Abstract

This is part of my mother's brief account of the remote Cornish farm where I was born. She repeated it to me several times during my childhood and it was word for word the same story every time. She told me the facts, almost without comment and without expressing her feelings and many years later, I still have no answers for all the questions I would like to ask. I never interrupted her tale to ask for more details because I sensed that it was a world apart, a world with sinister undertones, a description of which my mother felt reluctant, and at the same time compelled, to pass on to me, feeling perhaps that the story was my business.