There is no weather in hospital. When I lie in Treliske hospital, Truro, after breaking my ankle walking on a cliff, I can only remember the Longships lighthouse, the storm clouds and the sea. I came to West Penwith to find freedom in my body again – the reach and the joy that children have. I have said I feel unsteady here, like a tourist who has forgotten to go home, so has no home at all. But the hospital ward feels like a new home, a tiny city with its own peculiar clock. Every time the air ambulance lands, an operation is postponed.
After a week I return to Newlyn, to the tumbledown house we are renting with the orange flowers in the garden. I can hear the river Coombe from my bed, rushing from heath to harbour. There was a shipwreck in the harbour for most of the summer, which I liked to pretend was a warning to captains who don’t pay their fees, but it has gone now. The Coombe flooded in spring 2013 (you can watch it on YouTube), but the water didn’t reach the house and, even if it had, it would have survived. You can’t do much to harm granite but wait.
I have a wheelchair, but it doesn’t fit inside the cottage. Instead I hop with my crutches, like a pirate. This means I miss Pirates On The Prom, when Penzance attempts to regain the world record for the largest number of people dressed as pirates assembled in one place. The dress code is surprisingly strict: a pirate-style hat, or bandana or kerchief; rolled-up trousers or pantaloons; a striped or black-and-white shirt; and a minimum of two accessories – sword, hook, musket, eye patch, parrot.
Some people get the date wrong and wander around Penzance dressed as pirates by mistake. The record attempt fails, but not by so few that the pirates who do not leave the pub for the count can be blamed: the Admiral Benbow on Chapel Street cannot hold 4,000 pirates, and neither can the Turks Head. Hastings retains the world record, which is absurd. You might as well give it to Switzerland.
But mostly I crawl. I get to know the floors and the cobwebs very well. My landlady is kindly, and she wouldn’t want me to vacuum up the spiders. In any case, they eat the horseflies, one of which was so sedated with my blood that I was able to punch it and imprison it in a half-chewed Nicorette, like a trophy: the fly in the Nicorette mask. Or I sit in a chair watching the orange flowers and feeling as if I have been inserted into a painting.
I get bored, and beg to go to Prussia Cove. It is not accessible, either, and I was too hopeful to check, because I didn’t want to know the truth – which is that Prussia Cove is steep and rocky, and that this is its wonder and its identity. Halfway down, I tell them to go on without me. I sit on the path in my black wheelchair like a ghost. Soon the squire bounces up in his Jeep, asks me if I am OK, tosses the wheelchair in the back and drives me to the car park, where I count sheep. I am not just saying that, it is true. I have also begun to iron. I haven’t ironed since I left school.
There is a grass snake in the garden. My husband informs the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and they send a letter telling us to place rocks in piles for basking, and arrange piles of leaves and logs for eating; the leaves will attract the slugs and the larvae. The letter is such a powerful piece of advocacy that I begin to see the grass snake as a persecuted minority for which I have responsibility. My husband is also talking about chickens. He is going on a beekeeping course. I do not know what our grass snake will think of the bees.
When I am well enough to go to the Morrab Library in Penzance, I can think only of lunch at the Honey Pot cafe. It got such good reviews from the critics, who talked about it as if it was in the Shire, but accessible, that it was invaded by Londoners, some of whom apparently clicked their fingers at staff. When I first discovered the Honey Pot cafe, they let me leave and return with money – they didn’t take credit cards - with only my word as a deposit.
At the time, this amazed me; now I know better. I know I will not get up the hill to the Honey Pot cafe by myself, but I also know that if I sit in my wheelchair outside the library, the first person to pass will ask me where I am going and push me there. And so it is.
