In the 18th century, physicians went looking for a nostalgia bone, as though a person’s yearning for a past time or place could be assigned to a chunk of tissue. But for me, writing in the 21st, the stimulus can be found not in the body I’m in, but the memories I carry. And in particular, as I edge further into my 40s, the memories of coastland I visited in the 1980s: a four-mile stretch in south-east Cornwall where my family and I summered each year with my grandmother.
As a child, I would zigzag down the narrow cliff path with wild abandon, my mother nervously calling out to me as I sprinted down to the white sand below. This is where the roots of so many of my happy memories can be found. Not simply in the towering cliffs themselves, but in my fearless approach to them at that age, galloping towards the sea without any doubt that my legs would get me there.
It’s a fearlessness I often recall with a pang of longing, as though my younger self is beckoning me back to a time when there was no vertigo, only the crash of the waves and the peppery tang of pasties on the beach. In one photograph, taken in 1988, I am crouching next to a sandcastle, decorating it with seashells. Magicking turrets out of the sand. Turrets that I already knew, at the age of five, could never last.
The wooden-clad shack we – my mother, father, grandmother and sister – crammed ourselves into over that decade of summers was a citadel to that impermanence, too. It was perched high above Whitsand Bay, nestled into the rock, and a feeling of sanctuary permeated our days there. My grandmother called it The Haven: an emotive name for an emotive place that, even now, evokes memories of home. It was there that my grandmother showed me how to hold a conch shell to my ear to listen to the distant roar of the sea. And it was there I returned 30 years later, in 2022, largely to remind myself of my grandmother’s singing voice as she lulled me to sleep.
It was a serendipitous invitation that brought me back to Cornwall – and one that now imbues that silvery shoreline with remembrance of another. After reading my memoir about loss and grief, Kris Hallenga, the founder of the breast cancer awareness charity CoppaFeel!, got in touch with me on social media. “This is very random,” she wrote, “but I think you said in your book that you spent your childhood summers at Whitsand Bay?” As chance would have it, she and a few friends had just bought a cabin there, where they planned to let cancer patients stay for free. And, she added, “if you ever want to relive those carefree days down here, please use our place”.
A few months later, I did – with one friend at the driving wheel and another in the seat behind me. And as we drove past the bay’s rugged contours, I was surprised how little of it had changed. Stepping out of the car and on to a grassy knoll, I turned my body to the shoreline to watch the last beam of the day caress the sea. And for a split moment, I genuinely wondered if this was my grandmother’s way of welcoming me home. A place made not of bricks and mortar but the more ephemeral elements of sand, mist and shells.
Is this what a sanctuary is made from? For the ancient Greeks, the word referred to a vessel in which to keep holy things and cherished people. Which is how I think of this place now. A receptacle for remembering the woman who first brought me here, and the woman who helped me to return. On the day I heard of Hallenga’s death this year, I paid tribute to her with a picture of Whitsand Bay, and thought of my grandmother as I did so.
“No one could touch us there,” my mother said to me recently when I asked her what The Haven meant to her during those years. Like many Poles who emigrated in the mid-1950s, she came to this country seeking a place of safety. And perhaps it is this longing for refuge that has infused my own over the years – especially now, as I think about the pull that those towering cliffs still have on me.
On the last day my friends and I spent in Hallenga’s cabin, we zigzagged the cliff with a calmer circumspection than I had as a child. Yet the feeling of sanctuary felt strangely unchanged. It was a moment that brought me back to those carefree days in 1988. A homecoming of sorts. Just me and the sea.
