Memories of Old Cornwall: The past remembered – an occasional note by William Morris.
Let’s talk about May Quick. She deserves more than a corner in this narrative. She lived in a long low white cottage on the left of the road before the little red post box in the wall that nobody posted letters in because the snails liked it and hid inside and would eat the mail.
May was fey. In days gone by they’d have called her a witch though she’d never have thought that, nor would the friends with whom she attended church twice each Sunday come rain, come shine. It is just me saying that.
Her cottage had no name. But then few did in those days. It was just May’s cottage. She lived on her own. If you can call it living on your own. She had countless cats. What does countless mean? It means you couldn’t count them. Somewhere between one and two dozen I guess. Probably closer to twelve than twenty-four. But a lot of cats in any case. They were everywhere.
Another thing about her, she cultivated every inch of land. That was the way with the old Cornish. She had a tiny little patch in by the house, alongside the footpath that leads to the church. And if there were potatoes in her big field she’d have potatoes in the little patch, even if it were just two rows of a dozen. “Can’t waste God’s earth”, she might have said. Except she’d have said it in a heavy old Cornish drawl. I could never write dialect good enough to do her justice, but May was unique. My Gran, Bertha Hicks, spoke the old Cornish way but May made her look like an amateur. Curious though. Sit me around someone like May long enough and I start talking with a Cornish lilt. The habit gets under your skin. It is the same now I am older and it embarrasses my children, but there are so few of the old Cornish left that it happens far less these days.
I earned my first half-crown picking potatoes in May’s potato field. In those days there were no machines to lift the potatoes. It was women and children that did the work. So you had a potato field that needed lifting – that was all done by hand. The women each dragged a sack and each had a row. They tucked their skirts into their knickers and bent over double. They’d pull up a plant and punch the potatoes into the sack they dragged, then set aside the plant and move on to the next. The children came behind the women, a child to each woman. I followed my Gran. So we’d use our fingers to sift through the dry earth. You had to have a dry day to pick potatoes, and catch up the stray potatoes left behind by the women and throw them into our own little sacks. I remember that first long hot summer afternoon. I was diligent and worked hard and at the end of the day May paid my wages. Half-a-crown she gave me – in a little brown paper wage packet. That’s an eighth of a pound. Doesn’t seem much but half a crown was our biggest coin in general circulation in a world where £200 would buy you a fair sized cottage down in Cornwall.
I’d talk with May of where the fairy wells were, or what the gossip was of him or her. She taught me how to trim a hedge with a sickle and a stick. She used to keep the path clear across to church on what the incomers now call the St Michael’s Way though she’d never have heard such a name. May would meet her friend Irene in Ludgvan Church. They both sang in the choir. And Irene had a voice to wake the congregation. She always sang with such gusto it was like she led the choir. Arthur Parsons, the new guitar playing, charismatic vicar from up country took Irene out of the choir and broke her heart. And May’s too because she never went back to church again once her friend had been tossed out of the choir. Out of loyalty I guess, though church was her life. And the rest of May’s story is sadness, though it would be wrong to remember her that way. She died as needs must we all some day. Two great sycamores have grown up on the little potato patch in by the house, so that’s gone. And her home is derelict with a tree growing through the roof. She left it to her two nephews and they couldn’t agree to talk to one another let alone sell it or fix it up or live there themselves. So it has stood empty, crumbling away, May’s beautiful cottage, empty these thirty years or more.
Which is the way much property in Cornwall falls into the hands of incomers. But as I say, it would be wrong to think of May with sadness. Her spirit whilst she lived was filled with joy and laughter and she was and is one of the best of people to have ever walked God’s earth.
I have spoken of the Blewitts, the Bennetts, and the Quicks, the great farming families of my youth. There were others too, the Richards of Splatridden, the Morris’s of Castle Kayle, and others beyond these to whom we had some relationship or other. Cornwall is, or at least was, a farming county, a place in which the land features large as does its sister the sea.
And you felt and smelt farming in those days. It featured larger. At dawn I would listen in the Spring for the sound of Boy Quick’s horse as it pulled the harrow through the backs, the cacophony that was the rattle of the chains as it went by. Strange that I shall never hear that sound again, the sound of a horse drawn harrow being pulled through the lane, a boy calling behind, on the way out to the fields, and the same back again at sunset. And nor shall you. It is a sound of my Cornwall, and perhaps yours too, gone forever, never to return.
Cornish farmers are a strange bunch. They have a “the land is ours and we are the land” proprietary approach. And they seemingly have an “us and them” perspective on outsiders that can seem resentful, though they are great hearted in reality. But arable farming is a solitary pursuit these days. It wasn’t always thus. The great gangs of villagers that once came to the fields to pick potatoes or flowers or cabbages or whatever was needed come the day – they are long gone to find pickings on changeover day making beds for tourists. They have been replaced by machines, and where machines won’t cut the mustard, by migrant labour content to live in caravans and pick daffodils during the season and be paid a pittance for the privilege and be grateful for it.
When the fields were plump and ripe with daffodils or vegetables to be picked they were spoken of by villagers as the “golden mile”. Now farming has changed forever.
So many things have disappeared from our universe. Seaweed for instance. During the Spring there would be an endless procession of tractors and trailers on the seafront in Penzance at low tide. I’d be there with a pitchfork, working for the Blewetts, loading up the trailer. But nobody collects seaweed anymore. The seaweed would be piled on the top edge of a field in great heaps to rot, and then ploughed in. I was speaking to Boy Quick the other day. “Seaweed stops clubbing in broccoli,” he said. “Broccoli needs strong ground (strong meaning well fertilised). The iodine in seaweed kills the worm”. The wireworm he means that gets into cauliflower roots (cauliflower is called broccoli in Cornwall remember). “Got to have seaweed to teal broccoli”. “Teal” means “grow”.
“That’s why they teal broccoli so well round Gulval. All the seaweed in the soil over the years.”
I was thinking of trying my hand at growing broccoli which was why I was having the conversation. “Go to Boy Wallace. He’ll give you some plants”.
So I asked, which of the boys was Boy Wallace? “I call them all Boy Wallace” he answered. I should add that Boy Quick is older than I am. It’s not disparaging. Just the Cornish way. I have no idea whether anyone has ever called me Boy Morris. Few I think. But May Quick would have done.
Which is another reason to miss her. God rest her soul.
William Morris 