I was born early one Sunday morning, at my parents’ home in Liskeard, a market town in East Cornwall where, from a very early age, I soon realized I was bound by love, spirit, cultural heritage, myth and legend to this Celtic peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the sea and partially separated from England by the Tamar River.

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My paternal grandparents lived just down the road and the tales they told of ‘old’ Cornwall captivated and influenced me to a greater extent than I’m sure they could ever have imagined. My grandfather spent his formative years in a moorland parish, the son of a long line of Cornish miners whose roots lay in West Cornwall.  It was amidst the changing fortunes of the mining industry, the differential pay rates and a constant threat of redundancy that brought his branch of the family to work the mines of East Cornwall.  My grandparents often took us children up onto Bodmin Moor, to run wild while my grandmother picked bilberries.  As my grandfather and I walked across the windswept moors, he would tell me the histories of the many derelict Mine Engine Houses, that dot the moorland landscape, with a passion that came from the heart, a wistful sentimental yearning it seemed for days long past.

Growing up, magic and lore surrounded us.  The old ways were widely accepted and determined our frame of reference as to what was ‘normal’ in our formative years so naturally it wasn’t to a doctor my mother took my brother to find a cure for his eczema.  Throughout the width and breadth of the land Charmers ply their craft of healing.  A power that is handed down from mother to son, father to daughter.  Their powers of healing include curing a person of warts, shingles, eczema, ringworm and even local snake bites.

Bonesetters were another source of healing and highly regarded among Cornish folk, which my husband can attest to after being cured of a lengthy and painful attack of sciatica which modern medicine failed to alleviate.

My parents left Liskeard when I was thirteen and we lived on the harbour at Portreath for some time, where I attended Treswithian School in Camborne.  We later moved to St. Austell where I finished my schooling at West Hill.  Employment in the Telecom Industry and Local Government took me through the birth of my daughters and to our family decision to emigrate to Canada in 1996.  It seems bizarre to me even now that a person who had to shorten her honeymoon because of a homesick longing to cross back over the River Tamar, into Cornwall and home, could move 3691 miles away to a new land and a new life.  I must admit, the prospect was exciting.  Canada is a great country and its inhabitants friendly and, to a newly landed immigrant family, helpful and supportive, and for that I was very grateful. 

Life opened up for me as the years passed.   I had a fulfilling career and the opportunity to study and graduate from the University of Manitoba, but it was my lifelong ambition to write that finally brought me the pleasure and gratification I had sought for so long. 

It was the birth of my grandchildren that inspired me to write Alex and the Druids’ Eclipse, A Cornish Tale.  You could say it was my ‘lightbulb moment’, with all my Cornish memories, the myth, the magic, legends and lore, and especially our heritage that goes back to the Celts of the Iberian Peninsula, fueling my passion. I knew I had to show my grandchildren, I wanted to bring it to life for them, to make them as proud of their Cornish Celtic heritage as I am.

Cornwall is and always will remain in my soul.  I often think of the thousands of Cornish miners who made their way to North and South America, Australia, the Transvaal and many other countries around the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, never to return home to Cornwall or see their families again.  I am very grateful to live in an age where we can skype, facetime, call and communicate through the many social media networks.  Ask me what my nationality is and I will tell you, with great pride in my heart, Cornish.  I still regularly bake traditional Cornish fare, pasties, saffron cake, yeast buns and Cornish under roast, all learned at my Gran’s knee. My daughters have no doubt of their heritage and are proud to call themselves Cornish, and that famous Cornish pasty holds a very important place at their tables.

Our annual visits home to Cornwall are very precious to my husband and I, when we can again see our families and friends, visit old haunts and to walk along the shorelines, climbing over rocks draped in bladder wrack and slippery green algae seaweeds.  One beach in particular will always hold my heart.  A hidden cove within walking distance of my husband’s home village, where the silence is broken only by the soft whisper of the waves sucking at the shingle and the sighs of long dead smugglers and pirates, drifting like smoke through the ether.