White Horse by Kate Mole.

Yesterday I walked another bit of the South-West Coast Path, from Praa Sands round to Marazion.  I was with a friend, who is aiming to complete the entire circuit of the path, from Minehead to Poole Harbour.  He does bits of it as and when he can, and invites people to accompany him if they live locally, or are keen walkers, or just feel like doing it with him.  This was a short section, only about six miles – well, short for him; about the right distance for me to walk comfortably. 

So we set off, on a fine blowy August morning, leaving behind the surfers and swimmers and paddlers and family encampments on the long beach, and enjoying the warm air, the well-marked path, and the general sense of freedom and physical well-being that comes with a day out by the sea.  We took in Bessy’s Cove, and revelled in the view at Cudden Point.  We ate the occasional blackberry from the hedges which, in a week or so, would be smothered in ripe fruit.  We chatted about various things as we walked: my friend told me all about what was happening at his office, and what his children were doing in Canada.  He also disclosed that his mother was not well, though she wouldn’t tell him what might be the matter or what she was doing about it.  She was a very private person, I knew, and a very independent one, and I said that she would probably check herself into a hospital or a nursing home, or whatever the case demanded, when she thought the time was right, and then she’d tell him what was going on.  He readily agreed that this was exactly what he thought she’d do, and when it happened, he said, gloomily, he would be the one who’d have to clear out her house and her things.  She lived in a big place near Carnon Downs, and had never thrown anything away – the house was full to bursting point with books, needlework equipment of all kinds, china and glassware, and a huge collection of local memorabilia.  Going through all this, he said, would take him several years…

At around one o’clock our inward sensations suggested lunch would be a good idea, and we decided to stop at the next village and have something to eat.  Just as we had agreed this, the next village came into view.  It was Perranuthnoe.

Perranuthnoe.  The name seemed familiar.  I got the map out and had a look – I didn’t think I had ever been there.  We left the path and walked up the road to the village, and I didn’t recognise anything I knew.  We stopped at an excellent cafe and sustained ourselves with sandwiches and tea.  We sat outside, and chatted briefly with the proprietor.  And all the time, the word, Perranuthnoe, Perranuthnoe, tolled like a bell inside my head.

I walked out of the cafe in a dream.  We retraced our steps down to the coast, and turned right, past a field of cabbages, and along the tamarisk-fringed path, the sea loud on our left.  We walked in single file, in silence for a while.  The scents of seaweed and sun-warmed earth were strong.  The tide was almost fully in and the waves beat on the grey slate-shingle beach, behind the hedge full of blackened sedges.  And it was here, along this stretch of shore, that I remembered why Perranuthnoe was familiar to me, even though I’d never been there.  It took me most of the way back to Marazion to go through it all in my head.  It was my friend, who walked in front of me quietly humming the tune of Cornwall My Home, who had reminded me of it, by his mention of clearing his mother’s house and her things.  It made me remember all about my granny, the stories about her, the life she lived, what she told me, and what happened when we had to clear her place.

My granny was born in 1894.  Which was not a good year to be born in because it made her 20 years old, in 1914.  Just in time for the First World War.  It could have been worse – she could have been born a man, but then most probably I wouldn’t have been here to hear the story and tell the tale, would I?  Just like all her friends’ children and grandchildren aren’t.

A lost generation, they called them.  But they weren’t the only ones lost – it meant that their children were lost too, that they didn’t happen.  This was the fate of my granny’s friends.  They were all brought up together near Penzance, a nice group of them, girls and boys, went to a good school, the boys went up to Oxford after that.  Then the war came and they all rushed off to enlist as quickly as they could.  She was engaged to one of them, Roddy he was known as, but it always seemed to me from what she said that it could have been any of them really, she could have taken her pick.  They were all just as likeable; decent honest chaps, not world-changers maybe, but they would all have made perfectly respectable lawyers, accountants, doctors, industrialists.  They would have contributed to society, been part of the nation’s resources of talent, one of its stores of excellence.  They would have written books, opened concert halls, made medical discoveries and profited industry.  They would have married their female friends and had healthy children and brought them up with the same sort of values they had been taught themselves.  One of them, not my granny’s fiancé, was very much taken with America, having decided that the US of A was the place where the big things were happening these days, and he intended to emigrate there, to New York.  The others were all invited to spend holidays with him, and they and their families would have visited him and stayed with him and seen the sights.  All of them would have kept in touch, wherever they ended up, and stood godfather to each other’s children when they came along.  But they missed these pleasant and useful futures, because they were all wiped out, blown to bits, one after the other, mostly before even the end of 1914, all the promise of their lives to come abruptly ended and their progeny unborn.  And my granny was left behind to deal with it.

She went to be a nurse in a big London hospital in 1915, to do what she could.  Not a nice job, dealing with men with their arms and legs blown off, their faces ruined, men blind, deaf or disfigured, or their minds wrecked beyond any healing.  But she did it, and she survived the war and its horror and the mean sort of poverty it created as well.  There was a shortage of everything, she said: food, soap, medicines, free time, healthy men, fresh air, decency.  After it was over she went back home, and in the spring of 1919 she fell victim, as did many others, to the influenza epidemic.  This in fact killed my great-grandparents, whom my granny briefly nursed.  But there was no shortage of people to catch it from.  My great-grandfather died raving about the rats,they said, how it was the rats in the trenches, who had grown fat from eating the corpses of the men killed there, who had spread the influenza germs.  It wasn’t influenza, or not anything that we would now think of as ‘the flu’.  It was haemorrhagic pneumonia, that turns your lungs to mush in about an hour, the stuff of nightmares almost as much as the war itself is.  It struck people down so that they collapsed like ninepins, and pretty often never recovered, the strong as well as the weak.  I read something a while ago that said it was the people with strong immune systems who were the worst off, because their bodies’ defence systems went into overdrive to ward off the terrible infection, and so they died of a sort of self-generated shock, while the weaker people, infants and the elderly, didn’t react so badly.  Whatever it was, my granny got it, and though she was in hospital a long time and not right for ages afterwards, she did get better.

But in the autumn of 1919 she was barely out of convalescence, still white and wambly and depressed and unsure of her wellbeing, along with a good segment of the rest of the population.  She was in Cornwall, and it was damp and foggy.  She had inherited her parents’ house, and she had some money though she would need to go to work eventually, and she seemed to have nothing very pressing to do.  When Remembrance Day, 11 November, came around, she decided she couldn’t stand staying in town and seeing the band go by, and hearing the church services, and seeing the processions and listening to the music, all of which were designed to remember the dead, when she remembered the dead every day of her life.  These things either made her cry, and she had cried oceans of tears already and decided it did no good, or else it made her not cry, which was worse.  She felt as if she was dead inside, as if she had died already, but was for some reason obliged to go on living.  Whereas for her friends it was exactly the opposite – they were actually dead, but she felt their presence was alive more than the real people.  She herself was the odd one out; she should have died too and then she could be with them.  So she took herself down to the coast, to Nanjizal Bay.

Now I’ve been there, often enough.  I can see that place quite clearly, in my mind’s eye, and I can stand there with my granny… From the cliffs above here, on a clear day, you can see the Isles of Scilly in the far distance, with the naked eye.  One of her dead friends had had a house on St Martins.  I know where that was, too, set above the sparkling blue and white bay.  I saw it, a long time ago – it was dilapidated then, the paint peeling and the window frames rotting in the salt air.  It’s been knocked down now.  But in my granny’s youth, it was in its heyday.  She said the whole party of them, when they could arrange the trip, used to go out there and stay at the house, taking a parent or two with them to preserve the proprieties.  They used to sail, and play on the beach, and go fishing, and cook their catch on the verandah outside the house.  She remembered the white sands of the beach there, the tiny fields with their tall hedges to protect the crops from the wind, the shallow blue sea round the island, and the lovely sense that really the whole place is almost part of the sea itself – it was just this bit that happened to be sticking up into the air.  Someone had told her once that, if you waited for the right state of the tide and if you were over about five foot six, you could walk from St Martins to the next island, it was so shallow.  You didn’t even need to swim. 

Standing on Nanjizal beach my granny couldn’t see the islands, but she knew where they were.  It seemed to her that over there, it was always summer, with the sun shining on the white sand.  Warm, and welcoming.  Perhaps her dead friends were there, she thought.  Here, it was the opposite – it was cold, and dark, and there was nothing to do, no one to live for.  She had lived all through the war and the others were dead; she had even survived the pandemic.  Perhaps if she tried to walk to the Scillies from here, she wouldn’t even drown.  Or if she did, what did it matter?  Who would care?  Who would even know?  One more death could hardly matter when there had been so many millions of them.  So she set off into the sea, in all her clothes, looking for the lost land of Lyonesse, or her lost friends, or oblivion, whichever happened…

When she came round she was in some cottage hospital, or I’m not sure, maybe it was just a private house, I never really discovered.  She was babbling about Perranuthnoe.  She had been fished out of the sea by a local farmer, who was alerted by some children playing on the beach.  He waded in and towed her back to the beach, fetched help, saw she was all right or at least, that she was breathing, and went back to what he had been doing.   He didn’t want anything more to do with the matter, or to hear her story, or be thanked.  He had his own troubles and he’d heard enough of everyone else’s.  She was off her head for quite a bit, asking how she’d got to Perranuthnoe, and a lot of other stuff they couldn’t understand.  But they were nice to her, and let her stay there while they looked after her, and she was kept warm and soothed in a mindless, unenquiring sort of way which was probably just what she needed.  Bit by bit she got over it, and realised that while she was out of it she’d had this dream, or something, about the story of Jan Trevilian, and how he was the only one to escape the inundation of the Isles of Scilly when everyone else was killed.  How he had ridden his white horse all the way to Perranuthnoe, and been the first of one of Cornwall’s most famous families.  She thought the story was most likely bunk, that there wasn’t a land of Lyonesse between Lands End and the Isles of Scilly, and if there was, why should only one man have got out?  And the white horse, well, you can see plenty of white horses on the sea just there almost any day you care to go and look.  The whole thing was a fairy story, a lie, just like a lot of other things she and everyone else had been told, and it all only came into her head because she had been thinking about the Isles of Scilly, or because she saw the white horses, or because it was on 11 November that the inundation was supposed to have taken place, or some other stupid reason.  And anyway it didn’t matter, it hadn’t changed anything, everything was just as bad as before and all she had accomplished was to make herself even iller than she’d been before plus inconvenience a lot of people.  And a stupid story about a white horse had no relevance at all. 

Well, my granny got better, obviously, or at least to some extent she did.  I don’t think anyone ever could, completely, get over something like that having happened.  But she did pull herself together.  She went back to Penzance when she could, and she resumed her job, in an office it was, and got on with things.  She married my granddad in 1924.  He was a travelling salesman based in Plymouth, and had been in the Navy.  I don’t know if she loved him, or if she married him because he asked her and she didn’t want to turn down the chance of marriage and a family.  He was not the sort of person, one gathers, that she would have married before the war, or if her parents had been alive, but the class system was different in those days, wasn’t it?  Anyway they had three children and got along somehow or another, and she lived till she was nearly ninety.  She went back to her office job once the children were old enough, and she brought them up pretty much on her own as he was away working so much, so she probably didn’t have much time to sit brooding about her old friends, or the Isles of Scilly, or what might have been.  When they took holidays they went to a friend’s caravan on the edge of Exmoor, or to a little farm in Dorset.  She was a completely unsentimental person.  A kind person, always, but very matter of fact – so much so that some people found her hard to deal with, I think.  She had no time for folderols, whimsical imaginings, or tall stories.  She didn’t read much; when she had any leisure she would do handwork of various sorts, or crosswords.  Her house was plain, clean, and functional, and there were no photographs in it, or albums, or anything from the past at all, really.  She had obviously put a lot behind her and left it there.  I only heard all of this just before she died, when for some reason she decided, after a whole lifetime of leaving the past in the past, that she needed to tell someone about all this, and she thought I was harmless enough to tell.  But the bit that came back to me most vividly, that day on the coast path when we were on the outskirts of Marazion, was this.  My granny’s house had no ornaments in it at all – dust-traps, she called such things, and if anyone gave her one for a present she would put it away then send it to jumble.  But when we turned her place out after she died, at the back of the top drawer in the tallboy next to her bed, we found a little packet.  A brown paper packet, several layers.  And inside it was a model, very small, very delicate, in alabaster I think it was, every detail perfect, down to its hooves and its mane.  A tiny, white, horse.

Kate Mole

Image: View from cliffs in Cornwall with sea pink in the foreground and wide beaches and waves stretching away in the distance from dd