At the very end of her polemical memoir Undercurrent, Natasha Carthew refers to herself as an ethnic minority, specifically Cornish. Even accounting for this being legally granted status since 2014, I suspect most people’s more informal use of the term doesn’t encompass those born and bred in England’s most southwesterly county.
Certainly, though, Undercurrent makes a robust case for Cornwall as its own, immovable entity, culturally and ideologically separate from England: Carthew is now middle-aged but, in the childhood and teen years recalled here, Plymouth was effectively the edge of the world.
That experience is one of those I recognised in Undercurrent, and which made me curious to read it in the first place. Carthew grew up in Downderry, a fishing community not far from the Devon border; this reviewer’s family were further inland (though the author’s – very Cornish – surname happens to be shared with a hamlet between my village and the nearest town). Then there is the deprivation and neglect which casts a shadow over even the happiest occasions in Carthew’s life. On this front, I count myself fortunate for an upbringing far kinder than offered by her cold, self-centred and adulterous father, yet the manner in which one comes to understand, via sly societal markers, their lower class position is evocatively conveyed.
One privilege afforded, and recognised by, Carthew is her proximity to Cornish nature, whose bounties she speaks of with finely lyrical turns of phrase: her unconventional word-coupling sometimes has a touch of Dylan Thomas. Furthermore, Undercurrent’s revisiting of the 1970s and 80s is interspersed with a grim-faced analysis of the present day. Cornwall’s housing market has been inflated beyond all sanity by second-home owners and predatory landlords, making renting extortionate and purchasing impossible for the county’s great swathes on low incomes.
Suffice it to say there’s no apparent prospect of any future elected British government offering meaningful assistance through regulation; perhaps an independent Cornwall would be less wedded to economic and social conservatism than its voting patterns suggest.
Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir Of Poverty, Nature And Resilience, Natasha Carthew (Coronet)
Price: £16.99/£24.99 audiobook. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER
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