After the Storm

Reflections on storms of nature and in the literary world

Cornwall was scraped raw when Storm Goretti tore through and everything feels battered and bruised. On Thursday night the wind rose into an unsettling Greek chorus, followed by a deep stillness as the eye of the storm regarded us. Then the lights went out from the Scillies to St Austell and the radio updates felt like the storm was enjoying a slow and deadly pursuit. It was unnerving to know something momentous was coming and that there was nowhere to go and no means of stopping it.

When the storm finally eased, the quiet that followed was that of utter exhaustion. We had spent the night in the barn with the horses, listening to the wind clawing at the walls and flinching at each crash of falling timber. When an old sycamore came down and struck the roof of the barn, horses and humans jumped together. By first light, when the east was faintly pink above the church, it finally felt safe to leave the horses to their hay nets and snatch some rest ourselves.

In the aftermath of the storm, we began to assess what had been damaged. I walked through our fields and took in the toppled apple trees and mourned the stately old pine brought down by the wind. Fence posts pulled from the ground lay like spillikins. Wooden struts were scattered across the fields. Buckets and branches had been flung far from where they belonged. My eyes were gritty with lack of sleep, and I was tired, but there was a need to keep moving and check what had held and see what needed securing before the next gale.

Yesterday morning I walked from Watergate to Looe through woods that were strangely quiet. The Giant’s Hedge lay folded into shadow, its long, ancient line barely visible under tangled growth. The Looe River was the colour of caramel in the lower reaches and the footpath was strewn with twigs and blocked in places by fallen trees. Once I reached the beach, the sea was stirred and the waves were summer sparkling, but the sand was scattered with torn kelp and pale driftwood which recalled the story of the storm.

It felt as though Goretti had tested the land before leaving it stripped back and hurting. And yet, sitting with a coffee at Hannafore, watching the sunlight spill a path across the water to Looe Island, I could see the landscape was adjusting and held beauty. It had not healed, but it had changed into a new shape and the feeling was familiar to me. As I retraced my footsteps, I reflected on this.

In the extraordinary aftermath of the Salt Path controversy there has been no clean ending, only a long period of exposure. There are hundreds of threads, posts, podcasts and speculation is rife. Friends have views. So do strangers. Even neighbours who have kept their counsel for years want to talk and voice opinions. I have found myself both in the middle of it and somehow watching from the outside too, as a story I thought I knew took on a life of its own.

I have watched the discussion spread through different places. Mumsnet’s intensity and rigour. Substacks that attempt to understand why stories like this matter so much. Opinion pieces on why memoir sits so uneasily between truth and art. Radio discussions on why readers feel shaken when something they trusted shifts beneath them. The press and the investigations fill countless pages, both print and digital. There are Private Eye sketches and satirical pieces. Messages from friends who were personally involved and who are so saddened. Emails from readers. The storm has passed through, but the ripples continue to spread out and we are left looking at what remains, trying to make sense of the damage and find a way through, wondering how we can rebuild.

As I write this I am waiting for the Observer’s podcast to air and the page to turn to the next chapter. Waiting has its own heaviness. You cannot move on. You cannot quite stop thinking and questioning. You live in the space between what has happened and what has not yet arrived. It leaves you tired in a way that no amount of sleep can change.

What I feel most is sorrow. Sorrow for how easily trust is hurt. Sorrow for how exposed it feels to care in public. Sorrow for something in me that has been altered, so that even if it is repaired it will never be quite as it was. Sorrow for a beloved landscape forever changed.

Cornwall after a storm understands this sadness. The land does not dramatise what it has been through, but bears the marks. I live in a tiny place where the most dramatic events until recently belonged to another century. A Civil War skirmish when Charles I was almost shot and a fisherman took the bullet meant for him. A vicar was hanged during the Prayer Book Rebellion. An old monastery folded back into the landscape as the violence of the Reformation faded into history. The river that has kept flowing past for hundreds of years, marking the ebb and flow of lives unremarkable but no less precious.

Many roads and sunken lanes lead here, but this hamlet is no longer the thriving hub of centuries past. Sat navs lose their nerve here. Walkers turn back -  or arrive and ask where to go when they find no pub or tearoom. Even people who grew up nearby sometimes miss the turning because there is no need to visit. The hamlet prefers not to be found. It is glad to be quiet.

It feels unbelievable that something as loud and public as a national literary scandal could reach into this sheltered fold of Cornwall. And yet it has. It shook me and, for a while, it has been disorientating, like watching the river run brown and fast after heavy rain. Yet places like this know about time. They have held fear and faith and endurance. They know that upheaval passes, and what remains are the traces and the stories people tell about them.

I sat down to write this piece in a house overlooking fields which have seen far worse than online storms and literary scandals, and I take comfort in still being here and at my laptop. I am glad I still believe in books, in publishing them, in the bond of trust with readers, in the joy of writing and the honest exchange of ideas. I feel reaffirmed.

Like Cornwall after Storm Goretti, I am not back to how I was. I may never be, but I am still here, and for now that is enough.