Priddy’s Tale

Foreword

Extract from Wild Southwest—Legends

of the Cornish Coast, by Dr Christopher

Berryman

There was once a young man who did a favour for a spirit of

the sea.

That’s

how a story like Priddy’s should start. But that sounds like

another legend, a tall fish-tale in a land already bursting with

them. So I’ll begin more quietly, like this...

There have always been Priddys at Rosewarne Cove. They don’t

have the best reputation. Hard-nosed land-dwellers say it’s

impossible to get a good day’s work from them: they embody the

Cornish concept of dreckly, roughly equivalent to

Spanish manana. There’s even a rhyme about them, best roared out in the pub

with a burring, piratical Penzance accent: I’ve seen Gweek and Truro City, but I’ve never in my life

seen a working Priddy!

Harsh

judgement, and not entirely accurate, in my experience of the clan.

It’s fairer to say that they’re dreamers, poets. Work’s not easy to

come by in the far southwest, and when they find it, they tend to

be fishermen, boat-builders, ferry crew. The occasional plucky

lifeguard thrown in. They don’t seem to thrive away from the sea,

and if they do leave, they always return.

Well,

read the story, and then you can decide for yourself if you believe

Priddy’s tale. I’m a little ashamed to be telling it, respected

academic as I am now. But I’m retired, and not so concerned with my

reputation as I used to be, and I’ve seen some things in my years

among the whales, sharks and dolphins that perhaps I shouldn’t take

to my grave with me. It all began in the summer of 2016, when Jem

Priddy was no more than a boy, and a lost boy at that, down in

beautiful Porth Bay...