Penmarric (60 page)

The toll of death and the misery of the bereaved were appalling.

Among my Cornish contemporaries, George Carnforth had been killed in 1915 and now two years later his brother Aubrey followed him to the grave; their father Sir Justin was already a widower, so through the war he had lost his entire family apart from his daughter Felicity. Peter Waymark was still alive, I heard, and so was Francis St. Enedoc, but many of the humbler men of Cornwall had found foreign graves, and I was hardly surprised when my mother developed a morbid preoccupation with Hugh’s safety. In vain I told her time and time again that Hugh was much too far from the front lines to get himself killed; she remained convinced she would never see him again, and to make matters worse Hugh was a hopeless correspondent. On the rare occasions when he did make the effort to put pen to paper we learned little from his letters except that French lavatories were primitive and that French food was a sadly overrated commodity, but in a private letter which he addressed to me at the mine he admitted being both bored and homesick; French women were all the same and none of them could hold a candle to Rebecca Roslyn. Had I seen Rebecca at all? He wrote to her every week in care of Charity Roslyn at Charity’s cottage in St. Just, but he hadn’t heard from her lately and he was afraid Joss Roslyn might have discovered that they were exchanging letters. Could I try and see Rebecca and find out what was happening? Was there some other man paying attention to her? I was to tell her when I saw her that he spent all day thinking about her and couldn’t wait for the war to be over so that he would be able to see her again.

For the first time it occurred to me to take his fancy for Rebecca seriously. When Charity confirmed that Rebecca was head over heels in love with him and had been since the age of thirteen I began to think he really might marry her eventually, but I said nothing to my mother for fear of upsetting her and merely wrote back to Hugh that Rebecca was as anxious for his return as he was.

“If only the war could be over,” my mother would sigh again and again. “If only Hugh could come home …”

Adrian came home. He was wounded in the October of 1917, and although the wound left no radical disability, he was confined to a military hospital for some weeks. When he was discharged he was judged unfit for further service and by Christmas he was back at Penmarric after an absence of more than three years.

Both Jeanne and Elizabeth were enraptured with him. He had won a few colored ribbons for bravery, which was creditable enough, of course, but to the girls this was an excuse to speak of him with bated breath and shining eyes. I had to remind them both sharply not to mention his name in my mother’s presence.

“I wish you would try to like Adrian, Philip,” said Jeanne timidly when my mother was out of the room. “He’s such a good, kind, worthwhile person. I was always surprised you didn’t get on well with him.”

“We had nothing in common,” I said shortly, “and we were always getting in each other’s way.”

“Well, it’s your loss,” said Elizabeth, outspoken as ever. She sat on the kitchen table, her shoulders slouched forward as usual, her black hair straggling around her pudding face, her black eyes watching me with a challenging stare.

Her stomach curved generously below the waistband of her skirt, and beneath her jacket her breasts had a middle-aged sag to them. The onset of adolescence had done nothing to improve her looks. “He and I have had some simply inspiring discussions about God and Life and Civilization and all that kind of thing. Oh, if only I could go to school! I’m sick of being taught by that ninny Miss Cartwright! I’m hoping Adrian can help me persuade Papa to drop this mid-nineteenth-century notion of his that education for women is ‘not quite nice.’ Adrian at least can understand how horribly frustrating it is for me—I mean, how on earth am I ever going to appreciate the glories of Greek civilization if I can’t tell an alpha from an omega? It’s so unfair not to let me go to school!”

By chance I saw Adrian soon after that in St. Just. He and William came into the pub one evening just as I was leaving it. I supposed I ought to say something, so while William wandered on ahead I made an effort to be pleasant.

“Hullo,” I said. “Welcome home. Congratulations on all your medals.”

He smiled at me readily enough, and as he smiled the light fell across his face and I saw the lines about his mouth and the white scar at the corner of one eye. He was painfully thin and walked with a limp.

“Thanks,” he said. “It’s wonderful to be home. Congratulations on your success at the mine.” And as I nodded and stepped past him he added, “Won’t you join us for a drink?”

“I have to be getting home,” I said and went out abruptly into the square without waiting for his reply. I considered I had fulfilled my obligations toward him and had no intention of pursuing the conversation further.

But he had other ideas. I saw him twice after that and each time he tried to badger me into having a drink with him. In the end I was obliged to be frank.

“Look,” I said, “don’t let’s pretend because I can’t stand hypocrisy. I dislike you and you know damned well you dislike me. It’s always been that way and as far as I’m concerned nothing’s changed. Now leave me alone and don’t come bothering me again with your hypocritical overtures of friendship.”

At that he reverted to his old pugnacious self again and abandoned his saintly “let’s-be-nice-to-each-other” attitude, which he had had the gall to tell me he had developed while fighting in the trenches. I knew he only wanted to emphasize the fact that I had stayed at home and he hadn’t. However, after an exchange of insults we parted enemies again, turning our backs on each other and walking angrily away in opposite directions, and the wall of our hostility stood repaired and resurrected between us, a towering monument to those bitter memories of the past.

Early in 1918 Jeanne was sent away to a finishing school at Eastbourne to learn a few airs and graces, but she was so miserable away from home that my father allowed her to abandon, the school after only one term. However, Jeanne’s fleeting absence from Penmarric had one satisfactory result. Lizzie managed to persuade my father that with Jeanne gone it was pointless for him to retain the governess who had nothing left to teach her remaining pupil, and my father grudgingly gave his consent for Lizzie to attend Cheltenham Ladies’ College, the famous girls’ public school. Almost bursting out of her school uniform with excitement, she departed for her first term at the end of April and we saw no more of her at the farm for several weeks.

Meanwhile Lizzie’s hero Adrian had decided to go up to Oxford to read history. I was conscious of relief that I would no longer run the risk of meeting him in St. Just, but I was too preoccupied with other more vital matters to think much about Adrian just then. At last the war really did begin to look as if it were drawing to a close; earlier in the year the Germans had advanced on the Somme; at Ypres and on the Aisne until they were once more on the Marne, but after that Foch, Haig and Pershing turned the tide until by the end of September the German High Command was thinking in terms of peace. Finally on the eleventh of November the Armistice was signed; the war had ended at last amidst universal relief, but even before the cheering had died away I was worrying about my mine.

The Government’s nominal lease was due to expire at the end of the year; the country’s economy had been stretched to the limit during four years of massive warfare, and now that the need for tin was no longer so vital the Government was anxious to rid itself of the mine and turn it back to private enterprise.

Fortunately there was every reason not to close the mine, for we weren’t losing money and there was still plenty of tin waiting under the sea, but the mine did require more capital investment. Shaftmen complained the skip road needed repairs, timbermen presented me with a long list of galleries where rotten timber posed a threat to safety and the pitmen were forever complaining about the pumps. In addition to all this, there were missing rungs on shaft ladders, worn rails on the main tramming level and the gig needed overhauling.

It was the question of safety that concerned me most. Any mine is potentially a dangerous place, but some mines are safer than others and I wanted my mine to be as safe as I could possibly make it. I felt I owed that at least to my friends who had no choice but to go beneath the ground every day to earn their daily bread, and besides I was no more anxious than they were to work in a possible death trap. The owners of the other mines along the Tin Coast could do as they pleased; their mines weren’t my concern and there were always men like Jared Roslyn to conduct crusades for better working conditions on behalf of the miners who were employed there, but Sennen Garth was my concern and I was prepared to go to any lengths to see that it was the safest mine in Cornwall.

Good maintenance was the key to safety—but good maintenance costs money, and money was something I didn’t have.

Since I was convinced my father wouldn’t lift a finger to finance the mine out of his own pocket, I went first to London to see if the Government would grant the mine a subsidy, but the Government, entangled with financial problems of a far greater magnitude than the Sennen Garth mine, was not in the mood for subsidies. It was only then that I gritted my teeth and rode to Penmarric to beg my father to keep the mine safe—and thus keep it alive, for without capital investment I knew it would soon be doomed. The issues of safety and survival were no more than two sides of the same coin, although I hardly expected my father to see beyond the figures of his current bank balance to the question of the miners’ well-being. However, to my surprise he was much more agreeable about it than I’d anticipated; perhaps I had underestimated the fact that Sennen Garth, despite its maintenance problems, was still very much a going concern. In the end he agreed as landowner to float a new company—“as my contribution to the postwar unemployment problem,” he was careful to explain to me, “and because if there are gamblers willing to invest money, in a speculative venture they might just as well invest their money in Sennen Garth”—and granted me a concession to mine the land in whatever way I thought fit. However, despite all his remarks about gamblers and speculative ventures I noticed he was quick enough to buy up sixty percent of the shares as soon as he had the chance. At first I thought his Penmar blood ran more strongly in him than he cared to admit, but soon I realized he was following a policy of controlling the company with an iron hand.

“The mine lasts only so long as it can pay its own way, Philip,” he said to me. “If it goes into the red don’t expect me to put additional capital into it over and above my shareholdings. Not one penny more of my money goes into that mine, so you’d better be sure you organize the concern in the best possible way.”

“You won’t need to put a penny more of your money into the mine,” Ì told him shortly. “With your dues as landowner and your dividends from the shares you’ll be making more profit than you would ever have believed possible.”

“I wonder,” said my father.

And presently I wondered too. On inquiring further into the mine’s position, I learned from my purser that the net profits had dropped alarmingly. Wages had risen; it cost more to get the tin out of the ground; the tin market was in a shaky state and the price of tin wasn’t what it should have been.

“It’s monstrous!” I protested; “We’re getting as much ore out of the ground as we used to in the old days—the records show that. Yet we’re only making a quarter as much money.”

“The economic climate is different today,” said the purser, a sharp, sensible, middle-aged man called Walter Hubert “You’ll have to increase the mine’s output if you want your profits to be as substantial, as they used to be.”

With new equipment, I thought, new methods, more men … With the new capital I had been able to modernize much of the mine and thus raise the general standard of safety to an acceptable level, but much still needed to be done and I had only been able to afford to concentrate on the essentials. To employ more men was out of the question; I was already starting to worry about what would happen if the cost of living rose much further; the miners would want more pay and there would be even less profit than there was already.

It was 1919. I was only just beginning to realize the extent of my problems concerning Sennen Garth, but even then I was dimly aware of the struggles with my father which lay ahead of me. The mine absorbed me as always; now I was bent upon the task of infusing it with new life, and so immersed was I in the mine’s problems that I found it difficult to pay any attention to my family. But 1919 turned out to be quite a year. Hugh came home belatedly from the war and eloped with Rebecca Roslyn, Mariana found her second husband, and Adrian abandoned his historical studies at Oxford after deciding that what he wanted more than anything else was to be a clergyman of the Church of England.

I was not in the least surprised that Mariana had chosen to marry again, since she had been husband-hunting seriously for over two years, but I admit I was surprised and disgusted by her choice. Her husband was a childless widower, fifty-nine years old; he was also Marquess of Lochlyall and master of a townhouse in Edinburgh, a summer residence at North Berwick and the usual hundred-room Highland castle somewhere at the back of beyond. Mariana married him quietly one April morning in Edinburgh and afterward wrote a long letter to both my parents explaining why she had not announced her intentions earlier. She had no valid excuse, of course, for keeping her parents in the dark, but she rambled on for several pages about how she had been having such a difficult emotional time in Scotland and had been so prostrate with nervous tension after being pestered by two suitors for over a year that finally she had washed her hands of both suitors and married the Marquess at the first available opportunity. Since the Marquess was “an older man” he made her feel “secure” and “perfectly at peace.” She “adored” him and “trusted him absolutely.” Everything was “divine.” Eventually, she promised, she would bring him down to Cornwall to meet everyone and we would see how sensible she had been to marry someone so “mature” and “kind” who was “the perfect gentleman in every respect.” She absolutely knew we would all “adore” him and “heartily approve” of her choice.