Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey Read online

  Cherry lay on her side where the tide had lifted her and coughed until her lungs were clear. She woke as the sea came in once again and frothed around her legs. She rolled over on her back, feeling the salt spray on her face, and saw that it was night. The sky above her was dashed with stars and the moon rode through the clouds.

  She scrambled to her feet, one hand still holding her precious shells close to her. Instinctively she backed away from the sea and looked around her. With growing dismay she saw that she had been thrown back on the wrong side of the rocks, that she was not in Boat Cove. The tide had left only a few feet of sand and rock between her and the cliff face. There was no way back through the sea to safety.

  She turned round to face the cliff that she realized would be her last hope, for she remembered that this little beach vanished completely at high tide. If she stayed where she was she would surely be swept away again and this time she might not be so fortunate. But the cold seemed to have calmed her and she reasoned more deliberately now, wondering why she had not tried climbing the cliff before. She had hurried into her first attempt at escape and it had very nearly cost her her life. She would wait this time until the sea forced her up the cliff. Perhaps the tide would not come in that far. Perhaps they would be looking for her by now. It was dark. Surely they would be searching. Surely they must find her soon. After all, they knew where she was. Yes, she thought, best just to wait and hope.

  She settled down on a ledge of rock that was the first step up onto the cliff face, drew her knees up to her chin to keep out the chill and waited. She watched as the sea crept ever closer, each wave lashing her with spray and eating away gradually at the beach. She closed her eyes and prayed, hoping against hope that when she opened them the sea would be retreating. But her prayers went unanswered and the sea came in to cover the beach. Once or twice she thought she heard voices above her on the cliff path, but when she called out no one came. She continued to shout for help every few minutes, forgetting it was futile against the continuous roar and hiss of the waves. A pair of raucous white gulls flew down from the cliffs to investigate her and she called to them for help, but they did not seem to understand and wheeled away into the night.

  She stayed sitting on her rock until the waves threatened to dislodge her and then reluctantly she began her climb. She would go as far as she needed to and no further. She had scanned the first few feet above for footholds and it did look quite a simple climb to begin with, and so it proved. But her hands were numbed with cold and her legs began to tremble with the strain almost at once. She could see that the ledge she had now reached was the last deep one visible on the cliff face. The shells in her jersey were restricting her freedom of movement so she decided she would leave them there. Wrapped tight in the towel they would be quite safe. She took the soaking bundle out of her jersey and placed it carefully against the rock face on the ledge beside her, pushing it in as far as it would go. “I’ll be back for you,” she said, and reached up for the next lip of rock. Just below her the sea crashed against the cliff as if it wanted to suck her from the rock face and claim her once again. Cherry determined not to look down but to concentrate on the climb.

  She imagined at first that the glow of light above her was from a torch, and she shouted and screamed until she was weak from the effort of it. But although no answering call came from the night, the light remained, a pale beckoning light whose source now seemed to her wider perhaps than that of a torch. With renewed hope that had rekindled her strength and her courage, Cherry inched her way up the cliff towards the light until she found herself at the entrance to a narrow cave that was filled with a flickering yellow light like that of a candle shaken by the wind. She hauled herself up into the mouth of the cave and sat down exhausted, looking back down at the furious sea frothing beneath her. Relief and joy surged within her and she laughed aloud in triumph. She was safe and she had defied the sea and won. Her one regret was that she had had to leave her cowrie shells behind on the ledge. They were high enough she thought to escape the sea. She would fetch them tomorrow after the tide had gone down again.

  The sea crashed against the cliff as if it wanted to suck her from the rock face.

  For the first time now she began to think of her family and how worried they would be, but the thought of walking in through the front door all dripping and dramatic made her almost choke with excitement.

  As she reached forward to brush a sharp stone from the sole of her foot, Cherry noticed that the narrow entrance to the cave was half sealed in. She ran her fingers over the stones and cement to make sure, for the light was poor. It was at that moment that she recognized exactly where she was. She recalled now the giant fledgling cuckoo one of her brothers had spotted being fed by a tiny rock pipit earlier in the holidays, how they had quarrelled over the binoculars and how when she finally usurped them and made her escape across the rocks she had found the cuckoo perched at the entrance to a narrow cave some way up the cliff face from the beach.

  She had asked then about the man-made walling, and her father had told her of the old tin mines whose lodes and adits criss-crossed the entire coastal area around Zennor. This one, he said, might have been the mine they called Wheel North Grylls, and he thought the adit must have been walled up to prevent the seas from entering the mine in a storm. It was said there had been an accident in the mine only a few years after it was opened over a hundred years before, and that the mine had had to close soon after when the mine owners ran out of money to make the necessary repairs. The entire story came back to her now, and she wondered where the cuckoo was and whether the rock pipit had died with the effort of keeping the fledgling alive. Tin mines, she thought, lead to the surface, and the way home. That thought and her natural inquisitiveness about the source of light persuaded her to her feet and into the tunnel.

  The adit became narrower and lower as she crept forward, so that she had to go down on her hands and knees and sometimes flat on her stomach. Although she was not out of the wind, it seemed colder. She felt she was moving downwards for a minute or two, for the blood was coming to her head and her weight was heavy on her hands. Then, quite suddenly, she found the ground levelling out and saw a large tunnel ahead of her. There was no doubt as to which way she should turn, for one way the tunnel was black and the other way was lighted with candles that lined the lode wall as far as she could see. She called out, “Anyone there? Anyone there?” and paused to listen for the reply; but all she could hear now was the muffled roar of the sea and the continuous echoing of dripping water.

  The tunnel widened now and she could walk upright again; but her feet hurt against the stone and so she moved slowly, feeling her way gently with each foot. She had gone only a short distance when she heard the tapping for the first time, distinct and rhythmic, a sound that was instantly recognizable as hammering. It became sharper and noticeably more metallic as she moved up the tunnel. She could hear the distant murmur of voices and the sound of falling stone. Even before she came out of the tunnel and into the vast cave she knew she had happened upon a working mine.

  The cave was dark in all but one corner and here she could see two men bending to their work, their backs towards her. One of them was inspecting the rock face closely whilst the other swung his hammer with controlled power, pausing only to spit on his hands from time to time. They wore round hats with turned-up brims that served also as candlesticks, for a lighted candle was fixed to each, the light dancing with the shadows along the cave walls as they worked.

  Cherry watched for some moments until she made up her mind what to do. She longed to rush up to them and tell of her escape and to ask them to take her to the surface, but a certain shyness overcame her and she held back. Her chance to interrupt came when they sat down against the rock face and opened their canteens. She was in the shadows and they still could not see her.

  “Tea looks cold again,” one of them said gruffly. “’Tis always cold. I’m sure she makes it wi’ cold water.”

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��Oh, stop your moaning, Father,” said the other, a younger voice, Cherry felt. “She does her best. She’s five little ones to look after and precious little to do it on. She does her best. You mustn’t keep on at her so. It upsets her. She does her best.”

  “So she does, lad, so she does. And so for that matter do I, but that don’t stop her moaning at me and it’ll not stop me moaning at her. If we didn’t moan at each other, lad, we’d have precious little else to talk about, and that’s a fact. She expects it of me, lad, and I expects it of her.”

  “Excuse me,” Cherry said tentatively. She felt she had eavesdropped for long enough. She approached them slowly. “Excuse me, but I’ve got a bit lost. I climbed the cliff, you see, cos I was cut off from the cove. I was trying to get back, but I couldn’t and I saw this light and so I climbed up. I want to get home and I wondered if you could help me get to the top?”

  “Top?” said the older one, peering into the dark. “Come closer, lad, where we can see you.”

  “She’s not a lad, Father. Are you blind? Can you not see ’tis a filly. ’Tis a young filly, all wet through from the sea. Come,” the young man said, standing up and beckoning Cherry in. “Don’t be afeared, little girl, we shan’t harm you. Come on, you can have some of my tea if you like.”

  They spoke their words in a manner Cherry had never heard before. It was not the usual Cornish burr, but heavier and rougher in tone and somehow old-fashioned. There were so many questions in her mind.

  “But I thought the mine was closed a hundred years ago,” she said nervously. “That’s what I was told, anyway.”

  “Well, you was told wrong,” said the old man, whom Cherry could see more clearly now under his candle. His eyes were white and set far back in his head, unnaturally so, she thought, and his lips and mouth seemed a vivid red in the candlelight.

  “Closed, closed indeed; does it look closed to you? D’you think we’re digging for worms? Over four thousand tons of tin last year and nine thousand of copper ore, and you ask is the mine closed? Over twenty fathoms below the sea this mine goes. We’ll dig right out under the ocean, most of the way to ’Merica, afore we close down this mine.”

  He spoke passionately now, almost angrily, so that Cherry felt she had offended him.

  “Hush, Father,” said the young man, taking off his jacket and wrapping it round Cherry’s shoulders. “She doesn’t want to hear all about that. She’s cold and wet. Can’t you see? Now, let’s make a little fire to warm her through. She’s shivered right through to her bones. You can see she is.”

  “They all are,” said the old tinner, pulling himself to his feet. “They all are.” And he shuffled past her into the dark. “I’ll fetch the wood,” he muttered, and then added, “for all the good it’ll do.”

  “What does he mean?” Cherry asked the young man, for whom she felt an instant liking. “What did he mean by that?”

  “Oh, pay him no heed, little girl,” he said. “He’s an old man now and tired of the mine. We’re both tired of it, but we’re proud of it, see, and we’ve nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.”

  He had a kind voice that was reassuring to Cherry. He seemed somehow to know the questions she wanted to ask, for he answered them now without her ever asking.

  “Sit down by me while you listen, girl,” he said. “Father will make a fire to warm you and I shall tell you how we come to be here. You won’t be afeared now, will you?”

  Cherry looked up into his face, which was younger than she had expected from his voice; but like his father’s, the eyes seemed sad and deep-set, yet they smiled at her gently and she smiled back.

  “That’s my girl. It was a new mine this, promising, everyone said. The best tin in Cornwall and that means the best tin in the world. Eighteen sixty-five it started up and they were looking for tinners, and so Father found a cottage down by Treveal and came to work here. I was already fourteen, so I joined him down the mine. We prospered and the mine prospered, to start with. Mother and the little children had full bellies and there was talk of sinking a fresh shaft. Times were good and promised to be better.”

  Cherry sat transfixed as the story of the disaster unfolded. She heard how they had been trapped by a fall of rock, about how they had worked to pull them away, but behind every rock was another rock and another rock. She heard how they had never even heard any sound of rescue. They had died, he said, in two days or so because the air was bad and because there was too little of it.

  “Father has never accepted it; he still thinks he’s alive, that he goes home to Mother and the little children each evening. But he’s dead, just like me. I can’t tell him though, for he’d not understand and it would break his heart if he ever knew.”

  “So you aren’t real,” said Cherry, trying to grasp the implications of his story. “So I’m just imagining all this. You’re just a dream.”

  “No dream, my girl,” said the young man, laughing out loud. “No more’n we’re imagining you. We’re real right enough, but we’re dead and have been for a hundred years and more. Ghosts, spirits, that’s what living folk call us. Come to think of it, that’s what I called us when I was alive.”

  Cherry was on her feet suddenly and backing away.

  “No need to be afeared, little girl,” said the young man, holding out his hand towards her. “We won’t harm you. No one can harm you, not now. Look, he’s started the fire already. Come over and warm yourself. Come, it’ll be all right, girl. We’ll look after you. We’ll help you.”

  “But I want to go home,” Cherry said, feeling the panic rising to her voice and trying to control it. “I know you’re kind, but I want to go home. My mother will be worried about me. They’ll be out looking for me. Your light saved my life and I want to thank you. But I must go else they’ll worry themselves sick, I know they will.”

  “You going back home?” the young man asked, and then he nodded. “I s’pose you’ll want to see your family again.”

  “Course I am,” said Cherry, perplexed by the question. “Course I do.”

  “’Tis a pity,” he said sadly. “Everyone passes through and no one stays. They all want to go home, but then so do I. You’ll want me to guide you to the surface, I s’pose.”

  “I’m not the first then?” Cherry said. “There’s been others climb up into the mine to escape from the sea? You’ve saved lots of people.”

  “A few,” said the tinner, nodding. “A few.”

  “You’re a kind person,” Cherry said, warming to the sadness in the young man’s voice. “I never thought ghosts would be kind.”

  “We’re just people, people who’ve passed on,” replied the young man, taking her elbow and leading her towards the fire. “There’s nice people and there’s nasty people. It’s the same if you’re alive or if you’re dead. You’re a nice person, I can tell that, even though I haven’t known you for long. I’m sad because I should like to be alive again with my friends and go rabbiting or blackberrying up by the chapel near Treveal like I used to. The sun always seemed to be shining then. After it happened I used to go up to the surface often and move amongst the people in the village. I went to see my family, but if I spoke to them they never seemed to hear me, and of course they can’t see you. You can see them, but they can’t see you. That’s the worst of it. So I don’t go up much now, just to collect wood for the fire and a bit of food now and then. I stay down here with Father in the mine and we work away day after day, and from time to time someone like you comes up the tunnel from the sea and lightens our darkness. I shall be sad when you go.”

  The old man was hunched over the fire rubbing his hands and holding them out over the heat.

  “Not often we have a fire,” he said, his voice more spritely now. “Only on special occasions. Birthdays, of course, we always have a fire on birthdays back at the cottage. Martha’s next. You don’t know her; she’s my only daughter – she’ll be eight on September 10th. She’s been poorly, you know – her lungs, that’s what the doctor said.” He sig
hed deeply. “’Tis dreadful damp in the cottage. ’Tis well nigh impossible to keep it out.” There was a tremor in the old man’s voice that betrayed his emotion. He looked up at Cherry and she could see the tears in his eyes. “She looks a bit like you, my dear, raven-haired and as pretty as a picture; but not so tall, not so tall. Come in closer, my dear, you’ll be warmer that way.”

  Cherry sat with them by the fire till it died away to nothing. She longed to go, to get home amongst the living, but the old man talked on of his family and their little one-room cottage with a ladder to the bedroom where they all huddled together for warmth, of his friends that used to meet in the Tinners’ Arms every evening. There were tales of wrecking and smuggling, and all the while the young man sat silent until there was a lull in the story.

  “Father,” he said. “I think our little friend would like to go home now. Shall I take her up as I usually do?”

  The old man nodded and waved his hand in dismissal. “Come back and see us sometime, if you’ve a mind to,” he said, and then put his face in his hands.

  “Goodbye,” said Cherry. “Thank you for the fire and for helping me. I won’t forget you.”

  But the old man never replied.

  The journey through the mine was long and difficult. She held fast to the young tinner’s waist as they walked silently through the dark tunnels, stopping every now and then to climb a ladder to the lode above until finally they could look up the shaft above them and see the daylight.

  “It’s dawn,” said the young man, looking up.

  “I’ll be back in time for breakfast,” said Cherry, setting her foot on the ladder.

  “You’ll remember me?” the young tinner asked, and Cherry nodded, unable to speak. She felt a strange affinity with him and his father. “And if you should ever need me, come back again. You may need me and I shall be here. I go nowhere else.”