The Great Western Beach

by Emma Smith; Bloomsbury 384pp; £14.99
"It has been said that you only ever meet the world once: in childhood," said Juliet Nicholson in the Daily Telegraph. "In Emma Smith's evocative, witty and profoundly moving book, her England - of the era after the First World War - shines with an intensity quite unblurred by the eight decades or so that have elapsed since."

Smith - then Elspeth Hallsmith - grew up in genteel poverty in the Cornish seaside town of Newquay. Its Great Western Beach was her playground, and she remembers busy summer days filled with sunshine, picnics, children's parties and "delightfully eccentric" characters: batty but inspirational teachers; the Italian family who made "forbidden, mouth-watering" ice cream. "But sentimentality has no part in this book."

Fear and disappointment run "like a rip-tide" through her family. Her moody and tyrannical father Guthrie, a survivor of a German prisoner of war camp, was a frustrated artist forced to work as a lowly bank clerk: "his annual submission for the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition is annually rejected." Her mother, Janet, was some years older than her husband, whom she married after losing three fiances in the war, said Patrick Gale in the Independent. Unlike Guthrie, she was good-looking and charming, "her popularity doomed to make him hate her all the more".

Smith's "clear-eyed analysis of her parents' marriage raises this memoir above mere entertainment", while her descriptions of their "proudly-masked poverty" is unsparing: "the homemade frocks, the nettles gathered for soup, the complex system of prejudices". But this is no "middle-class misery memoir": Smith's sense of humour and her lyrical descriptions of seaside life see to that. The Great Western Beach "deserves to become an overnight classic and to find a home at holiday-cottage bedsides from St Ives to Great Yarmouth". Beautifully written, "enchanting" yet "hardedged", it "should endure", agreed Miranda Seymour in the London Evening Standard.

"The book is full of episodes that the greatest of short-story writers would gladly trade limbs for," said Lynne Truss in the Sunday Times. When Smith's father finds a brooch on the beach and proudly presents it to her mother, her shocked reaction and the argument that ensues are "almost unbearable to read about"; equally fascinating is TE Lawrence's brief, rude tea-time visit. "I suspect that it will become a classic of the genre."

FIRST POSTED JULY 31, 2008