A PERFECT CORNISH SUMMER

Phillipa Ashley

Dedication

In memory of Mike Fosbrook, my inspirational English teacher

Prologue

September 2008

Porthmellow.co.uk Town Blog Forum

MoaningOldMinnie: Another shop closed? That’s three in the past six months. This town’s going to the dogs! Why doesn’t somebody from the council or chamber of trade do something before we have tumbleweeds rolling round the harbour?

‘I swear someone’s going to drown one of these days,’ the old man said in his thick Cornish burr. ‘And guess who’ll be the one to have to fish the little buggers out.’

It was all Sam Lovell could do to hide a smile at her neighbour Troy Carman’s expression as he watched the teenagers in wetsuits opposite the Smuggler’s Tavern. They were laughing and jeering as they egged each other on to leap off the harbour wall into the inky waters. Every Sunday evening in Porthmellow, from spring through to autumn, it was the same: the town band playing outside the pub and teenagers tombstoning into the harbour. A last hurrah of the weekend before everyone had to go back to work and school the next morning.

Sam rested her half of lager on the peeling table. Like a lot of things in Porthmellow, the tavern was in dire need of a spruce up. ‘Didn’t you do a bit of tombstoning when you were a lad?’ she asked.

Troy shook his head at the kids shrieking as they climbed onto the top wall above the harbour. ‘Back in the day I might have, and we didn’t have these fancy wetsuits, then. I used to do it in my cotton underpants. Our mum went mad. I only had three pairs. One to wash, one to wear and one for Sunday best. Full of holes, they were too, by the time they’d been through her mangle a hundred times.’

‘Troy. I love you to bits, but that is way too much information,’ said Sam, trying to purge from her mind the image of her elderly neighbour leaping into the harbour in a pair of pants as murky as the water.

Although the sun was shining on the terrace of the Smuggler’s Tavern this September evening, it was too little too late. The summer had been grey and gloomy far too often, keeping visitors away from their remote part of Cornwall. Times were hard and many families had had to miss out on a holiday altogether. It was exactly what the little harbour town didn’t need – not to mention Sam herself, who had left her job to start her own catering business the previous year. Who could have foreseen a global crash? Certainly not Sam, who’d been too busy keeping her family together after losing three of the people she loved most within the space of a couple of years.