(Not) Counting the Minutes at Falmouth Town Station

I was born at 8.25 am on the 2^nd of January 1959 with apparently the straightest back the midwife had ever seen. Not really sure how this has benefitted me in life but there you go. My dad was unable to visit my mum and meet me until after his day's work at the factory was complete. A loving, but not traditionally romantic, man he brought my mum her favourite sweets as a present: a box of fruit gums. That night bad fog resulted in the cancellation of all buses so my dad walked the 11 miles home after he left us tucked up for the night. It was a Friday and he didn't work Saturdays so I guess he was able to rest a little before leaving home the next afternoon for another visit.

My father wrote of his love for my mother, and the impact she had on his life, in an approximately 60 thousand word text entitled Memoir of a Life, that he finished a first draft of not long before he died in January 1979. This included:

My attraction was immediate. . . There was nothing about her that failed to appeal . . . the more I saw of her the more sure I became that I wanted this girl to be my wife. . . Within weeks I was absolutely certain that I wished to marry. . . I was no longer lonely when in her presence. I found communication between us to be ridiculously easy. I had no discontent when I was with her, and to make her happy was a purpose that I could seriously put my mind to.

She was truly the only girl I had ever known who made me feel complete.  (Thornton unpublished).

My dad was an adventurer, born into a working-class family it was always likely that he would follow his father into factory work and live and die within the community within which he was born. Although he fulfilled the first part of this expectation the last 15 or so years of his life were lived very differently. Largely self-educated, the books he read and the people and places he encountered in the army (towards the end of World War II) gave him both a taste for exploration and a desire to search for something more; to live his life differently than this peers. This led to my father, mother and I packing our bags and leaving Liverpool, the city of all our births in the mid-1960s to undertake several moves in the UK and abroad. The beginnings of our travels were funded by the sale of our house, bequeathed to my father from his father, another unusual man of his class and time, who not only parented my father alone after the early death of my grandmother but also saved enough to buy a house for them to live in. When the money ran out my dad, and often my mum too, worked when and wherever they could. Sometimes there were no jobs and I recall lean times, including one memorable night when we had nowhere to stay and so slept in a railway carriage. My mum told me once that she felt guilty that our peripatetic lifestyle might have disadvantaged me. I was shocked that she felt this. I loved our life, and benefitted from what I learnt on the way about, for example, the history and geography of the places we lived and about the social and political lived realities of cultural difference. We had so much fun together too and this is what I remember the most.  The last nine years of my dad’s life we spent living in Cornwall, mostly in Falmouth, but for the final nine months in Coverack, a small fishing village, on the Lizard Peninsula.

Apart from a couple of years living closer to me my mum remained in Cornwall, in Coverack, and later the nearby town of Helston, for the rest of her life. She never remarried or entered an intimate relationship again: ‘I had the best,’ she told me ‘why would I want another?’ Seven weeks before she died, just a couple of days after her terminal lung cancer diagnosis I travelled from Plymouth to Helston to complete the final bits of packing for her home move to Falmouth. We had decided on the relocation to be nearer to long-standing good friends and because of the easier commute from Plymouth (where I lived and worked) to Falmouth by public transport as neither of us had ever learnt to drive.

Mum never got to live in her new flat as after release from hospital she moved in with me where she stayed until she died on the 30^th January 2012, just one day short of the anniversary of my father’s death 33 years previously. Although my mum and I were 80 and 53 respectively when she died it was far too soon a parting for both of us. 'I'm going to miss you so much' she said to me a few days before her death. At the same time true to her optimistic approach and stoical nature she was telling others 'I’m not too bad at all' when asked how she was.

After my mum’s death I spent the next two years living between Devon and Cornwall as had been our plan. I write this piece sitting in the living room of the home we choose together. I live here permanently now, well when I’m not on a journey ‘up country’ or across the sea to work and/or to visit friends. Through a likely mix of nature and nurture I too have wanderlust and I’m keen to be on a trip. I am always pleased to return home though, happy in the place that was so important to my parents and I during my teenage years. I am sad, so sad, that my mum and I didn’t get time together here but I feel my parents all around me in and about the town and surrounding area. Despite the frequency with which I travel I hate to be, am anxious of, being late, and although the nearest railway station is literally a three minute walk away I’m always there at least 10, usually 15 minutes before the train arrives. This gives me plenty of time to think, to remember, to reflect and rather than counting the minutes at Falmouth Town Station it provides me with the headspace to plan pieces such as this. 

Gayle Letherby (nee Thornton)