In The Great Western Beach Emma Smith writes in a child's voice so convincingly that I was almost taken aback at first. This is a memoir she penned for her grandchildren according to the foreword. It's made up of a series of vignettes from her early childhood up until about age twelve when her family moved away from the Cornish coast inland. She notes that it's impossible to be wholly truthful and that as lives are filled with secrets best left unshared her autobiography will be fragmentary, "made up of selected glimpses, bits and pieces" of her life that perhaps no one will be interested in reading. Although the style the book is written in makes it easy to pick up and set down, I found it absorbing reading, and read the second half of the book in one big gulp.
Written from the perspective of the snug insular life of a child this is very much the story of one family in a small Cornish village. Although the years she covers are from 1923 through 1935, there's really very little about the social or political milieu of England during those interwar years. Smith captures the voice well, but you can also tell she's writing from the vantage point of a life lived and understood. There's a sense of wonder but there's also something more that you don't necessarily expect from a child. In a way it's sort of unusual combination, but maybe not so much. Children often understand far more than you'd expect. In any case the style works very well, and as Emma grows older, so too does her understanding of family dynamics.
Emma Smith (Elspeth) was born in Newquay, Cornwall in 1923 and lived there for the first twelve years of her life. Two elder siblings, twins, figure prominently in her memoir and later there's an addition of a baby brother. During the years of WWII she worked a secretarial job for one of the war departments and later worked on the Grand Union Canal, a job which consisted of carrying steel and coal cargoes between London, Birmingham and Coventry on narrow boats. She wrote about this in The Maidens' Trip (can you guess which book I know am dying to get my hands on---grr for promising myself not to buy any new books in the near future). She later worked with a documentary film company in India, which she fictionalized in The Far Cry, which Persephone Books reissued (and one that I own already--such welcome foresight on my part!). Apparently she also wrote several successful children's books as well as another novel. Now I see where that child's voice comes from.
It's hard to summarize The Great Western Beach since it touches on so many varied memories. Although very nostalgic, and therefore consisting of many happy remembrances, it's not without tinges of sadness as well. The memoir is divided into three sections moving from one home to the next as the family's fortunes improved. As might be expected Elspeth and her family spent many hours at the seaside which was so close to her home. While her brother went to a regular school and later went away to boarding school, Elspeth and her sister were educated privately. Elspeth was much more the child eager to please, or as the reader later learns eager to avoid her father's wrath, but her older sister had no fears and no qualms to disagree or speak her own mind.
Probably not the best match, Elspeth's parents struggled to find happiness that was always out of reach. Her father, a decorated war hero (of which he never failed to remind people) had set out to be a painter and find fame and fortune. Instead he married an older woman and never quite seemed to find the success he yearned for. Elspeth's mother was three times a would-be bride and three times her fiancés died before they could wed. She served as a nurse in the Great War and drove ambulances and seemed to enjoy a certain notoriety in their small community that her husband found annoying. A strict disciplinarian, he was especially hard on the twins, and although he favored Elspeth the most she feared his outbursts greatly.
The relationships of the family members struck me the most, and reading about them will probably stay with me the longest, but the most enjoyable aspects of the books were just the ordinary, average things that Emma Smith writes about so fondly.
"On my birthday Mummy escorted us three children to the much grander Ice-Cream Parlour that has just been opened on the slope leading down to Towan Beach, and when we were sitting at a table she ordered Knickerbocker Glories from the waitress. Knickerbocker Glories are ice-creams which the Americans have invented, and they are served in a tall glass vase, and are so big it took us ages to eat them. This was a treat that wouldn't and couldn't have happened before our mother got the inheritance from her dear dead Uncle Stuart. We were far too poor then (although we weren't supposed to say so) for delicious daily Quoit Dairy ice-cream cornets, and certainly too poor for Knickerbocker Glories on my birthday."
That's just one small taste of a book filled with many such happy reminiscences. I was a little sad to leave this long gone world, but glad to have visited even if only for a little while. My only complaint is to not find out what happened to Elspeth's siblings and get a little insight into some of the scenes from childhood she herself didn't understand and have full knowledge of when she was little. But as Emma Smith, some things must remain private. This is a really charming read and I only wish I could remember my own childhood so vividly.