Cornish art & culture

Cornish Writing

The way things are

My Cornwall By Clies Stevens

A short while ago I attended the diabetic clinic in the West Cornwall Hospital, and getting bored I took a short stroll to amuse myself. I had left Margaret to keep watch for my name being called and off I went, much like an errant schoolboy under the gaze of his mother. I found a print on the wall of another waiting room of Penzance station, probably set around the late 50’s early 60’s. I was amazed at the activity going on around the platforms.

Goods were being moved, there were rail staff all over the place and passengers coming and going. W.H.Smith’s paper and bookstall was doing a good brisk trade (this is now closed and forgotten but is still there but unseen as it as actually under the station wall and main road outside) The place was a hive of activity, of hustle and bustle with steam rising from the engine towards that graceful roof that Brunel designed for his stations, even the pigeons were there under the canopy and all over the station life was happening.

Just to the outside edge of the station a shunting wagon could be seen moving goods wagons and it was a scene that took me back to when I would go by train to Penzance with my parents for a day. The big adventure however was the train journey; St.Ives to St. Erth then change trains and platforms by going over the same old bridge that is still there today. The huge hissing monster of an engine would glide majestically past us to come to a halt further up the platform, the driver leaning from his cab watching for the signal from the guard to pull out onwards to Penzance, clouds of steam hissing from the steam jets and the smell! That mysterious fascinating sulphurous oily smell that wafted down the platform, it promised a land of excitement and magical things that only a small boy could imagine and I desperately wanted to go in that cab!

It was not to be however, Mother watched me with eagle eyes to make sure I stayed clean, but to a young lad clean was boring! Getting into that magical place up the front of this whole train was akin to being allowed on the long liners in St.Ives harbour, well almost!
However I transgress from the print and the fascination it had for me. The station today is a mere shadow of it’s former self though everything is still there. Even outside in the car park the old goods yard rails are buried under Tarmac and concrete, and the old shunting yards along eastern green could soon have a transformation back to their former hustle and bustle and life.

But living in the past is not the way for me and I regretfully left the print and behaved like a grown man again, though I left an 8-year-old boy standing in utter fascination on that platform of 1958!

A few days later I collected my local paper, the St.Ives times and Echo and leafing absently through it I discovered a photo of the old staff of the Island factory, and there smiling at me was my mother and others that were an essential part of growing up as our unrelated Aunts and Uncles who always kept an eye on us.
The factory had a chequered history, starting in the 1840’s when St.Ives was a famous Pilchard fishing port and on this site Bolitho’s had a fish curing station. Later it became a factory that used silk and was quite famous in it’s own right. During the war the factory turned out camouflage netting and other nets for the armed forces. Then it made mattresses and later went over to contract dressmaking for stores like M&S.

Now it is called St.Nicholas court and expensive ‘apartments’ are there in what was once a hive of a bustling smelly fishing industry.
Dragging my eyes from familiar and loved faces now long gone I started to read the article that accompanied the photo. It was about the businesses that had disappeared from the town in the years from the 1960’s to today. I found it phenomenal! The list went on and on, and stirred sluggish grey cells again and I found myself walking down Fore Street yet again, a literal small town very busy street and the whole world to a small boy whose life was the Harbour, beaches and the cliffs and moors surrounding my precious town.

You could buy anything back then from a gas stove to a three piece suite, a bag of potatoes to a dress and a double bed, baby clothes and order a hundredweight of coal, place an advert in the Echo itself or buy a marvellous pasty and a fragrant Saffron cake. I was never allowed to go and fetch the saffron cake because it would attract the mice from all over town! At least that was my explanation for the lumps that would be missing from it.

Today however the same street is virtually empty of the old life it once witnessed, where once the busy housewife shopped bored tourists meander up the cobbles that once saw the life of the town pass over its lumps and bumps. The ladies outfitters are gone, as are the gents, would you believe there were once six gents outfitters in my little town? There were also fifteen ladies outfitters!

Dairies, jewellers, greengrocers & tobacconists and fish merchant’s butcher’s bakers and fish merchants, we even had two coach companies operating from the town! Things change I suppose but to see my beloved little town die in winter when once I would race ‘downalong’ to see mates around the harbour and every house and cottage had a light in it is so sad. Today I can walk through those same little streets, streets with names of ‘Back road West’ and ‘Teetotal Street’
‘St.Peters’ street, and others like these that could fill a whole page whose cottages now have notices in the windows, ‘Cottage to let sleeps 6 or 8’ available from etc. etc.

It feels like the town is dying, these same streets where people like Sven Berlin and Barbara Hepworth, Hyman Segal and others once strolled and were then just ordinary folk to the towns people.
Times change and I suppose I have to as well, at least I once knew the jewel as it was in the crown of Cornwall, my homeland.
CLIES STEVENS

Cornish writing

Clies Stevens 'My Cornwall'

Clies is a regular contributor to Genius Loci and also writes for 'Cornish World'

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