Why we’ve chosen not to flee to our second home
Sally Jones thought self-isolating in her Cornish bolthole would be like a holiday – until everyone else had the same idea
Our big, comfortable holiday home in North Cornwall ought to have been the perfect bolthole for a spot of self-isolation. When we bought it last year, it was the fulfilment of a long-held dream after decades of renting scruffy but eye-wateringly expensive cottages each summer at Rock and in nearby Trebetherick.
Our occasionally sun-drenched family holidays spent on this stretch of the Cornish coast with our two children, now in their twenties, had created myriad memories for us all: fishing for mackerel, digging sandcastles and playing French cricket at Daymer Bay. Once nicknamed “Kensington-on-sea”, the area has long been a magnet for the well-heeled and well-off
– and for thousands of ordinary, middle-class families like us, too.
Numerous celebrities, including David Cameron, Harry Enfield and Gordon Ramsay, have holiday homes there. Throughout their teens and early 20s, Princes William and Harry were regular visitors, melting unrecognised into the crowd of posh, young surfers at Polzeath through the simple expedient of wearing wetsuits and rubber surfing hats. As guests of Lord Reading’s son, Jules Erleigh, at the family’s clifftop cottage at Trebetherick, they once even played a riotous game of rounders with the locals outside our rented cottage.
So it was no surprise, then, that plenty of more upmarket punters, faced with an impending coronavirus lockdown, had the same idea as me: head out of town to the second home. I had been happily making plans to drive down from Warwickshire with my husband, John, 79, and dauntless 92-year-old mother, Christine. Why not see out the worst of the pandemic in beautiful surroundings? After all, there’d be plenty of room down there to keep a two-metre distance from others.
“We’ll take all our own supplies so we’re not a burden on the local shops,” I reasoned. “It’ll be just like being on holiday. We can get takeaway meals at the Pityme Inn up the road, and with miles of clifftop walks and open country on the doorstep, we won’t see a soul and I can keep the family safe. The kids and their loved ones can even come down from London to join us.” The whole jaunt seemed like a great idea, and I even fondly imagined brushing up my explosively wayward golf technique at St Enodoc.
But it seems the assorted masses – the professional showoffs, the Rich Kids of North London, the “actress-models-whatevers” with well-heeled daddies – who also call Cornwall their second home, beat me to the punch.
Lady Violet Manners, the Duke of Rutland’s daughter, for instance, announced on Facebook that she would be returning to live the rural idyll within the great, rural fastness of Belvoir Castle: “Time to get reaquatinted [sic] with the family kitchen,” she wrote. “Corona maybe taking some of our freedoms but it can’t steal our joy in the simple things.”
But then came horrifying TV coverage from old familiar places: Daymer Bay, Polzeath Beach, and the coastal footpaths heaving with people taking a gung-ho line that all “this self-isolation nonsense” was just nanny-statism at its worst.
Everyone with a second home in North Cornwall seemed to be already ensconced, surfing, playing frisbee on the crowded beaches, meeting friends, piling their 4x4s with scarce supplies from the local shops, markets and supermarkets.
And, judging from the furious reaction of locals, these “covidiots” – as they have since been dubbed – have spoilt it for all of us.
At the weekend, the Visit Cornwall tourist board published a statement asking people to postpone their visits, amid concern that everything from the local health service to supermarkets could be stretched to breaking point by the unseasonal influx.
When Boris Johnson declared that everyone should avoid travelling, he clarified that “self-isolation at home” meant your primary residence, not your holiday house, however remote and charming it might be.
I rang a doctor friend who lives in Rock for an update on how much pressure we second-homers were adding.
“Half of London came down this weekend,” she said, “and it’s terrifying. They haven’t a clue about the real dangers. You see a mum and dad in their 40s with young kids, blocking the whole pavement, so no one can possibly keep two metres away from them. We walk the dogs before 7am so we don’t meet too many people, and we choose paths where we don’t have to touch any gates.
“There’ve been five Covid-19 cases round here so far, including two youngsters sent down from London to Polzeath by their worried parents. They went into the local Spar and soon afterwards tested positive. The whole shop’s had to be steam-cleaned from top to bottom – and this is only going to get worse.”
The thought of the impending chaos and the escalating pressure on the limited resources of Cornwall’s only “proper” hospital, Treliske in Truro, gave me further pause for thought. With all three of us in the age groups most at risk, particularly my mother, I dreaded the nightmare scenario if any – or more likely all – of us came down with the virus in Cornwall: of rationed ventilators and critically ill patients lying helpless in corridors.
With my former colleague, the great explorer Robin Hanburytenison, a proud Cornishman, fighting for his life at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, this was already horribly close to home.
Chastened, I unpacked the suitcases and wandered up to our local church, St George’s Newbold Pacey, to say a few prayers and have a quiet think in the peace of the cool, mercifully deserted space.
On the wall by the door, I noticed a splendid memorial commemorating a similarly heartbreaking scenario – but from 350 years ago. A landed gent, Edward Carew, who lived in London, fled the plague in London in 1668, escaping with his family to his Warwickshire estates around Newbold Pacey, only to discover too late that he had brought the pestilence with him.
Beneath the fine effigies of Carew and his newborn daughter, Felicia, is a heart-rending inscription, describing how both “put off their veil of mortality” within days of each other – Felicia at just 11-days-old.
“Plus ça change…” I thought.
Yet another reason why we won’t be relocating to Cornwall after all this year.
The whole jaunt seemed like a great idea. I even imagined brushing up on my golf ’