The Forgotten Story

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• Winston Graham
  
• Prologue
  
• Book 1
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Book 2
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty One
  
• Chapter Twenty Two
  
• Chapter Twenty Three
  
• Chapter Twenty Four
  
• Epilogue
  

Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel,
The House with the Stained Glass Windows
was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark' novel,
Ross Poldark
, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which,
Bella Poldark
, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.

Aside from the Poldark series, Graham's most successful work was
Marnie
, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham's other books were filmed, including
The Walking Stick
,
Night Without Stars
and
Take My Life
. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel,
The Grove of Eagles
, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography,
Memoirs of a Private Man
, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.

On a stretch of yellow sand on a beach of north Cornwall, just below Sawle cliffs, there lie the remains of a shipwreck.

Every tide submerges it; seas have dashed over it, men have come and gone, but something still survives: a few spars deeply overgrown with seaweed and mussels round which venturesome children sometimes play. Indeed, at dead low tide when a heavy ground swell has sucked away the sand it is possible to make out the way the vessel struck, broadside on, and to see the backbone and the iron ribs lying exposed among pools and dripping a little in the sun.

There are still some who remember the wreck and will tell you the date she came in, a handsome ship, on the ninth of December, 1898. But these have been years of flux in the village of Sawle; successive wars and depressions have seen rapid changes, and few are left to tell the tale. Even those who remain and remember find that no one is interested in something that happened in Victorian times. Their own children could not tell you anything: they are far too deeply involved in today to bother about the past. Although the information is still to be had for the asking, they do not ask and will not listen.

So with the instability of unaired memory, the facts themselves are harder to come by with each year that passes. You may learn the vessel's name – that she was registered at Falmouth, that she was carrying a mixed cargo and bound, some say, for Liverpool, that some of her crew were saved, though whether all or how many it is hard to recollect. Some will nod and draw at their pipes and tell you that there were passengers aboard, but of course they do not remember names or details.

For this information you may if you are curious turn up the files of the local paper and find a photograph of the ship and the bare bones of the story, just as the tide will ever and again draw back the sand from the bare bones of the wreck, like a wicked child pulling away a cover and saying with secret gloating: ‘See what I did!'

But there is no flesh upon the bones, and for this it is better to rely upon what is still to be gathered in Sawle. There the men who remember will tell you that on the evening of December the eighth, 1898, a strong wind blew up round the coast and that before the night was far advanced the wind had reached the force of a heavy gale. In the morning, almost as the late dawn broke amid the scream of the wind, a farmer called Hoskin, out on the cliffs on business to do with his cattle, glanced out over the grey scud of the sea and saw, only just visible on the low horizon among the shifting mists of the morning, a sailing vessel driving before the gale.

One minute she was there, the next she was invisible again, her sails blown to shreds, her decks swept by the hurrying seas. But Hoskin had seen enough and, dog at heels, hurried across two fields, climbed a stone wall into a lane, and ran down the steep hill to where the sometime mining and fishing village slept in the fold of the hills with the wind roaring among its cottages and ruined chimney stacks.

Rousing the rocket crew was a matter of minutes, but by the time they had struggled up with their apparatus in the teeth of the wind upon the lower cliffs which guarded the entrance to Sawle she had already struck.

A boy named Coad saw her come in. One moment she was leaping and plunging like a horse among terriers, the next she had sharply stopped and was heeling over as if about to capsize. From the extremity of the swing she partly righted herself, and the great waves, unable to move her, began instead to smash into her exposed side, sending up fans of sea and spray.

Hardly able to see or speak for the wind, the rocket crew dragged their gear to the nearest point on the cliffs, pushed it to the edge and fired their first rocket, carrying its thin lifeline over the broken sea towards the wreck.

Normally the distance would have been amply spanned, but so strong was the wind that the rocket fell into the sea some distance short The crew wiped the spray from their faces and tried again. By now in the growing light it was possible to see figures clinging to the deck of the ship.

There was little time to spare if the rescuers were to be useful, and they fired two more rockets before deciding to wait upon some slackening of the wind. But the gale, though often rising to new heights, seldom dropped below a constant pitch of fury, and although they chose the best moment of the morning the line again fell short.

Helpless now, while others from the village came on the scene, they watched the ship settle in the water. All around them the rocks were grey with flying scud, and now and then a back-wash from a returning wave would sweep the slanting deck. Almost everything had been carried away – but the tiny figures still clung there mutely appealing for help.

Then one of these figures was seen to crawl away from the poop and work his way towards the bows.

‘Thur's a fool thinks he's going to swim ashore,' said the leader of the rocket crew. ‘ Fire another rocket, Joe; try an' stop ' im; he'll not go to save 'imself that way.'

Another rocket hissed and sputtered away from the cliffs. One or two of the men made gestures at the ship, but before any more could be done the figure in the bows of the ship had slipped over the side. A wave hit the vessel and everything upon it was hidden from view in an explosion of white and green water; the mist and spray from this was blown across to the watchers and some minutes passed before one of them shouted and pointed with a gnarled finger at the sea some distance from the wreck.

A head could be seen bobbing and disappearing on the bubbling crest of a great wave. They caught sight of the swimmer again two minutes later. He was being swept towards Angader Rock, which barred the entrance to Sawle Cove. But he was not seen again. Men do not live in Cornish seas when a gale is calling the tune. The watchers cursed in broken snatches and strained their eyes towards the wreck.

Then one shouted: ‘Try Sawle Point. Can't we get the gear down thur; the wind'll be abeam of us.'

With sweat mingling on their foreheads with the spray, they hauled their tackle away from the cliffs, dragged it round the edge of Trelasky Cove and with a clumsy impatient care began to half-haul, half-lower it towards the edge of Sawle Point.

The seas were breaking over this, but as the point lay almost due west of the ship they would no longer be firing into the wind but across it. Slipping and sliding in their haste, hobnailed boots sparking on the rock, they set up their gear and prepared to fire their next rocket.

From here the ship lay pointing north-east with her stern towards them; the angle of her deck was acute, her masts reaching towards a gleam of yellow sunlight among the racing clouds. Her mizzen mast was at a greater angle than the other two.

They fired the first rocket well out to sea and away from the ship, and there was a moment's silence and then a cracked cheer as the line was seen to have been blown full across the poop. All along the cliffs people waved and opened their mouths in sounds which were lost as soon as uttered.

One of the figures on the ship snatched at the line as it passed him and quickly made it fast.

Now began the task of paying out by means of this thin rocket line first the whip, which was an endless rope much thicker than the line and had to be secured to the main mast, then the hawser, and finally the breeches buoy.

You may still hear all this from the lips of a man who saw it. You will be told that just for a moment when the mizzen mast collapsed it looked as if the breeches buoy would be carried away, with only two of the crew rescued. You will be told what happened when the survivors came ashore, of the efforts of the Sawle people to provide them with dry clothing and food, of how some of them were accommodated at the Tavern Inn and others in the cottages near.