PENZANCE

A few blogs now on signifant holidays. We went to Cornwall every May for forty years at school Whit holiday. Our first break was to Lamorna Cove, near Penzance, a small family hotel with walls covered in pictures by Lamorna Birch who lived next door. When they sold up, we took a variety of holiday lets, most commonly in a cottage which had been an annex to the hotel. Our main purpose was to visit the new art exhibition in the Penlee House Gallery. Jean was very interested in the Cornish artists especially the Lamorna, Newlyn and St Ives schools.

Peter Dawlish In childhood Jean was a voracious reader and remembered a children's series about four boys sailing a masted fishing boat named Dauntless. We searched bookshops and found copies, finding that the author was Peter Dawlish. One year we found a Lamorna village history on sale in the village shop indicating that Peter Dawlish was the pen name for James Lennox Kerr who lived in a house we passed every year overlooking the bay and was married to the daughter of Lamorna Birch. There was a board adversing paintings of the Kerr family. We knocked on their door which was opened by a bearded sailor with three small dogs. I introduced us as people interested in his father's books and he said that most people asked about his artist grandfather We struck up a friendship that lasted until his death. We went to his 80th birthday celebrations and I helped him write his autobiography. He was by career a hydrologist (that is he mapped the ocean bed). James Lennox Kerr wrote on a range of topics, the first an account of his crossing America as a hobo by jumping trains. Then he wrote adult fiction, social novels about poverty in Scotland where he came from. He also wrote crime stories and stories about ships. He tried one story for boys,The Blackspit Smugglers. After war service on mine-sweepers he wrote a series of about four boys in the sailing boat Dauntless, which Jean came across in the Bradford City library.

Penlee House Gallery is close to the Penzance promenade with Morrab Gardens to the right. The Penlee House Gallery to the left it has a small museum and a permanent art collection, not to mention an excellent cafe, several times a year they put on themed exhibitions bringing together paintings from other galleries. We came down for the opening week and bought the bulky exhibition souvenirs. We therefore have a record of each exhibition.

Gardens. There are beautiful semi-tropical gardens in Cornwall. I am focussing on three near Penzance that we went to regularly. The gardens of St Michael's Mount are not open every day. They are set on a steep hillside and rockface and filled with tender plants. There are alsothree balcony gardens leading down to the coastal path. Trengweinton Gardens (National Trust) has a colourful garden alongside the drive. At first we showed tickets to an old lady at a window. Sparrows were flying in and out.The Minack Theatre is an outdoor theatre which puts on a regular programme.. It has a natural rock garden full of aloes, and other tender plants. We went to West Side Story, at which a basking shark plus cub stole the show other one we went to was Our Town, a conversation beteen ghosts in the graveyard.One year we stayed close to Trebah and Glendurgan gardens.

There are also many plant nursaries to buy tender plants.

Stevie Dufyn March 2024.