Rural England jaunt brings thoughts of Cornwall and ancestry home

My England is all country lanes and village greens, shingled beaches and tooth-cracking Brighton rock.

Cornwall is not on the itinerary but on this journey it’s all I think about.

I fly into Heathrow last week and there it is, the land of my early childhood, the old country that exists as much in my imagination as real memory. That place is not London, as unlike many Australians I have never lived or worked there. My England is all country lanes and village greens, shingled beaches and tooth-cracking Brighton rock. Put me back in Surrey and I am forever nine years old, with pigtails and a pony named Peter Edward.

In 2009, I began work on the family tree. Both my parents were deceased and information on Dad’s ancestors was scant. I visited Cornwall that year in search of more data from my paternal grandmother’s side. Two lines, the Trevithicks and the Candys, came from around Truro and the Roseland peninsula. I even spied a speck of a settlement named Trevithick in my AA Road Atlas, but it hardly stood out amid all the other towns with that ubiquitous Tre prefix, which simply means settlement.

At least I mastered the correct pronunciation of Trevithick, gradually compressing the “e’’ until it was all but swallowed. Thomas Trevithick and Elizabeth Randal Candy tied the knot at Truro in the mid-19th century, I discovered, and promptly sailed off to Australia. One of their twin daughters, Emma, was my great-great grandmother.

On this recent visit, Cornwall is not on the itinerary so there’s no opportunity to tarry over municipal records. But yet, as I motor through Devon and Wiltshire, and lie awake in a jet-lagged fug (eyes wide open at 4.30am becomes the new normal), all I think about is Cornwall.

Do I look Cornish? Yes, perhaps, with dark hair and light eyes, more than a touch of Spanish smuggler running deep in the bloodstream. Dad had black curls and green eyes and, in summer, skin the amber colour of whisky. My paternal grandmother, Eliza, looked what would have been called “exotic”, too, although she had white hair by the time I was born, and a knowing smile.

Back home, I dig out my parents’ holiday snaps. They are small, in black-and-white, with borders; frequently I am shown decapitated or so blurry as to be a ghost. There I am at St Mawes with Mother, who looks severe in a pleated skirt and short-sleeved jumper. My feet are rock solid on the cobbled quay amid unexpected palm trees. I have no real memory of that day. Dad would have scoffed at family trees and suchlike and I doubt he knew of the Trevithicks and Candys. Eliza was of a generation that did not talk of such matters and she christened him Elwyn, a Welsh name she read in a book when she was carrying him and his twin brother, Roy. We are, I have now discovered, a dynasty of twins.

Dad always thought he must have had Welsh blood because of his name, and until I was nine he read me Dylan Thomas at bedtime, which he said would make me “wordy”, and he, a journalist, wanted a writing daughter. That picture makes me wish Dad and I had taken a later seaside pilgrimage with books of poetry under our wings.

Oh, and a new moment to share, Dad, if you are up there with a celestial subscription to T&I. I had an afternoon tea in Devon and first spread the strawberry jam on the scones and then added the clotted cream. The waitress glared. “From Cornwall, then,” she sniffed. The Cornish, apparently, do it the other way around to the know-it-alls in Devon. So there.