Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
REVIEW BY JOANIE WILLETT
Growing up in Cornwall has been indelibly etched throughout my social learning, which makes reading (and viewing) material about Cornwall tricky. The overwhelming most books, TV, and films are written about middle-class escape or escapism which, frankly, has no relatability to the Cornwall that I am from. Indeed, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I read a book (by Natasha Carthew) which resonated with my lived Cornish experience, and I realised the immense power of seeing one’s life reflected back on the page. Petroc Trelawny’s Trelawny’s Cornwall achieves this feat.
The book is part memoir, and part historical geek-out about the things and institutions that interested Trelawny as a child, and that helped to form who he became as an adult. So he tells us about his experience of, and historical research into, a range of institutions, economies, communities, and organisations. We are also introduced to his identity crises around his (extremely Cornish) name, and are encouraged to muse on the complicated relationships between place and home, that is bound up in being part of the Cornish diaspora.
This is not an introspective book. Instead, Trelawny situates his personal stories in superb, rich histories of Cornwall. He clearly had a massive sense of childhood curiosity, which he uses as a launch point to explore topics ranging from mining to the Flora Dance. He unfurls a Cornwall whose stories are being overwritten with other, visitor-related narratives. He tells us about the history of Falmouth town (did you know it had a Consulate until relatively recently? No? Me neither) or how Methodism got so huge, so attractive, and was still a force to be reckoned with in the ’80s. Trelawney brings together the sections of jigsaw about the Cornwall I was raised in, making it into a coherent picture.
His stories are wide- ranging, taking the reader far from St Martin on the Lizard Penisula, locating the Cornwall of his childhood in terms of events and people that make up the Cornwall of the present. This beautifully written and very readable book is about Petroc Trelawny. It will be an engaging and thought-provoking read for anyone interested in Cornwall, but it is also about me, and everyone else who grew up in Cornwall in the ’70s and ’80s. For that, I thank him.
Trelawny’s Cornwall
Petroc Trelawny
Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£22)
ISBN 978-1474625098
