Book review: The Great Western Beach

Published on Wednesday 16 July 2008 15:11

THE GREAT WESTERN BEACH by Emma Smith Bloomsbury, 384pp, £14.99

That image gives you the sense of release and pure joy that courses like life-blood through Emma Smith's enchanting recollection of growing up in Newquay, on the Cornish coast, three-quarters of a century ago. Thirty years have gone by since this admired novelist was last published, but it has been worth the wait for an extraordinary first-hand account of the ecstasies of childhood. And its traumas; for, with every recollection of the magic of life beside the sea – a night-time beach bonfire, the scent of gorse and a warm Atlantic wind – Smith produces a darker one to counter it.

The family viewed here from a child's perspective is not a happy one. Their tragedy is the familiar one, of a mismatch. The mother is charming, straightforward and cheery. The father is intelligent, brave, artistic – and savagely disappointed. A former war hero, he loathes his life as a bank clerk. He wants fame, and on his terms. (The pleasure of winning a tennis cup, even, is poisoned by the fact that his wife's name is jointly recorded upon the trophy.)

The sense of Father's pain and its insidious effect gives Smith's memoir the hard edge that makes it remarkable. "Anger is what I daily dread," the author writes. Her child's eyes view her father as bully and idol; the wielder of a strap with which he beats his children; the mesmerising reader of poetry to young Emma (his favourite child); and as the unhappy man who stares out at "a singing, heaving, tossing, savage ocean" that speaks, as we are told, for his suppressed despair.

Thanks to Father, the family experiences two separate lives, a state of affairs that perplexes the child who records events. How is it, she wonders, that she and her older siblings are always presented to the outside world as wonderful, while, back at home, they know they amount only to a disappointment, a nuisance and a worrying expense?

The artful delivery of an uncomprehended double life may be the author's most impressive achievement in this beautifully written book. The detailed images are, perhaps, too exact to be credible; the conversations may seem too perfectly recalled. Small liberties, we can be sure, have been taken with the truth. So, with memoirs, it often is, and I don't believe it matters here, when the result is so convincing, and so fresh. Emma Smith has written a book that should endure as a classic among memoirs of childhood.