The question of food cropped up during the stowing as we had nothing but some pasties and a jar of cider that Mrs Garth had thoughtfully stowed in the motor boat. A young man who had been helping us in no uncertain fashion whilst his girl fried slept in the sun on a nearby rock said, ‘Look, if you’d care to invite us to supper with you, I’ll press-gang that good-for-nothing woman over there who happens to be my fiancee into doing some cooking.’
So Stuart introduced her to the galley and the larder, and by the time we were through she had a hot meal ready for us. I don’t remember her surname. To us she was always just Anne. Her fiance’s name was Bill Trevor. They came down and gave us a hand quite often after that first evening and for some strange reason things always seemed to go better when Anne was around so that we came to regard her as our mascot.
After dinner we sat on the bridge drinking and singing snatches of old songs to an accordion which Stuart played, whilst the tide crept darkly up the cove. Old Garth’s boat was floating shortly after eleven, just as the moon began to rise and fill the whispering cliffs with strange shadows. The old man had heard that Bill and Anne were staying at Boscastle and offered to take them in the boat. They were so keen on the idea of going back by sea in the moonlight that Bill gave me the keys of his car and asked me to park it at the farm for the night and drive over for them in the morning. I readily fell in with the idea since it would mean transport for my luggage to Bossiney. I knew that the job I’d undertaken was one that I’d got to live with.
Down on the beach I took Garth aside to settle for the hire of the boat. But when I spoke to him of it, he shook his head angrily, ‘Man,’ he said, ‘I’ve enjoyed the day. Thee’s given me a change and that’s as good as a holiday. I’m my own master. You’ll not be spoiling it by offering me money.’ He gripped my elbow in a hard hand. ‘An’ if thee’s in difficulties and need men to give thee a hand, come and see me. There’s plenty of us over at Boscastle who’d come for the fun of it. We’re men of the sea and if it’s a question of putting a boat in the water there’s few of us won’t give a hand.’
There was nothing adequate I could say. I shook his hand. He turned quickly away and went up to Anne. A moment later he had picked her up and was wading out to the boat with her. With a tow line fixed, the barge came off the sand with barely a sound and Stuart and I watched them chugging out of the now moonlit cove with a feeling that things were going well.
It was two o’clock before I drove back to the farm, for Stuart insisted on my explaining to him how I intended getting the craft off with the tackle I had borrowed.
The next day we started on the back-breaking task of building up a boulder and sand causeway between the rocks on which she rested and the one jagged outcrop that lay between her and flat sand. When we were tired there was always some holiday-maker to take over for a short spell. In three days we’d quite altered the appearance of the end of the cove. At night I slept like a log in an iron bedstead that Sarah had insisted on lending me complete with mattress, sheets and blankets. We lived out of tins, except once when Anne came down and whilst Bill laboured furiously with the three of us — the half-wit from the village was now under contract for the hours of daylight — Anne cooked about the biggest meal I have ever seen.
By the end of the third day we stood back in the red light of a wild sunset and could see how, by raising her stern and shifting her foot by foot, we could swing her on to the flat sand without damaging her. But the sky was flecked with dirty looking cloud. ‘There’s a break in the weather coming,’ I told Stuart. The weather forecast that night included a gale warning.
It was about four in the morning that I woke. The wind was roaring against the ship’s sides and I could hear the crash of rollers growing louder as the tide came up the cove. I dressed and went up on deck. Stuart joined me shortly afterwards. Intermittently the moon broke through ragged gaps in the clouds and showed us the water tossing angrily at the entrance to the cove.
‘Is it going to clear?’ Stuart asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s going to get worse.’
He nodded. ‘What about that?’ He indicated our three days’ work with the glowing bowl of his pipe.
‘We’ve had it,’ I said. ‘And we’ll be lucky if those boulders don’t smash through the plates.’
We decided to batten everything down and go up to the farm. There was no point in staying on board. There was nothing we could do.
As we climbed the path to the head in the grey light of early day it began to rain, stinging, blinding rain that whipped our faces. The tide was high and the waves were already sucking at the sand of our ramp and weeding out the smaller boulders. ‘By tomorrow morning,’ I said, ‘we’ll not know that we’ve done any work at all these last few days.’
CHAPTER THREE
Sarah understood our mood as soon as she saw us, wet and angry, at her door. She piled the fire high, gave us a huge breakfast, and left us alone with a chess set that had belonged to her husband.
Neither of us had played chess for a long time. We played all day, while the rain lashed at the windows and the gale shook the house. We spent the night there for we knew there would be no sleep for us on board.
Next day the wind had dropped and the sun shone on a drenched world. We went back along the cliffs and saw the sea thundering at the cliffs with blows that looked like depth charges. The tide was falling. When we reached the cove it was just as I’d first seen it. Of our three days’ work there was not a trace. ‘But what about the boulders?’ Stuart said. ‘Surely they haven’t been sucked out to sea?’
‘Buried under the sand,’ I told him. ‘It’s lucky we hadn’t started shifting her.’
‘There is that,’ he agreed. ‘Once we do start moving here we’ll have to work fast.’
Two plates had been buckled and looked as though they might have sprung a leak. Otherwise she seemed none the worse. Obviously she’d weathered bigger storms during the winter.
Bill and Anne came down to commiserate with us and we drove over to Boscastle for lunch. Stuart was in a sombre mood. He seemed dispirited about the whole thing. And his mood flared dangerously at an innocent remark of Bill’s, who was trying to cheer him up. ‘You think I’m a child to be patted on the hand and given crumbs of comfort like a bag of sticky sweets,’ Stuart cried, banging down his knife and fork. His voice was tense and strained and his eyes strangely narrowed. ‘When things go wrong with you, you can go crying to Anne for comfort. But I’ve got no one. Nobody in the world. All I’ve got to show for my life is an old landing craft. And that’s on the rocks. I’m no good. I’m finished. And bloody little fools like you come with words of comfort. I don’t want your comfort. I don’t want it — do you understand?’ And he flung out of the room.
It was a side of him that I hadn’t known about until then.
There was a stunned silence. And then Bill said, ‘What an extraordinary fellow!’
I said, ‘Not so extraordinary.’ Then I asked him if he’d been overseas.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I was in a reserved occupation — they lowered the age just in time.’
I said, ‘Well Stuart was nearly four years overseas. He was wounded twice. And I rather fancy — he hasn’t told me, but I think I’m right — that his wife and child were killed by a flying bomb.’
Anne nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I understand now. Those photographs — and that charred furniture. What hell for him! Find him a girl, David, before it drives him crazy.’