Read Online The Main Cages by Philip Marsden - Free Book Online Page B

piano. He took it along the coast in a sailing boat but the piano was too big and the boat turned over and sank and that is how I lost my father, Mr Sweeney. He drowned. So I have always been very afraid of the sea. Be careful, please …
    Maggie Treneer found out what had happened at Newlyn and confronted Croyden: ‘So now where’s his luck, your Sweeney?’ She told him if he went back to sea she’d throw him out of the house. Croyden weighed it up carefully, then took to sleeping in the net loft.
    Autumn came early that year. It crouched in the corner of August’s darkening evenings; it was there in the cold that lingered after dawn. In the second week of September, the wind freshened from the west and within a few hours had become a full gale. It tore the leaves from the trees and spun them in angry circles around the yards. Apples fell by thedozen and rolled down the leats. It lasted for the best part of two days.
    On Parliament Bench, they watched the storm whip up the seas beneath Pendhu Point and Toper Walsh folded his arms and said, ‘Well, there’s another gone.’
    ‘Gone!’
    ‘Another what, Tope?’
    ‘Another summer.’
    ‘Eeee,’ agreed Boy Johns.
    With the coming of autumn, the faces on the Bench became fewer. Toper Walsh still put in his daily appearance, arriving before everyone else to sweep the Town Quay and clear up any litter. No one was sure whether this was an official post for Toper, or whether he did it because it gave him some degree of authority. Boy continued to come, saying nothing more than his customary ‘Eeee’. But others like Brian Tyler liked to watch the visitors and when the visitors became scarcer so did they. Archie Stephens had grown so wheezy that he seldom left his home now. Dick Treneer went to see his cousin in Mevagissey. (Dick was commonly known as Red Treneer because of his political views and to distinguish him from old Dick Treneer, though it meant he was sometimes confused with Red Stephens who had no political views but had once owned a pair of very red trousers.) Brian Williams had fallen out with Toper. The Crates had taken their toll. It was said that Joseph Cloke and Moor Martin had a bench of their own up there. Tommy Treneer had not been seen since he left Cooper’s Yard.
    So in September, as the days became shorter and the hotels and guest houses emptied and the Petrels were towed in to Penpraze’s yard to have their masts taken out, labelled and stowed in the rafters, and as the Garretts laid up the
Polmayne Queen
and returned to stealing shellfish from other people’s pots, and Whaler Cuffe and the others left their summer sheds to take up residence again in their own houses, the Bench began to run out of things to talk about. Not only were therefew strangers to criticise but nothing in the town was being knocked down, the autumn storms had been and gone with little destruction, and no one had died since March.
    Towards the end of the month things livened up. The lifeboat was called out twice – a false alarm and a schooner put under tow (no casualties) – and then on the afternoon of the twenty-third the Reverend Arthur Winchester was found dead on the floor of his study. On the desk was the conclusion of the latest chapter of his monograph ‘The March of Science’:
    … we are like a man standing on the edge of a great sea. He has been given a boat with which to cross it but he does not appreciate the dangers. This man gives up the land at his peril …
    The Bench had never acknowledged Winchester in life but now they competed to show their appreciation.
    ‘An inspiration,’ concluded Toper.
    ‘A true man of God.’
    ‘From up east, wan’t him?’
    ‘London.’
    ‘Ninety-one years old!’
    ‘Some age.’
    ‘They won’t come like him no more.’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘Eeee.’
    Within three weeks of Winchester’s death, a replacement had arrived at Polmayne’s rectory. The Reverend Andrew Hooper had spent fifteen happy years as an army