The Wager and the Bear

2. A great many legends are told.

A great many legends are told of the village of St Piran; so many, it is difficult, sometimes, to sift the truths from the fables. There are those in the village (just as an example), who say the ancient stone boulders that mark the two ends of the harbour wall are the mortal remains of the fishermen, John Brewster and Matthew Treverran, who were turned to stone (and justly so) for playing dice on a Sunday. Others will tell you that the harbour walls themselves are nothing but the open arms of a knocker - a Cornish demon from the tin mines at Botallack - who drowned in the waters of Piran Bay while fleeing from St Michael after a violent dispute at cards. These are the kinds of stories you will hear if you spend time in this village, if you have an honest face, and if you have the patience to listen. There are some in the community who still, to this day, hide the body of a cockerel in the coffin of a loved one. The fowl will be revived in the next world, and his appearance will remind St Peter of his denial of Christ, for it was as the cock crowed that Peter committed his mortal sin. The memory of this, and the attendant shame, will tempt the saint to be merciful when he judges the deceased. So goes the logic. It is not unusual for villages in Cornwall to cling to traditions like these, but St Piran, you might well think, appears to have more customs than most. Every Christmas, the children of the village parade up the hill by candlelight beneath the giant effigy of a whale. This, they will tell you, is in memory of a man who saved the village from one of the great pandemics, when he rode onto the beach on the back of a whale.

They are idle tales, the tales told in St Piran. Some, like the tale of the fishermen turned to stone, are brief events. You might have been in St Piran on the day they happened, and still have missed them. One moment John and Matthew, the dice playing fishermen, were flesh and blood. The next instant they were boulders propping up the harbour walls. No one, so far as we know, was there to witness it. Other stories unfold over weeks. Or even months. And then there is the story of the wager and the bear. Once there was a time when everyone in the world knew this story. Or part of it. They will tell you it has something to do with a bear. And it does. But this is St Piran. This is where the story started, and also where it ended. They have their own way of talking about things here. So, for them, this story is perhaps the strangest tale of all. It unfolds not over days (as the newspapers might have suggested), nor weeks, nor months, but decades. It is a story of human lifetimes. Martha Fishburne told parts of the story to the children in Piran School, and in due course some of them wrote down the episodes they could remember. Charity Limber, who cleaned at Marazion House, heard a great deal of the story from Monty Causley, and she told it all to Jeremy Melon, and Jeremy wrote some of it down, but only part of it, for he didn't live to see it all through. There are photographs if you care to look hard enough for them, and a great many accounts in old newspapers, and even one or two older residents who perhaps remember some of it. There was even a film made once, and a stage play, and most school history books of the period and online encyclopaedias have some version or other of the events. But none of these allowed the whole story to unfold. And this, perhaps, is why the tales are still told in St Piran. It hasn't snowed in the village for fifty years, or maybe more, but there are villagers today who still display a snowflake in their windows in June, and this, they will tell you, is to remember the wager and the bear.

It was a long time ago. Over eighty years have passed since Tom Horsmith, still just a teenager, walked into the square with a pack on his back and a smile on his face. His is the name local people remember if they remember any name at all. But every story, in a village like St Piran, will have its hero. Many also have a villain. Sometimes one gets confused with the other. If there was a villain in the story of the ice, it might be as well to meet him now. His name, after all, is the one the rest of the world remembers, and much of the world considers him the hero. He wasn't, in truth, a villain. Not really. Neither was he a true villager. He was an incomer. An invader. His name was Monty Causley.

He was a Cornishman, but not, people will tell you, a Cornishman from St Piran. They say that he came from Lostwithiel where his family made cider, although some believe he was originally from Bodmin and his fortune came from tin. No matter. He was the man who owned Marazion House, on the sea front, and Marazion House was central to the game of dice that would play out in the story of the wager and the bear. The house was the most prepossessing dwelling in the village. It was stone-built, somehow part of the very geology of the bay, an edifice that looked as though it might have grown organically from the walls of the cliff itself, like a sort of artificial rearrangement of the rockface, not quite vertical, not quite horizontal, a building that had never seen the pencil of an architect nor the string of a plumb line, but had somehow evolved in segments and parcels, a piece here and another piece there, until, like an elderly relative, it had become a timeless feature of the harbour. Impressive. Compelling. Maybe it had been the first house in St Piran. No one really knew. Maybe there were smuggler's caves behind it, buried deep inside the cliff, concealing long-lost troves of treasure. That is the sort of house it was. A secretive house. A house that told no tales. It seemed to occupy a dangerous hinterland between sea and land, unnaturally low for a seafront building, carved from boulders that might have been the petrified remains of dice-playing fishermen. It stood in a small bay of its own, the sole building at the top of a shingle beach scarcely wider than the house itself. To reach the front door you would need to descend a dozen steps to a stone path that ran along the top of the beach, and from there you would climb up six steps to the porch. No one would design a house like this today, but Marazion defied all principles of good architecture. The stones of the walls were black with age, and green with lichens, and pockmarked with tiny barnacles, and never truly dry. The fine spray from the waves at high tide, and the southerly winds and the ocean squalls, conspired together to give the walls a sheen.

Who would have built a house so close to the water? When the high springtides came, the sea would very nearly reach the front door. There were times, during these occasional tides, when you could not leave the house to venture into the village without getting your feet wet. The steps could be slippery after a storm; but the house must have been built by master masons, for winter storms would come and go, and the summer sun would blaze, and the ocean waves would lap at the doorstep and then retreat. Marazion would stand unchanged, unaffected, unmoved, with all of its secrets still untold. Seagulls roosted on the slates as if the house was just another cliff-face, and here was where they had evolved to be; and from the roofs, with a single leap and a dive, they could plunge into the harbour at high tide for sprats, and shrimps, and discarded potato chips. The guttering and walls of the house carried the trails of seagull excreta, all the way around, like spilled paint.

Monty Causley was the third Causley to own Marazion House. His father had owned it before him, and his grandfather before that. But this didn't make Monty nor his parents or grandparents, true residents of St Piran. None had truly lived in Marazion House. They were absent landlords, strangers still in the village. The house had been, at best, a bolthole for occasional summer visits, a rare and remote holiday-home. Or else it had stood empty. Monty rented it out to holiday makers. Two thousand and four hundred pounds a week the house could earn in the height of summer. A thousand pounds a week off season. It could, perhaps, have earned more had it been in one of the popular holiday destinations, like St Ives maybe, or Porthcurno, or even Newquay where surfers made the season longer; but St Piran was just a bit too far off the tourist map, just a little too tricky to get to. The village sat at the end of a single-track road with no other way in and no other way out (apart from the cliff paths and the sea). Most of the winter months the house stood dark and unoccupied, locked and shuttered against the storms. And just occasionally, in the spring or autumn, there might be a fallow week where no one had booked, and these were the weeks when, from time to time, Monty Causley and his wife, Carys, would drive down from London and park on the quay.

He was mean. That was what they said about Monty in the Stormy Petrel Inn, where the locals would settle at the end of the day to make a long cider last the evening. He was mean, and that was enough to make him the villain. He was mean, and the wager was a judgement on his meanness. The fact that he only showed up when bookings were scarce was evidence. He rarely drank in the Petrel. He never took coffee in the harbourside café. He didn't often give in to the temptation of a Cornish pasty, or haddock and chips from Kenny Kennet's bistro. He bought very few provisions from Jessie Higgs's shop. He wasn't often seen. He and Carys would bring a box-load of groceries with them from a swanky store in London, and they would carry it down the stone steps, and along the short...