Tag: St Ives

Cornwall’s Secret

On arrival at the log cabin, we were charmed by the interior and greeted by a sparkling blue winter sea view.

Winter became spring, as I completed the final edits of my novel: You Can’t Go It Alone. A holiday in February is now a romantic memory, but I must share a secret I discovered in Cornwall.

As a Valentine’s Day gift, my husband planned a winter holiday to Cornwall.  Severe weather warnings via every form of communication heralded the beginning of our adventure.  Why worry about Siberia when you live in the UK, and Cornwall is always warmer?

On arrival at the log cabin, the interior charmed us then distracted us with sparkling sea view. Fairy lights adorned the archway above luxurious leather sofas. The pine interior filled with rugs, cushions and rocking chairs reminded me of Norwegian interiors in style magazines. A cute, bespoke kitchen contained everything required to cook grilled Dover Sole in a butter sauce.  Cosy and warm in the cabin, we ignored the weather warnings broadcast on the television.

On the first day, we went to look at St Michael’s Mount, but it was closed.  No worries, I wanted to visit the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, as I adore The Hepworth in Wakefield – well she was a Yorkshire lass.  Alas, you guessed it, the museum was closed. Off next to Trengwainton Gardens but it was closed until Sunday. The bitter cold drove us back to the log cabin for the evening.

Glorious cliffs sculpted by time and nature: Land’s End

No one can close Land’s End, so we travelled to the famous landmark and planned to grab lunch there.  Land’s End is accessed through an entrance you would find at a theme park – so it could be closed.  We walked past the souvenir shops before we reached Land’s End.  Glorious cliffs chiselled by the elements and reminiscent of Hepworth’s sculptures greeted us. Lunch in The First and Last Inn was not possible as it was closed.  I wore two coats, two hats and a hood teamed with my waterproof trousers to keep out the arctic temperatures.

Mousehole is the ‘loveliest village in England’ according to DylanThomas.

Amused by the name ‘Mousehole’, we called at the village for a very late lunch. Quaint stone houses welcomed us in the sheltered harbour.  We ate cheese sandwiches in a friendly coffee shop tucked away at the end of the village.  Apparently, Dylan Thomas described Mousehole as ‘the loveliest village in England. And, there was an ice cream parlour called Jessie’s, so we ordered vanilla ice cream.

We stood in the amongst the silhouettes of people found in a Lowry painting.

Rejuvenated by our rest in Mousehole, we braved the cold to visit beaches. Golden white sand marked with endless footsteps greeted us at Sennen Cove. We rambled along the beach. Light showcased the beach in all its glory, and we stood in the amongst the silhouettes of people who had escaped from a Lowry painting.  The next day we hiked around the coast in St Ives and marvelled at the magical beauty of the golden light.  Sadly, our camera could not capture the texture of an artist’s brush.

We marvelled at the magical beauty of the light in St Ives

Winter is the best time to view the beaches of Cornwall. Forget the art galleries and tourist traps and enjoy nature’s treasures.  Step onto the beaches and walk inside a painting to enjoy nature’s pallet.  Snow fell as we drove home.  Thankfully, the Severn Bridge remained open until we got home.  Visiting Cornwall, in winter, felt like having the world to ourselves – an idyllic romantic winter paradise. Shh, don’t tell anyone…

 

Please see all my travels at Handbag Adventures and my website and blog at JessieCahalin.com.

 

Talland House and the Mystery of Mrs Ramsay’s Death

Maggie reading on St Ives beach being filmed by a French TV crew.

I have waited over a year for the release Talland House by Maggie Humm. According to the blurb, “Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from the pages of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells her story outside the confines of Woolf’s novel…” It is an honour to introduce you to Maggie Humm.

Maggie Humm is an international Woolf scholar, she is the author/editor of fourteen books, the last three of which focused on Woolf and the arts. Talland House was shortlisted for the Impress and Fresher Fiction prizes in 2017 (as Who Killed Mrs. Ramsay?) and the Retreat West and Eyelands prizes in 2018.

Jessie: Tell me more about Talland House.

“Maggie Humm has brilliantly filled in the edges beyond Woolf’s canvas…” Lauren Elkin

Maggie: Talland House re-imagines Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse from the point of view of Lily Briscoe the artist character. Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted London, the novel tells Lily’s emotional journey in becoming a professional artist: her love-life, mourning her dead mother, as a suffragette, nurse and solving the mystery of Mrs. Ramsay’s death. The novel contains a prequel to To the Lighthouse and many fictions of Woolf’s life, including her family, the artists and friends she knew.

Jessie: What was the initial inspiration for the novel?

Virginia Woolf’s wonderful, quasi-autobiographical To the Lighthouse. I first read it as an adolescent after the death of my mother and fell in love with the mother-figure Mrs. Ramsay. Only years later did I discover that Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen was 49 when she died and Virginia 13 – the exact ages of my mother and me when my mother died. There’s something so extraordinarily moving about mothering in To the Lighthouse. In the novel Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly and in parentheses (apologies to those who haven’t read the book!). The death is unexplained – the most surprising death in 20th century literature. I knew I had to write a novel discovering how Mrs. Ramsay died!

Jessie: How long have you been working on the book? Did it involve any special research?

Years! I took a UEA/Guardian diploma in creative writing followed by nine months of mentoring with The Literary Consultancy and much revision.

The research was huge but so enjoyable. As a Woolf scholar (my last three books focus on Woolf and the arts) I’d read all Woolf’s writings and writings by her family and friends. For Talland House I read Cornish newspapers for the times Lily is in St. Ives for weather, incidents, and atmosphere. I loved being in the airy, light map room at the top of the British Library looking at old photos of St. Ives for housing types, street scenes. I read artists’ memoirs, art journals of the turn of the twentieth century for a sense of artists’ lives and studios. I read everything on-line about World War I in London and how it felt to be there, for example, when the Germans suddenly switched from Zeppelins to Gotha bombers in 1917. London and St. Ives almost became characters in Talland House. I googled about music halls, other leisure pursuits, clothes, transport, and the accurate names of buildings and visited all Lily’s places. Lily gradually took over my life, my feelings, even my physical characteristics. She’s always early for appointments, she’s an only child with a dead mother, and her fingers are the shape of mine. Sometimes I wondered if I existed outside the novel!

Jessie: I am intrigued and want to delve into your writing. Please present some extracts from the novel so that will transport us to the settings in Cornwall.

Talland House

“Talland House…a kind of home, a place where she’d always wanted to return, and she’d missed it with the sadness of missing an old friend, a real person.”

“Lily glanced up at the house. Over the years, Talland House had come to mean more and more to her, a kind of home, a place where she’d always wanted to return, and she’d missed it with the sadness of missing an old friend, a real person. There was a special spot—the steps from the drawing room into the garden where Mrs. Ramsay liked to sit—at a specific moment of the day—early evening when the low sunlight caught the bright escallonia hedge—and it looked magnificent.”

St Ives

“Here no one knew her, here there were no family responsibilities, here she could be herself or whatever herself would become.”

“Lily had a glorious view of St Ives’s harbour, the seagulls twisting iridescent in the sun, a lighthouse seemingly close enough to touch. The weeks ahead spread out before her like a freshly washed sheet. Here no one knew her, here there were no family responsibilities, here she could be herself or whatever herself would become.”

Beach and Godrevy

“The beach began to empty as families took their children home for tea, and Lily rested on the top bar of the promenade railings looking out over the glare of the sea at Godrevy Lighthouse, hearing distant cries, the pat-pat of sails flapping against the rigging, the waves lapping. Now she felt the whole of the past could be present, as if her childhood days inched forward as slowly as the tortoise in the garden at home.

Godrevy Lighthouse

“It was pure joy to be with Mrs. Ramsay, lit by gleams from Godrevy…”

“It was pure joy to be with Mrs. Ramsay, lit by gleams from Godrevy, the conversation from the dining room too faint to understand. Mrs. Ramsay’s face seemed atop a statue, marble and firm. She looked so commanding suddenly, and Lily felt the rich essence of female connection, a fervent intensity because they were both women and Mrs. Ramsay was a mother. She gave Talland House a point of view, a sense of life, of its odd but necessary capacity.”

“Maggie Humm has brilliantly filled in the edges beyond Woolf’s canvas; she has a deep, awe-inspiring understanding of the role of the visual in Woolf’s work, and here she reveals that she also has a novelist’s gift to create something new, that has its own imaginative life, from that understanding.”

-Lauren Elkin, author of the award-winning Flaneuse

Find out more about Maggie Humm and her writing at:
http://www.maggiehumm.net/

 

Please see all my author interviews at My Guests and my website and blog at JessieCahalin.com.

A copy of my novel is available here.