Chapter 93

For our long-anticipated first summer holiday together as a couple, I’d been planning for a while (since before Easter, probably) to take Julie on a camping trip to the seaside in Cornwall; I’d never been to the Duchy, and with some subtle questioning I’d sneakily discovered that Julie hadn’t either, despite living in the next-door county all her life. It would be a first for both of us to cross the Tamar.

By asking around fellow students and my lecturers (it was actually Prof’s secretary who first recommended Cornwall when I was making enquiries as to where people went on holiday), consulting a couple of travel agents before we left Cardiff, and a little more sneakiness (all in the good cause of trying to give my darling a lovely surprise), I’d decided that we should take the train down to Penzance and then camp for a fortnight at Sennen Cove, close to Land’s End. On balance it seemed to offer beautiful seaside scenery without being awash with other holiday-makers, who were more likely to be found either at the long sandy surf-swept beaches of the north coast, or around the small rocky fishing inlets of the south coast and the Lizard Peninsula.

(Of course, a childhood diet of Famous Five and their seaside adventures at ‘Kirrin Island’, which I’d always assumed was a fictionalised version of somewhere in Cornwall, had been part of the appeal – as was the fact that, like my Dad, I was rather fond of Cornish Dairy Ice Cream. It wasn’t until quite a few years later, when our kids were reading Enid Blyton, that I discovered that ‘Kirrin’ was based on Corfe in Dorset, and that Walls made their ice cream in Gloucester, not Cornwall!)

Okay, so the area wasn’t very developed for visitors; the booklet that I’d received from the Cornish Tourist Board was pretty skimpy on suggestions for things to do if the weather was unfavourable – other than the famous signpost at Land’s End and the “First and Last Inn”, a centuries-old smugglers haunt, there certainly weren’t the many ‘tourist attractions’ that there are in Cornwall today – but it also seemed particularly relaxed and informal, which is just what I wanted. Yeah, it had been a lot of fun sharing the caravan with our friends, but I quite fancied taking the love of my life away on our own with no distractions, and plenty of places where we could be just the two of us. After all, we were about to be separated for nearly a year, so I wanted plenty of happy memories to sustain us as we began our new careers three hundred miles apart.

During my research process, I had been warned by several people, including Dad, that it was ALWAYS a very bad idea to travel to or from Cornwall at the weekend in the summer, so we had taken our time after finishing at the vegetable factory, and spent the rest of Sunday at my parents working out the camping kit (and enjoying one of Mum’s roast lunches), and, after hitting the bank as soon as it opened at 10 o’clock to deposit our pay cheques, we headed for the railway station on the Monday morning, 4^th August.

It was already another hot day. We were both wearing shorts and tee shirts; we’d packed a pair of jeans and an anorak each, but were otherwise trying to travel light.

Our rucksacks were bulging; I had the cotton bag containing the two-man tent bungied to the outside of mine, Julie had the groundsheet and picnic rug strapped on to hers. We’d borrowed my parents’ single burner Camping Gaz stove and a set of three aluminium pans with lids and detachable handles, rounding off our catering equipment with a couple of sets of melamine bowls, plates and mugs and cheap cutlery that Mum had picked up at Woolies for us. What with extra gas bottles, a couple of torches and spare batteries, Mum’s First Aid Kit in its little blue Boots The Chemist tin, our sponge bags, towels, more plastic bags for wrapping everything in to try and keep it waterproof, and a white plastic gallon container for water, there had been quite a pile on the sitting room floor for us to pack.

The long period of fine weather continued unchanged as we crossed the East Midlands; the sun was shining out of a blue sky and the countryside still looked fairly lush and green. It was pretty hot in the train with the sun glaring into the left-hand windows, but we were able to open the vents and get a pleasant breeze going.

Mum had kindly given us a couple of Tupperware containers of food – sandwiches and cut-up pork pie and haslet for our lunch, and a tin of pork luncheon meat (with the key sellotaped on) and a prepared salad for our evening meal. Julie had been entrusted with a Thermos vacuum flask of tea (milk in); having known me and my innate clumsiness for 21 years, Mum was not going to risk it with me! Julie also had the screw-top ex-Nescafe glass jar which contained our teabags.

We ate just after we had changed trains at New Street; the salad looked so good that we had it as part of lunch rather than saving it for later.

It was a slightly funny feeling knowing that the train we joined in Birmingham had come down from Newcastle – it was the route that I would follow if I was ever able to hop on the train down to Bristol again, and the next time I did travel that way, I would most likely have come all the way from Darlington.

After Birmingham, the train went through a brief thunderstorm. I just hoped that it was a temporary disturbance – my name would be mud if we had to spend the whole fortnight skulking in our tent because it was chucking it down outside. We had lived for three years in Cardiff so were used to carrying on as normal in the rain, but a ruined summer holiday was a different kettle of fish. Anyway, Julie didn’t seem at all worried; she was happy chattering away and looking forward to being just the two of us exploring somewhere new together.

The train stopped at Bristol Temple Meads, and again at Exeter Saint Davids – Julie had a momentary attack of guilt at being so close to her parents but not popping in to see them – and then we got to the coast as Dawlish Warren where there was (and still is) a fantastic three miles where the railway line runs along the sea wall and you get a completely uninterrupted view of the English Channel. The final stop was at Plymouth, where we had to change trains before crossing Brunel’s Tamar Bridge and finally entering Cornwall.

The last bit of the journey was a local stopping service and definitely seemed the longest part, and also the most old-fashioned – it even had a couple of pre-British Rail carriages with no corridor between compartments! It was almost possible to believe that the Famous Five would have travelled like this, with George’s dog Timmy hanging his head out of the window. It was just the steam locomotive that was missing.

We went through a number of places that we’d heard of, like Devonport, Saltash, Liskeard, Bodmin, Lostwithiel, St. Austell, Truro, Redruth and Camborne before the line emerged onto the coast for the last few miles to Penzance. We even spotted St. Michaels Mount over the water as we looked out to sea.

From Penzance railway station, it was just a matter of walking round the corner and hopping onto a number 1 bus for the eight mile journey along the A30 towards Land’s End, and remembering to get off just before the end of the journey. We actually went past the turn because it appeared before we expected it, but we got the driver to let us off at the next stop, walked down Cove Road for a few hundred yards and then cut off across the scrubby dunes to the field where the campsite was situated.

Trevedra Farm was (and is) a family-run campsite that had been going for almost twenty years, and judging by the wonderful view and easy access to the beach, it had a great future. Okay, it was indeed nothing too luxurious, but it was cheap and cheerful. (We took the kids back there for old times sake a few years ago, and it was fantastic. The owners have really invested in the facilities, and it’s now got all ‘mod cons’ without losing any of its friendliness and character.)

We got a very friendly Cornish welcome at the office / shop, were shown the toilets, shower block and drinking water taps, and were then pretty much left to our own devices to do as we please. There weren’t many rules, and we were able to find a little hollow in the dunes a little bit away from the main camping field, where a ring of stones suggested that other campers had enjoyed a small driftwood campfire and a slightly higher degree of privacy. We checked with the owner as we bought a pint of milk, and he was perfectly happy for us to be a little secluded from the others; as we didn’t have a car there were no issues about access.

We got the tent up remarkably quickly and efficiently with no injuries and no recourse to bad words; so it had been worth bothering with the trial run at home, even if at the time we had cursed the difficulty in folding it back up to the same size that it had arrived in, so it would fit back into its bag. We reinforced some of the tent pegs in the sand by putting medium-sized rocks on top of them; where the grass had built up a mat they seemed able to hold by themselves. Then I walked over to fill the plastic container with drinking water while Julie sorted out the cooking kit.

Cooking on the camping gaz stove was going to be interesting; with the lightweight aluminium pans, to avoid burning the food we had to be very careful not to have the gas turned fully on, and had to remember to keep stirring. We used the big lid and handle as a frying pan, the small pan with lid as our kettle, and the medium pan for cooking the main ingredients. Fortunately the campsite ran a small shop which sold the basics – milk, eggs, butter, bread – but also had a few extra essentials for forgetful campers. I had remembered to bring a tin-opener, but I had forgotten that although you can fry bacon and sausages using a fork, it takes a spatula or two spoons to safely remove an egg from the pan (unless you tip it onto the plate complete with all the grease). Luckily the shop had still been open that first evening when I needed a big spoon to stir the Batchelor’s Savoury Rice which was now going to augment our slices of tinned pork luncheon meat, and it hadn’t suffered from the pause in cooking while I went to buy a wooden spoon, and a wooden spatula when I saw it and had my memory jogged.

We took an after-dinner stroll to the washrooms to clean up our cooking equipment and top up the drinking water again; there was only a cold water tap for normal use, but you could put a 10p coin in a meter if you wanted hot. Fortunately we hadn’t got the pan too grubby, so cold water did the trick alright. Dropping the things off at the tent, we then walked over the dunes on to the beach and pulled off our shoes before enjoying strolling hand-in-hand at the edge of the sea, paddling in the last gasp of the waves as they came up the beach. Then we headed back to make a final cuppa and dive into our sleeping bags; not only had it had been a long day, but we wanted to celebrate being alone at last.

We immediately discovered that the tent was rather too small to be able to easily get undressed inside it unless you were a contortionist; but as we were well away from other people, it didn’t worry us to quickly strip off outside. We soon found that the ridge of the tent was just too low for Julie to be able to do her usual upright cowgirl tricks, but she’s nothing if not adaptable, so we managed very well.

Early the next morning, when the sun shone onto the canvas and woke us up, we both scuttled naked round to the back of the tent for a quick wee into the sand dunes, and returned to our makeshift bed. We soon discovered that we were too excited about being on holiday to get back to sleep, so we kissed and cuddled until Julie said that she wanted her morning cup of tea. We made that over the gas stove, drank it hot, and it still wasn’t yet half past six! There was no sign of life anywhere else on the camping field.

We pulled on our swimming togs and ran over the dunes to the beach; the sea was a ‘refreshing’ temperature and we were glad of our towels to wrap round us as soon as we got out of the water. The sun quickly began to warm up and we even took a little stroll up the beach, meeting and greeting a couple of early dog walkers, before returning to the tent to pull on our shorts and shirts.

At about eight o’clock, we wandered over to the little campsite shop to buy the makings for breakfast. The owner told us that the milkman had just been, and that the butcher would be over at eleven if we wanted to buy anything else.

“All local produce; we use him ourselves and his meat’s pretty good. This is his bacon I keep in the fridge; I’m afraid that we’re right out of sausages until he comes.”

Carrying our pint of fresh milk, half a dozen eggs, some butter, a couple of bread rolls, a paper bag of eight rashers of streaky bacon and a couple of tomatoes balanced on top, we headed back to our tent.

Being a man, I tried to pretend that I could use a frying pan over a gas stove; I had no problem turning the rashers of bacon with a fork or extracting them from the lid onto our plates. The embarrassing failure came in trying to balance a greasy fried egg on a wooden spatula and transfer it without loss. The first one landed in the sand next to the stove, and was judged uncleanable; my other half helped me with the second and third by gently holding it on the spatula with our spoons. The bacon was cold by now, the rolls untoasted, the tomatoes had been forgotten when it came to cooking so were raw, but it all tasted great – fresh air and being on holiday does wonders for the appetite!

We had our cup of tea some time afterwards – if I’d have had any sense I’d have boiled the water first, and then fried the bacon ... I now understood not only why normal frying pans had sloping sides, but also why they sold portable camping stoves with two burners.

We wandered back over to the camp shop just after eleven to find a little blue Bedford van, which turned out to be the mobile butcher. A small hand-written sign propped against the back door told us that he’d be at Trevedra on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. There was a small queue of other campers buying from him; we exchanged greetings with a few of them before our turn came. One of them asked if it was our first visit – it turned out that most of them had been here several times before, in fact two ladies said that they’d been meeting up here every summer for the last eight years!

The butcher had a nice little selection of meat on trays; Julie decided that the lamb chops looked especially good so we bought six small ones for our tea. We also invested in half a dozen sausages for breakfast the next morning; this was of course in the days before coolboxes were common, so we didn’t want to risk keeping anything longer than that in case it went off – a tummy upset on a camping holiday with the toilets a couple of hundred yards away seemed an especially bad thing.

He also had some Cornish pasties, which we thought would do very well for our lunch.

“Two pasties as well, please.”

“Do you want sweet or savoury?”

That floored us! I’d always assumed that a Cornish Pasty was the local equivalent of a pork pie but with some vegetable to make the meat go further, all protected in a pastry case to keep it intact as you made your way down the tin mine or carried your smuggled kegs of brandy up the cliffs to escape the waiting Excisemen.

(I know, I read far too many stories of Cornish tin miners, wreckers and smugglers as a child. Hey, that was part of the romance of choosing Cornwall for our holiday in the first place!)

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you can either have just skirt of beef, swede, potato and onion, or you can have one of my double-ended specials with afters, which has got a divider and apple at the other end for your second course.”

We decided to go for the ‘pasty with afters’ and he placed two in a paper bag for us.

“How do you tell which end is which?”

He chuckled as he explained.

“The hole to let the steam out is in the meat side; traditionally your wife would cut out your initial from the left-over pastry and stick it on the apple end so you could feel the difference in the dark, but I don’t have time for that!”

We paid him and thanked him. He turned to the next customer and we took our purchases back to the tent before going for a wander around the dunes and scrub to get to know the area (and work up an appetite).

The pasty was indeed very good, and we decided that we could stand having them for lunch three days a week. As we couldn’t swim for an hour after eating our pasty, we took a stroll down the beach to Sennen and bought some postcards at the beach café; they also sold stamps so we wrote our cards (but not to Julie’s parents) and treated ourselves to a choc-ice as a reward, before finding a post box and then strolling back to our tent to change out of our shorts and shirts and into our bathers.

The water was certainly warmer than the North Sea, and much clearer, so we enjoyed our dip and actually did some serious swimming in the deeper water rather than just larking about in the shallows as most other people on the beach seemed to be doing. The afternoon flashed by as we alternately swam and soaked up the sun.

The lamb chops for tea were indeed very good, even served with tepid Smash reconstituted mashed potato from a pack. Washing the ‘frying pan’ was harder; we ended up copying the Swallows and Amazons (or was it the Famous Five?) and scrubbing it round with sand first to mop up the fat, before boiling some water in the small pan for a mug of tea and using the leftover to wash out the big lid.

We went to bed before it was quite dusk, made love, and slept like a pair of logs until the rising sun hit the tent and lit it up. We nipped round the back of the tent to water the dunes and then put on our cossies for a wake-up swim in the sea.

For breakfast after our early morning dip we fried the sausages while drinking our first mug of tea; the first gas bottle died part way through, so Julie had to dig through my pack for another one. Having quickly learned from experience, our second cuppa came out of the flask once the egg was safely beside the sausages on each plate. Then we tidied up the tent, draped the sleeping bags over the ridge to air, and headed for the beach to find that we were almost the first there.

It was yet another lovely morning, not a cloud in the sky. At lunch time we strolled down to the beach café and bought some sandwiches and a mug of tea before lazing on the beach all afternoon.

Supper came out of a packet – as well as Savoury Rice in several flavours, Batchelor’s also manufactured the ‘Vesta’ range of dried meals. We both had a ‘Chow Mein with Crispy Noodles’, which went down perfectly well at the time. (Every time Julie and I enter a Chinese supermarket and smell the Monosodium Glutamate we are reminded of those days!) The washing up was certainly easier than after the lamb chops.

The next morning, we decided that we fancied some toast, so at eight o’clock we were down at the beach café as it opened for sausage, egg and beans on toast. They also had one of those fancy Italian coffee makers which produced lots of steam and gurgling noises, so after our pot of tea and marmalade on toast, we both had a cup of milky coffee and an iced bun as a treat.

The mobile butcher was there again; this time we paid more attention to what the other people were doing, and got the campsite owner to write our name on the paper bag containing our meat and keep it in his fridge until we needed it!

I needn’t have worried so much about the weather; it didn’t let me down – it was mostly hot and sunny the entire time. Not like the East Coast often was, where even if the sun was shining, you needed a sturdy canvas windbreak and to huddle in your towel after bathing until your skin was dry again! What wind there was seemed to come from the South, so we were sheltered from it down on the north-facing beach, and a couple of days when the temperature hit the low 80s, it was almost too hot. We even bought a couple of cold bottles of dandelion and burdock from the beach shop to keep our fluid intake up.

Three days after we got there we had a couple of thunderstorms, but they had been forecast and we could sense them building up and were safely in our tent out of the rain as soon as the first heavy drops fell. Otherwise it was the kind of lovely August weather that I’d hoped for.

We were camped so close to the beach that there was no point in our taking anything more than our bathing towels with us, and sometimes we just left them on the tent guyropes to await our return. We did have the sense, after the first couple of mornings, to make a second flask of tea as we had our breakfast, which saved firing up the Camping Gaz stove during the day.

As well as bathing in the clear waters of the sea, we also did quite a bit of soaking up the sun – we’d quickly found an even more private spot in the dunes and rough sea-grass behind the tent, away from the main paths through to the beach, and it didn’t take me a lot of persuasion for Julie to try topless sunbathing again.

Of course, with her being a natural blonde and having the fair skin to prove it, it was most important that she didn’t get sunburned. Which meant that her boobs needed properly coating with suntan lotion (she didn’t get on with tanning oils which just fried her skin), and checking frequently so they didn’t get too much exposure at once.

I offered myself as an applicant for the lotion applicant post, and was immediately interviewed and invited to give a practical demonstration of my lotion-applying skills.

We both enjoyed the process of anointing her chest so much that she almost forgot to remind me that her shoulders also needed doing. As I knelt up to reach them more easily, she became aware that Gustav was straining at my swimming trunks, which weren’t hiding much detail at all. She giggled, sat up and reached for her bikini top.

“I think I’ve probably had enough sun for the moment; let’s go and lie in the shade for a bit!”

It was a great deal easier to slip out of trunks and bikini bottoms inside the tent than it had been underpants and shorts, and we made love slowly and especially affectionately. As the love of my life pointed out afterwards, if we’d stayed in our sunbathing spot, we would probably have had much more of a quickie, so as to minimise the risk of being caught at it by one of the kids who were running around the dunes, and it wouldn’t have been anything like as good. The tent was a little stuffy, but there was at least plenty of time and privacy to appreciate and enjoy each other’s bodies.

Of course our holiday wasn’t all petting and passion. Much of it was effectively our honeymoon, yes, but not all of it.

We did do the tourist bit and visited Land’s End; it was only a mile away by road, although a little further on the winding coastal path. We had already bought some sticks of Rock at the Sennen beach shop as presents for our friends, but we saw some tea towels that we liked at the gift shop.

The one I liked most, and bought as a present for Dad, was printed with: