SKATE

The skate really does have wings. It flies through its element. It is a beautiful olive colour when it comes up in the trawl. It can grow to be nine foot long but half of that is always tail. The phrase ‘as big as a dustbin lid’, which I used in my verses just posted, was a gift to me from a local fisherman describing an experience when he was seineing off Exmouth. He was, so runs the yarn, walking through the shallows off a sandbank when he stepped on the famous dustbinlidsized skate and was quick enough to grab it by the gills and add it to his catch.

My verses, ‘The Skate’, that I posted two days ago were written for a competition run by the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery maybe fifteen years ago. The Art Gallery had exhibited paintings by famous couples. Stanhope Forbes’great work was flanked by a wonderful painting by Elizabeth Forbes, his wife. To enter the competition, prize a fifty pound book token, one was invited to write a ‘poem’ inspired by a painting that had been exhibited. I don’t suppose too many people entered but I had the glory of winning joint first prize and was invited to the Gallery to receive my book token. At Plymouth I found that the enterprising gallerists had assembled an audience and I and my co-winner were invited to read our poems. The audience was made up of about twenty old Plymothian ladies and a couple of old Plymothian gentlemen. My opposite number read first and the audience responded with the gravity and applause that his work deserved and I then read my verses. .. Well! I thought I had written a funny poem and I expected at least half a smile from some of the listeners. No! They heard me out agape giving me the respect which they obviously thought that ‘poetry’ merited. Not the flicker of a smile. I somehow felt that I had earned my twentyfive quid.

A Hopeless Dawn, by the way, is a tremendous painting by Frank Bramley hung in the old Tate Gallery. It is a grim spoonful of social reality.

As we drove home I had much to say to my wife about the reception of my wonderful and amusing verses by the Plymothians but over that it might be a good idea for me to skate.

Tomorrow: Tides

THE SKATE

Plymouth's old Museum and Art Gallery is very grand

and there's quite a few paintings there that I like and understand

such as that A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach by Stanhope Forbes

which makes the point that a fisherman's life wasn't just grief and storms

as you might think from paintings like Hopeless Dawn, which, you might know,

shows two women weeping because their men are out in a blow.

But for me the best about A Fish Sale is the giant skate

as big as a dustbin lid and weighing half a hundredweight.

Well, I've caught a few skate myself but never one half so fine

but this was Newlyn, 1885, not Exmouth '99

and when we'd caught skate we'd always fillet them on the way home,

cut off the wngs with two curving knifestrokes and the gulls would come

screaming from godknowswhere to gobble down the guts and things

until the skies were full with the flash and smack of their wings.

And that's the one thing about A Fish Sale I don't understand:

there's not one gull in the picture, neither at sea nor on land.