Skiátheá

Retells in a contemporary setting a traditional Cornish (English) tale - the Mermaid of Zennor. The original tale is of a fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid. Free ebook.

Skiátheá retells in a contemporary setting a traditional Cornish (English) tale - the Mermaid of Zennor. The original tale is of a fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid. Neither lover can live for long in the world of the other.

Skiátheá is about brief love, but also its transforming magic. Our modern mermaid is a charming conversationalist and above all else a storyteller. She will not talk of her past or future, save in stories, for neither truly exist. She has sad eyes.

Excerpt:

I fish in a quiet corner of the beach, at a place against the northern cliff where a stream drops a curtain of water across a cave mouth, of about twice a man's height. Beside it a dozen steps lead to a footpath that climbs to the headland one way, along the landward run of cliff in another, and past irregularly spaced bungalows to the top of the village, in a third. The cliff at this spot dips low, and the sea has made a circular shape of it; clap your hands in the centre and it makes an interesting sound, not an echo, for the cliff-bowl is too small, but the resulting noise is louder and deeper than it should be.

Men of a certain age often go fishing to get away from things. But I come to this place to get closer. To the sea, to the wind and the sand and the coldness of the waves and to my thoughts. The latter can go onto paper, onto the writing pad that is usually on my knees - I do six pages in a good night, more than the usual count of fish. I am a faster writer than a fisherman. In fact, a better anything than a fisherman. Perhaps this is the shortcoming I am trying to get away from, which is paradoxical, like human nature.

This place where I fish is familiar to me: Mawgan Porth. Port Mawgan in the old Cornish, meaning both home and harbour. But it is a home no longer, I now live far beyond the beach and the green valley that bounded my childhood world. I return here for the same reasons as I stay away; waywardness; vagaries of circumstance and income; and the fact that you can return to the home of your childhood, but never to your childhood home. Whilst the hillside pines and the willows of the valley floor have grown taller since I left, and the houses have altered their shapes and colours, the real change for me is in seeing childhood friends all married and facing middle-age, and that is why I do not linger.

Yet the beach itself does not change. Or rather it is always changing, which is why it remains a constant force in my life. I hope I can still come here in my last years and see the sand swept clean and the sea flowing in interesting ways with an incoming tide, the way it always does, if that is, my beach and I make it into old age.