Away BACK To Lamorna

A beautiful aquatint of Lamorna Cove by Geoffrey Sneyd Garnier (Penlee Museum & Gallery, Penzance)

We've just come back from a week in Cornwall and there's a little bit of a story to why we stayed where we did. It only seems like a couple of years since we were last there, but I see from my blogpost about it that it was April 2012! That first time, we stayed in the second house from the left in the terrace (above), but we saw that the next-door house was much nicer than the one we were in. Through the large bay windows we couldn't help but notice beautiful paintings on the walls, stacks of lovely china in the alcoves and attractive furniture. In fact we even found ourselves at an auction on the same day as next-door's tenants (at David Lay in Penzance -- very good) and later we saw all their beautiful purchases laid out in their window (this made a strong impression on me as success at an auction is something I value highly). It turned out to be possible to rent that next-door house for holidays and so this time it was us in the beautiful house, which we now know is called Cove House.

Cove House (on the left with two bay windows and extension)

In the comments book, someone had described the house as 'Kettles Yard by the sea' and it certainly has that flavour. There's enough modern stuff to enable life to be lived more or less as normal (hot water, big cooker, small TV and so on) but otherwise one feels one has passed through a membrane into the past.

I liked the old flags used as curtains in the bathroom and the stacks of chunky Portmerion mugs with Bewick prints on them in the kitchen.

There was a wonderful lamp with prints clipped to the shade -- too frail to use but splendid to look at:

Dora makes a determined stand for modernity

My favourite object in the house was this strange little figure:

There was a brand name on the back, or perhaps it was even a marketing slogan, but I forgot to make a note of it. If anyone knows anything about her mysterious ballbearing anatomy, please leave me a comment about it.
     The best thing about Cove House is really its location, right down by the sea in front of the little harbour (and, necessary evil, the car park) at Lamorna Cove. You can have your feet in the sea in half a minute, or you can be sitting in the little enclosed garden in even less time. The sea performed a full repertoire for us, from emerald calm to silvery seething to foamy waves -- always mesmerising.

The whole of the Cove is privately owned and changed hands recently, causing some anxiety. Parking is very strictly overseen, although a parking place comes with the house booking (plus another one in the tiny garage, if you should happen to drive a miniature car). I have very fond memories of having the crab and fish soup at the cafe decades ago when I spent two Christmases in St Ives with my mum -- they still serve the soup but the bowl of it that I had this week wasn't the splendid rich concoction of memory (and some reviewers on TripAdvisor seem to agree with me). But times change. As do I -- against my better judgment, here are a couple of photos of me from the first time I went to Cornwall, in the mid-Eighties. Note the legwarmers...

On one of the front windows of Cove House is a little notice, part of the advertising of it as a holiday rental:

This intrigued me greatly. I adore Arnold Bennett's Potteries novels and it was exciting to think that we were staying in a house he once stayed in -- although having tried to psych myself up to a pitch of 'resonance' with AB, I decided in the end that it's impossible to get a real sense of a person's presence from being in a place they once were. Still, he probably slept in the same bedroom and looked out at the very same view. I decided, as soon as I got home, to try to research his visit (or perhaps visits) in more detail. Stop here if you don't want to wade into a long episode of sleuthing...
     In the postcard on the window (above), which is dated 1908, Cove House is not actually there. To begin with there were only three houses in the terrace -- Cove House was built later. You can see that the building materials are a little different in the earlier photo of the house exterior. And the little extension was built later still. This is borne out by comparing this map, from the decade of 1900-1910...

The three houses in the terrace are just to the left of the footbridge. Although there's hard-standing for another house, there isn't actually a building there

...with this one from the 1960s:

Cove House has now been built and is named on the map

Alas, I haven't found a map for the decades in between so can't pinpoint exactly when the house was built. It was probably between about 1910 and 1920, I think.
     Here's an old photo of Cove House before the garage extension was built:

Now here's a postcard from the Sixties, with the garage now added:

The whole cove had been developed by this stage, with a car park, sea wall and slipway. The cafe has been created on the left as well. But I think that Cove House was perhaps also run as a tea room in the 1930s.
     In her biography of Arnold Bennett of 1974, Margaret Drabble says that Bennett came down to Cornwall for a six-week stay in July and August 1930, right at the end of his life (he would die of typhoid from drinking tap water in Paris the following March). He came with his partner, the actress Dorothy Cheston -- they don't seem to have brought their four-year-old daughter Virginia with them. He had just finished his last (full) novel, Imperial Palace, an epic contemporary story built around the running of the Savoy Hotel. Bennett was a celebrity and there was interest in where he had chosen to spend his holiday:

Birmingham Daily Gazette, 18 August 1930

Shortly after Bennett's death, this letter appeared in the Staffordshire Sentinel (27 April 1931):

It's this letter that makes me think that Cove House functioned as a tea room -- the 'unpretentious little cottage, one of a row, facing the water'. As a publisher myself, it's exciting to imagine Bennett sitting in our holiday cottage correcting his proofs!
     Although Imperial Palace was Bennett's last completed novel, when he returned to London in September (following a short cruise on a friend's yacht), he began another novel, Dream of Destiny, which he would not finish. In this, he has a character declare:

And in a letter from Cornwall to his nephew Richard, Bennett wrote, 'On the whole, this is certainly the best English holiday I have ever had, and one of the very cheapest.' He went on:

Later in the holiday, at the end of July 1930, the couple moved up to Trewoofe (pronounced 'Trove'), a comfortable house at the top of the lane that leads down to Lamorna Cove, owned by the Shaws. Their daughter was the excellent painter Dod Procter.
     Bennett's final verdict on his Cornwall staycation (which, as far as I know, was his only visit to the county) comes in a further letter to his nephew:

And I agree with every word of that.

'Green Sea, Lamorna Cove' by Dame Laura Knight -- the sea was even greener than this during our stay

The green sea, and Porthmeor Beach, seen through the window of one of the studios in the St Ives School of Painting, last week

If you'd like to stay in Cove House yourself, you'll find all the details here: http://www.lamornacovehouse.com/ (btw, none of the above is intended to 'advertise' the house, it's just written out of my interest in a lovely place!)

Summer catch-up

Bum by Pauline Boty, 1966

 Bum, indeed, the summer is nearly over and even though I have been at work, as normal, through most of it, I've still got that deep-rooted 'back to school' feeling. It's intensified, of course, by my kids actually having to go back to school and there have been new blazers and bags and shoes to buy. Going back to school feeling spruced up and in some sense renewed is important, I think.

Pauline Boty, 1938-1966

I haven't been blogging over the summer, which I very much regret, but my Photoshop expired and without Photoshop I was stymied: no piccies, no blog. Now I've got Photoshop again and all is well. So here's a quick catch-up of what I've done of late.
     Way back at the end of July we made a pilgrimage to Wolverhampton to see the Pauline Boty exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. It's still on, until 16 November 2013, and is really worth a visit. There are very few female Pop artists, largely because of the sexist state of affairs in art schools and on the art scene generally in the 50s and 60s. Pauline Boty went to Wimbledon College of Art and then went on to the Royal College of Art to specialise in stained glass. She was there from 1958-61 and got to know Peter Blake and David Hockney, among other artists. The interplay of influence is particularly strong with Peter Blake. She was beautiful and iconoclastic and probably would have had a career as an actress or television star if she hadn't died of cancer at the age of 28. She refused treatment as she was pregnant and didn't want to harm her child. I love her paintings which are so sexy and joyful, full of portraits of her idols -- Monroe, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Elvis -- through which she seems to connect herself to them. Bum, above, was her last painting, commissioned as part of the stage set for Oh Calcutta!. More on her here.

     Wolverhampton Art Gallery was a great place with an excellent contemporary collection including a fantastic set of paintings of America by Lisa Milroy. There was also a really good touring show of Ron Mueck sculptures which is also on until the beginning of November (last day Nov 2nd).

Jonathan Slinger as Hamlet in the RSC's current production

While we were up in the West Midlands we took the opportunity to see Hamlet at the RSC in Stratford, with Jonathan Slinger as Hamlet. It was riveting. I last had anything to do with Hamlet when I did it for O level decades ago, but apart from the incredibly famous lines that crop up all the time, the whole play seemed lodged in my memory, so my teacher must have done a good job at the time. I enjoyed it very much. When we got back from the theatre to our hotel nearby there was trouble. We'd got ourselves two interconnecting rooms (for four of us) and on the way out my hubby had been extra vigilant and put the chain on the inside of one of the doors before exiting through the other one. Unfortunately, when we came back we opened one of the interconnecting doors to go back through to the other room and it caused a vacuum effect which sucked the corresponding door in the other room shut. There's only a handle on the room side of each of these facing doors, so there was now no way to enter the second room. D had to go down and confess what had happened and a chap came up to help. His only idea was to try to shoulder the interconnecting door open but he couldn't budge it. Then a supervising woman arrived, rather cross, and she managed (quite easily) to hook the chain off the door from the outside (which doesn't say a whole lot for their usefulness as a security device) and we got back in. We heard her outside the door saying, 'Why couldn't you have done that, Nathan?' and then huffing about 'stupid kids', whereas in fact they were innocent and only suffering the embarrassment of their Dad getting them locked out of their room.
     A few days after this escapade we set off again, this time just me and the kids, down to St Ives. D had to stay behind to oversee our unending (and behind-schedule) building work. I was daunted by the 300-mile drive down to Cornwall so we broke the journey at Stonehenge. We decided not to go and see the stones themselves, having read sad reports that suggested you're just as well off having a good look from the road as you drive past. Instead we holed up in a nice new chain hotel at the services and spent the rest of the day doing collages. This was almost the best day of the whole summer for me. I really enjoyed sitting with my kids cutting and tearing up the bag of mags I'd brought and sticking the bits down. I promised not to go into which of us did what, but our efforts are below. One of us did two. I was interested to see that two of us picked out the same foxy (and used it similarly). Doing this made me very happy -- but they got bored before I did (and made me hurry up -- I would have gone on for hours, given the chance).

It was almost worthy of the epithet 'Ballardian' to be spending the night at a services, and lord knows I've been waiting for anything in my life to be remotely 'Ballardian' for long enough (it probably isn't something one should hope for) but I enjoyed the mild strangeness of it. The next day saw us back in the unending stream of traffic heading for England's furthest corner, but with a pleasing sense of having stolen a march on at least some of the cars. In St Ives we had rented a house right at the top of the steepest hill in town, just near the Leach Pottery, which I'm afraid we didn't visit because I didn't think the kids would enjoy it and it's a bit dry for me too, to be honest. Walking back up that hill most days nearly killed me but made me feel damned virtuous. And I didn't eat an ice cream all week, even though the kids were almost fainting with pleasure at jaffa-cake ice cream and all the rest.

You could walk down to the sea through the most beautiful cemetery I know, on Barnoon Hill, where Alfred Wallis is buried in a grave made by Bernard Leach that always reminds me of a biscuit tin.

I wouldn't mind being in a biscuit tin if I could spend eternity here.

We had a nice walk along the cliffs at Lamorna and we went to the fabulous beach at Gwithian Towan a couple of times. There wasn't much on at Tate St Ives but we went anyway. We had fantastic scones steaming hot straight from the oven at the Tea Room, right on the harbour front and a very delicious evening meal at Black Rock -- I would certainly recommend it (maybe not for small children as quite sophisticated menu, but not at all formal).

Even though I've been to St Ives four or five times before I realised I'd never been on the Island before (the little rocky headland at the heart of the town -- photos no good, so not shown) so we had a good rake around there.

And on the jetty as well. We even saw the seal that swims round the harbour (didn't get a photo) but I couldn't see whether it was the old one-eyed seal who we used to always see when Mum and I went to St Ives for Christmas a couple of times in the 80s. It was a little sad to be back in St Ives without Mum but it was good to be reminded of the times we had together there. In truth, the town at the height of summer now is completely different to how it used to be at Christmas almost three decades ago. I still had a laugh remembering how my Mum loved to say 'the Digey' and some of the other quaint St Ives street names in a cod Birmingham accent.

Some things don't change. Barbara Hepworth's studio was still exactly the same, with the same four coats hanging on the back of the door (not visible in my pic). They've made it into more of a destination now, with a proper entrance (at least I don't remember that from before) but it was still beautiful to be in her creative space.

jumpers on the jetty

Since we came back from St Ives, we've just had a couple of days out in London: RA Summer Exhibition (very stimulating and inspiring, as ever), Laura Knight and the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery (I must see Summer in February about Laura Knight and Alfred Munnings but I think it will have to be a DVD now. The book the film is based on is a lovely read -- recommended if you love art and Cornwall). Paper at the Saatchi Gallery is the best thing I've ever seen at Saatchi (on till 3 November 2013), even if I am firmly on 'Team Nigella'.

Pianos-pipas n17 by Marcelo Jacome

Two of a series of Portraits Cliniques by Eric Manigaud -- exquisite large-scale pencil drawings

Also at the Saatchi Gallery was a small survey of contemporary British art and a show sponsored by Hugo Boss which had an amazing interactive work. You projected your own shadow onto the wall and then falling (digital) marks that fell constantly down the wall filled in any little bowl-like spaces that your shadow made -- and you could throw the marks up in a shower as well. It was beautiful.

Me with falling 'net'

I had the best time in Selfridges with my daughter when we 'dared' to go onto the designer floor and actually look at the posh clothes. As I habitually look like an extra from Worzel Gummidge, it's a wonder we weren't thrown out, but I expect they thought I was some sort of minder for the beautiful model who was with me. We (well, she) had a treat of a fro-yo from the Pinkberry shop in the Food Hall. I got a free taster of the salt caramel flavour frozen yogurt which was mindblowing. Here's what she got:

just don't think about the price... very lovely the fro-yo was too, specially the chocolate muesli topping.

Finally we went to see What Maisie Knew at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill Gate, which, it being a Tuesday night, was full of rather grumpy elderly people shouting out to other elderly people to be quiet during the adverts. The film was a very impactful interpretation of the Henry James novel (brilliant novel), set in contemporary New York, with Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan and gorgeous Alexander Skarsgård. Onata Aprile is fantastic as Maisie, passed from adult to adult and constantly told that she is loved until the words ring almost completely hollow.

Onata Aprile as Maisie