Tag: West Cornwall

Bewildered again. Back in Kynance

The view through the window of the marvellous cafe at Kynance Cove

Years ago we were on the Roseland peninsula, skulking along the coast path when we spotted a botanist. We knew she was a botanist because she was in the classic field botanist’s question mark pose – head bent over, walking very slowly and scanning from side to side like a faulty photocopier. “What are you looking for?” I asked. I should admit immediately that I’m quite deaf because I clearly heard her say “squirrels”. A conversation of stacking non sequiturs concerning little furry animals followed for a while when it finally dawned on me that she was looking for Spring Squills – Scilla verna – for the serious, and I was able to purge my imagination of the possibility of a colony of Red Squirrels living under the radar in Cornwall. However it was worth the embarrassment because I’d never seen a Spring Squill and then suddenly we knew where to find them. Now, of course, I wave a languid arm at them and say in my best Martin Jarvis/ Just William voice – “Oh them’s Spring Squirrels” whilst inwardly plotting terrible revenge on Violet Elizabeth Bott. If you’re interested, they grow profusely behind the coastguard lookout east of Portscatho and – what’s more – all the way around the Lizard coastline.

Anyway, the Spring Squill was the cause of even more confusion today, because we set out to find not just any old pond, but the precise pond in which I had come to believe I’d failed to identify a pretty rare plant last January. Needless to say I was wrong in every respect because once we got back with grid references and photographs and then defrosted our hands I waded through my pile of books and found that my hoped-for rarity had never been found anywhere near the Lizard but that there was another proper rarity growing down here that I also thought we had seen today.

It wasn’t the best day for a minute examination of the local flora. The gunmetal grey sky and a nominal temperature of 4C hardly describe the reality when you factor in the 20 mph east windchill. We were heads down all the way, and even with my new heavyweight oiled Welsh wool polo neck, two hats and a down jacket, we were very cold. Thank goodness for the cafe at the bottom which was open and selling tea and toasted buns.

Anyway, it turns out that Land Quillwort which does grow here is all but indistinguishable, at this time of year, from guess what? ……. Spring Squill- oh bother!! Now the Quillwort is so rare that you can’t just go uprooting bits of it, so the only way to see what it is would be to revisit in March and see what’s come up. This is how we amateurs go completely bonkers and land up with gimlet eyes and strange personal habits. I could cite the authorities I’ve consulted but this isn’t meant to be a student essay as much as a cri de coeur from a bewildered man.

But why’s this so much fun? Well you’d have to talk to a psychotherapist I’m afraid, but sitting here surrounded by photos, grid references and field guides I feel completely at home and in my happy place. No peculiar tics any more, I’ve been pretty successful at hiding them. Tomorrow there’s a possibility of snow which, in this part of Cornwall is a rarity. If I could offer just one suggestion as to why this is so rewarding, maybe it’s this. When you get to a certain age you become invisible. Even your children begin to see signs of senescence everywhere and turn away offers of advice or help, occasionally rather rudely. But then, as it happened today, emails arrive from older friends and younger people with real heft asking you to do something; a bit of proofreading maybe. Plans are laid for field trips which will go ahead because we – The Three Musketeers – will go out on a recce and we can make them happen; and you can ask questions of world class experts and get them answered and you feel useful. And if you should think that this is all nonsense then ponder this. The 202o UK and Ireland BSBI Plant Atlas is the result of as many as 170,000 volunteer days of recording. If you read anything in the newspapers that refers to plants and their current state in the midst of a climate catastrophe it will almost certainly come from this data. We oldies still have our uses!

Hm

Working landscape

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I woke up this morning listening to horses passing.  Their hooves were sounding  on the cobbles outside, except they weren’t because it didn’t take long to realize that these horses were big clots of rain falling from the blocked gutter into the yard below.  We’re staying in an old net-loft, once used as an artist’s studio, and the gutters in the building opposite (so close you could reach out and touch it) are completely clogged with a wonderful array of grass and ferns – very Cornish! I’d  been having one of those dreams that you can chase down to an event during the previous day. My dream concerned a pair of wellington boots – black and very ordinary looking – but which I knew were known as “recording boots” – and which I desperately wanted to own.  They were (needless to say) very expensive. At this point, amateur Freudians, Jungians and my properly professional therapist would be saying – “What were you supposed to be recording?”  I’d gone to bed after reading from John Wright’s new book on foraging, so the obvious (but wrong) answer would have been that I wanted to record plants.

As I often do, when Madame and I sit in bed with a cup of early morning tea, I mentioned the dream to her in the knowledge that it would be hard for her to find any sinister interpretation in my harmless desires. We chatted for a bit and then there was one of those therapeutic silences and it occurred to me that I had spent an amount of time on the bus stop outside the old fishermen’s institute in Newlyn yesterday, regarding a young man – or more precisely – regarding his wellingtons.  I promise that this is not some homoerotic/rubber confession, at least not mine.

And so, with a bit of clarity beginning to dawn, I explained the origin of the dream and Madame launched into one of her revelatory discourses.  Our conversations often seem to possess unexpected emergent qualities.  Suddenly we were back on the quayside in a Newlyn harbour some time between 1880 and 1900.  The young man I observed yesterday, the one with the slightly too large, green, steel toecapped safety boots was obviously a fisherman returning from a spell at sea.  He looked tired out.  On his back was a rucksack that contained very little – I could see a bottle of shower gel, so probably his work had taken him away for several days.

“It hasn’t changed very much”, Madame said. “Not from the Stanhope Ford paintings.”  And it was true. With a different set of clothes he could have been one of the eponymous “Jack” models from the paintings, which were revolutionary at the time, with their focus on a rather romanticised view of working lives. The fishermen, smokng their pipes as they mended their nets and their wives, sometimes grieving wives, gutting fish or hauling them off in huge baskets to sell.  The beautiful young girls not yet eroded by the weather of a harsh life – all there then, and all still here now.  Stanhope Forbes, Walter Langley and the others had found their recording boots.  The herring and pilchard have gone, long since but the young men still put to sea.  In the pub a group of older men came in – down fishing, but not local men – among them one from the Shetlands, one from Ireland.  We eavesdropped on their conversation. They were talking about boats and about the cost of gear.  One remained silent, keeping his counsel and sipping his single pint where two of the others were downing them.

Out on the street there was a lot of ordinary life going on. Young mothers out with their children in pushchairs, a couple of men outside another of the pubs, one saying to another – “She’s not speaking to me so I might as well ….”. There’s work, but it’s often poorly paid and seasonal just like it always was.  Nowadays the catch goes off in lorries while the remaining boats play cat and mouse games with the Spanish and Dutch factory ships out there hoovering up everything including the sea-bed. The fishwives have morphed into an army of cleaners who look after the holiday cottages whose owners live elsewhere. Not much of the money comes into Cornwall.

The Newlyn School painters, if they were able to come back, would find plenty of familiar scenes to paint.  The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their original models are probably still here somewhere. They’d be able to buy their favourite French cheeses in the upmarket shops  and get some sourdough bread too – that would have pleased them, no doubt. They never lost their London ways. But here, life’s a gamble – only the bookmakers get rich, and hardly anyone can afford a pair of recording boots.