style="font-size:15px;"> But day-trips on the Queen of the Dart – renamed the Polmayne Queen – proved popular. It was the winters that were long for the Garretts. Rumours that they pulled others’ pots had been circulating for some time but until Croyden and Jack saw them that night, no one was quite sure.
When Jack Sweeney drew his pots the following day he did not replace the gurnard baits. Instead he stuck pigs’ trotters onto the stakes of the first two pots. He left the pots out for two days then reverted to gurnard. Within a week he was beginning to catch again, and his catches were good and he said to himself for the first time: perhaps this way of life really is possible.
Towards the end of April he received a letter from his solicitors in Bridport. The final lot of the farm had been sold, but a sum of remained outstand £236.35.6d remained outstanding. So that was it. He didn’t have that sort of money, nor could he earn it pulling a few strings of crab pots. Only when he read the letter a third time did he realise that the money was not owed by him but to him.
Two days later he started to look into the possibility of buying a bigger boat.
‘What?’
Maggie Treneer was lying in bed. Her two-week-old daughter lay beside her. Croyden was standing in the doorway and he was telling her that Jack Sweeney was buying a boat and was offering him a crew’s share. He was going with him, he was going back to sea.
Maggie looked at him not with anger but with a calm hatred. ‘What makes you think you can do any better this time?’
Croyden was holding his beret, toying with it.
‘What’s happened to you, Croyden?’
He shrugged and looked away. ‘Nothing.’
‘You yourself said this man Sweeney knows nothing of fishing.’
Croyden looked at her again and said, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Understand what?’
‘He’s lucky.’
First they went to Mevagissey. They found an old friend of Croyden’s called Sydney Bunt who offered them a black-hulled tosher that was much too small for their purposes. ‘There’s plenty more selling,’ he pointed along the harbour. ‘Try the Howard.’ But the Howard was in very poor condition.
Two days later Jack and Croyden took the train down to St Erth and from St Erth to St Ives where they saw a suitable-looking driver going for a good price. The man selling leaned back against the bulwarks and watched them as they inspected his boat. ‘From Polmayne, is ’ee? You’d know the man I bought her from. Jimmy Garrett?’
They thanked him and left and went to see a very talkative man named Edgar Pearce who owned a lugger named the New Delight. They looked at her closely and afterwards they stood on the sand and Croyden said: ‘Seems sound enough.’
Edgar Pearce shook his head. ‘She might look all right to you, but she’s no good.’
In her early days, he explained, she had been worked with a full lug-sail and a mizzen but in 1910 they’d put a steam engine in her and of course that meant drilling a hole there, out through the stern for the propeller but not central, on account of the deadwood bolts, and then so that the propeller spun free the rudder had to have a bit of a cut in her and then the stern-tube forced the crew’s quarters up for’ard and that meant the mainmast had to be restepped and that made the hold hard to get at, and then he’d put in a petrol-paraffin engine, and there was a knock she’d had the previous summer –
‘Wait,’ interrupted Jack. ‘Why are you telling us all this? Don’t you want to sell?’
He looked at them sheepishly. ‘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, they looked 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 the route. 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.
