A Birthday Voyage

Some days stay with you forever. Days steeped in sunshine and blessed with salty breezes. Days that, even as they unfold, you somehow know will remain vivid and bright in the corners of your memory. Days to hoard in a treasure chest of recollections and pore over in years to come. Days etched into the hardwood of a life.

My birthday this June was one of those treasure-trove days, one that will no doubt find its way into a future book. We’d been watching the forecast avidly, hoping the conditions would be just right for a day on the water. This year, fortune favoured me. It felt like a reward for all the birthdays spent indoors revising for public exams, or sweltering in exam rooms, or,  saddest of all, those high-summer picnics and barbecues washed out by a thoroughly British deluge.

The day began still and bright, the kind of morning where the light is silver-clear and the horizon seems to melt into the sea. We slipped out of Fowey harbour just as the estuary was waking up, our boat drifting dreamlike on water so calm it could have been poured from a mirror. Not a ripple stirred as we whispered past Polruan and out into the open sea.

Once past the markers, we opened up the throttle and cruised past Polridmouth, sweeping across the wide arc of St Austell Bay, heading for Falmouth with only distant crabbers and tideline seabirds for company. This is the very stretch of coast Daphne du Maurier knew and loved. We were following in her wake, down the shoreline and on to the Helford and Frenchman’s Creek. It’s impossible not to recall her stories when you see the places she wove so vividly into them all around you. And impossible, too, not to feel a tug of melancholy — that we move on, birthday after birthday, while the coast remains constant and unchanging.

A carpe diem moment, perhaps. Or a gentle reminder that tempus fugit. Or maybe, just maybe, a whisper from another writer to love this place, to write about it, and to capture something of its fleeting magic.

I made a few scribbled notes over breakfast at Mylor Yacht Club. Seabirds wheeled above us. Creamy scrambled eggs, yellow as a child’s painted sun, were dolloped onto buttery slabs of sourdough. The coffee was strong and hot, the orange juice sweet and bright with the taste of Florida and the ache of nostalgia. Another birthday breakfast, another continent. Not gulls but pelicans. Not salty bacon filched from my boyfriend’s plate, but maple-cured and candy-sweet. That memory was soon overlaid by this new one: a view across the pontoons where cool boxes and bags waited to be stowed, dogs sat patiently to hop aboard, and men in deck shoes coiled ropes. Boats tugged at their moorings and halyards chimed in the breeze like wind chimes. The tide was high and the longing to cast off palpable. We felt it too. Breakfast was over; it was time to explore the river.

There were churches drowsing beside half-forgotten creeks. Jetty timbers flaked into warm waters. A seal with dark, soulful eyes slid beneath the surface. Boat ribs, long abandoned, lay half-sunk in silt. We passed a Palladian mansion with lawns unfurling to the water’s edge. A shoal of mullet, dark and ancient, flickered through the muddy shallows. A lone heron kept sentinel on a far bank. All of it, a living postcard. And as we glided past, the scenes blurred one into another, dreamlike, each more beautiful than the last.

Lunch found us on a sunny quayside, faces glowing and hair whipped by the breeze. We tucked into scallops and fish finger sandwiches, the grown-up kind, with proper fillets and tartare sauce laced with dill, and I sipped ice-cold Pinot Gris, the glass beaded with condensation. It was simple, joyful, and perfect food for a birthday spent afloat.

But it wasn’t just the sunshine or the sea that made the day special. We turned into the Helford later that afternoon, the river bottle-green beneath the shelter of ancient trees, the air heavy with salt and memory. I had longed to approach this stretch by boat, for this is my Pencallyn, the fictional estate at the heart of The Promise. It’s here, among the creeks and hidden gardens, that echoes of the D Day landings still murmur beneath the shush of turning tides.

Trebah and Glendurgan revealed themselves slowly from the water, like scenes from a film.

The closer we came, the more I saw the past lying just beneath the present. It was there in the concrete still poured over the beach and the whisper of the shingle still scarred by jetties. Barnacle-encrusted hulks of rusted metal loomed like ghostly monoliths; their twentieth-century purpose long forgotten. Then I blinked, and the past was gone. I saw these places as the American soldiers must have seen them, beautiful, peaceful, a last moment of calm before the storm. The contrast between this idyll and what lay ahead for them across the Channel hit me afresh. I thought of the men whose bravery and stories are at the very heart of The Promise.

We turned for home as the sun began to trail golden fingers across the sea, sloping slowly west. The boat hummed gently beneath us, the engine a low rhythm in the hush of early evening. We were quiet for much of the return, the kind of contented silence that only comes after a perfect day, when no one wants to break the spell. I thought again of the soldiers who had travelled these same waters in very different times, heading toward uncertain futures. It was impossible not to feel the weight of their history beneath the beauty, and the siren call of stories still waiting to be told.

This day gave me more than sunshine and birthday memories. It reminded me of the threads that run through The Promiseand how a novel needs an emotional heart and how for me this is always rooted in the landscape I love. It was a perfect birthday voyage of calm seas, wild shores, and echoes of the past.

It was a birthday voyage I'll return to long after the incoming tide, and a thousand others, have turned.