Six: Three Holidays

The Sandcastle - Around the South Downs

A Caravan in Cornwall – Thinking about the Past

POSTCARD TO MICHAEL EVANS FROM SWANSEA (1946?)

POST CARD

Dear Micheal (sic)

We are having a nice time at Swansea. Master Micheal Evans

Daddy built a lovely sand castle for me The Mount

on the beach and another boy threw Radbrook Road

some stones at it. Then Daddy made him Shrewsbury

go away. I hope you are having a nice Salop

holiday at Lulworth Cove.

From Graham.

THE SANDCASTLE: ANOTHER BOYHOOD EPIPHANY

They must have had their summer holiday in Swansea fairly soon after the end of the war when he was six or seven. Holidays for most people then meant ‘the seaside’ and this may have been his first experience of it. They stayed in the house of Sid Paramor, someone his father knew who was away on holiday somewhere else. (Sid’s cousin was Norrie Paramor, leader of a big swing band who later became a senior A&R figure in the American music recording industry).

Along the back of the beach at Swansea was a railway viaduct, and they’d selected their spot for that day near one of its huge arches. He played about in the sand while his father took on the job of building a proper sandcastle. His father was always something of a perfectionist, especially with practical things, even though his range may have been limited. In later life, for example at Christmas, they could always spot a parcel that he had done up. The folding of the brown paper would be impeccable, the sellotaping precise and the writing of the address superbly calligraphed in his trained draughtsman’s hand. Perfectionism brings its frustrations, as the boy frequently observed, but, when it went well, it could produce a splendid result, a source of quiet pride.

Their sandcastle, for his father was building as much for himself as for his son, must have taken ages. This was no ordinary job with just a few tipped up buckets of sand. He constructed first a massive central mound, tamped down time and again to make it bigger and stronger. From this, as each new idea occurred to him, he developed something as intricate and complex as any castle known or imagined. He produced towers, turrets, bridges, gateways, crenellations and keeps, windows and arrow slits, and moats both inside and outside the main surrounding walls. It had everything. In fact, it was really far too good for anyone to just play with. Its careful craftsmanship deserved to be looked at and deeply admired.

His son did exactly that. He smiled at the sandcastle and at his father. Then another boy, who’d been watching this immaculate work in progress from a distance, came nearer. He smiled at this boy, too, to share his pleasure. The other one began throwing pebbles at it. They damaged part of the wall and when his father saw what was happening, he was visibly furious. This may have been the first time the boy had noticed and realised how much his father could restrain the expression of his emotions while at the same time making it indisputably clear exactly how he felt. He was incensed at this pointless vandalism and perhaps also felt that, indirectly, his son had been attacked as well. His son thought he might explode, but he did nothing of the sort.

He could still visualise it clearly years later. Sitting on the sand, he watched his father’s spindly legs in their khaki shorts move steadily but relentlessly towards this boy as though he would trample him into the surface of the planet. Instead, he used his legs in the way mounted police use the legs of their horses, more as a threat than as a weapon. The other boy would certainly have seen the look on his face and probably got the message very quickly. Through these advancing legs he could see the offender, scuttling awkwardly out of the way as his father, by now also waving his arms as though herding a flock of geese along a country lane, boomed – or, more likely, growled - the unusual phrase ‘Mind away! Mind away!’ This ferocious but low-key action did the trick. The other boy ran off and no one got hurt.

It was over. For the rest of his life, except for that single vivid incident, anything else about the holiday remained a complete blank.

CATECHISM CONCERNING A SUMMER HOLIDAY IN SUSSEX

How did Sussex come to be chosen for this holiday?

During the early 1930s, years before he was born, and probably before they were married, his mother and father discovered a place that captivated them. It can happen with places, and with people. You come across them at a moment when the emotional conditions are propitious, and you fall for them. The effects can last a lifetime. His parents, then in their early-to-mid twenties, away from London for a week’s walking on the South Downs, found the place: the village of Willingdon in East Sussex. And then, looking for somewhere to stay, they found the person: Mrs Kenyon. The two combined to create, for them, that special and enduring emotional effect.

Mrs Kenyon died years ago, and today the village’s former individual nature and status have gone. Only a couple of miles inland from Eastbourne, Willingdon has since been absorbed into larger neighbouring Polegate, no more than an extension of the much expanded greater Eastbourne. When his parents first came upon it, its centre and boundaries were clear. Mrs Kenyon’s stone cottage stood opposite the village Post Office, shop and bus stop, clustered beneath a huge tree. The butcher’s shop was next door and the pub a few steps down the road. Immediately outside her back garden gate was the chalky, pebbly track leading steeply up onto the Downs, through grassy banks packed with wild flowers.

Could a brief note of historical background be provided at this point?

Willingdon is tucked in under the eastern end of the South Downs, a unique combination of rolling chalk downlands, deep valleys with no rivers in them and long wide vistas of mostly grazing farmland that, when his parents discovered it, offered tantalising glimpses of the distant, glittering sea. This land has probably been inhabited for up to 8,000 years, but the earliest remnants visible now are the dips marking the former flint mines of the New Stone Age, some 6,000 years ago. Bronze Age trade routes crossed the Downs, and the Roman Watling Street passes along the ridge en route from Richborough, across country eventually to Shropshire and beyond. You can find impressive Bronze Age tumuli as well as signs of the hill forts built by more settled, and more warlike, Iron Age people. From medieval times, land use was almost entirely arable and sheep grazing right up to the Second World War. Since then, the most obvious trend has been more and more ploughing, as mechanisation and farming subsidies have had their effect. This later tendency has produced a rather different landscape from the one he would have seen as a boy.

When did this holiday take place and what was its general flavour?

The boy was eight when they had their summer holiday there in the late 1940s. There had probably been few changes since his parents had first found it. One of his biggest surprises was the colour of the local buses. Brought up among Midland Red in Shrewsbury and the London Transport buses, he’d nurtured the assumption that all buses were red. SouthDown buses were dark green and he found this a minor novelty. They took the bus into Eastbourne several times, bowling along through trees and fields, to the promenade, the pier, the beach and ice creams, then back home again to Mrs Kenyon’s for tea. It was on Eastbourne beach that he asked the apparently innocent, but actually knowing, question about why men and boys wore nothing more than trunks or shorts on the beach while women (probably ‘ladies’ then) were largely covered up by their one-piece swimming costumes. His parents exchanged glances, smiled slightly, said something half-heartedly about ladies possibly feeling the cold more than men, and quickly changed the subject. Of all the questions he must have asked them during his boyhood, he felt that this one had generated one of the most disappointing answers of all.

Did he share his parents’ strong emotional attraction for this corner of Sussex?

He did, though not as a child. It became apparent later, not very long before Mrs Kenyon died, when he stayed with her for a week when he was 22 and needing to shake London off for a few days. It was a hot summer and he went out on the Downs every day and walked and walked. He came to understand then how the magic of the place had worked on his parents during their first and subsequent visits. From the village street, you approached the cottage door up steep stone steps with flower-strewn rockeries on either side. The cottage inside was simple and old-fashioned in every aspect, the sort of place people write about finding today in corners of rural France, Italy and Spain: nothing special, no frills, but clean, fresh, adequate, comfortable and completely without pretensions.

There was no running water upstairs. Mrs Kenyon would bring up the large jug of water she had heated on the kitchen range for you to use in the circular basin on the washstand. The lavatory was in a little shed at the top end of the back garden, reached by walking up the path between the rows of vegetables in her kitchen garden. This was basic, traditional village living, as it had been for generations, and his London-born and bred parents loved it. Mrs Kenyon was their only choice of someone to become his godmother.

What other members of Mrs Kenyon’s family were in the vicinity, and what effects on day-to-day events did the boy observe?

There was only one. Mrs Kenyon was widowed and had a very charming daughter called Ann, much the same age as the boy’s parents. At the time of their holiday, she was staying with her mother having recently become divorced, or at least separated, from her husband. The word ‘divorce’ came up more than once in conversations and had to be discreetly explained to him. He gathered that the initiative for the separation had been Ann’s and that, when he was home from the sea, her former husband tried to approach her with a view to re-engaging. In her opinion, he was being a nuisance. He was not the only one.

There was a distinctly annoying day when Ann went with them to Eastbourne beach. Apart from his smarting disappointment at finding the beach was all pebbles until the tide reached its lowest, there was the problem, all day long, of the man who kept hanging around, trying to get Ann to take some notice of him. He approached them on the beach, asking Ann if she wanted a cigarette, getting one out for himself and lighting it, then sitting down as though he was part of the group. The boy’s parents warily took no part in this but occupied themselves with their son. Ann took care not to introduce him to them and made every effort to get him to leave her alone.

The boy gradually realised what this trespasser was up to, having heard his name mentioned the previous day during talk about divorce. But he was not giving in, and offered joint projects in building sandcastles or collecting sea shells. While he had no personal grudge against the man, he felt also that he was being surreptitiously discouraged from taking up these offers. Eventually Ann had to have a stern word with the man, and he removed himself to a position higher up the beach, still close enough to be a presence but not quite an intrusion. He sat there for the rest of the day, smoking cigarettes and watching the group closely. When they went off to get the bus home, he remained there as the tide crept up again and the wind cooled.

Did the boy notice Ann Kenyon’s presence impinge on the family’s consciousness in any other way?

Yes, there was one other notable thing about Ann. It was her passion for the boy’s father, which his mother told him about some years later: ‘She’d always loved him, dear, ever since we both started going down there. But being your father, he never really noticed. Or if he did notice, he probably imagined it was really none of his business.’ Somewhere within walking distance of Mrs Kenyon’s cottage there was an old house with a great ruined ornamental garden. They went there with a picnic on a hot afternoon with Mrs Kenyon and Ann. It was a romantic, overgrown, neglected place, such as a precocious child in an Iris Murdoch novel might discover and make their own. At a critical point in laying out the lunch, they discovered they’d forgotten an important item, most likely a bottle- or tin-opener. His father volunteered to walk back to the cottage to get it and, as he was getting to his feet, Ann said she would go with him.

Off they went and, after an entirely appropriate period of time, they returned. Knowing his father, both he and his mother could be sure that nothing ‘went on’, and for Ann, at this messy juncture in her life, it was probably just enough to spend that half hour or so alone with him, talking about it. Over the intervening years, reminiscing about people she’d known during her long married life, his mother would comment from time to time that one woman or another had had a bit of a crush on that quiet, undemonstrative, serious man, her husband. But unless they’d jumped up and down and shouted it at him, he would have remained more or less unaware. So it was with Ann.

Apart from Eastbourne, what other interesting places did the family visit during their stay in Sussex?

The SouthDown buses helped them explore several noteworthy places on the Downs, places the parents had been to before the war and wanted their young son to see as well. His father’s detailed scrutiny of local timetables and OS maps was always a feature wherever they went or lived. These trips took in Beachy Head to see the precipice, the lighthouse and the great expanse of sparkling sea; Birling Gap and Cuckmere to look across towards the Seven Sisters; and Wilmington to see the Long Man. In such places, recent history no longer than your own lifetime unfolds before your eyes across incredible thousands and millions of years. In imagination, you can make your connections with the long processes of life on the planet, with tiny marine organisms and with the earliest of pre-historic human activity. Here you become the latest small part of that infinitely long and magnificent hinterland that we call ‘the past’.

The very appearance of the sheer slices of white cliff at Beachy Head, where the green land just stops dead, tells you that something has been going on. In fact, as we know, the coastline all around Britain has been steadily eroding for thousands of years. Dunwich in Suffolk is a classic example, where virtually an entire village has progressively disappeared into the sea. You become more aware of this inexorable process when a cliff-fall or similar collapse destroys buildings or dramatically changes the shape of some familiar coastal landmark. The first lighthouse at Beachy Head, called the Belle Toute, was built on the headland itself in 1828 but had to be abandoned in 1899 because recent cliff-falls threatened it with collapse. The replacement lighthouse opened in 1902 and has sent out its beam for 25 miles around ever since.

He saw it first in 1947, the red-and-white striped lighthouse standing off the beach and, beyond it to the horizon, the blue, seemingly unmoving sea. You had to get very near the edge to see it properly and he wasn’t prepared for this. Walking along the green downland towards Beachy Head, you expect it to go on for ever. Suddenly, you reach the sheer drop, with no further way forward or down. It all stops there. Peering over carefully, they could see the tower of the cliffs beneath them, a section of the beach and the lighthouse. It was the kind of view that he couldn’t be properly prepared for, especially at an age when he was still seeing many things for the first time. Whatever else it was, for him it was at least slightly frightening.

Would a little historico-geological information be helpful here to provide a broader context for these experiences?

Probably. These cliffs, with the Seven Sisters further along, are as spectacular as any coastline you can find around Britain. Their height comes from the nature of their particular chalk, a soft white limestone, laid down between 70 and 100 million years ago when most of north-west Europe formed the bed of a warm sea. The hills and valleys of today’s South Downs are the result of erosion processes during only the most recent two million years. In that time, they have endured astonishing variations and extremes of climatic conditions, making some of our contemporary concerns about the effects of climate change seem rather modest.

While the surface appearance of the Downs has been altered mainly by human activity, unaided natural forces have had their effects on the coast itself. In early 1999, Beachy Head changed in a way that has considerably altered what had been observable in the 1940s. During the 10th and 11th of January that year, up to 100,000 tons of the headland crashed down to land at the cliff bottom, almost forming a land bridge across to the lighthouse at low tide. Apparently the cliff had given way along one of its vertical joints. Continuous high rainfall the previous year could be partly to blame but is only one of several factors always at work on the coastline. There is no consistent pattern in the erosion here, and no particular evidence that its rate is increasing. It is intermittent, though at times very much more dramatic than at others. The Seven Sisters area has lost several of its buildings during the 20th century and quite a number are under threat today.

This part of the Downs between Birling Gap and Cuckmere Haven was quite densely settled between AD 700 and 1000. You can see lynchets, the banks of earth left by the cultivation of fields, the long and round barrows, and the flint mines that all provide evidence of life and death, agriculture and primitive technology. The need for a lighthouse somewhere along this stretch of coast was sufficiently supported by the number of shipwrecks over the years. Said to be ‘the greatest of all time in Sussex’, the Spanish ship Nympha Americana drifted out of its convoy in November 1747 and foundered here. A quarter of the crew perished and intriguingly a consignment of mercury was salvaged from her cargo, worth £30,000 at 18th century values. When the tide is extremely low at Cuckmere Haven, some of the ironwork appears belonging to the German sailing ship Polynesia which went down after several refloating attempts had failed in 1890. The most recent disaster was the Danish Mogens Koch, driven aground in a gale in 1929, though later refloated and repaired at Newhaven.

Smuggling had been rife for centuries along the whole Sussex coastline, mostly (and sensibly) involving the illegal import of brandy and gin. There were times when some of the smuggling gangs numbered well over two hundred, which meant the preventive authorities could do nothing about them. Working on this scale, they operated quite openly and without any fear of being obstructed. In any case, bribery was not unknown in this line of business. In one period, the extent of official concern about smuggling produced four coastguard stations between Beachy Head and Cuckmere.

Like many parts of the southern coastline, Sussex was naturally considered an obvious target for possible invasion during the war. There were brick and concrete pillboxes and ‘dragons’ teeth’ tank traps near Beachy Head. Some of the beaches had been mined, and there were occasional restrictions on where you could go for this reason. To protect Newhaven during the war, lights were placed in empty valleys on the Downs to mislead German bombers into thinking that they were over the town itself. This would also confuse their navigation when looking for other specified targets nearby. The normally white outline of the Long Man of Wilmington, also on the Downs, was painted green to prevent its use as a landmark for enemy planes.

That is probably sufficient on the Beachy Head area, but mention of the Long Man of Wilmington stirs the interest somewhat. Did the boy and his family confront this ancient figure?

They certainly did and had a long walk through the lanes from the bus stop to reach him. It was another of those experiences that cannot be entirely prepared for. The boy knew where they were going, and that it was a big man cut into the chalk on the side of a hill. But what was he actually going to see? He was expecting some kind of statue. They eventually came round a corner to a five-barred gate, stopped and looked across the fields. There he was, long indeed, but only two-dimensional. The Long Man stood on the hillside between his two staves, looking over at them with a few noticeable gaps in his outline. Leaving his mother sitting among the grasses and wild flowers, he and his father climbed up one side, across the top and down the other.

Wilmington (Domesday 1086: Wilminte) means tun (farmstead or settlement) of Wilma (a south Saxon name). Norman Benedictine monks built the Priory here in the 12th century. It later came under the control of the Dean and Chapter of Chichester. The oldest house was built in 1450 and, according to an authoritative account, ‘Little has changed in the village this century’ [the 20th century]. While buildings can be dated relatively easily, the age of the Man himself remains very uncertain indeed. He is definitely pre-Roman but that is about as far as anyone has dared to estimate with any confidence.

At 226 feet tall, though his two staves are a few feet longer, the Long Man is one of the largest of similar human figures anywhere in the world. He stands on the south face of Windover Hill, originally marked out in chalk, cut into the turf. He was only visible in certain lights or after a snowfall, but in 1874 was made properly visible with yellow bricks. On the occasion of this visit, his bricks were white but in serious need of new paint, and some were missing. The latest improvement has replaced the bricks with over 700 concrete blocks that are repainted annually. Several old drawings suggest slightly different basic outlines and details and his present outline may not be completely accurate. How much that really matters will probably disturb the sleep of only a handful of ancient historians.

Windover Hill where he stands provides a rich archaeological feast. Here are sites from Neolithic times onwards, including flint mines, a Celtic field system, and long and round barrows. Ancient roads crossed the hill on and just below the ridge from at least the Roman period up to an 18th century coach route. Men working in a field here in 1861 dug up a crock full of Bronze axe heads. The presence of the Neolithic barrows and the mines encourages the possibility that the Long Man was there to defend them against intruders or robbers. He may equally have had a specific religious significance. The most popular legend says the figure is a memorial to a giant who had once actually existed, though the likely causes of his death are as numerous as the legends. There is certainly no evidence from experiment that he is any kind of astronomical almanac like Stonehenge.

Has the ‘heritage industry’ made its mark here in recent times?

Not to a dramatic extent. When father and son climbed up and down around the Long Man, there had been a low chicken-wire fence around him but no other sign of authority or control. He was simply there. Today, we are informed that he ‘is signposted from the A27, south of the village of Wilmington. Buses serve the A27 . . . and British Rail stations at Berwick and Polegate are served from Eastbourne, several other Sussex towns and London . . . There is a public car park at the Priory, with excellent views only a few yards’ walk away’. The Man may be reached ‘ by public footpaths to the base and the top of the figure and interpretation boards are located at the car park and at the bottom of the hill’. So the Man’s existence and location are more prominently publicised today, along with the means of getting to him. At least there are no signs yet of the re-enactors, pretending to be ancient Britons digging barrows, mining flints or sitting around in their imitation daub and wattle shelters after a long day among the lynchets.

FROM THE MEMOIR

Now I’m nine and in bed in a caravan. I was fast asleep but my mother has woken me up deliberately with: ‘Come and see the shooting stars’. Rubbing my eyes and wondering what this can all be about, the first thing I see is my parents’ glasses of beer on the small table, my father smoking a cigarette. ‘Look out of the window and wait. You’ll soon see them’. In yet another first-time experience, I do as I’m told. And I do see them, those quick bright streaks, fizzing across the sky and disappearing at the very moment when you know you have spotted them and want to watch them more closely.

It was the Perseids meteor shower that the Earth passes through in the middle of every August, and my mother didn’t want me to miss it. At their peak, in a clear night sky, you can see dozens of them every hour. In later years, I have lain on a grassy bank on a campsite outside Souillac; leaned back in a plastic chair for hours near Nîmes, glass of wine in hand, gazing at the sky and wondering now whether I was seeing a meteor or an orbiting satellite; and my eyes have flicked about in the Ardèche sky, looking for that very same crowd of bright cosmic travellers and never seeing as many again as I did that very first time.

We were in Cornwall, a year after that busy fortnight on the South Downs. Some Shrewsbury friends of my parents had parents with a large and beautiful house in Cornwall, with a garden the size of a small park. Here, in addition to the tennis court, the massive vegetable patch, the ornamental bits, the lawns and the shrubberies, they kept a caravan. It was ours for the summer holiday.

I see now that my parents astutely managed to arrange with someone they knew to help with our annual summer accommodation for three consecutive years. Perhaps that reflected the situation soon after the end of the war. Tourism as we know it now didn’t exist then, and the only inexpensive places to stay would be so-called boarding houses that lacked the contemporary benefits of en suite rooms, four stars and regular inspections by the English Tourist Board. The Butlins holiday camp was still waiting to be invented. Whatever arrangements were agreed between them, my father, though far from well off, would have insisted on making as appropriate a contribution as he could possibly manage. Scrupulous over financial matters, throughout his later life he was always adamant about paying someone like a plumber or an electrician by cheque rather than giving him cash and so contributing to the black economy. His view was that, as he could not – and should not - avoid paying income tax himself, there was no reason why anyone else should, even though a cash job would have saved him money. My mother held exactly the same view until the very end of her life.

The caravan was near the northwest Cornish coast, a few miles up from Camborne and Redruth, on the way to Portreath. It was another place where my father’s forensic approach to bus timetables and maps would come into its own. Our nearest bus stop was at Paynters Lane End, named after one of the significant local families, and Illogan was the nearest village. I can visualise nothing there now except for the village hardware shop that stocked a small quantity of everything you could possibly imagine, and then a few items you would never think of. On the other hand, it could easily not have the one thing you really needed.

Illogan provides a rich reminder of Cornwall’s former industrial strength. The area is littered with former copper and later tin mines, with names such as Wheal Basset, Carn Brea, South Towan, Cook’s Kitchen and Wheal Agar. The present village church was built in 1846 but the researched list of its rectors goes back to the very early 14th century at least. Records of the wealthy land-owning Basset family of Tehidy Park also go back that far. For example, a licence to crenellate Tehidy was granted in 1330. A later Francis Basset ‘commanded the miners’ militia when they marched to Plymouth in 1779, when it was threatened by the combined French and Spanish fleets’.

Our first seaside trip was to Portreath. The bus must have dropped us some distance away because I have a clear image of the long walk down to the coast. There’s something special about any road that leads you to the sea. You instinctively know, without being able to see it, that the sea, and only the sea, must be at the end of it. Where sea and sky meet and reflect one another, there’s a kind of light you don’t find anywhere else. The sea was invisible to me as we walked along, up and down the bumps on this switchback road, between the high hedge banks. It was sunny and blue and soft and warm and I knew that around the next corner, or perhaps the one after that, the sea would suddenly appear. At last, the moment arrived. When I thought we’d never get there, it came into view. There was the sea, immense and stretching away for ever. There were the rocks, the headlands, the harbour wall, the kiosk selling buckets and spades and shrimp nets on long bamboo handles, and the beach of soft firm sand. No pebbles here. This was what I really called a beach.

Battery House dominates the south side of the cove at Portreath, where they kept the cannons during the French wars. The so-called Smugglers Cottage (every seaside village has one) is a relic of the 17th century fishing industry and was once used by the Bassets ‘who created a miniature Brighton here during the 1780s’. You can see an old track on the hillside above the old harbour once used by mule trains bringing coal and ore down from the mines. Portreath saw dramatic advances during the Industrial Revolution. Many of the mines were situated on land owned by the Basset family, who benefited enormously from their exploitation. The area also benefited from the inventions of Richard Trevithick, William Murdoch and James Watt, who all lived locally. Steam-powered beam engines clustered around the mines, fuelled by coal brought in from South Wales where the copper ore was sent for smelting. To serve all this burgeoning activity, the first horse-drawn railway in Cornwall was opened here in 1809. Then came the great incline on the local branch of the Hayle Railway in 1838, linking the Camborne and Illogan mines to the harbour.

Celia Fiennes came through Cornwall on her way to Land’s End in 1698. She discovered incidentally (as all travellers to the West Country did, and reported faithfully) ‘the custome of the country which is a universall smoaking, both men and women and children have all their pipes of tobacco in their mouths.’ At the time, smoking was believed to ward off the dreaded plague and one Eton schoolboy recorded in 1665 ‘that he was never flogged so hard as he was in that year for not smoking.’ About a mile and a half from St Austell, Celia came:

. . . where they were digging in the Tinn mines, there was at least 20 mines

in sight which employs a great many people at work, almost night and day, but

constantly all and every day includeing the Lords day which they are forced to, to

prevent their mines being overflowed with water; more than 1000 men are taken up

about them, few mines but had then almost 20 men and boys attending it either down

in the mines digging and carrying the oare or the little bucket which conveys it up, or

else others are draineing the water and looking to the engines that are draineing it . . .

they have a great labour and great expence to draine the mines of the water with mills

that horses turn and now they have the mills or water engines that are turned by the water,

which is conveyed on frames of timber and truncks to hold the water, which falls down

on the wheels, as an over shott mill – and these are the sort that turns the water into the

severall towns I have seen about London Darby and Exeter, and many places more;

Redruth - or perhaps Camborne since they were just about distinguishable then – was the scene of the haircut episode. Going to the hairdresser may be an uncommon feature of seaside holidays but, for some time, the hair on top of my head towards the back had been sticking up awkwardly in little tufts. I’m not sure how much it bothered me, but it obviously bothered my parents. So one morning we took the bus to Redruth and found a serious-looking barber’s shop where my parents had a thorough consultation. They explained the problem and the barber shoved my head and hair around, brushing and combing it in all directions. At last he concluded: ‘He’s got a double crown, you know’. I’ve no idea what that was, or whether I actually have one, but his solution was to move my parting from the left to the right side of my head. This he did and reorganised my hair to suit the new arrangement. I know this new style didn’t last long, and believe the whole process was reversed the next time I had a haircut.

Cornwall is full of place names that were interesting and unusual to us, and my father didn’t take long with the OS map to find the Reskajeage Downs, along the coast from Portreath, just beyond Basset’s Cove. (There’s not much of significance round here without that family’s name on it). No discussion: we had to go there if only because of the name. This stretch of coast is now part of the South West Coast Path, the longest such route in Britain. It will take you and the thousands of other visitors right round the entire coastal boundary of Cornwall. In summer 1948, we were virtually on our own. We walked off down to the southwest along a cliff-top track, at times stumbling over and into the relics of former industrial buildings and their bits of machinery. We saw ruined stone walls, parts of engine houses, clear signs of the old mine sites and foundry buildings and equipment. As you looked along the landscape from a distance, much of this legacy was almost invisible, mostly covered now by the scrubby bushes, brambles, myriad wild flowers and clumps of grasses that relentlessly took back their territory following the temporary occupation of humanity and its works.

It reminds me now of a superb descriptive passage in Edward Thomas’s The South Country, written in 1909. His main theme is the relationship between the ancient Cornish burial mounds and the natural world where they stand, and the timelessness of this land, but the old mines get a look in as well:

Of all the rocky land, of the sapphire sea white with quiet foam, the barrows are masters . . .

They stand in the unenclosed waste and are removed from all human uses and from most

wayfaring. Thus they share the sublimity of beacons and are about to show that tombs also

have their deaths . . . But most of their hold upon the spirit they owe to their powerful

suggestion that here upon the high sea border was once lived a bold proud life . . .

In Cornwall, as in Wales, these monuments are the more impressive, because the earth,

wasting with them and showing her bones, takes their part. There are days when the age of

the Downs, strewn with tumuli and the remnants of camp and village, is incredible; or rather

they seem in the coursed of long time to have grown smooth and soft and kind, and to be,

like a round languid cloud, an expression of Earth’s summer bliss of afternoon. But granite

and slate and sandstone jut out, and in whatsoever weather speak rather of the cold, drear,

hard, windy dawn . . . The deserted mines are frozen cries of despair as if they had perished

in conflict with the waste; and in a few years their chimneys standing amidst rotting woodwork,

the falling masonry, the engine rusty, huge and still (the abode of rabbits, and all overgrown

with bedstraw, the stern thistle and wizard henbane) are in keeping with the miles of barren land . . .

And so he sees a country of contrasts, the soft and round with the hard and cold, the prehistorically old with the relatively recent, but similarly decaying, industrial age. Hand-in-hand with both, and with all the times between them, natural life through birds and flowers asserts its place and outlasts them all.

Our minds were not informed by quite such poetic influences as we walked the cliffs to Reskajeage that day, past features such as Ralph’s Cupboard, Samphire Island and Hell’s Mouth, a spot where wreckers would use lights to lure ships onto the rocks and rob them. My father pointed out industrial remnants as we came across them, and tried to identify what they might have been. Reflecting now on some of the things he told me, I believe he may well have got some of it wrong. No matter. I was more interested, strangely and compulsively, in testing the limits of my fear. I ran across the tufted grass towards the edge of the cliffs to look down the almost sheer drop and see the beach below. There I could see rocky inlets and small headlands with the sea breaking over them and, between the outcrops, perfect coves with untouched sands and hardly a soul in sight.

You could reach some of these coves by walking along at beach level and clambering over the rocks that separated them. For some of the others it meant walking and clambering down the cliff face from where we stood on narrow, treacherous little tracks. This is what we had to do when we found Reskajeage. Fortunately, there was a way down which was grassy and well used, and which both my parents felt we could all tackle safely. Once at the bottom, we changed into our swimming costumes in a convenient cave in the cliff at the back of the beach. We spent the rest of the entire relatively uneventful day there, lying in the sun, going in the sea, playing in the sand, eating our picnic and ‘exploring’.

The next day my swimming trunks were nowhere to be found. I had no memory of it but my parents finally realised that I must have left them in the cave when changing to leave the beach. By now, the tide would have come in, filled the cave with water and swept my trunks out to sea and probably far beyond Land’s End. There was no point in going back to Reskajeage to look for them and, just for a while, I was not exactly my parents’ favourite person. It was a less serious disaster than the shoe in the stream – perhaps partly because we were ‘on holiday’ - but it seemed to occupy the same sort of territory in the parental perception.

This whole area is now officially one of outstanding natural beauty. It attracts hundreds of thousands of walkers, climbers, swimmers, fishermen and bird watchers every year. It’s almost incongruous to compare the way we use it now with how it was two and a half centuries ago, at the beginning of our modern times. Then it was an area of outstanding industrial exploitation. Any ordinary person you found here would be grafting away for long hours every day of the week, extracting the ores of copper and tin for those who owned it all. The head of the Basset family, taking a break from counting his accidental millions, could stand on these Downs and feel the thudding beneath his feet as the beam engines and the steam engines throbbed and banged and hissed away, feeding their power to the mines. Above him, the chimneys would churn their endless curls of smoke into the sky, and around and beyond him the tramways and railways would send their clattering wagons of ore and coal back and forth between the harbour and the mines. He could look down the length of Cornwall’s tapering peninsula, and see his peninsula: this land and everything beneath it - his. Today, the Bassets and their fellow industrialists are long gone. Most of the people you’ll see nowadays are like we were in the late nineteen-forties - here to have their holidays or to indulge their weekend leisure pastimes, and then go away.

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