My Cornish Little Nan by Sandra Horn
After watching the last episode of Line of Duty, when I think I forgot to breathe much of the time, I needed something to read in bed that would let me cool down and get to sleep. In the pile of re-reads by my bed is Jill Paton-Walsh’s The Serpentine Cave. Perfect. As you’d expect, it’s beautifully written and beautifully crafted, a story of a mistaken episode in childhood and a search for a missing piece of identity – and it’s set in Cornwall, which is a plus for me. My Grandmother, Little Nan (so-called to distinguish her from Big Gran, my Great-grandmother) was as Cornish as cream. Mar’Ellen Harvey from St Just in Penwith. She was from a poor family (tin-miners?) and was born in the workhouse at Madron. She’d had pernicious anaemia as a child and had lost all her teeth to gingivitis by the time she was fourteen. She was ‘taken up’ by a couple of early property developers she worked for, and went with them when they left St Just – a scandal still talked of...