SAND WITH A VIEW

As a teenager wandering over the post-industrial landscape of Harvey’s Towans, I’d peer in through salt-grimed windows at the interiors of chalets perched among the dunes at the mouth of Hayle Estuary. I longed to spend a night in one of them, surrounded by warping formica, maybe a sunburst clock on the wall, and an Octopus inflatable dinghy wilted in the corner—a vision of out-of-season solitude. Now, at Godrevy, a couple of miles further around St Ives Bays towards the lighthouse, I’ve made it: I’ve moved beyond the glass of that memory and now occupy its vacant present.

The chalet I’ve been given access to feels like I’ve caught it before it’s had chance to put on its summer face. Two buckets positioned under leaks contain inches of serum-coloured rainwater. There’s been a fall of dead woodlice, or grammasoles as they’re known locally, on the kettle and toaster. It’s what I’d hoped for. Apart from the addition of a sun lounge, the place hasn’t been altered by the money that’s flooded into the dunes since the extraordinary increase in property prices in West Cornwall, and, more particularly, since the chalet owners acquired freehold status for their property: even the wise person will invest in sand-with-a-view if they have the title deeds to it.

The transformation of some of the chalets echoes the transitory fluctuations of value that have, by turns, animated and abandoned the Red River valley. It still amazes me how the currency of value charges something with an aura of desirability, and then leaks away—perhaps because I lived in the humbled magnificence of Scarborough for fifteen years before moving back to the South West. What were once squatters’ shacks and places for cheap holidays, are now being transformed into designer timber-framed houses with grey, aluminium double glazing, zinc roofs, blankets, candles and Scandinavian wood-burning stoves. While I unloaded my car, a couple from Warwickshire I chatted to pointed at one of the neighbouring ‘chalets’ for sale and told me the vendors wanted £1.5 million for it: ‘It’s the rental the makes prices like that viable — we were late this year with our booking and missed our summer slot; and we really missed our chance when we had children and could afford to buy one.’ If you’re servicing that kind of debt, you’re going to need to charge a shed-load of rent, and offer the standard luxury look, to keep hold of your dream second-home investment. While the new chalets would not look out of place in a coffee-table book in some fancy life-style shop of un-branded brands, they seem a little soulless and uniform, lacking the accretion of repairs and small innovations apparent in the originals, which are more like sagging playhouses, places where superfluous, superannuated consumption has come to rest, their discontinued and retired consumer durables on permanent holiday, sun struck and rusting slowly. This is stuff refusing to become rubbish, and has all the dignity that resistance lends.

I take my tea and go to the desk I’ve made for myself in front of the stunning view: a side table cleared of its faux-Bush 1950s radio, papers and leaflets crinkled like old skin, a clear-plastic twisted-stemmed lamp with a halogen candle bulb, and other bits and pieces of a life partly public — for this place is sometimes rented out when not being generously discounted to friends of friends — and partly private. The chalet is thin skinned and sensitive to the weather. The kettle feels more a kettle here. Winter may have worked its way into the heart of the soft furnishings, and their’s a distinctly mushroomy smell about the place, but I like the feeling of being in the rawness of the world, more within the white noise of the the surf below the low cliff in front.

In front of me, a pair of blue wicket gates, collared by a hoop of old rope, swing back and forth against themselves, trying to blow open; the rope has worn through the paint and formed neck-like grooves in the wooden staves. Beyond them, the silhouettes of surfers, fleet as bird shadows, fly across the faces of the translucent back-lit waves. Occasionally they get ‘aerial’ as they bail out, boards, bodies and umbilical leashes hanging for a moment above the surf as it collapses under them. You used to be able to watch them from any number of shelters in St Ives, then get changed and leave you stuff out of the rain while you went in to join them. The shelters are now either beach cafes or storage places for beach cafes. When did this sea view become so valuable? Was it the Tate-effect? Cheap loans? Boomer retirement lump-sums seeking better returns? A safe-haven for foreign investment? There is no single answer. But I know it used to be relatively cheap if you were prepared to live in the dunes. I remember seeing one for sale in the late 1980s—around the time Derek Jarman was in residence at Dungeness—and if I’d have the £4000 they were asking for it I’d have been in there, living the marginal life.

They were cheap for good reason. This was only just becoming a post-industrial landscape. At various times during the life of this chalet, you’d have looked out over tin-reclamation companies excavating sand off the beach at low tide. To the right would have been a kind of cable-car system of hoppers running down onto the beach where tin-rich sand was loaded and transported back inland for processing. At Godrevy, you can see some of the stumps of the girders that once supported the steel cables. Not far behind the chalets, there was an old explosives factory situated where it could do little significant damage to anything of value. And, of course, until the 1990s the Red River bled into St Ives Bay like a bottle of 1970s coal-tar food colouring. I always used to think of the Gwithian/Godrevy end of the bay as a sort of desert in which you could get lost among the dunes, or ‘towans’ as they’re known (from ‘tewyn’, the Cornish for sand dunes). I can remember toiling with my mother and little sister through heat magnified by the great bowls of sand, our thirst increasing with our sense of panic. Each dune complex along the bay has a different name: Harvey’s Towans; Phyllack Towans; Mexico Towans; Upton Towans, Gwithian Towans. ‘Hayle’, it used to announce on a large signboard as you approached Copperhouse, ‘three miles of golden sand’; and those miles seemed endless, the space marked by the repetitive rhythms of sandbanks and tidal scour, infinite and hallucinatory. How could you own such unstable land?

The chalets were also, I thought, a place of exile, where men who’d been thrown out, or left their families, went to learn to look after themselves, and to come to terms with the gaping exposure of their newly single status. I went to visit the father of my first girlfriend who was living in one with his new wife. You drove along the road by the wharf, opposite Lelant, where the colliers used to unload coal for the now-demolished power station, then up past the electricity substation and on into the dunes along a rubble track. There were tramlines, chain-link fences, odd walls and warnings; and then as we approached the green hut, we noticed an unsteady constellation around a sandy hole where a stone had fallen from a wall: glow worms. A strange gathering in a strange place; an ancient glow in the hot twilight. I’d not seen them before, and I’ve not seen them since. What I have seen in the dunes outside this chalet are tiny white snail shells everywhere, as if there had been a brief hailstorm of bones. If glowworms live on snails, then maybe there are glowworms around here in summer — but it’s late January and nothing’s glowing around here other than the wifi router.

*

I can’t sleep. The tide has come in and the surf feels close and intimate. It’s a sound I love, but the size of the surf is disturbing. It makes the place feel tenuous, as if it were about to be washed away. A refrain has been going round and round in my head from a ballad called the ‘Banks of the Newfoundland’, gathered from a Gwithian man for The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs : ‘And we’ll rub her round/and scrub her round/with holy stone and sand’. It feels like I’m being rubbed and scrubbed by the sound of the surf and the words, whitened and abraded and polished away, made shipshape, the sea between here and the Grand Banks filling the words of the song with a sense of distance and exile. On and on it goes, surf and song. I’d been dreaming of the rocks at Porthminster Point suddenly fissured with chasms while I was trying to carry our children across them. I pull aside the corner of the thin cotton curtains. The dark shadows of the palm trees shake against the sky and I’m back in my infants' school in a half-empty classroom, late on a winter’s afternoon, looking out over the bay at the lights of the harbour. I’ve never felt more safe than in that moment, writing page after page of an endless pirate story while the storm raged on outside, the whole room in a sort of trance.

*

One of the most cathartic works by the American artist Bruce Nauman I remember from his solo exhibition at The Hayward Gallery (a shocking 20-odd years ago it seems so vivid to me) involved a white-cube room built in the gallery. Inside the room played an audio recording of him growling and shouting and grunting, over and over, the title of the work: Get Out of my Mind, Get Out of this Room. There was nothing else in the room, just glaring white walls and his mauling voice. In the absence of shadows, in the absence of signs of scale, I felt my head and the room merge, and his voice become a voice in my head. Other visitors entered and quickly left. I found the self-hate and violence thrilling and gave myself up to it, giddy with the way his voice amplified and exceeded my own inner tyrant to point where it felt diminished and almost comic. It blew me away. I was the unwanted ‘other’ in someone else’s head; the consciousness in a chalet; light addressed by loud graffiti scrawled on the wall of an abandoned industrial building about to be demolished.

After my restless night in the chalet, I’m up early and full of thoughts about how Nauman’s work might intersect with the Red River project.  Before my first meeting of the day at The Writers’ Block in Pool, I stop at Tuckingmill for a walk along the Red River, diverging from the path to take a closer look at the storm-drain overflow pond below the bulldozed site of the old South Crofty mine. There’s a concrete drainage channel carved down the hill from the side of the new road bridge: it’s a beautiful, flat-bottomed V of concrete. Last time I was here, there was a Tesco shopping overturned at its foot. It must have been fun watching that go down, or riding it to oblivion. This time there’s an aluminium walking stick, along with the usual roadside litter, sluiced down and vomited by last week’s rainstorms onto the grass above the pond. I take a left halfway up the channel, climb a wooden fence, edge my way through gorse, and find myself looking at an old concrete building on the edge of a mass of bulldozed earth. Old bits of pipe and wire cable stick out of the disturbed ground. I can hear earthmovers beyond the bank, but they’re a way off. I’ll kick myself if I don’t take a look inside.

It’s like descending into a ransacked tomb. There are rusting skeletons of machines in concrete sarcophagi, and the place has been trashed and sprayed with the markings of those who have passed through, enjoying the shelter, the strangeness, the invisibility offered by its walls. This is a place to come to do serious damage to yourself, a place to contain, reflect and attempt to slough off the shouting and whispering of uglier emotions; to vandalise the abandoned works of giant industrial forefathers for the reason they’ve abandoned you with no guide to the future. The sump-garden of old cans; the needles and water-clotted porn; the avowals of someone 4 someone (that most naked of couplings); the wavering ivy and light streaming across some rusting mystery object, make this building, this room, feel haunted by the unsanitised meaning of the Red River valley. I’d have come here to get pissed and for a smoke if I’d have lived around here as a teenager. Not much more than a couple of hundred metres away on the road running by the entrance to South Crofty, there’s a sign advertising the regeneration project Heartlands, declaring it to be ’20 acres of Cultural Candy’. It’s hard to reconcile the well-meaning acts of rebranding with the damaged heart of the place, with feelings about the place that will not be consumed so sweetly. Would it be right to think about this building as the sign of trauma in the landscape? The psychotherapist W.D. Winnicott wrote in his 1965 essay ‘The Concept of Trauma in Relation to the Development of the Individual Within the Family’: ‘Trauma is that which breaks up the idealisation of an object by the individual’s hate, reactive to that object’s failure to perform its function.’ Might this also apply to community that finds that the industrial culture (the object) that once gave meaning to it, and was, to an extent idealised (and continues to be idealised in the current branding of Cornwall), is no longer able to function?

Maybe next time I’m back it will be bulldozed and tidied up like so much of the industrial landscape around the Red River. And as I think about this, I think of my cousin who lives in Camborne, high on skunk, sat on the ridge of his old home refusing to come down: a young man out of his mind and out of his house, punishing himself and those around him. I’ve not seen him for ten or so years. He’s living somewhere nearby, but I don’t know where. He was younger than me, but I remember playing with him in the earth in his back garden in Redruth as he took his Star Wars figures and spacecraft on missions against the dark empire. He’s never been able to settle. He was moved to St Austell for a while, but now he’s back. I should get in touch with him. Ah, as my mum would say: ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.