Not wanting to sit and wait on my cases myself I persuaded the village postmaster to look after them for me. It wasn’t easy. He was rancid with bitterness and inexplicable rage like all village postmasters I have met since, and he was from Birmingham to boot. I later learnt that he resented Camilla because she bought a hundred pounds worth of stamps from him at a time – he took such profligacy as a personal insult – but he resented everyone else in the village also, and often with slimmer justification. He hates me to this day – though he no longer runs the post office – because I once emptied him out of manilla envelopes, and I suppose because I asked him to mind my cases. Having got rid of them I walked down the hill, past the white cob cottages, ancient and huddled and slightly tipsy looking, all of them bearing names culled from a never-never land of eternal pastoral innocence and nautical high spirits – Tinker Bell’, ‘Lucky Pixie’, ‘Halcyon Days’, ‘Smugglers’ Cove’, ‘Tall Ships’. In a few minutes I was out in the harbour. I had never been to Cornwall before. As I’ve intimated already, Jews don’t in the main make for the West Country. Hammersmith is far enough in that direction for most of us. And we certainly don’t holiday in villages – not English villages anyway. So it was all new to me and surprising. I don’t really know what I expected. Violent seas, I suppose, and villagers in striped bandanas and hooped earrings stripping down the recent wreckage of some Potuguese man of war that they’d lured on to the rocks. It was therefore strange to me to see holiday-makers perambulating aimlessly, staring into shop windows, deciphering simple menus, loathing their children, and stuffing ice-creams and candy-floss into their faces, for all the world as if they were in Blackpool or Brighton. Don’t mistake me: I wasn’t then and I am not now censorious. I have always borne a determinedly tolerant good-will towards the more basic forms of tourism. You won’t catch me complaining about crowds. I won’t have it that you must carry a blackthorn stick and wear thick red socks rolled down over your boots before you can rightly claim the countryside is yours to spoil. I abhor the snobbery of rambling and the feudal politics of conservation. And I have always enjoyed a runny ice-cream in noisy company myself. What I couldn’t comprehend in those who treated Castle Boterel as if it were Blackpool or Brighton was why they weren’t in Blackpool or Brighton, since, according to any rational definition of seeing and doing and enjoying, there was so much more to see and do and enjoy there. Sharon wouldn’t have stayed in such a place as this above ten minutes; there were no department stores, and no deck chairs. And she would never have kept her footing on the sea-sprayed slate. I had trouble enough keeping mine, and I wasn’t wearing six-inch heels – not quite. I even went right over on my back once, lacerating my hands on thorn and rock, and entertaining otherwise thoroughly bored children.