How the Pasty Really Got its Crimp

For the next two weeks, Freya the Enormous allowed herself to become a local playground for the village children. She would follow them down to the river and spray them with water when they weren’t looking. She would kneel close to the ground and let them walk up her trunk and scramble onto her back. Sometimes, just when they were getting a bit too frisky, she would trumpet as loud as she could and send the kids scattering away, screaming with excitement.

For two weeks, laughter rang through the valleys of Godrevy. Only Silver looked on unamused. Everyone else was happy. Even those with the burden of feeding the ‘horse-buffalo’ and the foul fowl, felt blessed to be chosen to care for such wondrous beings.

No-one thought to question where Freya had come from or why. The business of reporting shipwrecks was not theirs – such laws were the preserve of the English who took it upon themselves to reduce tragedy to paperwork, watery graves to insurance profit, and lost souls to pithy material for their Sunday sermons.

Salvaging cargo that happened upon the beach, however, was very much their business. ‘Smuggling’[5] was considered by the Cornish to be an occupation, a duty and a right. Consequently, all participated in it. The fact that this was the strangest ‘abandoned’ cargo ever to wash ashore at Godrevy was neither here nor there.