The Main Cages Read Online Free PDF

‘Don’t believe I do.’
    In Mousehole they met an elderly man with a Mount’s Bay driver that had been in his family thirty years (too big). In Porthleven the boat they came to see had just been bought by a Helston doctor as a pleasure ‘steamer’. In Falmouth, theylooked at a drifter that was going cheap because she had been in a collision and ‘her handling’d gone strange’.
    In the end they found the
Maria V
back in Mevagissey where they’d first looked. She was a high-bowed, thirty-seven-foot drifter with tabernacled mainmast and a mizzen astern. She’d been built in 1925 by Dick Pill of Gorran Haven and had been fitted more recently with a Kelvin engine. Maria V herself was Maria Varcoe, who had left the money to her great-nephew, the Gorran man who had originally commissioned the boat.
    Beneath a sky of grey-brown cloud, Jack and Croyden motored the
Maria V
back around Pendhu Point and into the bay. Then came a week of strong northerlies and the
Maria V
remained on her moorings, tugging at the chain.
    On 6 May the last of the winds blew itself out, the seas settled and the Cox of the old lifeboat died. Samuel Tyler was eighty-three and he died in his bed. He had been Cox in 1891 when the
Adelaide
struck the Main Cages. The following year he lost three fingers fishing and handed over the command to Tommy Treneer. In his years as lifeboatman Samuel Tyler had helped save a total of 233 lives.
    At eleven o’clock that Saturday the cortège gathered at the lifeboat station. The RNLI flag flew at half-mast. The same flag lay wrapped around the coffin, its insignia uppermost. Tyler’s cork lifejacket and a yellow sou’wester rested on top.
    The procession was led by two black cobs and Ivor Dawkins of Crowdy Farm. He wore a khaki coat and Wellington boots and carried a switch of hazel. Dawkins did not share the town’s reverence for the sea, nor did he have much time for those who risked their lives upon it. He was keen to get his horses back to work and was leading the cortège at something rather quicker than a funereal pace.
    Funerals were as popular in Polmayne as lifeboat Coxswains, and almost the whole town turned out to line theroute. Jack Sweeney stood with Mrs Cuffe outside Bethesda. Whaler leaned on his stick, staring over the procession to the glow of sun above the bay. On the Town Quay they set down the coffin and for the first of several times sang ‘Crossing the Bar’:
    Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me;
    And let there be no moaning at the bar
    when I put out to sea …
    Beside the coffin stood the six pall-bearers in their red dress-hats: the current Cox, Edwin Tyler; his lineman, Dee Walsh; Red and Joseph Stephens; and Croyden and Charlie Treneer.
    In front of them all, struggling to keep up with the coffin as it left the quay, was Tommy Treneer. He was hunched and shuffling. His black jacket was too large for him. But the others dropped back to give him space. From his lapel dangled, one above the other, three RNLI service medals. He was now Polmayne’s senior retired Cox.

CHAPTER 4

    T he following week the town gathered together again, this time for the Jubilee of King George V. On a breezy afternoon, they made their way to the recreation ground. At one end of the field was a low stage, topped by bunting and flanked by a pair of poles. On each of the poles was a trumpet-shaped speaker through which a Broadcasting Apparatus, loaned by Mr Bradley, relayed a crackling version of the ceremony in London.
    Major Franks stood on the stage and began by addressing the town’s children. ‘My dear little friends! You have more opportunities for enjoying yourselves than any generation before you. You are living in a wonderful age, you must always endeavour to make the most of this privilege …’
    That afternoon’s endeavour was sports. Not a child over two was denied the joys of competition. Each one was placed on the starting line and instructed to run, skip or hop towards a