lavatory.

“I’ve studied mining for a long time,” I said abruptly, “and “I’ve been down the Levant mine at St. Just more times than I can remember.” How I managed to hold onto my temper I don’t know. “I was sent here by the miners of St. Just,” my voice was saying reasonably, “because they believe I know what it means to be a Cornish tinner. I wasn’t sent here because I’m my father’s son. That’s why I made no effort to trade on his name when we first began our conversation. It was the men of St. Just who sent me, not my father.”

“Are you a Socialist?”

I saw red. By this time I was clinging onto my temper with both hands and sweating with the strain.

“Frankly, sir,” I said, “I’ve no more use for politics than you have for mining. In my opinion in such a time of national crisis any talk of internal politics is pretty damned irrelevant. The only reason I’m here talking to you now is because I’ve got something you want and you’ve got something I want and what we both want is for England to win this bloody war. If we two can reach an agreement as quickly and painlessly as possible we’ll both of us benefit but England would benefit most of all. Why don’t we concentrate on the facts instead of wandering off into side issues and wasting time? What the hell does it matter who my father is? What the hell does it matter if I’m a Socialist or not? Is that fact going to help England win the war? The important fact is that there’s tin in this mine, probably ten times as much tin as anyone even dreams there is, and if you agree to finance—”

“You can regard that as agreed,” he said coolly, “I’ll advise the Minister to sanction the reopening of the mine and grant the appropriate funds since the prospects are evidently so promising. You’re right. We need every ounce of tin we can get.” And as I stared at him dumbly, unable to believe the magnitude of his words, he added, “How old are you?”

“I … Twenty in June, sir.”

I fully expected him to say, “Then why the devil aren’t you in France?” but he did not. All he said was “You’re a very unusual young man. You should go far.” Then he rose and shook hands and the interview was over and I never saw him again.

Within two weeks Government officials were at Penmarric to talk to my father; within a month the preliminary operations were being organized, and at last on one morning at the end of March the main engine was christened “Castallack” with a bottle of port, the engine house was decorated with spring flowers, and every man with mining in his blood came from miles around to cheer the resurrection of the Sennen Garth mine.

That was when I first met Alun Trevose.

He was a mining expert from Camborne’s East Pool and Agar, one of the men whom Jared had approached when he had been gathering his depositions, and he too believed in the wealth of Sennen Garth and the existence of the lodes under the sea.

He was just like me really. Not obviously like me—not like me in appearance or background or education, but like me in the ways that mattered. We thought alike, felt alike, acted alike. For he was a born miner, just as I was, a man with a passion for mining that equaled my own, and I knew soon after I had met him that this was the best friend I would ever have, anywhere at any time.

I had had plenty of friends at school but none of them had shared my interests. By this time I did not expect to make such a friend, and when I first met Trevose I wasn’t even sure I liked him. He was half Welsh, half Cornish, totally Celt. He had been born in Redruth, where his father had been a miner, but at the age of eight he had gone to South Africa, where his father had chased easy money in the gold mines. That hadn’t lasted long; the dust of the gold mines can play havoc with a miner’s lungs and then not even the best pay in the world can stand between you and an early grave. At sixteen Trevose was back in Redruth and vowing to spend the rest of his life in Cornwall instead of following his father’s example and dying on foreign soil. He had been married, but that, hadn’t worked out; his views on God, the upper classes and women soon became famous throughout the more conventional circles of the mining parishes, and at first people were suspicious of him, distrusting his nasal South African accent, which had supplanted the native speech of Redruth, and rating him little better than “one of they furriners” with “powerful uppity ideas.” But there was Cornish blood in Trevose and he didn’t remain an outsider for long. He knew mines and he knew tin and he knew how to lead men below ground, and after a time people forgot his strangeness and learned to live with his eccentricities because he was a good man to have around and kind too for all his roughness and coarse speech.

I liked him long before he could permit himself to like me. It went against the grain with him to be other than surly to someone with my kind of background.

As a miner he was an expert. No other word could do him justice. Sometimes I felt he could almost smell tin a hundred yards away behind a wall of granite. He was young, only ten years older than I was, but I trusted him more than I would have trusted a man twenty years his senior because he had the mysterious flair of the born miner and it was this flair that seemed to speak aloud to me and identify him as a man after my own heart.

He was with me on all those preliminary surveys of Sennen Garth, and it was he who organized the draining of the lower levels. A Government official had been appointed “managing director” of the mine and another official was acting as purser, but neither of those civil servants knew much about the Cornish tin mines and their principal purpose was to keep a watch on the expenditure of Government money. From the beginning it was understood that I was in charge of operations, but since I was young and inexperienced I knew I needed someone whom I could rely upon to give me good advice. There was no shortage of advice itself; endless streams of interested miners, anxious to work for “tutwork or tribute” in exploring the possible new lodes, were continually at my elbow, but Trevose was the one I trusted. When we finally sank a shaft farther below sea level and began to strike out under the sea, it was he who decided on the level to sustain and it was he who went on believing that we would blast our way into wealth.

There’s tin there,” he said. “I know it.”

The Government began to worry about expenditure and the civil servants suggested we should concentrate on mining the tin which remained in the old workings, but in fact it had turned out that there wasn’t nearly so much tin left in the old workings as everyone had thought there was. Soon I began to realize that the entire success of the venture depended on whether a series of rich lodes really did exist beneath the sea. I still thought they did, but now the amount of speculative risk involved seemed greater to me than ever before and I could understand why adventurers had fought shy of Sennen Garth for more than twenty years.

“Relax,” said Trevose. There’s tin there, waiting for us. I can feel it.”

So we went on under the sea and the walls ran with water and the noise of the pick and the hammer and the drill nibbled at our ears, but there was no lode of tin. The miners began to look worried. The old men at the surface shook their heads wisely and said there were no seams below the sea at that point and that they themselves had said so all along.

“They dont know bloody nothing from bloody nothing,” said Trevose. “We’ll go lower.” And we sank a shaft to the two-hundred-and-forty-fathom level far out under the Atlantic Ocean.

My father, visiting the mine out of interest, inquired politely if we had met with any success.

“Not yet,” I said defiantly, “but it’ll be very soon now.” But in the darkness of a hope strained to unbelievable limits my own faith began to waver. Those months exploring the mine and searching fruitlessly for a new lode had made me realize how ignorant I was, how little I knew in comparison to Trevose. I was merely an inexperienced boy thrust by circumstances into a position of authority. The more I worked with Trevose the more convinced I became that I knew nothing. I had been wrong about the extent of my knowledge, I thought in despair; perhaps I had been wrong too about the mine.

There’s tin here,” said Trevose one morning in 1915. “I can smell it.”

Above the ground it was raining and a clammy mist was blowing in from the sea, but down at the two-forty level it was as hot as hell and we were all naked to the waist. The dust from the previous explosions had settled and we were back drilling holes for the next fuses again. Our mechanical drill had developed a fault, and so we were relying once more on the traditional method of beating an upper with a seven-pound hammer. Trevose, like any other miner worth his salt, was ambidextrous in this skill, but I found it hard enough with my right hand to wield a heavy hammer for minute after minute in a hot underground hole far below the sea. In most of the mines around St. Just a miner wields a hammer and turns the drill rods single-handed, but this takes practice and I was inexperienced, so I turned Trevose’s borer while Trevose himself focused his attention on wielding the hammer. Even though I was comparatively inactive sweat was pouring off my body and dust was pricking my nose and making me uncomfortable. But at last when the holes were deep enough Trevose called for dynamite. The charges were packed, the fuses left dangling; having made sure that all was in order, we packed our belongings together and retreated from the stopes while Trevose was left behind to fire the charges. That day there were six of us in our “pare,” or working party. Trevose and I and four “hard-rock” men, two of whom had come from Botallack, which had closed at last a few months ago; the other two were Zillan men who had been subsisting on part-time employment at South Crofty after the unsuccessful attempt to reopen Ding Dong mine in 1912.

Trevose was flicking the sweat from his face; we stood there, the others swarthy, I fair-skinned, all of us covered with dust, and seconds later after the distant roar of the explosion hot air blasted down the gallery like a breath from the devil’s furnace.

“Now you bloody hell of a mine,” said Trevose, “give us that tin or by God I’ll blast you into the House of Water and flood you to the bloody adits.”

We had to wait a long time for the dust to settle and then we went back.

It was a mess. Rocks and rubble were piled high. We groped our way forward just as a tram arrived to cart away some of the debris. The dust prickled again in my nose and made my eyes water.

Trevose said, “I smell tin.”

I stared around. There was so much sweat and dust in my eyes that I could hardly see. I sniffed but I could smell only the acrid fumes of dynamite.

“Can you see anything?” said Trevose.

I looked at him, but he was gazing around vaguely at nothing in particular.

I stared and stared until I thought I would go blind.

And then I saw it.

I stumbled forward over the rubble, and the breath was rasping in my throat and my heart was hammering in my lungs. I tripped, fell and arrived on all fours by the chunk of rock which had attracted my attention.

And there it was. It wasn’t much, just a dark rock with flecks of white in it, but to me it was more valuable than a bucket of gold. For the flecks of white were white quartz stringers, the plainest indication that at last we had stumbled on wealth, and as I stared at that magic rock in my hands I knew already that the lode would be an enormous lode, vast, mighty and fabulously rich.

“Hey!” yelled Trevose, having made sure that I was the first to discover it. “It’s here! We done it, boys, the bloody lode’s here! Come see what the boss has turned up for us! If we ain’t at the beginning of a bloody champion lode as big as a bloody church I’ll be hauled up in the skip and stamped with my own bloody hammer!”

They came running. I said in a voice that didn’t sound like my own, “It was you who found it first, not me.” But he wouldn’t hear of it.

“No,” he said at once. “It was you who found this lode, sonny, make no mistake about that. You knew it was here long before I’d ever been near Sennen Garth. If it wasn’t for you we’d none of us be here today, and if that’s not a bloody fact I don’t know what is.”

But I was dumb by then, wanting to laugh and shout aloud with joy, yet struggling to control my tears, so I could not argue with him. I just stood there, overcome with emotions too deep to understand, and the candlelight from my helmet shone steadily into the darkness and onto the tin I had come so far to find.

St. Just was in an uproar. It so happened that my discovery coincided with payday at the Levant and everyone set out to drink to the new lode at Sennen Garth. The mine captain at the Levant stood me a drink and shook me by the hand; everyone wanted to buy me ale or cider and shake me by the hand, but I had no wish to get drunk, so after I had accepted drinks from the mine captain and Trevose I paid for a couple more out of my own money so that I wouldn’t feel obliged to keep pace with those around me. Egged on by his friends and by several glasses of draft cider, Trevose launched into the first verse of the “Furry Dance” while old Granddad Penhellick rushed away to get his fiddle. The barmaid, Jared’s renegade daughter Charity, was so excited that she kissed me on both cheeks and pulled me outside into the square so that we could dance together. I was too happy even to be embarrassed by such attentiveness. As I was protesting my inability to put one foot in front of the other in time to music, wives and sweethearts came running up the streets to the square to find out what was going on. Soon everyone was dancing. Even the children were joining in. At the climax of the celebrations I was carried aloft around the square amidst a host of cheering people, and when I had rescued myself from the undeserved tribute, I found Charity Roslyn again at my elbow.

With a hospitality that William Parrish would have deplored, she invited me to her cottage for a bite of pasty and a mug of beer. Not being hungry and preferring to drink with my friends at the pub, I declined. She then declared herself mortally insulted and asked me why I didn’t like beautiful raven-haired barmaids who lived up to the name they’d been christened.