Back Home in the Sun

We have been away for two weeks in England occasioned by Laurie doing a session at Way With Words literary festival in Devon where Laurie read from her new book to an audience of 150 fans. We spent two days in rainy Wiltshire (where Goldsmith Peter Page drove us around in his 1947 bread van), then rainy Cornwall for five days and rainy Devon for two days and finally five days in Devonshire sun. So no complaints: we were lucky.

We are both big fans of poet John Betjeman who lived and died and is buried in the Cornwall he loved, by the sea. He is buried in the churchyard of the ancient St Enodoc Church, on the slope down to the seashore, with the smells and sounds of the crashing surf.

We visited his grave, said a prayer and there we read aloud his poem Trebetherick:

We used to picnic where the thrift
Grew deep and tufted to the edge;
We saw the yellow foam flakes drift
In trembling sponges on the ledge
Below us, till the wind would lift
Them up the cliff and o’er the hedge.
Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea,
Sun on our bathing dresses heavy with the wet,
Squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea,
Fleas around the tamarisk, an early cigarette.

From where the coastguard houses stood
One used to see below the hill,
The lichened branches of a wood
In summer silver cool and still;
And there the Shade of Evil could
Stretch out at us from Shilla Mill.
Thick with sloe and blackberry, uneven in the light,
Lonely round the hedge, the heavy meadow was remote,
The oldest part of Cornwall was the wood as black as night,
And the pheasant and the rabbit lay torn open at the throat.

But when a storm was at its height,
And feathery slate was black in rain,
And tamarisks were hung with light
And golden sand was brown again,
Spring tide and blizzard would unite
And sea come flooding up the lane.
Waves full of treasure then were roaring up the beach,
Ropes round our mackintoshes, waders warm and dry,
We waited for the wreckage to come swirling into reach,
Ralph, Vasey, Alistair, Biddy, John and I.

Then roller into roller curled
And thundered down the rocky bay,
And we were in a water world
Of rain and blizzard, sea and spray,
And one against the other hurled
We struggled round to Greenaway.
Blesséd be St Enodoc, blesséd be the wave,
Blesséd be the springy turf, we pray, pray to thee,
Ask for our children all happy days you gave
To Ralph, Vasey, Alistair, Biddy, John and me.

Here is Betjeman's tomb and the view from it to the sea.