cream day ice

Juliet Nicolson reviews The Great Western Beach: a Memoir of a Cornish Childhood between the Wars by Emma Smith
It has been said that you only ever meet the world once: in childhood. Everything that follows is just memory. In Emma Smith’s evocative, witty and profoundly moving book, her England - of the era after the First World War - shines with an intensity quite unblurred by the eight decades or so that have elapsed since.
Born in 1923, Emma Smith (Elspeth Hallsmith when small) grew up in the Cornish seaside town of Newquay, in genteel poverty, with her twin brother and sister, Jim and Pam, the baby Harvey, her parents and their nanny/housekeeper Lucy.
The town’s Great Western Beach supplied the backdrop to Smith’s childhood, its prosaic name giving away nothing of the magical opportunities afforded by the endless stretch of sand. It became their “summer playground”: a place where, for Smith, “a timeless tranquillity that must be what is meant by heaven” bordered the “delicious embrace” of the sea itself.
Smith describes with a remarkably sharp recall that “teases the very edge of memory” how, although the seasons came and went, an all-pervading sense of summer filled those years.
The blessed good fortune of growing up in a seaside town peopled by delightfully eccentric characters meant constant entertainment - batty but inspirational teachers; the deck-chair man, “agile as a monkey”; and the Italian family who made forbidden, mouthwatering ice cream (the following day’s supply was said to be stored each night beneath their beds, right next to the chamber pots).
Busy summer days are filled with family picnics, the exquisite, unforgettable taste of the jam sandwich that follows a morning swim, and by the children’s amused monitoring of the influx of the summer tourists - “truly pitiable, these poor transients” with their “ludicrous” floundering attempts to master a surfboard.

telegraph.co.uk


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