War-time Menabilly

At the beginning of the war, my school was evacuated and took up residence in the Carlyon Bay Hotel, its adjacent building, the beach club and many of the houses in the vicinity.

Whilst on an OTC (Officers' Training Corps) route march and field exercise, during my last term, we stopped off at Menabilly to rest our aching feet. The place appeared to be abandoned and was virtually derelict, but it cast its spell, nevertheless.

When I tried to re-visit it during the seventies, I could not, of course, gain entrance, but was able to wander along the beach below the house.

I would like to have seen "Ferryside" and "Kilmarth". I gather from Margaret Forster's biography of Daphne du Maurier (in my view the best work ever written about her) that Daphne was not all that enthusiastic about Kilmarth.

It is some fifty years since I lived in England, but I return from time to time.

Anthony Paul - January 1997

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