I don't know if Barbara Hepworth ever hitchhiked, history doesn't relate, but somehow I think she’d have liked it. She certainly liked the road. Drawn by man on the hillside she thought its lines told their own tales. “The hills were sculptures, the roads defined their form,” she once said. For Hepworth humans and the landscape were inseparable, different but one, like a child in the womb or a nut in its shell. She would have liked how hitchhiking peoples the world, weaving their lives into the fabric of a place. And I was in her place: West Cornwall.
There’s something exhilarating nearing the end of Cornwall, knowing as you go west that the sea is closing in on either side until there it is washing around you on all three sides. For millennia people would have thought this was where the world ended, where it dissolved into an endless sea, nothing beyond but a smattering of small islands. Hepworth loved this part of the country. She loved its pagan power and rugged rocks, cliffs and beating waves, and it’s where she lived for most of her adult life, tucked away in St Ives.
I was slowly winding towards the town from Bodmin Moor an hour or two to the east. It was wet and as I waited on the roadside the cars hissed past covering me in spray. A family took pity on me and screeched to a halt on the slip road, hurriedly beckoning me in. The mother jumped in the back with her two sons as the rain drummed on the roof. The windows steamed up from my soaking clothes. The father told me he, like Hepworth, had grown up in the North of England but had moved down here as a teenager. “Too many nonces in Burnley,” apparently. In the 80s there was a string of paedophilia cases around there that shook his parents so much that they moved as far away as they could. He’d been here long enough to pick up a slight accent and to have noticed the changes the county’s undergone as droves of Londoners began to arrive and buy up all the houses. The change in Cornwall has been twofold they thought: the touristy areas have gone one way while the rest of the county had gone the other.
Bodmin had gone the other and it was best avoided if I didn't want any trouble, the mother explained. Full of dossers and drug addicts. They offered to take me through to the other side where I’d be a bit safer. By the time I’d had supper in a nearby pub, it was getting late but to my relief, the rain had finally cleared. That evening I walked along the Camel Trail. It’s an old railway line that once linked the Atlantic to Bodmin Moor. It would carry rich silt from the mouth of the Camel river to be used as fertiliser further inland. Today, it’s a lovely walking path and at that time of night, I had it to myself. It took me a while though to find a quiet enough spot to safely pitch my tent. I’d learnt my lesson from the Scottish Borders and was keen to find an open field away from the shadowy woods which loomed overhead.
Squeezing myself through a thorn bush, I found a meadow where I thought I could sleep unseen. I was woken in the morning by a splutter of a quadbike on the hill above. It droned unmoving for a while and I imagined the farmer sitting on it watching me through slitted eyes deciding what to do, shotgun slung over his shoulder. Luckily there was no gunshot and after a while, the engine whirred off over the hill again and left me in silence. When I peered out nobody was there, just the meadow and dramatic black clouds.
The morning brought with it my longest wait yet. The main road out of Wadebridge seemed to offer no issues with safe laybys and plenty of traffic passing slowly, but no matter what I did, nobody would stop. As the half-hour mark came and went I felt the first pangs of frustration. Usually waiting for a ride is a peculiarly hypnotic thing. Time rushes past as you watch every vehicle intently, eying the drivers for any sign of interaction, willing them to stop. But now my fake-enthusiastic smile was beginning to hurt my cheeks.
A man picking up litter nearby suggested that the issue was probably my hat. No doubt he was trying to be helpful but I was minorly offended. Realising this, he made up for it by excitedly saying that he bet I’d been picked up by some good-looking women. I replied that unfortunately, most people that picked me up were middle-aged men, usually called Mark. He looked disappointed and skulked off up the roadside.
After an hour I managed to convince a couple who’d briefly parked nearby to take me a couple of miles up the road. Hitchhiking usually has a way of working out and, eager to help, Neil and Lindsay gave me their number, telling me I was welcome to stay in one of their caravans if I ever needed to. They dropped me at an industrial estate and I tried to hitch for a while but gave up, feeling a little hopeless again as traffic sped past at full speed. There was a sign next to me flapping in the breeze with a photoshopped picture of a full English. “£7.25” was slapped on in a large yellow star. Too tempting to ignore I walked into the estate and the Pit Stop Cafe.
It was a tiny go-karting-themed caff tucked around the back of the warehouses. Inside there were four or five plastic tables with a few heavy-set folks hunched over great plates of steaming food. I put in my order and settled down as the splatter of frying eggs spluttered from behind the counter. There was a man in a polo shirt which had ‘St Stephen’s Fish, St Ives’ emblazoned on it. Lindsay had spotted it earlier and suggested I ask him for a ride so I did. He had one more delivery to make then he was heading back. “If you’re still there in 20 minutes I’ll give you a ride to St Ives,” he said cheerfully as he polished off his last mouthful. Knowing I had a lift at last I settled into my breakfast stress-free.
The English breakfast is an institution and sitting in the Pit Stop Cafe I realised just what an institution it is. In my opinion, the best time to have a full English is when you’re feeling sorry for yourself. A hangover is the most common reason but having just spent the morning watching people ignore me I felt I deserved a treat. True to form it cheered me up royally.
W Somerset Maugham once said that to eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day. Given the fat content in a fry-up, it’s a testament to its deeper power that he lived until he was 91. The roots of the English breakfast however lie all the way back in the 13th century. Lords and ladies, themselves harking back to the Anglo-Saxon traditions of hospitality, would entertain their guests with huge spreads exhibiting the full extent of their estate’s wealth. Hams, cheeses, pickles and pies would be cooked up into a magnificent banquet and enjoyed before the day began. The tradition persisted through the centuries though it wasn’t until the Victorian and Edwardian eras that such early morning excess spread beyond the gentry, slowly trickling down the hierarchy until it reached the masses. By the First World War, it was recognisable as what we’re used to today and the enormous source of protein contained was used to fuel the soldiers and working classes. In the 50s as rationing ended, greasy spoons began popping up throughout the country in industrial estates, docks, factories and on roadsides, sustaining a hungry workforce. Many, like the Pit Stop Cafe, still proudly do.
I wolfed mine down as many a full English has been wolfed down before: quickly and without speaking, and made my way back to the road, feeling completely satisfied. Not long after, the fish van came cruising over the hill and the man in the polo pulled up with a wave. I hopped in thoroughly pleased by the clockwork convenience of the whole operation. The cab did smell strongly of fish but I was too content to mind.
In a way, driving fish around Cornwall was Matt’s dream job. He’d had other jobs in the past and had been around the world as a crane engineer, but that was too stressful. The nagging thought that one mistake could kill wore heavily on his shoulders until eventually he quit and moved to Cornwall. The money was a fraction but, “Believe me,” he said with a shake of his head, “It’s not all about money.”
His life was now totally stress-free. He’d drive van loads of fish from St Ives to pubs all across the county. He’d be done in good time that evening and was looking forward to seeing his wife. They’d just bought a house together and were doing it up. The best bit of the job though was that he had visited practically every pub in Cornwall and Matt’s greatest love was the pub. He enthusiastically gave me a comprehensive list of all the boozers worth their mettle between Land’s End and Launceston.
I asked about the art galleries that had made St Ives famous recently. He rolled his eyes and huffed a little, “St Ives is blooody full of em!”
“You into that?”
“Me? Nooo, I ain’t into that!” He huffed again, “I don’t go down the art galleries, I go down the pub!” With that he began his list of St Ives’ finest establishments, highly recommending The Three Ferrets which was “a craaaackin’ boozer!” His list was cut short by a phone call coming over the Bluetooth. “Hellllllo, treacle-tits!” His wife announced purringly. Matt cleared his throat a little awkwardly and flashed an embarrassed look in my direction. Luckily, he informed her I was there before it went any further.
As we came into St Ives he pointed out a huge redbrick Victorian pile, standing proudly on a wide lawn. “You see that there,” Matt began, “that’s where they process all the school photographs. You know like them class photos and all of that.” It turned out the company was called Tempest and they process over 8 million photos every year of school children, graduates, classes and teachers. “Wouldn’t believe it would be down the end of the fuckin’ earth would ya?”
I didn’t much like St Ives though admittedly I didn’t give it much of a chance. It was full of tourists and pastelly clothes shops. I didn’t feel compelled to check it out and instead made my way through the crowds straight to the Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden, run by the Tate.
There I marvelled at the beautiful sculptures, their varied textures, satisfying twists and expressive forms. Tall, pill-like shapes stood gently, their matt shells begging you to run your hand over them while sharper-edged blocks receded behind like faceless Easter Island heads. They all evoked the neolithic standing stones so common around here, the likes of Men-an-Tor, Creeg Tol or the Merry Maidens which were raised millennia ago by curious minds, the Hepworths of old. Each sculpture, distilled through her chisel, was the ancient landscape embodied: a hillside, valley or river and the rumbling contours of the earth filled every human-like form. “I, the sculptor, am the landscape,” she once said, “I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.”
I walked back up the hill out of town, past the shaggy-haired surfers, tired and salty from an afternoon in the sea, past the Thai, Indian and Chinese restaurants, Fish and Chip shacks, building sites and camper vans and meandered through the crowds of tourists as they browsed the seafront.
Kate and Wendy picked me up from the fire station on the edge of town. I only wanted to go a few miles down to Penzance and they were happy to take me. They both worked at the Tate and had for a long time. Wendy arrived in the 2000s with nothing but a backpack and a CV. The Tate was the first place she walked into and she’d worked there ever since. Kate had come here in the 90s from Liverpool. “Did you come for work?” I asked.
“No … People issues,” she replied. I didn’t pursue it. She told me how she used to hitchhike in the 60s when it was an act of political resistance, a way of subverting the state and their controls. She’d hitch to festivals and concerts with flowers in her hair. She still missed the freedom and the adventure though wasn’t sure if she’d advise it now. She didn’t know why.
“It’s probably quite easy getting lifts down in West Cornwall,” she observed when I said I’d not had any trouble, “People are a bit more alternative.”
“Yeah they are more autistic you’re right,” Wendy chipped in with a knowing nod.
“No, not autistic!” Kate cried, “They’re more arty!”
“Oh right…” Wendy looked awkward and no one said anything for a moment.
We made our way along the snaking narrow road which joined St Ives to Penzance, over the final hills of England before the sea pinches them away. “There is no landscape without the human figure,” Hepworth once said, and I thought back to all the people I’d met since I left Edinburgh, seemingly an age before. All the people in their wonderful multiplicity who are the Britain of today, their hectic lives crammed in among tarmacked hills, polluted rivers and rugged valleys; between the lapping seas. These were the people that populated this landscape now, that lent their lives to the place and its ancient story. Each one is the form, the hollow, the thrust and the contour just as their neolithic ancestors were and just as Hepworth was.
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Love that W Somerset Maugham quote : ) Although not strictly true. You could also have pudding three times a day... Summer pudding, Eton Mess, Triflie, Treacle sponge and custard...
Have you read "First Light" by Peter Ackroyd?