Chapter 10: The Pinboard Marbles

Penzance to St Austell

There were only four people in the Seven Stars. The first two were bearded men sitting heavily at the bar. They were talking to the third, the barmaid. The fourth was passed out on the floor not far behind them. One of the men, Bill, explained the situation. The man on the floor was his brother-in-law and was celebrating his birthday. After a few (around 6) preliminary pints, Bill had taken him down to the Stars. There, he convinced him to down a pint of Shane’s famous cider. He did and now he was passed out.

“He’s quite lonely you see,” Bill said leaning over and watching him as he lay hopelessly on the floor. “My wife’s gonna kill me when she finds out!”

Bill had a Midlands accent and looked more like a pirate than anyone I’ve ever met, except possibly for the other man at the bar. His name was Ryan. The bar lady explained how Shane’s Cider should not be trifled with. It’s made specially by Shane himself, the former Hell’s Angel who owned the pub, and it was a mixture of Cornish scrumpy and German fizzy. ABV unknown. 80s rock blared deafeningly loudly from the speaker above the bar.

Neither she nor Bill were born in Cornwall. “Ha!” Raff butted in when I told her I was from Essex, “You’ve got Essex teeth!” The bar lady then bared hers, they were a little yellow and wonky, “I’ve got Nottingham teeth,” she said proudly.

“And I have Cornish teeth,” the younger man said, grinning proudly as he leaned over impressively, “Which is no teeth at all!”

He was being a little harsh on himself. He did in fact have one tooth, though it didn’t look like it would be there much longer. Scott was 29 and called himself a Cornish Viking and was one of the few I’d met who was born and bred in Cornwall. He lived upstairs and this was his living room. The reason for his lack of teeth was in fact a condition, he explained, but it didn’t help that on his days off he would drink around 25 pints.

“And that doesn’t include shots. They don’t count!” With that, he and Bill ordered a shot each and knocked it back. I thought 25 was probably a little spurious but even if he drank half of that it was impressive.

He had long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and a huge bushy beard. His eyes were as blue as a glacial stream and he did look like a Viking. Perhaps more so than a pirate.

It’s a little cliche to talk about pirates in Cornwall, and probably even more so in Penzance. The town’s name is synonymous with them thanks to Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, The Pirates of Penzance. According to the two ladies who dropped me there, the play is well known as far away as China and they get busloads of foreign tourists asking about them.

People love pirates. They have something of the Robin Hood romance about them: working for no one, beyond the system. We tend to sympathise with them, idealise them even. But we shouldn’t really, they were mostly unimaginably violent.

The southwest suffered more than their fair share of torment. Some of the most brutal pirates were the little remembered Corsairs who sailed from the baking ports of North Africa to these seas in search of plunder and slaves. They usually got both and at one point in about 1640, it is thought there were some 5000 English slaves in the Arabian slave markets, captured from their coastal homes by the Barbary Corsairs. A single raid in 1625 seized 60 unfortunate souls from Penzance itself.

Much of England’s early wealth and prestige came from equally violent pirates, or privateers as they’re often called, who harried the high seas and coastlines. The likes of Sir John Hawkins made speculative journeys to Sierra Leone to snatch human cargo and trade it in South America for pearls, gold and sugar. Queen Elizabeth was so impressed she told him to do it again, paying him for the journey. So began the British involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Soon it was no longer pirates involved but state-sponsored companies, merchants and chancers spotting a business opportunity. Some 3 million people were enslaved and sailed to the plantations while thousands of Englishmen became filthy rich. No one called them pirates anymore though.

I stumbled out of the Stars into a strange orange glow. Shane’s cider packed a real punch. I’d taken my leave shortly after a lady had come to the bar and ordered a pint of wine. She was given it in a Fosters pint glass with no questions asked and a dash of blackcurrant squash. It was getting dark and a Liverpudlian walked past. He thought I was homeless and offered me some of his joint. I declined. “You should get a job down here mate. I love it!”

“Maybe I should,” I slurred, deciding then and there that I would, “What are you doing tonight?”

“Ah mate, I’m just gunna go home to shag me berd. See youz mate!” With that he ducked into a doorway and was gone.

That night I slept in the corner of a field, behind the Tesco on the edge of town. I nearly pitched my tent on the flat lawn of the Penzance Helicopter club, reasoning that there couldn’t have been many helicopters about. Luckily my good sense got the better of me and I settled for a cosy patch of tarmac just over the hedge instead. It rained as I set up and all my things got wet. It was also incredibly uncomfortable but I was too tipsy to care much.

In the morning I caught a lift from the nearby petrol station. An old man called Keith picked me up but asked if we suspend any conversation until Melvyn Bragg was done talking about John Bull. Feeling a little hungover I was grateful. When In Our Time finished Keith told me he was originally from Yorkshire. When he was 15 he started work down a coal mine and then in his 20s he joined a steelworks. That all ended with Thatcher, as did just about everything where he was from he told me remorsefully. He left and like a marble on a pinboard trickled to Cornwall. With no further to go, he settled. “Manufacturing jobs go up and down when there’s ’t recessions,” he observed, his Yorkshire accent didn’t care that he’d not lived there for decades, “But services, go on all ’t time.” He now worked inspecting chair lifts in old peoples’ homes. “People always need their lifts inspected. It’s ’t law!”

Keith was driving all the way to Exeter but I wasn’t done in Cornwall yet so asked him to drop me by the road to Truro. From there I was picked up by a lady in a jacket, going to a wedding. She was called June and was driving to the Truro registration office. She was from Cheshire originally and had moved here in the last few years to retire - another pinball marble. Recently, she’d become a wedding registrar so spends her days uniting happy couples in holy matrimony, or at least civil matrimony. She loved it. “It’s always happy,” she said with a smile. You could tell from her cheerful atmosphere that she did and she recounted the wonderful weddings she’d been to on cliff tops, castles and beaches all over Cornwall.

June dropped me in Cornwall’s capital Truro and I went to get a pasty for lunch. Truro is a pretty town, with small colourful streets full of character. If you take out the largely pedestrianised centre with its looming Primark and JD Sports, it’s beautiful. A homeless man shuffled up to me and asked where I was from. He was from Hackney originally. “Hackney’s gunna be up and coming soon mate. Gunna be worth a bomb. We’re talking 3 or 4 mil an ’ouse! Should get in there.” I told him we’d probably missed the boat. “Oh right,” he replied, “I’ve not been back for a while.”

Truro

On the edge of Truro I was picked up by a lady called Linda. I’d barely waited more than 15 minutes in Cornwall for rides (except once) and Linda was a wonderful person, further improving my already buoyant mood. She was by her own admission an old hippy and had a gentle, comforting warmth. “I was 16 during the summer of love,” she told me nostalgically. She spent the last of the 60s and the early 70s hitchhiking around Britain and Europe. “I only picked you up because you see so few these days,” she said.

Linda had grown up in the bombed-out shell of post-war Jarrow in the North East. Her father was a coal miner and in the 30s had been part of the Jarrow hunger march when two hundred ‘crusaders’ had walked all the way to London to protest the dreadful unemployment the town faced after its shipyard closed. It failed and nothing came of it. She’d always been politically active and in her 20s began to involve herself in feminist politics of the great second wave. To begin with, she was most interested in ecofeminist ideas. “I went down the crazy witches dancing round drums route,” she said and I thought back to the groups of red-dressed women at Stonehenge singing as the sun rose. “But then I got more a bit more political and started working in crisis support.”

She began working closely with victims of rape and sexual abuse and was a pioneering figure in this area, setting up one of the country’s first ‘rape suites’ to offer support to victims. 30 years ago she moved to St Austell in Cornwall and set up a centre in Bodmin. It was hard work. Her tireless devotion was noticed though and in 2017 she was awarded an OBE. “I still don’t know how I feel about it,” she chuckled, “I’m an anarcho-feminist! It’s slightly hypocritical.” It was made all the more unpalatable by the fact the Conservative government had awarded it. “But in the end I accepted. People said I’d have to because so few women get them.” She laughed again.

We were coming into St Austell and Linda kindly offered to give me a quick tour of the town adding that it wouldn’t take long as there wasn’t much to see. We drove past a Sports Direct and through a narrow road then she turned and said, “That’s about it really!”

I tried to look for the positives. “The church looked nice,” I said meagrely. We agreed the church was quite nice but that really was about it. Linda suddenly remembered there was the highly controversial piece of public art that was recently unveiled. It was the world’s tallest ceramic sculpture and commemorated both the once-booming ceramics industry and the intricate link we all have to mother earth. It was called Earth Goddess.

“Sounds right up your street,” I said enthusiastically but Linda shook her head with a disbelieving look.

“I know. It should be… But it’s absolutely gopping!”

The statue seems to have pleased no one. One angry local said it looked like a ‘pork sword’ and even the church weighed in in a slightly medieval statement that called for its removal because its reference to an Earth ‘Goddess’ was idolatrous.

However, it’s probably most revealing that everyone seemed to agree that the area was in desperate need of investment and squandering funds on hideous sculptures seemed totally out of touch. Linda knew better than most the crushing poverty many in Cornwall faced. “I met some people the other day in an old mining community inland who had never even seen the sea.” The average breadth of Cornwall is 22 miles.

Linda’s determination was immensely inspiring. Her devotion to helping others is something the world could always do with more of. At a time when the corridors of power are clogged with self-interest and heartlessness, the unseen good of people like Linda is as important as ever. She despised the individualism our economic and political system fosters and its dogged notion that if everyone is selfish everyone is better off. She knew there was no truth in it.

As I stood on the road out of St Austell I realised why hitchhiking had been a political statement when Linda and her contemporaries were doing it and why it should be again. It’s because it requires a fundamental faith that people are kind. In a world of borders and inequality, climate catastrophe and distrust, such faith has huge consequences. But it has to be earnt. Hitchhiking, in my opinion, at least, is a pretty good way of earning it.

Mind you, I still wouldn’t want to be picked up by a pirate.