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there were many compensations, not least that of living in Cornwall. Could one choose a better place to be a relative failure? Perranporth has one of the finest beaches in the world – I call it Hendrawna in the Poldark novels, Hendrawna being the name of a small area of the hinterland adjacent to that beach.
    It was visited frequently by Tennyson, accompanied by his friend Henry Sewell Stokes, in the 1850s, and five years after Tennyson’s death in 1892 a poem was published in the Echo , for the first time, I believe, and attributed to him. I don’t think it has been included in any collected edition of his poems, but Henry Sewell Stokes should have known.
Hast thou ever in a travel
Through the Cornish lands,
Heard the great Atlantic roaring
On the firm, wide tawny flooring
Of the Perran sands?
    Sea-rent gully where the billows
Come in great unrest;
Fugitives all white and reeking,
Flying from the vengeful Sea-king,
Striking from the west.
    Level broadway, ever ermined
By the ocean verge;
Girt by sandhill, swelling, shoaling,
Down to imitate the rolling
Of the lordly surge.
    Nine large files of troubled water
Turbulently come;
From the bosom of his mother,
Each one leaping on his brother,
Scatters lusty foam.
    In the sky a wondrous silence,
Cloud-surf, mute and weird;
In the distance, still uplifting,
Ghostly fountains vanish, drifting,
Like a Druid’s beard.
    Spreading out a cloth of silver,
Moan the broken waves;
Sheet of phosphorescent foaming,
Sweeping up to break the gloaming
Stillness of the caves.
    I lived within a mile of this beach, and was free to walk on it whenever the fancy took me, or along the cliffs which rose up between Perranporth and St Agnes. This is Cornwall at its gauntest, at its most iron-bound. For centuries these granite cliffs have withstood mountains of water flung at them by tempestuous seas – literally millions of tons of seawater hurled at them in every gale – and they have lost none of their grandeur, scarcely anything of their shape or form through measurable centuries. The land bordering the cliffs is the habitat of rabbit and gull and errant seabird, mice and stoat and all small things – preying on each other but not yet preyed upon by man. It is rampant with heather and tiny flowers and wind-driven gorse, nothing much being allowed by the gales to grow above three feet in height; uncultivable, empty, wild.
    Or should I tire of the sea, there were valleys to walk in – and every valley with a hasty stream. Marlowe’s ‘By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals’ does not apply to the Cornish streams. Birds, yes, in plenty, but the streams are always in a hurry as if they remember their heyday as vital adjuncts for the nearest mine – to provide water for the washing floors and the tin stamps and vital fresh water for the pumping engines which would corrode quickly if the acid minerals in the water they pump up were to be used.
    I have no fear of heights when heights are presented by flying in planes, or standing at the top of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower and looking down. But I have a morbid fear of climbing, which I have expressed in scenes in several of my novels: Night without Stars and The Loving Cup , for example. This stems almost certainly from an early occasion in Cornwall. I used to climb all over the great cliffs, without much thought to the risk, and usually on my own, and one day I decided to explore Sobey’s Ladder, which is a narrow mineshaft not far from Wheal Prudence – driven from part way down the black cliffs to the sea below. (Sobey was a miner who used to keep a boat on a ledge down there and use it for fishing.) When I was part way down I slipped and fell about six feet. There I clung on, with jagged rocks licked by the sea a hundred feet below. Slightly concussed, bruised and cut on shoulder and leg, nothing worse, I crawled slowly back to the top, lay there on the