When Wilkie was here the local mothers were holding a ‘small-pox’ party. Anyone with a baby was waiting at the inn for the local doctor, who had brought ‘a lot of fine fresh matter’ down from London and was going to vaccinate every baby he could lay his hands on. If you tried to do the same thing today the town would be in an internet-fuelled uproar, but in those days all you needed was a doctor’s certificate, some impressive whiskers and your word would be God’s. I can’t make up my mind which of Lizard’s two pubs was the smallpox inn, so I have a drink at both – and although the Top House seems most likely (it has an open, early Victorian feel), the woman behind the bar insists it wasn’t built until 1860, and I’m not going to argue. I then crack my head on one of the offensively low (fifteenth-century) beams in the Witchball and, like Wilkie (although what drove him out was the thought of the ‘fine fresh matter’), I hurry back into the sunshine.
If you live in a city (as most of us do), you will know what it is like to inhabit an atmosphere laced with diesel fumes, human detritus and grit. Strangely, we don’t generally notice the air that we breathe, unless we’re standing at a junction and a bus is coughing grey toxic particulate smog straight into our lungs. But the truth is that the city air is killing us. We all know it, even if we try to put that inconvenient fact to one side, along with so much else. Perhaps we’re waiting for a time when we’re less busy? Or, as if by magic – just like that! – a day when our governments are not working to placate the fossil fuel lobbyists. I mention it because the air on the walk to Lizard Point is so dizzyingly fresh, so sparklingly clean, so ozone-rich as it blasts in over the point from the south-west seas, that I can feel my brain being pummelled and scoured and positively derailed by the unaccustomed giddying glory of it all. This is the air – better than laudanum! – that would have transported Wilkie and Henry as they strolled along the narrow path, fringed with tamarisk and myrtle, that took them to ‘the southernmost land in England’. Breathe it – and weep.
Wilkie was excited to find that many footpaths in Cornwall run along the tops of the thick stone walls that divide the fields – and I am excited to find that this is sometimes still true. It is early afternoon and there are no clouds in the clear April sky. The fields are green with fresh new grasses and blackthorn blossom is frosting the hedgerows. Down by the Point there are neat clumps of thrift edging the paths, their first pink buds getting ready for the summer months; and I am happy to find (and identify) delicate violets and forget-me-nots. I’m told there is sea asparagus here, and Cornish heath, but the main plants you’ll see, clinging to the cliffs and open ground, are the bright yellow flowers of the Hottentot fig and the rapidly spreading, fleshy, succulent jellybean plant. Neither of these would have been here in 1850. They arrived, somehow, by ship or garden, from South Africa and Mexico respectively. And now they dominate England’s southernmost tip, to the great delight of many thrill-seeking tourists (they look spectacular, especially in the late summer when the jellybean plants turn a lurid red), and to the despair of most conservationists, who agonize over the effect this is having on the fragile native clovers and fringed rupturewort.
It is a dilemma, how much to intervene – and whether, indeed, there’s any point, given the vigorous glee with which these interlopers have spread – although the National Trust volunteer I meet at the cliff edge seems sanguine: why not let them thrive here, he wonders, and make a stand for the more delicate native plants further along the coast? The language of invasion and resistance creeps into our conversation, almost every conversation, about non-native species. None of us can help it – it shouldn’t really mean anything – but it is good to remember that these are plants we are talking about. The National Trust man knows that, of course. And there are indeed very good reasons for resisting the spread of many non-native species: it’s not just so we can save the poetry and magic and diversity of what we have, but there are diseases to combat and ecosystems at risk. As climate change accelerates, things are going to become even more complicated: are our native species best placed to adapt to the coming storm (and droughts)? Or should we welcome African and Mexican plants to our shores? Is nature in fact going to find its own way – and should we therefore abandon the Cornish heath (a rare white heather now found only on the Lizard) to its doom? Be assured that the debate around what happens to Britain’s flora and fauna in a time of unprecedented globalized trade and massive climate upheaval is ongoing and lively – and possibly even fruitful – but it has nothing to do with the human cost of the same. Even so. The Mexican jellybean plant is coming! Retreat! And regroup at Kynance Cove.
The walk along the cliffs from Lizard Point westwards to Kynance Cove is empty and wild, even on a blazing hot Sunday afternoon in April, but the Cove itself (which Wilkie described as ‘the place at which the coast scenery of the Lizard district arrives at its climax of grandeur’) is thronged with happy people. There’s a car park here only a short scramble from the beach, and some three to four hundred cars, which may explain the crowds. Also, as Wilkie knew, low tide is the time to be here, when the beach expands and some thrilling caves emerge from the waves – and that’s 3.30p.m. today, so we are bang on schedule.
Wilkie headed down the steep path to the beach, leaving Henry to sketch from the clifftops. It was August and he felt quite alone, although perhaps the ‘deep mist’ kept people away. More likely, this gadding about on beaches would have been something strange to the Cornish people of the day, unless they were looking for food or wrecks. A guide materialized to show Wilkie the rocks and for the next few hours he was steered and pushed and cajoled up ‘Asparagus’ Island and past the ‘Devil’s Throat’ and the ‘Devil’s Bellows’, slipping on the wet rocks, almost plunging to his death more than once (he claimed), sometimes standing on the shoulders or even the face of his guide, who taught him one of life’s more valuable lessons: ‘never scramble your toes about, where toes have no business to be.’ They gathered wild asparagus from the summit of Asparagus Island and the guide told him tales of smugglers and wrecks and fishermen slipping under the waves in the winter storms. I look at the steep sides of Asparagus Island (down which a skinny young man is currently bounding with improbable grace, like a carefree Barbary ape) and decide that Wilkie was either lying or he really did find a guide who could, as he says, have taken a drunken man ‘up and down Asparagus Island without the slightest risk either to himself or his charge’.
I am happier following Wilkie into the caves, walking tall in the ‘great, irregular, Gothic halls’ before we ‘wriggle onward a few feet, serpent-like, flat on our bellies’. Enid would love it here, among the smugglers and the dark hidden caverns. Children run in and out, yelling. I follow a father as he leads his very solemn six-year-old son round one of the shorter routes. Outside, people are charging into the sea, hoofing up the waves, swimming and flapping their polystyrene bodyboards, kicking plastic footballs, and shouting with joy in the sunshine. The beach is alive with holiday delight. Picnics and windbreaks cluster between the rocks. A young woman has sculpted a mermaid from the wet sand and is now lying with her head on its lap. Just past her, closer to the foaming sea, I am amazed to find a single living starfish in a rock pool – amazed, that is, to find it has survived so much human freight.
The poet Tennyson was here, in Kynance Cove, two years before Wilkie, jotting in his notebook: ‘Glorious grass-green monsters of waves. Into the caves of Asparagus Island. Sat watching wave-rainbows.’ Wilkie is also enraptured by the sea, ‘as it rolls and rushes and dances in the wind’ and almost stays too late (‘the surf dashes nearer and nearer to our feet’) – but then he didn’t have the shrieks of children to warn him or the stampede of oiled bodies rushing to the lonely (but lovely) café that overlooks the bay. I find a spare corner of a trestle table and watch the wave-rainbows from on high. I’m sitting with a couple of lean Americans who have ordered at least two dozen cream teas – towering plates of fluffy scones, huge troughs of claggy yellow cream, buckets of jam – but this
apparent surfeit suddenly makes sense when a straggling, exhausted party of their friends appears, sweating and heaving from the walk from Lizard Point, some of them close to tears, many too old, I would have thought, for this sweltering adventure – and I watch as they collapse with cries of astonished delight into the arms of this incomparable Cornish feast.
I hear they are on a cruise ship, making its way round the coast. What would Cornwall be without its tourists? Now that the mines and the pilchards (‘a Cornishman’s national pride’, says Wilkie) have almost gone, tourism is the apparent key to prosperity. In 1850, when in other parts of Britain there weren’t enough jobs to go around, Wilkie could write: ‘The number of inhabitants in the county is stated by the last census at 341,269 and … the supply of men for all purposes does not appear to be greater than the demand.’ Wilkie found the people happy and busy and fruitfully employed. There were ‘ten thousand persons – men, women, and children’ working in the fisheries. He thought the ‘inexhaustible mineral treasures in the earth, and the equally inexhaustible shoals of pilchards which annually visit the coast’ meant that the people of Cornwall would always prosper. Nowadays the population of Cornwall is about 550,000, although that number is almost irrelevant when you consider that there are over five million annual visitors and rising.
In the 1964 edition of the Shell Guide to Cornwall John Betjeman lamented his lost world: ‘Cornwall has changed so much in appearance since the first edition of this guide was published in 1933 that now, thirty years later, the text has had entirely to be rewritten.’ On he went: ‘Roads have been widened, blocks of houses have been taken down in picturesque ports to make way for car parks; petrol stations proliferate … In the holiday season lorries and cars trailing caravans and boats block lanes never intended for such heavy traffic.’ According to Betjeman, before the great upheavals of the mid-twentieth century the only people who visited Cornwall were ‘fishermen, golfers and artists’. He manages to make it sound like they were all wearing tweed. The changes, every one of them unutterably awful (he would swear to that), had happened in the years since he was a boy and ‘everyone in the village had oil lamps and candles’ and ‘a journey to the nearest town and back was a day’s expedition’.
Ithell Colquhoun, renting a shack further down the coast, wrote in 1957: ‘I have never spent a whole year at Vow Cave and am sorry now that I did not do so before Lamorna became, during the summer months, uninhabitable.’ And I remember my own first Cornish holiday, aged eight, in 1971, when the sun blazed and the surf rolled and we had miles of golden sandy beaches all to ourselves. Didn’t we? I certainly remember my first trip to the Mediterranean a couple of years later. We were spending ten days in the hills of Provence, not far from Mont Ventoux, and we had been promised a day at the seaside, even though my father (my kind, gentle, but – he’d be the first to admit – somewhat gloomy father) explained that there was almost no point in going, what with the insufferable crowds and the rank pollution (discarded picnics and plastics and French effluent) and the fact that the once pristine Mediterranean Sea (the wine-dark sea of Homer and Dumas and Matisse) had been poisoned and blighted with oil spills and emptied – dragged clean – of all its teeming fish and every last scrap of sea life. And I remember heading south in our white Triumph 2000 Estate, with the cicadas shrieking at the open windows from the hot, scented hills; and how we surged over the last rise and there, laid out in front of us, was a vision of such potent beauty – the light leaping from the radiant sea, the almost empty beach glittering with ochre and gold – that we were all briefly struck dumb. And then we were seized with laughter, hysterical from the car journey, my mother too, overcome with wonder and joy to see this heart-stopping, undeniable beauty; and the look on my father’s face – amusement? disappointment? – as he started to explain (and then quickly stopped) that what we think we can see is not the same as what there is.
I’m not saying my father was wrong. In fact, and alas, today the Mediterranean is sicker and emptier than ever before (and still undeniably blue and lovely). And Britain’s own seas and shoreline, that once seethed with whales, walruses, dolphins, pilchards and puffins, are silent and sodden with invisible plastics. We all understand this in theory. But we are also having to contend with something known to conservationists as shifting baseline syndrome, the bewildering and endless realignment of what constitutes ‘normal’ – from Wilkie to Betjeman, from Ithell to us – so that we can no longer remember, or have no first-hand knowledge of what it was like to see butterflies thick in the meadows and starfish in every rock pool. We are rightly suspicious of our golden childhood memories, but none of us ever lives long enough to notice that the tap of life is being screwed shut.
When Wilkie was here in Kynance Cove he was alone, in August, apart from his friend Henry (sketching on the cliffs) and his indefatigable guide; and now here we are in April, and there are 400 vehicles in the car park and cruise ships disgorging tourists into the bay. I’m not saying that’s wrong: who are we to say who should or should not be enjoying this extraordinary cove with its rainbow waves and shimmering rocks? Not John Betjeman, let’s hope, nor me. Back in Wilkie’s time most people had to work hard just to scrape by. But there’s no avoiding the fact that there are an awful lot of us these days, on the move and keeping busy, scurrying up and down the land, nosing along the coast, looking for a lost lane or a lonely beach, and all the while buying and using and accumulating and shedding an unfeasible amount of stuff.
Imagine what this beautiful cove was like 150 years ago. And be honest. Wouldn’t you rather have it all to yourself – maybe you and a few others – as Wilkie once did?
Then again, who wouldn’t? I mean, I know I would.
Three
Pilchards to Postcards
‘Influences, essences, presences, whatever is here – in my name of a stream in a valley I salute you; I share this place with you.’
Ithell Colquhoun, The Living Stones
Wilkie Collins & Ithell Colquhoun,
Lamorna Cove to Launceston, 1850 and 1950
Incidentally, I’m starting to wonder (even worry) about Wilkie’s travelling companion, Henry Brandling. Wilkie hardly mentions him, except when he tells us that he has wandered off to make another sketch. We know that Wilkie wrote to a friend, Charles Ward, from Penzance, not far from here, unsuccessfully pleading with him to join them: ‘Here, sir’, coaxed Wilkie, the lifelong sensualist, ‘we live on Ducks, Geese, Chickens, tongue, pickled pilchards, curried Lobster – Clotted cream – jam tarts, fruit tarts – custards – cakes – red mullet, conger eels – salmon trout’. Charles, another artist, had been on a painting tour to Normandy with Wilkie three years earlier (Wilkie had created some pleasant sketches); and it was probably Charles, ten years older than Wilkie, who had led the young boy-man out into the Roman night for his adolescent adventures, where ‘he proceeded, if I may be allowed the expression, to the utmost extremities’. I get the sense that Charles Ward was a lot more fun to be with than Henry, who was perhaps a rather nervy man, a friend from the Royal Academy of Wilkie’s undeniably neurotic older brother, Charles (‘Charley’) Collins.
Henry’s family, the Brandlings, were coal and now railway potentates in Northumbria. His father, like Wilkie’s, had died recently – and he too was seizing the chance to pursue his artistic ambitions (there’s a certain irony to this trip ‘beyond railways’), albeit with rather deeper pockets than Wilkie’s. But he’s a hard man to trace. He was slightly older than Wilkie; and his public art trails off soon after this Cornish adventure; and if I’m looking at the right Charles Henry Brandling in the census for 1881, he ended up living in Cheltenham aged fifty-eight with his wife Mary (thirty-four), four children, a servant called Emily Griffin, and with his profession listed as ‘Artist Architectural Drawing’. By the time of the 1891 census the household had swelled to eight children, one exhausted wife (forty-four) and three servants. He died in 1897. I think that’s him – although what I can tell you is that
if he’s the poor deluded, borderline insane, ‘Henry Brandling’ who is the subject of Peter Carey’s gripping 2012 novel The Chemistry of Tears, in which he travels to Germany from Northumbria to have a giant clockwork duck made for his ailing son, then it’s no wonder Wilkie wanted to keep his distance. My suspicion, founded on absolutely nothing, is that Wilkie wanted Charles Ward along because they were both enthusiastic visitors to local prostitutes (in Rome, Paris and beyond), as were Wilkie and Dickens. But Henry (as seen in The Chemistry of Tears) would have been, in Wilkie’s eyes, a bit of a prig.
Wilkie and Henry were marching hard, despite all that hot lobster and clotted cream, to get to Land’s End. (‘The Land’s End!’ raved Wilkie. ‘There is something in the very words that stirs us all.’) He pretends that he has visited St Michael’s Mount (‘so well known to readers of all classes … that they will surely be relieved rather than disappointed if these pages exhibit the distinguished negative merit of passing the Mount without notice’); and skips along the coast from Lizard Point to Land’s End almost without comment. He does, though, give a passing nod to ‘the beautiful coast scenery at Lamorna Cove’, and I make a brief detour there with Anna – who has joined me for this stretch – so we can explore the place where the surrealist artist, writer and mystic Ithell Colquhoun lived and worked.
Footnotes Page 8
