How Britain’s coastal communities lost hope

Most Cornish stories are told by outsiders, and are not Cornish stories at all. It’s as a setting for bourgeois summer holidays and bourgeois art – from Daphne du Maurier (Fowey) to Enid Blyton (Newquay) to Virginia Woolf (St Ives) – that Cornwall, or rather a projection of Cornwall, is famous. Writers come here to tell stories about themselves: Gavin Knight wrote The Swordfish and the Star, a credulous tale of celebrity fishermen set in Newlyn, my adopted home town; Lamorna Ash wrote Dark, Salt, Clear, a portrait of unease; and Raynor Winn wrote The Salt Path, whose fictions were exposed in The Observer.

Natasha Carthew gives us something different in Rough Edges: she was born in Cornwall, yet her story is one of departure. This is the Cornish paradox: you must leave in order to prove you are from here, and Carthew finds herself moving to Ireland with her partner, because she has been priced out of her own homeland. This is her farewell to “the salt belt of deprivation … where, on certain stumbling, cash-strapped days, many of its inhabitants feel like they are falling. Where the rough edges of the earth start to slip and they are left sliding towards an unknown abyss – sea spray in their eyes, pebbles in their shoes, wind tangling their hair – and they start to wonder, How do I get back up?”

Carthew is an idealist, and she takes her narrative beyond Cornwall. “Britain is an island nation,” she writes, “bounded by water, we look towards its fringes to mark the edges of our national community, to what is holding us together. But, in truth, it is the British coastline that has slowly unravelled.” And so she walks around that coastline looking for answers to the unravelling, in a dark and furious parody of a coastal holiday: “The burnt and peeling cliche of seaside culture … a hyper-saturated, sandy idyll.” The seasons are her structure and, when summer has gone, “what is left is the tarnished remains of a ravished landscape”.

She is a riveting, self-aware narrator: “At best I float around and at worst I sink into a deep cavern of existential dread … I’m moving with small circling steps whilst my investigation takes great strides – coast to coast to coast to coast – English Channel, North Sea, North Atlantic Ocean, Irish Sea. I have never felt so alone.”

But first Cornwall, where she grew up in the village of Downderry. She wonders if those growing up in big coastal cities felt, like she did, “the weight and drag of poverty, the burden of being rooted in place no matter how far you tried to stretch for the stars or the horizon, because there simply was no other way out”. (I would say yes to the first, and no to the second.) Carthew describes that, when she was growing up, “there were no job opportunities available … except cleaning chalets, gutting fish, packing crab or working in the village pub”. Sometimes her lyricism stops dead, to make a point: “People like me, who are born and raised in intense poverty, are not supposed to do anything with their lives except drink and fuck and mess about insignificantly until premature death strikes.”

The routes available to her “were rabbit-burrow narrow” and there is a similar claustrophobia to Rough Edges amid “the goading, stormy sea”. She was “poor in every practical respect of the word, but rich in the colours of sea glass, shells and hedgerow flowers, prosperous in the saline drift of early morning fog and the taste of blackberries in September, potatoes in October and winkles picked off the rocks in summer, all by my own hand”. The inequality “was never quite recognisable or tangible; it was ungraspable, akin to water or air: it was just there”.

If the Cornish working class do escape, they “return to their community, years later, to find it had changed beyond recognition, each house doubled in size, rebuilt with giant glass balconies, car and boat ports and swimming pools, familiarity flipped and neatly clipped”. This is a search for identity and place: Cornwall is still a paradigm here, just a meaningful one.

She lists the names people had for her: “TRAILER TRASH – REDNECK – SLOB – PEASANT– SCUM – CHAV – WHITE TRASH – TRAMP – UNDERCLASS – DREGS – COUNCIL-HOUSE TRASH.” She mourns the lack of remembrance of communities – “our experiences were never considered worthy of collecting and preserving” – and sets out to write her own. Wherever she rests on the journey, she looks for fellowship: she haunts local charities that soothe communities and details their hopes. If she is seeking redemption, it does not come.

Beyond Cornwall, Carthew is a shy interviewer, and this seems very Cornish to me: insular and hesitant. Still, her encounters are fascinating. “‘So, Brexit – you vote yes or no?’ I ask [a fisherman in Plymouth]. ‘Bleddy voted yes, dint I, like a bleddy idiot.’ ‘How much did exports fall?’ I ask. ‘’Bout 83%.’ ‘Shit,’ I say. ‘Any other work?’ I ask. ‘Don’t be daft. Fishin’ is the only thing I know.’”

In Rhyl, north Wales, she meets a group of elderly nature writers. “‘We’re trying to describe the mountains in the distance,’ a lady called Efa tells me, ‘the reflection on the sea.’ I smile politely, because there is no reflection, the waves are too rough. ‘What about the kids playing in the surf?’ I ask. ‘Or that couple, over there, sharing an ice cream?’ ‘We’re nature writers,’ she tells me. ‘Aren’t we all a part of nature?’ She looks at me as if I’m stupid.” Carthew has always lived with this erasure. At one time she internalised it: her former drug use, she writes, “is a descent into darkness, an obscurity filled with forfeiture”. She estimates that one third of her childhood friends are dead.

Carthew prefers to tell us things we do not wish to know: Britain leads the western world in homelessness, for example; we are excluded from 92% of the countryside by trespass laws; youths in coastal areas are three times more likely to suffer from undiagnosed mental health conditions than those inland.

At first, the thinness of the interviews irritates me. Then I begin to read them as numbness. The British are not good at fury, but almost no one Carthew meets feels secure in their place. “The people I speak to, residents on estates who I greet whilst they sit weather-watching on their front steps, drinking tea or smoking a cheeky fag, tell me they feel disconnected, almost like they don’t exist.” A university student in Aberdeen tells her: “I’m not sure if people tell me I shouldn’t be here, or if I just think it.” In Southend, she meets Joan, 88, who points up at the home she used to have, “a white-washed building from the seaside Regency period”. She lost it to poverty and can now only look at it from the street.

Carthew has written her own life across the isles before she leaves them. It’s at heart a plea for recognition, but she is conscious of the truth of narcissism: of our inability to see beyond ourselves, and what that brings us. She meets an artist in Blackpool: “‘Do you ever paint the ocean?’ I ask. ‘I paint everything, but people want portraits when they come to Blackpool. Portraits – and rock.’”

Rough Edges: Where Land Meets Water, the Untold Stories of Coastline Communities by Natasha Carthew is published Sceptre (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18 (10% off RRP)

Photography by Niall McDiarmid/Millennium Images