Every summer, generations of kids have been jumping off the pier in St Ives. I bet the minute Smeaton turned his back to put down his trowel and hoisted his trousers back up over his bum crack after having just laid the last block of his pier in 1770, at least twenty local kids pushed him to one side and jumped off the end.
One of the reasons I don't like Michael Foreman's books is that he treats pier jumpers as if they were stupid. At the start of one book, this kid who lives right by the sea and is supposed to go pier jumping all the time, goes running along the pier, past his mates who are shouting to him not to do it, and jumps off the end without looking. As the tide's out, he ends up paralysed from the neck down (adding to the difficulty of him already being paralysed from the neck up). If you live by the sea you tend to know when the tide's in and when it's out, and if you're that reckless, without being harsh, you're asking to end up in a wheelchair in my opinion, nobody in their right mind who knew what they were doing would do that. And it's not that his mates were actually encouraging him to do it, which is another myth of pier jumping. Nobody makes you do it.
I've never been much of a joiner-in myself, but one thing I do do with loads of other local kids during the summer holidays is go pier jumping. It's a bit of a rite of passage for kids in St Ives, and one of the things that seperates us out from the emmet kids, who we don't really like joining in. I'm not one of the ringleaders or anything, and not that daring (like I wouldn't jump off the top of the car park wall by the Museum for instance, like some of them did on the spring tide the other day, that was MENTAL), but when it's a high tide, and living right by the harbour as I do, I'm usually there and I take my turn in the pecking order (which is pretty low down because nobody knows me really and I keep myself pretty much to myself), and nobody tries to stop me joining in. In fact there's some videos on You Tube of the St Ives pier jumpers, and if you know who you're looking for, you can just see the back of my head in the background on one of them (but not jumping off, because nobody could be bothered to film me jumping). I've blown up a still frame from it and stuck it on my wall with a circle round my head.
Sometimes we get emmet kids trying to join in, but you can always tell who they are (well obviously most of the time you don't know them, so you can tell they're emmets), if they're wearing a new, but really crappy make of wetsuit that doesn't fit them properly (because their mums and dads have bought it with growing room for next year as well, not realising that a wetsuit that doesn't retain a layer of water in it next to your skin totally defeats the object of wearing it), but the real giveaway is the shoes that are supposed to protect your feet against weever fish, which are the MARK OF THE EMMET. When they get full of water, these shoes are impossible to swim in, and they either fall off and get lost in the sea or if they take them off we chuck them around until they end up in the sea anyway.
Emmet kids hang about on the edge of things, then gradually get to the front and either take ages to jump off or make a great showy-off thing of it, shouting and waving their arms about. Locals cheer each other on, but we never cheer the emmet kids. Some of them get a bit too cocky, and these are the ones who are most likely to hurt themselves by landing stupidly in the water, jumping too close to the wall or even onto the submerged steps. Lately we've had a bit of attention from the police, to do with jumping near boats or in front of boats as they're coming in or out of the harbour, but to be honest, they've been pretty cool about it, saying that they grew up here like us, and when they were kids they did it, and because they know that if they banned a local tradition like pier jumping altogether there'd be an outcry and nobody would take any notice, so that would be just one more thing that they'd have to do, and wouldn't be able to do it anyway, they're taking the right line in my opinion. They know the locals know what they're doing, and I reckon the story that was in the paper was more for the emmets really, not us. The other hazard is seals, and you have to make sure you don't jump on top of one of them because they hang around right under the wall, especially at the end of Smeaton's Pier where they wait for the fishing boats to come in, and sometimes you don't see them until you're in mid-air. I saw an emmet kid jump off the pier the other day, and as he came up, this seal came up right next to him, and the kid literally CACKED himself, you could see it running out of the bottom of his wetsuit legs as he came up the steps afterwards.
One of the reasons I don't like Michael Foreman's books is that he treats pier jumpers as if they were stupid. At the start of one book, this kid who lives right by the sea and is supposed to go pier jumping all the time, goes running along the pier, past his mates who are shouting to him not to do it, and jumps off the end without looking. As the tide's out, he ends up paralysed from the neck down (adding to the difficulty of him already being paralysed from the neck up). If you live by the sea you tend to know when the tide's in and when it's out, and if you're that reckless, without being harsh, you're asking to end up in a wheelchair in my opinion, nobody in their right mind who knew what they were doing would do that. And it's not that his mates were actually encouraging him to do it, which is another myth of pier jumping. Nobody makes you do it.
I've never been much of a joiner-in myself, but one thing I do do with loads of other local kids during the summer holidays is go pier jumping. It's a bit of a rite of passage for kids in St Ives, and one of the things that seperates us out from the emmet kids, who we don't really like joining in. I'm not one of the ringleaders or anything, and not that daring (like I wouldn't jump off the top of the car park wall by the Museum for instance, like some of them did on the spring tide the other day, that was MENTAL), but when it's a high tide, and living right by the harbour as I do, I'm usually there and I take my turn in the pecking order (which is pretty low down because nobody knows me really and I keep myself pretty much to myself), and nobody tries to stop me joining in. In fact there's some videos on You Tube of the St Ives pier jumpers, and if you know who you're looking for, you can just see the back of my head in the background on one of them (but not jumping off, because nobody could be bothered to film me jumping). I've blown up a still frame from it and stuck it on my wall with a circle round my head.
Sometimes we get emmet kids trying to join in, but you can always tell who they are (well obviously most of the time you don't know them, so you can tell they're emmets), if they're wearing a new, but really crappy make of wetsuit that doesn't fit them properly (because their mums and dads have bought it with growing room for next year as well, not realising that a wetsuit that doesn't retain a layer of water in it next to your skin totally defeats the object of wearing it), but the real giveaway is the shoes that are supposed to protect your feet against weever fish, which are the MARK OF THE EMMET. When they get full of water, these shoes are impossible to swim in, and they either fall off and get lost in the sea or if they take them off we chuck them around until they end up in the sea anyway.
Emmet kids hang about on the edge of things, then gradually get to the front and either take ages to jump off or make a great showy-off thing of it, shouting and waving their arms about. Locals cheer each other on, but we never cheer the emmet kids. Some of them get a bit too cocky, and these are the ones who are most likely to hurt themselves by landing stupidly in the water, jumping too close to the wall or even onto the submerged steps. Lately we've had a bit of attention from the police, to do with jumping near boats or in front of boats as they're coming in or out of the harbour, but to be honest, they've been pretty cool about it, saying that they grew up here like us, and when they were kids they did it, and because they know that if they banned a local tradition like pier jumping altogether there'd be an outcry and nobody would take any notice, so that would be just one more thing that they'd have to do, and wouldn't be able to do it anyway, they're taking the right line in my opinion. They know the locals know what they're doing, and I reckon the story that was in the paper was more for the emmets really, not us. The other hazard is seals, and you have to make sure you don't jump on top of one of them because they hang around right under the wall, especially at the end of Smeaton's Pier where they wait for the fishing boats to come in, and sometimes you don't see them until you're in mid-air. I saw an emmet kid jump off the pier the other day, and as he came up, this seal came up right next to him, and the kid literally CACKED himself, you could see it running out of the bottom of his wetsuit legs as he came up the steps afterwards.
I see from today's St Ives Times and Echo that on Sunday evening, three days after I wrote this blog, some DICKHEAD threw himself off the end of West Pier without looking. He wasn't an emmet either, to add insult (to us) to injury (to him, serve him right)he was a local. He cut his leg on the propellor of an outboard motor and had to have 23 stitches EVERY ONE OF WHICH WAS TOTALLY DESERVED. It's a pity it wasn't a hundred ALL IN HIS HEAD and put in with a BLUNT NEEDLE. I will crtainly be keeping an eye out at school for somebody who isn't doing PE for no apparent reason when we go back next week. It's people like him who get us a bad name and get us banned from doing stuff that kids in St Ives have been doing for hundreds of years, probably.
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