In Cornwall: Review of 'Diving Belles' by Lucy Wood.

I have been in Cornwall four days – walking in its country lanes, drinking locally brewed rhubarb cider, feasting on real Cornish pasties and having dollops of clotted cream with every dessert. The people are different here. They wave at me like I am an old friend and it feels like I’m back home in Ireland. The sun is hot in this part of England and the sea is so clear. I bought a pair of glass turquoise ear rings, the same colour of the sea. Standing in the garden mid-morning, with the dew still wet on the grass, I watch the sea mist slowly creep inland. I have never seen sea mist before. It looks like a beautiful lady walking slowly around the earth, her ghostly white skirt trailing behind her.

I like to read about the places I visit so I went to ‘Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights’ to find something delightfully Cornish. ‘Lucy Wood is as Cornish as you’ll get,’ Nick, the bookseller said as he handed me a lovely little book, with illustrations of mermaids and seashells on the front cover. Lucy Wood grew up in Cornwall and Diving Belles’ is her first collection of short stories; the stories are an entanglement of everyday experience, memories, otherworldliness and Cornish folk lore.

I was captivated by the two worlds which Wood has created in the collection: that of the constrained human world and the freedom of the magical realm. It is interesting to watch as these two worlds collide and merge. In ‘Lights in Other People’s Houses,’ I was caught between the mundane problems of Maddy and Russell and intrigued by the confused wrecker who longed for the sea. Pretty soon the wrecker begins to take over the house and the humans don’t really seem to mind that their hallway is full of sand or that shells drip from the taps. Likewise Iris gets vouchers to go underwater to see if she can find her husband whom she hasn't seen in years. When she does find him, he has become something other than human. This acceptance of there being another sort of existence painted a very alluring picture of the Cornish landscape where pixies and people live in harmony.  

All of the characters are so very unique which displays Wood’s great imagination. From the rather boring character of Rita who stands up on the cliffs and turns into stone to the grumpy old grandmother who combs the beach for treasures, all of the characters are surreal. However, it’s not all froth as some of the stories have a dark side. In ‘Magpies’ a man follows an injured bird into the wood to find that he has been there before; dreams, nightmares, and meetings with old friends are woven into the story. In ‘Of Mothers and Little People,’ the narrator keeps referring to ‘your mother’ and ‘the man’ and the familiarity of these characters haunted me.

The story which undoubtedly touched me the most was ‘Notes from the House spirits.’ It is written from the perspective of the spirits who guard the house and they record every little detail of what goes on. They notice every piece of dust that settles on the curtain rail and the butterballs left to rot under the sofa and all the people who come and go. They grow attached to the people. They remember things about them like the sound of their laugh or the way the showered. Perhaps it is the omnipresence of the narrator which paints such a potent and intricate portrait of human life.

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Tomorrow I will return to Bath; go back to my reading lists and my books and begin exam revision. Bath is small and claustrophobic and the people look straight through you. There is no sea. I will arrange my new collection of sea glass, pebbles and shells on my desk and when I need to escape I will lift a shell to my ear, close my eyes and imagine I am by the sea.