Tourists

(from 2017)

Cornwall is always an attractive part of Britain for vacations, because traditionally it has a milder climate than most places, dubbed the Cornish Riviera in the brochures. So here we are, dodging the rain showers and acting like traditional tourists for a week.

Our daughter and son-in-law love Cornwall because as a county it is very dog friendly. The beaches are dog friendly. The bars and some restaurants are dog friendly. And the folk clubs are dog friendly. Because of this, you tend to just get responsible dog owners, who pick up after them, if you know what I mean. The Abba Song Super Trouper is generally sung as Pooper Scooper here.

Taking dogs with you has its humorous side. At one place we visited I saw an extremely large black dog of indeterminate breed bound up to a man who was standing there with his family and head-butt him in the groin. As he went “ooof” and partly doubled over, a small voice trilled “Daddy, he’s slobbered all over you...” There was a slight pause and then “It looks like you’ve wet yourself...” At that point we tiptoed carefully away...

Our main touristy day out so far has been to visit The Lost Gardens of Heligan. If any readers are ever in Cornwall it is well worth a visit. It was originally an estate of well over 200 acres belonged to just one family for about 400 years - a regularly repeated story in British history. But the First World War decimated the staff and the whole place fell into disrepair and over decades was literally lost. A visitor, who was not a gardener but an archaeologist, stumbled upon it through brambles around 1990, and the project of re-birth commenced. A series of documentaries on British TV really put it on the map in the late 1990s. We were last there about 15 years ago when it was very much a work in progress - now it is almost finished and maintained in beautiful condition. There are walled gardens originally designed to make the estate self-sufficient, and numerous exotic plants in wild valleys, now reached by modern broad-walks. Quite nearby, which the energetic can do in the same day is the Eden Project, which has huge domes and tropical forests. It was the brainchild of the same person who started the Heligan restoration. Unlike Heligan, the Eden domes are not dog friendly, so we gave them a miss this time.

So what was the highlight for me? The Thunderbox. What on earth is that? It is a name given to the latrine/privy/loo/lavatory/toilet/WC/rest room used by the gardeners. As to why it might be called the Thunderbox we can perhaps gloss over that. But this was discovered under rampant foliage when they came to excavate. Now I had better explain that I am not actually a collector of toilets... (There has to be a name for that - perhaps not Crapologist - although the main promoter of water closets, i.e. WCs, in Britain’s Victorian era was actually one Thomas Crapper. You see my purpose with these posts is always to educate...)

But Heligan’s Thunderbox has a poignant story. When they removed the collapsed roof and all the brambles that filled it, they made a discovery. On the flaking white-washed walls, in pencil, with the date August 1914, the gardeners had written their names. What is poignant is that most of those names can now be found on local war memorials in the surrounding villages. Out of 22 main gardeners, 16 died in the conflict.

Many other staff never returned after the war, and the new economic conditions meant that the whole estate fell apart. To be rediscovered and restored over 70 years later.

The Thunderbox actually has a sort of heritage status. The Imperial War Museum granted it “Living Memorial” status in 2013.

And while we are on the subject of museums and visits, if ever readers are in London they should consider actually visiting the Imperial War Museum. It has touristy things like the air-raid experience, and weapons and airplanes and equipment captured from spies. But amid the entertainment factor, much is very sobering, because to its credit it does not glorify war.

I last went there shortly after the Holocaust exhibition opened. I know I have written up this account before, but can’t remember now if it was here or somewhere else. Anyhow, I had a special interest in that exhibition, because while it rightly focussed on the Jews and other races systematically targeted by the Nazi regime, it also covered members of a religious group in which I have an interest. They were there because they were conscientious objectors, and being a conscientious objector in Nazi Germany was often fatal.

They may have changed the layout now, I don’t know, but it was a sort of one-way system, which aptly went downhill. You started off with the increasing of anti-Semitism and sidelining of other minorities, racial, religious and political, and then as you descended, it just got worse and worse. Stories of heroism and courage of ordinary citizens who lost their lives trying to make a difference occurred along the way. There were visual interviews with survivors and witnesses. You ended up with displays of materials, shoes, glasses, pathetic minutia of ordinary lives destroyed, confiscated at the gates of the extermination and concentration camps.

When I went down there, I was inadvertently accompanied by quite a large crowd of teenagers, who were also visiting the museum. They were typical teenagers, mainly boys, noisy, boisterous, some pushing and shoving and playing about. I guess there should have been some supervision or at least some museum staff on hand to keep them in hand, but I didn’t see it. But as we descended into the bowels of the story, the noise tailed off. They became quieter. And quieter. As we reached the bottom and the literal end of the line - there was complete silence.

    

I think that’s an example of an exhibition really doing its job.