Coronavirus lockdown may be easing, but when will we be carefree again?

In the latest of his reflections on place and pathway, Will Gore recalls a night-time railway journey to Cornwall, and wonder if he will return this summer

Beatrix in the sea at St Ives, Cornwall, August 2016 (Will Gore)

We’re supposed to be going on holiday to Cornwall this year. It was booked long ago for early August, so we might have a chance. But will the beaches be too crowded to venture to? Or will they empty through fear?

I’ve not often travelled to England’s most westerly county. It always feels an unnecessary further step when Devon is, in its own way, just as delightful. Still, we’d been looking forward to exploring it this year, staying in a cottage halfway between St Ives on the northern coast and Marazion to the south.

My daughter was particularly excited, feeling almost proprietorial towards Cornwall after an expedition she and I made there four years ago.

Looking back, there were a variety of factors to explain why we went alone. We had just finished some building work at home, and so a swanky foreign holiday was out of the question. My son had just had his first birthday and was a terrible eater and sleeper, so the prospect of taking him anywhere felt pretty miserable. Our daughter had, after initially being delighted by a younger sibling, grown restless and angry at the reality. I think we imagined that giving her sole attention for a few days might help.

I can’t truthfully say there are no more comfortable ways to travel. But there are certainly none more thrilling. Perhaps it’s because sleeper trains are so redolent of a bygone age

She had become fascinated with the idea of travelling on a sleeper train so initially I made plans to take her to Scotland. I also hoped I could surreptitiously make her fall in love with mountains. But I soon realised that if that didn’t happen, or if the Scottish weather did its worst, we might be in for a bleak time.

I turned my attention to the south, and booked us aboard the Night Riviera service from Paddington. My daughter was thrilled. My wife began to wonder whether she was getting the raw end of the deal (she hadn’t when the Highlands seemed our likely destination).

On the allotted day, we left home at about nine o’clock in the evening, a rucksack apiece and an extra bag for me. My daughter had never been an early-to-bed child, and by the age of six was frequently still awake after that time, often reading secretly. The added excitement of a night-time rail journey meant she was buzzing, even when we were finally able to board the sleeper service at half past ten.

I can’t truthfully say there are no more comfortable ways to travel. But there are certainly none more thrilling. Perhaps it’s partly because sleeper trains are so redolent of a bygone age – or at least of an imagined one captured in Agatha Christie novels. There is also that wonderful knowledge that when you wake up (from a frequently disrupted slumber), you will open the blind and gaze upon the dawn of not just a new day in an unknown land, but of a new adventure. Taking the sleeper should be on everybody’s bucket list.

My daughter wanted the top bunk, but I insisted she take the bottom. Sure enough, she fell out three times in the night. Still, she slept well; I dozed intermittently.

Breakfast on board arrived early. By 7.30am we were fed, watered and clean-toothed, standing on the platform at St Erth station, watching the Night Riviera rumble onwards towards Penzance. I drank strong coffee while we waited for our branch line connection, which soon chugged in, and then took us around the coast, clinging to the steep hill, as we gazed at the sea sparkling to our right.

I had found, after much anxious searching, a small B&B right at the top end of Carbis Bay village, but on that first morning we went on to the end of the line so that by 8.30am we found ourselves sitting on the sand, luggage and all, in St Ives. I felt shattered but intensely happy. Beatrix was oblivious to any tiredness she might have felt – and to the coldness of the water, which she splashed in without a single care. Boats bobbed gently in the harbour, and slowly but surely the town and its tourists awoke, milling around contentedly.

If we’re lucky, we might return in three months’ time. But we will not be carefree; not for a long while.