CHAPTER TWO
At the Ding Dong Mine
I have set down in detail the manner of my return to my native Cornwall because, like 'the prelude to an opera, it was all of a part with the strange events that followed. As an outcast myself, it was inevitable that I should be thrown into company with men who themselves lived outside the law. At the time, I admit, I felt that I was the subject of a series of most fetal coincidences. But now that I look back on the whole affair, I feel that it was less a series of coincidences than a natural sequence, one thing leading inevitably to another. From the moment that I decided 10 take Dave Tanner's advice and reurn to England on the Arisaig I was set upon a course that led me with terrible directness to Cripples' Ease.
It may sound fantastic. But then is anything more fantastic than life itself? I have so often been angered by people who damn books from the comfortable security of their armchairs for being too fantastic. I have read everything I have ever been able to lay my hands on, from the Just So Stories to War and Peace — that's the way I got myself educated — and I have yet to read any book that was more fantastic than the stories I've heard in the mining camps of the Rockies or down under in the Coolgardie gold district of Western Australia. And yet, I will say this, that if I had been told as I strode over the mist-shrouded road to Penzance, that I was walking straight into a terrible mine disaster — not only that, but into a pitiful story of madness and greed that involved my own family history — then I just should not have believed it.
For one thing I was far too absorbed in my own wretchedness. I had dreamed so often of this homecoming. All Cornishmen do. Their dream is of a lucky strike and then back to Cornwall to swagger their wealth in the mining towns with big talk of the things they've done and the places they've been. And here was I, back in Cornwall, an outcast — alone and penniless. I doubt whether there was any one more depressed, more completely dispirited by his own sense of loneliness — yes, and his sense of fear — than I was. And all round me was the deep, soundlessness of the mist in place of the blazing blue of the Italian skies.
There was no traffic on the road. Everything was dead and cold and wet. Old tales of the tinners — old superstitions that I'd heard by the camp fires — came to my mind. I'd thought them stupid tales at the time. Piskies, the Giants, the Knockers, the Black Dogs, the Dead Hand and a host of other half-remembered beliefs — they all seemed real enough up there in the mist on the road to Penzance. There were times when I could have sworn somebody was following me. But it was just my imagination. That and the fact that I'd have been scared of my own shadow if the sun had suddenly broken through the mist.
The trouble was that I hadn't understood what it would be like coming back to an organised society. I hadn't realised quite how much of an outcast I should feel. Four years in Italy is apt to give you the idea that the organisation of the masses is such an impossible task that any individual can discreetly lose himself in the crowd.
But in Sennen Cove, after breakfasting at the inn under the curious gaze of the waiter, I had gone into the little general stores to get a map of the district. The shop was warm and friendly, full of seaside things with a stand of postcards crudely illustrating old seaside jokes. It reminded me of little places near Perth. A girl was talking to a man with a little brushed-up, sandy moustache — obviously an officer on leave. 'You wouldn't think it possible, more than three years after the end of the war,' she was saying, 'Nearly fifteen thousand, it says. Listen to this — " You 'II find them on the race tracks, in the Black Market, running restaurants, selling bad liquor, organising prostitution, gambling and vice, dealing in second hand cars, phoney antiques, stolen clothing — they're mixed up in every rotten racket in the country." Parasites — that's what this paper calls them. And that's what they are.' She threw the paper down on the counter. It lay open at the page she had been looking at. The headline ran — FIFTEEN THOUSAND DESERTERS. 'I know what I'd do with them if I were the Government,' the girl added. 'Round them up and send them to the coal mines for three years. That'd teach them.'
I had bought my map and hurried out of the shop, scared that the girl would notice me. Unseen eyes seemed watching me from the blind windows of the cottages as I hastened up the damp street and footsteps seemed to follow me as I climbed the hill to the main road. A little knot of people waiting for the bus at the school watched me curiously as I hurried by. I felt like a leper, so raw were my nerves and so much did I hate myself.
I reached Penzance shortly after noon, having been given a lift over the last three miles of the road by a lorry loaded with china clay. It was market day in Penzance. I strolled down to the waterfront. There were men dressed much the same as myself in seamen's jerseys and a jacket. Nobody took any notice of me. I felt suddenly at ease for the first time since I had landed in England.