Sandy The Story of a Boy and His Friends Growing Up in Cornwall in the Late 1800S

Sandy is the true story of a boy and his friends growing up in Cornwall in the late 1800s. It's the story of a 'lost world' in two senses -- the lost world of childhood as recalled from an adult perspective, and the lost world of late Victorian England as lived through in a rural community, when the ordinary family depended for its livelihood on long hours of difficult manual labour. The Sandy whose early life this book chronicles grew up in West Cornwall's countryside at the end of the 1800s. Initially living in Falmouth, where he was born, Sandy moves when his father inherits a derelict house and farm from his Uncle Benjamin. Here we come to see the restoration process that the whole family is involved in once this move had been made. The reader can enjoy an array of local colour in the antics and adventures Sandy embarks on with the new friends he makes, from Polwheveral Creek to Porth Navas to the woodlands north of Constantine. There is a St Michael's Mount noticeably void of today's tourist hordes. Then there are larger-than-life characters, such as the sailors who wouldn't feel out of place in Treasure Island, with facial scars and eye-patches and mutilated limbs. Enjoy such new-fangled inventions and machinery as gas lighting for the home and a horse-drawn grass-cutter, and share in the wonder their arrival must have excited among the common people. Become acquainted too with such local traditions as the Helston flora dance, and delicacies like star-gazy pie. Childhood however runs its natural course, and once on the brink of manhood Sandy cannot resist his passion for the sea, of which his father sternly disapproves. The only option Sandy has is to run away from home, which he does, joining the Royal Navy in Plymouth. He returns briefly after serving for ten years, to find out what has happened to his friends and family. Then that chapter too closes, and with it a whole past world of English rural life.