The Colour of Mourning

Jenna stood in the rain on the cliff path above Portreath. It was a soft, persistent rain, the kind that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air, soaking everything by sheer persistence. It pearled on the wax of her old jacket and dripped from the brim of her hat, merging with the salt spray that gusted up from the churning bay below. She’d promised her grandfather she’d come. He’d been dead three months, but a promise to a Cornish miner, she’d learned, outlived the man.

“Take it back,” he’d whispered, his voice gravel from a lifetime of engine fumes and underground dust. His hand, knotted and tremoring, had pressed a small, cloth-wrapped bundle into hers. “Take the colour back to the water. Don’t let it dry out with me.”

Now, the bundle was a weight in her pocket. Inside was not family jewellery, but a lump of tin ore, polished by his pocket to a dull, pewter sheen. A piece of Dolcoath, the great mine that had swallowed his father and his best years, now just a flooded hole and a memory. He’d stolen it on his last shift, forty years ago. A piece of the mountain’s heart, he called it. A piece of his own.

The rain blurred the horizon, blending the gunmetal sea into the leaden sky. To her left, the land fell away in great, gashed terraces; the ghost-lands of the clay works, now great white moonscapes of quartz and pooling water, silent of the thunderous dredges. Ahead, the cliffs showed seams of ochre and slate, the bones of the place. This wasn’t a landscape for painting, Jenna thought. It was a landscape of extraction, of things taken away, leaving only scars and weather.

She turned from the sea and walked inland, following the old mineral tramway that was now just a muddy rut between gorse bushes. The rain found its way down her neck. She was heading for the Blue Hills, not the tourist spot, but the ruins where the stream ran orange with ochre. Her grandfather had taken her there once, a rare day off from his custodial job at the art gallery in St. Ives. He’d stood her by the staining water and pointed to the vibrant, ruined banks.

“See that, m’bian? That’s painter’s gold. They dug that out for centuries. Made fortunes for gentlemen in London. Left us with pretty streams and holes in the ground.” He’d knelt, his bad knee cracking, and scooped a handful of the thick, orange sludge. “Your lot, the artists, you come and you paint the light. You paint the pretty fishing boats. You don’t paint this. This is the colour of what’s gone.”

Jenna was an artist, or trying to be. She painted the sea, the skies, the cottages. Her canvases sold in a gallery on Back Road West. They were good, technically. They held light beautifully. But they felt, even to her, like postcards. Pictures of the surface.

The tramway path met a lane, and the rain intensified. Up ahead, she saw a figure hunched under the lean-to shelter of a ruined engine house. The square chimney stack, a stark finger against the cloud, was all that remained of the pumping engine that had once kept the deep levels dry. As she drew closer, she saw it was an old man, mending a lobster pot, his fingers moving with an automatic deftness among the tarred twine.

“Proper mizzle,” he said, not looking up. His voice was like stones shifting in a tide.

“Proper,” Jenna agreed, pausing under the scant shelter. The rain drummed on the corrugated iron roof.

He glanced at her, his eyes the colour of the sea under winter sky. “Not a day for a stroll.”

“I’m on an errand. For my grandfather. Tom Trevail.”

The man’s hands stilled for a moment. “Dolcoath Tom.” He gave a slow nod. “Knew the sound of his cough before I saw him. Knew the set of his shoulders. Underground does that. What’s the errand?”

Jenna touched the lump in her pocket. “To give something back.”

“Ah.” The man resumed his mending. “A lot took. Not much given back.” He nodded towards the orange stream cutting through the field below them. “My father worked the ochre. Came home looking like a sunset. Cough was red, not black. Still killed him.” He spat into the mud. “They called it ‘painting the town’. They meant St. Ives, all those artists buying their nice, clean tubes of colour. Never saw the pit it came from. Never saw the colour of our lungs.”

The words hung in the damp air, a condemnation. Jenna felt a flush of defensive shame. She bought those tubes. She painted the light.

“What do you do, then?” he asked, though his tone suggested he already knew. He could probably spot an artist, even in waxed cotton.

“I paint,” she said, quietly.

He didn’t scoff. Just nodded again, as if she’d confirmed a diagnosis. “Sick as a dog, this weather,” he said, abruptly changing tack. “Gets in the bones. My bones remember the damp of the deep levels. His,” he jerked his chin, indicating the ghost of her grandfather, “would too. You can’t give the tin back, m’bian. The hole is flooded. The mountain’s wounds are full of water. But you can give it a different story.”

He tied off the twine with a sharp, final twist. “You paint, do you? Don’t paint the light. The light’s for the tourists and the dead. Paint the weight. Paint the rain on the engine house. Paint the colour of this stream. Paint the waiting in the faces of the women who watched for the boats that didn’t come back. That’s our colour. That’s what you give back.”

He stood, hefting the mended pot. “Your grandfather wasn’t giving back ore. He was giving back a story. Don’t drown it. Paint it.”

And with that, he stepped out into the rain and was gone, a silhouette dissolving into the grey.

Jenna stood under the engine house, her heart pounding. The old man’s words had cleaved something open inside her. She thought of her tidy canvases of harbours and sunsets—all surface, no weight. No history. She pulled the cloth bundle from her pocket and unwrapped it. The tin ore was cool and heavy in her palm, its surface a constellation of dull stars.

She didn’t go to the sea. Instead, she turned and walked back along the path, the rain now a companion, not a nuisance. She walked until she found a place where the orange ochre stream met the darker water from the mine adit, a confluence of two kinds of loss, creating a strange, beautiful, toxic marbling in the peat-brown pool.

She knelt, the wet earth soaking through her jeans. This was it. Not the vast, cleansing sea, but this small, stained, secret place where the industries of colour and of metal met in the land’s slow bleed.

She didn’t throw the ore in. She placed it carefully at the water’s edge, where the orange tendrils could lick at it, where the rain could fall on it. A offering to the memory in the mud. A piece of the mountain returned not to the deep, but to the story.

Back in her studio in Carbis Bay that evening, she ignored her clean, stretched canvases. She took a large, rough board. She mixed her paints not with clean linseed, but with water from her canteen; water she’d collected from the ochre stream. It grained the pigment, made it gritty.

She began to paint. Not the sea, but the rain on the granite. Not the fishing boat, but the empty pot, the mended twine. Not the sunset, but the deep, staining orange of the earth, bleeding into the grey. She painted the weight of the ore in her hand, the set of her grandfather’s shoulders, the profound patience in the old fisherman’s eyes. She painted the colour of mourning for what was gone, which was also, she realised, the colour of endurance.

It was dark when she finished. Exhausted, she stepped outside. The rain was still falling, that same soft, persistent Cornish rain, washing the narrow street, dripping from the gutters, soaking into the ancient, patient land.

Jenna stood in the rain. It cooled her face, which was streaked with ochre and tears and the sweat of creation. She held her paint-stained hands up, palms to the sky, letting the drizzle clean them. The water ran in rivulets of gold and grey and burnt sienna down her wrists, a tiny, echoing stream of everything that had been lost, and everything that, in the remembering, was found.

She stood there for a long time, feeling the weight of the past and the insistent, gentle press of the future, finally understanding her inheritance. It wasn’t a lump of ore. It was the right, and the duty, to paint the true colour of home.

David Hughes is a Cornish based writer whose motivation is driven by the rugged landscapes, seas, old industries and characters of West Penwith.