Cornwall

The boy and the woman are standing in the shallows holding hands, looking towards the beach. There is a large bay behind them, which is bordered by rocky cliffs. They are both looking at the camera. The boy has a beaming smile on his face, which is flushed with excitement; the woman is hunching her shoulders and looks very cold. You know that immediately after the photograph has been taken, she will let go of the boy’s hand and hurry away to put a warm cardigan over her bathing suit.

Every year we went to Cornwall for our week’s annual holiday. We set off at 6 p.m. My dad insisted that we travel overnight to avoid the traffic. In those pre-motorway days he always allowed twelve hours for the drive from Manchester. My mum sat in the front, and I was curled up on the back seat with a blanket. I managed in spite of my excitement to get to sleep.

I was always woken up twice in the night. The first time was when we arrived at Bristol and got lost. There was the sound of raised voices – ‘Look, Mary, you’ve got the map and I am driving, just tell me which way to go!’
‘Well, Jack, as I said ten minutes ago, I think you should have turned right, half a mile back!’
Eventually this argument, which seemed to be an essential part of the holiday ritual, subsided.
The second time I was woken up, we were at the top of a hill, and below us was the sunlit, sparkling sea. We found our usual B&B. The landlady had put up a forbidding sign in large letters: ‘Guests must vacate their rooms each day between 10.30 a.m. and 5 p.m’.

This was fine when it wasn’t actually raining, because we always went to the beach. On rainy, windy days we went to a café, run by a large, red-faced, cheery lady. We would sit at a table and look through the condensation running down the window at the rain-soaked streets. The lady owner would bustle up, and noticing our glum faces, she would say, ‘’Ello my ’andsome, you should have been ’ere last week, they tourists was dropping with the ’eat.’
‘Here we go again,’ said my dad under his breath. We looked out at the cold, rain-spattered streets, and tried to imagine we were ‘dropping with the ’eat’; we failed.

I was clearing out a large drawer last year, when I came across the photograph. There is something poignant about old monochrome family photos. Nestling at the bottom of the drawer, there were also two plastic bags – my parents’ ashes. They had died within three months of each other, four years before. Every time I re-discovered them, I felt a pang of guilt. I still hadn’t quite decided where I wanted to scatter them.

Of course: the beach. My wife, seven-year-old son and I would drive down to Cornwall (during the day!) and take the photograph with us. If I could identify the beach, I would leave my parents’ ashes there.
We drove slowly along the coast, turned into a bay, then suddenly – there it was. I remembered it with a mind-jolting clarity. For a few seconds I was seven years old, and smiling.

The tide was going out, and we scattered the ashes into a large rock pool and watched them being slowly washed out to sea. I think that wherever they are now, my mum and dad would have been pleased.

^{© Jim Anderson, 2025}