Petroc Trelawny is a much loved Radio 3 presenter: urbane, warm, witty, knowledgeable and never patronising. And with a name like his, the Cornish roots are obvious.
Now, I have a dear friend who, like Trelawny has deep ancestral ties with Cornwall. She now lives in Penryn where I have stayed with her several times. When I boarded the big GWR train from Paddington to Truro in September, I took newly published Trelawny’s Cornwall to her as a thank-you-for-having-me gift. Like me, she is life-long music maker and Radio 3 buff so it seemed a perfect fit. Of course I couldn’t resist reading the opening pages before I gave it to her which meant – inevitably – that I had to buy another copy for myself because he drew me in hook, line and sinker, as a Cornish fisherman might say.
It’s not an easy book to categorise because it seamlessly blends travelogue, memoir, history, geography, economics and a lot more. And I learned a huge amount as I walked and drove through England’s most southerly and westerly county with this man, youngest of five brothers, who went to school in Helston after his father retired from the Army and moved the family “home” to Cornwall.
He leads us through Helston with its attractive buildings, tells us about the Flora Dance and the silly (but very catchy!) song which made it famous, He’s a bit of a railway nerd so he tells us about the Cornish stations and lines closed as the result of the 1963 report by Richard Beeching, acknowledging ruefully that although the cuts were heartbreaking for local communities they did enable the rest of the pretty extensive national network to thrive and develop. He visits some of these stations or their sites. Today, if they haven’t been demolished and built over, some are cafes or community centres thus still serving local people. And, of course, we marvel at Brunel’s railway bridge across the Tamar, which incidentally Trelawney tracks to its source a few miles south of Bude.
I had no idea that Cornwall was once the country’s, if not the world’s, communication centre when cables were laid on sea beds in the late 19th century so that people could send messages to America, India and Australia in just a few minutes. Much later came satellite dishes named after characters in Arthurian legend although most of the Cornish ones are no longer operational. We stand with Trelawny on the wind-swept cliffs and marvel.
Mining, formerly Cornwall’s industrial mainstay, is another dominant strand and he’s very good on how and when the industry developed, what brought about its demise and the situation today. There is lithium in Cornwall and it’s essential for car and other batteries. At present it has to be imported. Can one of the start-up entrepreneurs Trelawny talks to (he’s every inch a journalist and interviews many people in this book) find an economic way of extracting it in Cornwall?
He introduces us to personalities such as John Betjeman, whose father had a holiday home in Cornwall so his son wrote about it, later bought a house of his own and died in the county. I was glad to see Charles Causley in the mix too. He was a wonderful poet but oddly underrated. I used, incidentally, to teach Betjeman and Causley together as required by the O level syllabus we were using in the 1980s. Perhaps Trelawny studied the same set of poets when he did his O levels at Helston. He was in one of the last cohorts to take O levels before the introduction of GCSE. He then chose not to go to university but to develop his ambition to be a broadcaster by taking a job and learning the ropes as he went.
Whether you know Cornwall or not, this book is richly compelling. And once you’ve read it you will – I guarantee – want to hop on God’s Wonderful Railway, or into the car headed for A30, and get down there. Happily, I’m booked to visit my friend again in March for another Cornwall fix.
Susan’s Bookshelves was originally a 2021 lockdown project, suggested by my daughter-out-law who thought that as I read widely, compulsively and a lot, it would make sense to write about the books which grab me – for whatever reason and in whatever circumstances. So that’s what I did. Nearly four years later I have written over 200 of these blogs, ranging across fiction, non-fiction, biography, several centuries and many countries. The only theme is that whatever it is, it took my fancy or drew me back for a re-read. And I’m open to anything except fantasy. Spare me dragons, witches, elves, and unicorns, please. From time to time I wonder whether the idea has run its course but whenever I mention that my regular readers tell me to carry on, so I do. This is the last for 2024 (during which I have gobbled 130 books, although only 52 found their way here) so Happy New Year to you all and, of course, happy reading. See you on 01 January 2025.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
