Fat Willy, Brown Willy

Newquay

I may not have aged too well since I was stationed at RAF St Mawgan in the late 1980s and early 1990s but, hey, have you seen Kelly McGillis or the bloke who played Goose recently?

Newquay, it seems, has fared even less well than the three of us since our Air Force days.

Bargain booze off-licences, mobile phone shops and charity shops seemed to dominate the high street of the town. I would have spent a quarter of century telling people how nice Newquay was and, it seems, I would have been wrong for at least part of that time.

Shakespeare said that “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” and in just about every area of life he is correct. Newquay, however, was just plain bad, whichever way I thought about it. It’s not just my thinking that’s changed, it’s Newquay. A lot of stuff, both good and bad, had happened to me since I’d last seen the place but it seemed only the bad things had happened to the town.

Fat Willy

There was hope, though, and that came on three fronts: first of all, a few of the old businesses survive: a baker serving proper pasties, Fat Willy’s Surf Shack and the Sailors’ Arms. Secondly, a few of the clearly much newer shops buck the tawdry bargain feel of most of the high street and sell art and locally made jewellery. The third saving grace is that the people here still clearly love the place. Perhaps if I come back in another thirty years, we’ll both be looking good for our age.

Even now, it is just the high street that looks a little unloved. The rest of Newquay is just fine and it’s not quite as new as its name suggests. At Trevelgue Head on the northern edge of town there are signs of Bronze Age burials and there was an Iron Age fort here, too, so there must have been something worth protecting back then before the birth of Christ. The geography here must have offered protection to little boats from the worst of the weather for thousands of years. Settlements which form part of modern-day Newquay appear in the Domesday book but it wasn’t until the fifteenth century that a new quay was built to further protect the fishing boats which were by now operating from here. The name of the town itself took another couple of centuries to be recorded.

Of course, Newquay has always had the stunning coastline and the sea and having spent a night with the sound of the crashing Atlantic sneaking in through the open window of my hotel room, it would be difficult to wake up feeling anything other than optimistic.

I like Newquay and hope for the best for it but, somehow, I never enjoyed living in Cornwall. I think that I could change my mind about that now I’m older. As I drive through Newquay and round the headland to Fistral beach, I struggle to put my finger on quite why I didn’t like it here.

Perhaps I just wasn’t happy for a lot of the time for other reasons and blamed Cornwall. Perhaps, aged twenty, I just hadn’t got very good at being alive yet and I blamed everything but me. Perhaps the place just made me feel guilty for not making the best of it in the way that sitting inside on a bright summers’ day seems wrong but being warm and cosy inside on a cold, drizzly day seems okay. I’d come from Doncaster and didn’t know what to do, I’d moved quickly from the drizzle to the sun and hadn’t adapted. I don’t know, all I know is that I now have the sense to see how glorious Cornwall is.

Watergate Bay is a crescent moon of sand backed by high, green cliffs. I only remember it as a backdrop to a pub we used to visit but today, despite the new additions of dozens of apartment blocks, it is beautiful. Much warmer than it should be and the whole place smells sweet, like everywhere is a cream tea. I go to the café on the beach and have a mug of tea and a scone with cream and jam – even though I lived here, I do my scones the Devon way with the cream first. This is a wise thing to do as, if you are having tea with a Cornishman or my wife, you get first dibs on the cream.

I watch the surfers in the breakers, their heads bobbing, waiting in the rolling, roiling sea for a decent wave. One of the surfers is out of the water, talking to a couple in their coats, his dark wetsuit covers everything but his face, he looks like some mythical half-man, half-seal. The sun glints on the scattered rocks of the beach.

A group of teenagers arrive, looking like they’re on a school trip. None of them seem to look around at what is going on or at the beauty of where they are, they are all trying to take selfies with their phones. Perhaps that was my problem when I was closer to their age, I was focussed too much on me and too little on the world around me and on other people. I watch the other people now, the surfers on the beach. A life unlived for me when I had the chance. I’m living fully now though and doing so with a massive scone, so massive that I don’t eat again for the rest of the day and I am not a man who skips meals.

Jamaica Inn

On the way home I stopped off at Jamaica Inn which used to be by the main road. I used to pass it every time I drove to St Mawgan, but they’ve moved it. The main road, that is. The Jamaica Inn is still where it has stood since 1750 and there had already been an inn on this spot for two centuries even then.

Jamaica Inn gained its name because it was owned by the Trelawny family, two of whom had been governors of Jamaica. This was a coaching inn offering rest and refreshment to passengers and horses.  As I arrived it started to pour with rain and I could just imagine the coaches coming to a halt outside the inn, the driver with the collar of his greatcoat turned up and his tricorn hat pulled low, a scarf across his face. The passengers scurrying inside to get warm on their weeklong journey from London to Penzance.

Brown Willy

Sudden rainfall is not uncommon in these parts, it’s called the Brown Willy Effect. Okay, no sniggering at the back, Brown Willy is the name of a hill on Bodmin Moor whose 420-metre summit is the highest point in Cornwall. All of the air which has travelled across the Atlantic Ocean suddenly hits this high spot and has to climb and cool and, very often, let go of all the water that it’s collected on its journey.

Journeys were the very reason for this inn, the old turnpike road from Launceston to Bodmin ran past the door and then, much later, the A30 where I used to sit in summer traffic jams trying to get back to Newquay and the beach and my outrageous surfer shorts. It was on a journey to the area in 1930 that the novelist Daphne du Maurier stayed at the inn and heard tales of its role in smuggling. That led her to write her novel of the same name. That’s not the inn’s only literary connection, either. For a while, it was owned by the thriller writer Alistair Maclean.

Despite the weather, I trudged down to the nearby Dozmary Pool where, it is said, the Lady of the Lake gave Excalibur to King Arthur and where Bedivere returned it as the king lay dying. It doesn’t seem possible to get very far from King Arthur, no matter which end of the country you visit.