Charlie don’t surf. Nor do I, alas
In Newquay, women are taking their clothes off in the streets. Men are too, mind, though I find this less of a distraction. My brother John, who lives on the edge of the town, doesn’t seem to notice — though he does notice that I have noticed, and points out that I would look a little more dignified if my tongue weren’t hanging out. People drive for miles to surf here, he explains, and if I had ever tried to get into a wetsuit sitting in a Ford Fiesta, I would know why they choose to get changed beside their cars before they grab their boards from their roof-racks and make their excited, rubber-suited beelines for the beach.
Surfing is not, alas, a field in which I have great expertise, though I do know that Apocalypse Now contains the line ‘Charlie don’t surf’, and I have a mirror in my bathroom, so I know why fat unfit men in their fifties don’t surf. But John is two years and three stone younger than me, and has ridden the waves since he was a teenager. And as we stand on the cliff-top watching the figures rolling and riding, padding and paddling on the seascape and sandscape below, I realise all too late that surfing is fun.
The following day, John shows me another side of Cornwall. He won’t tell me where we are going, except that it is south; he wants it to come to me as a surprise, as it had come to him. Pottering about in his boat in the creeks of the Roseland peninsula, he had stumbled upon what is surely one of the most heavenly corners of England. Today, we approach it on foot, and he hangs back to watch my reaction as I catch my first sight of the church of St Just in Roseland and its reflection in St Just Pool. Perhaps it would be truer to say that it is the sight that catches — and holds — me.
It isn’t the church that grabs me; that’s pretty enough, to be sure, even if it has been rather obviously over-restored. It’s the experience of seeing a perfectly composed picture, and realising that I can walk into it. As I do, I discover another, interior dimension that is as remarkable as it is unique. The steeply sloping churchyard (in which the lych-gate is level with the tower top) is a dense arboretum of sub-tropical trees and shrubs — tree ferns, fan-palms, camellias, azaleas, myrtle and more that merge into a memorial garden just beyond the graves. Set along the paths are granite stones bearing extracts from scripture, hymns and poetry. Quite a few of them carry texts from Isaiah, with references to fir trees, pine trees, thorns, briar, box and cedars of Lebanon; but the one before which I find myself lingering bears a single verse from Genesis: ‘They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.’
Michael McMahon
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