Homesick Student

I left Cornwall when I was eighteen, and never moved back. It was college that took me away, I was running towards expectation, freedom, and difference. Leeds hit me hard. I fell in love with the blackened sandstone churches and the red brick terraces stepping down the hillsides. Already in love with Nick, I missed him terribly, but I didn’t miss the gorse bushes of home. Because I wasn’t always happy, I remember my first year in Leeds in mixed ways, but it left an impression on me. Even now, the street names resonate: The Headrow, Headingley Lane, Roundhay…, and I recall the way the revolving doors to the main building of the Polytechnic would move heavily under my gloved hands. The weather is cold in my memory, although in all of the photographs of myself from that time, I’m in light clothing. Stiletto heels in the evening though, and how they would stick to the floor of the Students Union. There was always Simply Red playing. I hated Hucknall. The Pogues though…


Coming home from Leeds in the holidays was a cliché of student experience. I was barely off the train before I felt constrained. I always saw Nick first, and would lie to Mum that I had caught a later train (or a train the day later). The people who knew me would remark that my hair was different, the buses would be infrequent, my old friends had the same lives without me. My family? Oh, awful, just the worst. Such tensions, so annoying, petty, dull. If I couldn’t be with Nick, then I wanted to be away. I returned less and less over those years, and after I graduated, hardly at all.

When I say I’m from Cornwall, some people say how lovely it is and ask why I left and if I want to go back. ‘You must miss it‘, they remark. I’m generally decisive, replying in the negative. It’s a hard place to make a living, not much happens, the weather is not as good as you might think. In some ways, I’m more sentimental about Leeds than Cornwall. I haven’t been back to Yorkshire for decades, so it’s probably nostalgia for a time when everything was fresh, possible, and safe because eighteen year olds know no fear.

Just lately, I’ve been homesick for Cornwall. I miss the clean air, the gathering of starlings, hills, scrubby heather and gorse with hawks flying over, the smell of damp leaves rotting. I’d like an ice-cream from the stand that’s always been there in Truro Market (they do all kinds but I‘d settle for Cornish Vanilla). I’d go a walk on Portreath beach when the tide’s out and the sand is firm. I’d even like the wind that always hurts my ears. I promise not to say a word about the price of petrol, or be sarcastic about the unavailability of fresh fruit - or I‘d wait until I left the shop. I’d be patient when I get stuck behind farm machinery, drive slowly through the villages, spend my money in locally owned businesses, read the West Briton, participate in community affairs….

A weekend ought to be enough to have me crawling back to Cov. Oh, but it’s grey around here.