 |
 |
It's quite strange really that I only recently began to fit my family history into an idea of Cornishness. My father was a miner who went to Camborne School of Mines (like his younger brother, who lives in America). I was born in South Africa because he worked on the gold mines there, and the reason I live in Australia is because he was sent here to manage a kaolin mine near Ballarat when I was six. He worked, at that stage, for English China Clays, which did the pits near St Austell that have now been converted into the Eden Project. I still remember the white streams running through the woods. It seems like another age now. But it is of course a very typically Cornish biography - I remember my father saying that when he was a young man, there were two choices: he could be a miner or a farmer. His older brother got the farm, so mines it was. (I've been down a few mines in my life). My other two uncles still live in Grampound, a small village half way between Truro and St Austell. The Croggons ran a tannery there for over three hundred years, but it closed down a few years back and now they all do bed and breakfasts. They all make fun of the fake Cornish who come from the Midlands and adopt Cornish names. All the same, they identify very strongly as Cornish. When I went back to Grampound when I was 17, I was not a furriner (though an uncle from the other side of my family, who was born in Cornwall, and had lived in Grampound for 15 years, was still called a furriner) because I was a Croggon. I was stopped in the street by strange old men and women who would say, so, you're Richard's oldest girl? Best A Alison Croggon Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com