Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

There’s nothing romantic about Cornish fishermen, whatever tales they may spin

Lamorna Ash chooses to make Newlyn’s seamen heroic, but the real Cornwall has none of the magic dust she likes to sprinkle

Fishing boats at Newlyn

Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual. There is a tendency, as old industries die, to watch them covetously and with awe; to paint them a paradigm of all that is lost. In the 19th century, fishwives posed for the artists of the Newlyn School on the quayside. Today, journalists are found at the Star Inn, which featured in Gavin Knight’s The Swordfish and the Star, buying pints for Ben Gunn, a ‘celebrity’ fisherman, for a tale.

Ash is a woman who can lose herself ‘along the simplest of paths’. She immerses herself in the real Newlyn, which is doughty, and the Newlyn of her imagination, which is mournful and filled with legends. She sails on the trawler Filadelfia with ‘Cornishmen born of salt’. She guts fish, spools gruesome testimony to their passing, hallucinates with seasickness and writes down fragments of her dreams, ‘the ghostly blue light shining on my words’.

The result is sometimes baffling — she is making myths, not observations — and sometimes touching. She does not belong here, although she wonders if, covered with scales, she is turning into a fish. I think the sea — her setting — is incidental. The real theme is loneliness:

I don’t know if loneliness has always looked like the sea on a colourless day, or if before that afternoon I just hadn’t had the image in my head to describe it, but ever since then, when I have felt at my most alone, I feel that flat stretch of ocean once again, feel it rise up and cover me over.

Ash doesn’t belong in Newlyn, although she wonders if, covered in scales, she is turning into a fish

This is a young woman searching for something.

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