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Autobiography and memoir

The poet and author grew up in a coastal village defined by hardship and scenic beauty. What would she find when she returned to an area with some of the lowest wages and highest property prices in the country?

Natasha Carthew

There is a part of me that hates the village I grew up in. How each house and path and landmark holds some catch-breath memory as I walk the two-mile-long coastal road that connects Seaton to Downderry. Memories that are embedded in every step, the places where I grew up and the places where my father, his parents and their families were born, lived and died, our initials still scratched in concrete in each and every footing, but built over now with extensions, double driveways, patios.

The road is the same but the buildings are higher, and the pockets of green have been paved, the trees where we used to play in front of our flat replaced by too-big houses. The upper reaches of the village are no longer a sea of green: nothing left of the swath of gold that was our daffodil field but two neat borders of yellow in the front garden of a solitary oversized house. Past the shop on the left and the butchers thats now a house on the right, the working mens club that has been rebranded for the blow-ins as a soulless village hall, then finally down the dog shit-covered path that passes the pub and the wall where we working-class kids used to sit and drink and think about the purpose of all of this.

As a young girl I knew that I didnt want to spend the rest of my life cleaning holiday homes, and I certainly didnt want to marry a farmer. If anything, I wanted to be a farmer but in Cornwall in the 80s that dream was strictly reserved for boys, sons of landowners. I was gay, a tomboy, different from all the other girls. My saving grace was the natural world and my notebook, words to keep me safe, keep me hidden in the tangle of hedgerows and rockpools.

I have returned to Downderry to write this, the same way a finger traces the outline of a scar. It is September but already the bay has endured at least one high tide. I can tell by the trail of weed and driftwood banked against the muddy clay cliffs, and the way the tiny stream that passes our old primary school has settled into its usual winter shape in the sand, finding its place effortlessly.

The beautiful far-reaching vistas after the fog lifts, the smell of an early catch as the bellyful trawlers return to harbour, the taste of cream teas and pasties lingering on the lips for visitors, these passing moments will be the things that forever come to mind. But the truth is that Cornwall, my home, is a place of deep, long-lasting deprivation. Poverty and inequality are worse than ever, with 20 neighbourhoods in the county among the 10% most deprived in England. This is a place of forever summers and even longer winters, filled with despair and hardship and fear.

These two things, the beauty of the Cornish landscape and the brutality of growing up nose pushed against it, have without doubt informed the greatest part of my life. Its a story of what ebbs and flows just below the surface of a beautiful ocean day, the unseen, the undercurrent.

***

When the sea spray starts to thicken and become drizzle, I close my eyes and return to one of my earliest memories. Like today, it is raining. My sister and I are watching the oily raindrops as they smack up against the glass. I remember the window shaking with the wind, the draught as the gusts blew in from the south-west, the sea less than a hundred metres from our second-floor flat. Those sou-westers always had us believe we were afloat, the window becoming the wheelhouse on our pretend fishing trawler, the reflection of the lamp in the corner suddenly a navigational star out there in the pitch-black night.

Imagination was our thing, making stuff up and making do with the little we had, not just out of necessity but a need to shut out certain things: the raised voices, slammed doors, fists punched into walls.

I open my eyes to see a lone seagull come into the bay. I watch as she calls her two babies out of hiding. When she leads them towards the gully where the lugworms are at their fattest Im reminded of my own mother, how she worked every available cleaning job in the village so she could provide for me and my sister. Her meagre wage went on food, rent and the clothes on our backs.

Some folk call seagulls opportunists, scavengers, thieves, but in truth they are intelligent, resourceful and loyal. They have found a way to succeed despite being thought of as the underclass of the bird world. When their habitat is taken over by tourists they refuse to retreat, and I love that it reminds me of Mum, a woman who argued that a council house in this village, the village that my forefathers built from the shore-side up, was the only place good enough for her girls.

As a little girl I didnt notice the size of our home. It didnt bother me that my parents slept in the front room, yet the cut of poverty slipped beneath my skin without me noticing, carving deep into my flesh as I watched the world pass by outside the window every day.

Disadvantage is a lonely word, and when I was growing up my mother never uttered it once. Looking back, I know that the blot of that word must have stuck to us like skin-sodden fog. There wasnt a day that went by that she didnt tell us how lucky we were to have the sea at the end of the road. We collected dog whelks and tiny ribbed cowries for prettiness, picked yellow cranesbill and red campion for jam-jar love, and I also had my sea-glass jewels to look at when the things I was yet to understand got too loud.

During the 2020 lockdown, Cornwall saw the largest increase in children taken into care in the whole of England and Wales, a 17% jump. Official reasons why so many Cornish kids ended up in the care system include abuse, neglect, breakdowns in family relationships, but there is nothing to say why Cornwall saw the biggest jump of all counties. Ill bet anything that greater factors are at play, such as access to health and care services, transport, education, leisure. These are the undercurrents that move in and around society without ever being properly recorded, the things in a young persons life that mean the difference between love and loss.

On average, earnings in Cornwall are well below the UK national average. It also has some of the highest costs of living in the UK. Housing is some of the most expensive outside the south-east and London with 10 times price-to-earnings ratios in popular locations. According to the Trussell Trust, the national charity that supports some 1,200 food banks throughout the UK, including the one in Truro, there was an increase of 11% in the use of food banks in 2021 compared with the same period in 2019.

***

When we got our own council house in the 1970s it was everything to us, but once the word got around at school that we now lived in Treliddon Lane, it was as if we had been stamped on the forehead. Every kid knew the words for what they had been told we were, and it wasnt long before I heard the slur council house trash. I can still see the whispering girls in the classroom, pulling away the boys who were my friends, can still hear their pretend laughter when I walked into the room, jealous because, despite my humble life, I was good at art, good at sport, jealous because I hit puberty first. Ill always remember years later when my mum was collecting my young brother from school and being asked by one of the posh mothers: What do all of you actually burn on your fires up there on the council estate? Without blinking an eye, Mum replied: Fir cones and old shoes. The woman went red and Mum went on her merry way. I love her for that.

What nobody seemed to realise about us council house trash was that while we were cash-poor, we were rich in laughter and tall tales, generosity and love. These women had a way of fighting for (sometimes with) each other and they had a way of connecting despite most of us not owning a phone. The Got an extra shift, can you look after the kids? shriek over the back fence and the Heading up to the shops, you need anything? shout were their calls of the wild, our tribe. I was often roped in to entertain a baby while their mother cried on my mums shoulder, or ran up to the shop with a fiver and a note to plead for Mindys emergency fags. No longer did my sister and I live in the shadow of our father in a one-bedroom second-floor flat, but smack-bang in the middle of a new clan of people, our people.

Thatchers right to buy scheme in the 1980s would be the end of such communities. When a council tenant sold up (often at a profit) a private buyer would move in. This meant that those families living in poverty, needing a roof over their heads, found it increasingly hard to access social housing. Cornwall is still littered with abandoned caravans; it is also starting to fill with them again. On a walk along any coastal path you will likely come across someone living among the bracken and briars, off-grid not because of some environmental middle-class yurt-driven want but because of necessity, extreme poverty.

House prices during the coronavirus pandemic rose even higher to sate a gluttonous demand for Cornish homes. By December 2022, the average property price in the county was 323,000, 10 times the average Cornish wage. Property in Cornwall has always been expensive, in comparison with local wages, but a surge in pandemic staycations meant many private landlords moved into making long lets to affluent Londoners, evicting local tenants. Working from home during Covid also meant a lot of rich folk from up-country could live their dream of a cottage in Cornwall, while keeping their remote jobs, pushing locals even further towards the fringes of society.

What does this all mean for Cornish communities? It means there are entire villages, such as the beautiful twin fishing villages of Kingsand and Cawsand, along the coast from Downderry, where in winter all the cottages are boarded up, not just because of the battering sea but because they are holiday homes, second homes, and nobody is there. Cornwall has as many families waiting for social housing as there are holiday homes.

***

At the age of 19 I met my first proper girlfriend and we moved into a basement flat together in Plymouth. I was out of my beloved council house that no longer felt like home and out of Downderry, the village where Id always found myself mostly alone.

I returned to Cornwall in my mid-20s, an age when many decide to leave home, but I was done with hunting. I had finally dug up a little something inside myself, had fallen in love while living in London with the woman Ive been lucky enough to call my partner for 26 years, had my first collection of poetry published there, and I brought these two best parts of my life home with me to Cornwall. Another village, but the county and place I came from.

I am Cornish proud, but for every strand of the childhood and teen trauma I endured, the village I grew up in will never be a friend to me. When I think about it I feel overwhelming pain. When I visit it I feel a deep desire to escape all over again.

Often poverty is not a tsunami but an incoming tide of tiny waves. They hit and they hit until finally you are overwhelmed with water, and with little option you struggle to keep afloat, your head above water, trying to think of all the ways to make some cash so you might survive the next breaker crash, hoping that at one point you might witness the dark in its final dawn retreat, light breaking through and the glimmer of something close to hope.

This is an edited extract from Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience by Natasha Carthew, published by Hodder & Stoughton (16.99) on 13 April. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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I felt a deep desire to escape: Natasha Carthew on Cornish beauty and brutality - The Guardian