Daughters of Cornwall by Fern Britton

Author:Fern Britton [Britton, Fern]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-05-04T17:00:00+00:00

Hannah, Trevay

1938

My mother did as she said she would do. With a loan from my grandfather, and much searching for a suitable property, she leased a shop in Trevay and bought an old Austin 7 car. She drove very badly, either so slowly that people honked to get past her, or so quickly (sometimes on the wrong side of the road) that other drivers flung their motors onto pavements to avoid her. ‘I am a very good driver,’ she’d exclaim if any of us dared take a sharp intake of breath, the last before we surely died. ‘I have never had an accident!’

To which Edward would reply quietly, ‘No, but we’ve seen plenty behind us.’

Mum’s shop had been a wool shop before she took it on. The stock of wool left by the previous keeper stayed with us to keep the custom coming, but gradually, as she imported more of the Eastern silks, the customers remained with her and changed their tastes. Over time her shop became, in Cornwall anyway, rather famous. You couldn’t get better anywhere else in the county. Including Truro.

Trevay was a small fishing village some ten miles up the coast from Callyzion. The harbour front was built with rugged fishermen’s cottages and a pub, The Golden Hind. Beyond the harbour wall lay the open sea. Along the harbour wall was a jumble of fishing boats, large and small, and on its granite walls the men would land their catches and mend their nets. The Cornish accent here was broader than in Callyzion. It was hard to tune my ear to it, getting only one word in three or four, but as time went on my own accent grew the same. My mother was always correcting me. ‘Darling, please don’t use the Cornish vernacular. If it’s a rough day say it’s a rough day, not your other nonsense.’

She was right, I had begun to say ‘’Tis helluva hooley’ instead, because it was such fun. ‘Yes Mum.’

‘And when things are right, say so. Just using the word “ideal” will not do.’

Her shop was in the back street, behind the harbour cottages, in the middle of a short run of shops. There was a butcher, greengrocer, hairdresser, tobacconist-cum-newsagent, a baker who sold out of pasties every day by ten in the morning, and us. We were between the hairdresser and the greengrocer. All these buildings were built by the Victorians and so were well organised within. We had a dry cellar below the shop, a room behind the shop with a kitchen curtained off, and the next floor housed the four of us in two bedrooms – I shared with Mum – and two further letting rooms above that housing two lodgers. One was Mr Tomlinson, the St Peter’s Church verger. The other was Miss Penrose, a young woman who taught at the junior school.

Sometime in the mid-1850s the railway company built a branch line into the village, capitalising on the popularity of seaside holidays to quaint destinations. With the train came a hotel.

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