Now you may be thinking, having heard the piskies make their bold plans to set sail over the seven seas, that they would be on their way by now?
That, I have to tell you, would be quite wrong. Piskies never do anything at all in any sort of a great hurry. This is because they have a Cornish way of being, and part of being a Cornish being is to do things dreckly.
What, you might ask, is dreckly?
Well, it is very similar to a phrase you would have heard if you have ever watched The Lion King – Hakuna Matata. It means no worries for the rest of your days and it’s a problem-free philosophy. The fine folks who live in the sunny country of Spain have a version of dreckly too. Theirs is called mañana
/manˈjɑːnə/
In Spain, where it is terribly hot and tiring a lot of the time, it is easier to put off until tomorrow any jobs that might require doing today. It is much more tempting to take a siesta, (their word for a nice nap,) eat some tapas(snacks) and maybe go for a stroll to see what everyone else is doing. Answer, usually, not a lot.
Dreckly is quite similar. Piran, who, as we know, reads a lot of books, likes to compare it to something he saw in The Bible. “Consider the lilies of the fields” he would say in his important sounding voice “ How they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin.” It is true enough. Flowers do not have to get up in the morning and get dressed, and catch a bus or a train or drive a car to get themselves to work, dropping off their buds at daycare on the way. They stand in the soil and smile at the sun. Then, when it rains, they gratefully drink. It’s not a hard life.
That’s not to say that the piskies are lazy. They have many tasks, not least, collecting enough dry kindling for their nightly campfire. They mend their clothes with spider silk and they collect lots of foodstuffs from the fields and hedgerows. They check on their neighbours to see that no-one has fallen sick or needs help and they enjoy their own sports and hobbies.
As we mentioned earlier, they are also most particular about keeping their houses neat and tidy. Knowing that they were about to travel all the way across the world, taking, like so many tiny snails, their homes with them, the piskies determined to do a big spring-clean. Even though it wasn’t even Spring.
Curtains would be taken down and washed, rugs would be taken out and beaten, floors and tables would be beeswaxed and drawers would be fitted with new linings. If this all sounds like hard work, it was, and this is why they chose to do it dreckly.
Queen Daphne had asked her Housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, to accompany her on the voyage to Australia, but to her consternation, Mrs Danvers had refused. In fact, she had become angry and her face had gone all red. “I would rather see Menabilly go up in flames!” she had shouted. Queen Daphne was a bit put out. She was used to having Mrs Danvers run her house for her, and do all the cooking and cleaning, and even brush her hair at night and lay out her nightie. It was going to be difficult having to do all those things by herself. She had once tried cooking some sausages, but she did not realise you had to put them in a frying pan first, and they had all burst out of the fireplace and splattered everywhere!
Demelza had some concerns about her rambling roses. It had taken her many moons of patient pruning to get them to grow all around her front door and windows and all the way up to her cottage roof. Joan the Wad herself had helped her in the beginning with some magic spells to get them to flower and to smell divine. Because Joan the Wad was a will o’the wisp, she could work by firefly light, and they spent many starlit sessions with the secateurs.
Would the salt air aboardships dampen the spirits of her blooms? Demelza decided she better go to find Joan the Wad and ask her for some more advice. However, Joan the Wad had gone off with Jack o’the Lantern to lead some travellers astray on Dartmoor, so as with other chores, Demelza’s visit to Joan went on the long list titled : Dreckly. Not that Demelza was afraid of Dartmoor and all its ghosts. Far from it! She would have loved nothing more than a long, muddy tramp across the Tors, and an encounter with the Headless Horseman, but then again, she had her window-boxes to paint…
Piran had similar concerns to Demelza, but he was worried about his books. Inside of Piran’s long house it was just like a huge library with books on every wall from floor to ceiling. Where there was no more room on the bookshelves (that were already stacked three deep) there were piles of books piled willy-nilly practically everywhere. To get into bed, Piran had created a staircase of books, and to get to the kitchen stove was now impossible. This was why Piran chiefly ate cold pasties.
Piran knew that damp salty air was not good for paper, and can cause it to get damp and mouldy. He had looked up a secret recipe for a magical spray to coat and seal them, but it would take ages to turn every page until all were safe. He would get round to it dreckly. He was also forced to consider offloading some of his collection. The New World they were off to had all sorts of new and fascinating things in it he knew nothing about! Now for Piran not to know something, that was most unheard of! He needed NEW books, books about Australia, about its unique flora and fauna (or as you and I would say, it’s plants and animals). Books about its history and its geography. Books about its famous writers, poets, artists, politicians and First Nations peoples. Oh dear, where was he to start? The answer – Dreckly.
Sting was wondering what instruments to take. Along with his trusty fiddle, bodhran and pennywhistle he had a fine suite of Fender electric guitars. They had been especially miniaturised for him, by a visiting American Druid called Martin Kierszenbaum, in return for some cherry tree stones. But would he be able to plug them in on the ship, and did they have electricity in Australia? As he pondered, he set to writing another song. “Why Should I Sigh for You”
However, unlike most of Sting’s forays into re-working one of the human Sting’s timeless classics, every time he played the original, he found his eyes welling up and tears falling. SO much so, that he was unable to see his piece of paper in front of him and scribble down his own lyrics. Perhaps, to be fair to Sting, for a very small piskie about to embark on a dangerous ocean trip, “dark angels follow me, over a godless sea, Mountains of falling, for all my days remaining…” were not the words to inspire him with superpiskie courage. Thus, Sting’s instruments remained unpacked. He would do it. Dreckly.
Wesley had extra responsibilities as he would be both QuarterMaster and Chef on the ship, for many months at sea. He had seafaring relatives who had told him about the olden days. When Cornishmen had set off on Tall Ships in days of yore, they had often fallen sick with an illness called scurvy. This was because they got lots of Vitamin Sea but not any Vitamin C. Wesley was therefore amassing as many lemons and oranges and mandarins and limes as he could get his hands on. He had ordered sacks and sacks of flour and barrels full of pickled herrings.
Hard as it was for him to admit it, they might not be able to make Cornish pasties in the ship’s galley, once they had run out of turnips, potatoes and mutton. The countries they would be pulling into port in would have foreign foods to barter for and buy. Coconuts and mangoes, plantains and papaya, strange coloured maize and red hot chillies, empanadas, pisco sour and dulce de leche. This last one, Wesley looked it up in a recipe book, sounded as if it would make an excellent substitute for golden syrup, if he could find some cream to make thunder and lightning splits. So, yes, Wesley was a busy baker, but like all of us, he needed to put his feet up sometimes and have a nice cup of rosehip tea. He would finish all the food orders….dreckly…..
Fraser, being Scottish, was not so prone to doing things dreckly. However, he had another characteristic, in common with his Scots kinfolk. He suffered terribly from Homesickness. Even though he was still on the island called Great Britain, topped and tailed by the lovely countries of Scotland and Kernow with that funny place called England in the middle, he was already homesick for the Highlands. He sat and stared at his portrait on his wall so long and so hard that it brought tears to his eyes. He hummed old songs all night long (as piskies are only awake at night) such as My Ain Folk and The Dark Island, which are all about missing Scotland. This did not actually help the situation, as it only made his sentimental Scottish heart more homesick. How on earth was he going to cope when he had to sail even further away from his beloved Bonnie Birthplace? Fraser did not know. He took to muttering darkly under his breath “It’s a bad business, it’s a bad business alright.” He even began to wish he had ignored the smoke signals when they appeared on the brae and seemed to spell out the word “Antartica” and led him to start building his igloo. The others were too busy (or not) with their own preparations, to notice his gloomy mood, and Fraser sat by himself, whittling away at his spurtle, and muttering a lot.
Morwenna, whose idea it had been in the first place, to gather everyone together and set off for Australia to look for Theodore, had had an extraordinary piece of good luck. A Human had dropped one of their winky-blinky oblong devices right outside her front door! The screen was smashed into an interesting starburst shape, but to Morwenna’s amazement, when she pressed the button at the top, it came to life!!
Now Morwenna had been eavesdropping on the humans for quite some time, and with her keen interest in technology, she already knew a lot about these things. She knew that they had a game on them called Facebook, that they talked to each other on and shared stories. When she told Piran this, he was highly skeptical. “What sort of a book can a face be” he sneered. “a book is a book and a face is a face.” This was true, but Morwenna knew that since a clever person had invented the world wide web, there were new ways of finding out information and communicating. Piran loved his books and that was understandable. An out and out bibliophile (a piskie who loves books) he had been so worried he would miss the smell of old books when he sprayed his special spray on them for the sea trip, he had re-invented the recipe to allow for the volatile organic compounds to continue to decompose, causing, as he had researched, the glorious smell of old books.
Putting Piran’s skepticism to one side, Morwenna spent many hours skipping around on the keys of the winky-blinky oblong device. It seemed you needed a thing called a Password to get it to open up. She tried many many combinations but nothing worked. Then, one day, by chance, she danced from letter to letter and typed out the word Password, then she added three numbers, 1, 2 and 3. No Human would be silly enough to use such an easy password, she thought….but she was wrong!
To Morwenna’s amazement, a picture appeared on the broken screen. And to add to her astonishment, she could have sworn (not in a bad way) that the picture was of no other than Theodore!!!! It was a little bit hard to tell as he had his back to the camera, but something about it made Morwenna quite sure that it was him. This was not the end of the excitement. Holding Theodore by the hand was a small human child, a wee girl. She was wearing a pretty white dress and a dear little pair of pink wellington boots. Who could she be?
Morwenna considered all the options. It could be Theodore’s cousin, Ellie-Mae, who lived in Cornwall, in Polruan. But Ellie-Mae was older than this. Maybe Theodore had made a friend, and was going for a walk with her? Or maybe, just maybe, maybe Theodore had a new baby sister of his own????
It was terribly exciting. And it made Morwenna’s urge to get going all the stronger. The others would have to shake off their dreckly ways and get down to getting organized to go. Morwenna called everyone to her house and they all sat round and sang a rousing chorus of “Proud to be Cornish” to put some fire in their bellies. Tomorrow, they would depart!! (Or, at the very least, the day after tomorrow, or the day after that….)
Cut and Paste 