Book description
The Great Western Beach is Emma Smith's wonderfully
atmospheric memoir of a 1920s childhood in Newquay, Cornwall. She
recalls the rocks, the sea, the beaches, the picnics, the teas and
pasties, the bracing walks, the tennis tournaments and bathing
parties, the curious residents and fascinating holiday-makers -
relishing every glorious, salty detail. But above all this is a
portrait of a family from the astonishingly clear-eyed perspective of
a nine-year-old girl: her furious, frustrated father, perpetually on
his way to becoming a world famous artist but suffering the indignity
of being a lowly bank clerk; her beautiful, unperceptive mother, made
for better things perhaps but at least, with three fiancà ©s killed
in the Great War, married with children at last; the twins, fearless,
defiant Pam and sickly, bewildered Jim, for whom life is always an
uphill climb, and baby Harvey, brought on the same winds of change
that mean that life, with all its complication and wonder, cannot stay
still and the Cornish playground of Emma's childhood will one day be
lost forever.
The Great Western Beach deserves to become an overnight classic and
to find a home at holiday cottage bedsides from St. Ives to Great
Yarmouth'
Emma Smith was born in Cornwall in 1923. During World War
II she volunteered to work on the canals as a boatwoman. Later, these
experiences would become the basis for her memoir Maidens
Trip, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
In 1946, Smith went to India with a team of documentary film-makers
including Laurie Lee. She then moved to Paris and wrote the novel
The Far Cry, based on her time in India. It became her second
bestseller and was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
fiction in 1949. Susan Hill helped revive Emma Smith s career: she
found a copy of The Far Cry in a jumble sale and wrote a piece
for the Telegraph about it. The Far Cry was re-issued by
Persephone Books in 2002
Emma Smith went on to write a further novel and numerous successful
children s books. Since 1980 she has lived in Putney, London.
