Mrs Alison Johnstone was my grandmother. I have always understood Bodrigy was a wedding present from her husband, my grandfather, George Johnstone. Apparently  she was in the house when it burnt down sometime in the early sixties, although she was rescued in time.

Among people I recall, though presumably long dead now, were Mrs Bray (with a head of white hair, which made her very conspicuous even from the other side of the cove to where she lived) – she caretook the house; Basil Bolitho who lived with his parents in the second cottage below Bodrigy, and ‘Sharky’ Stevens, still alive at the time of writing this (2012) and living in the same property (White Cottage?), up the lane opposite the Hotel

Cadgwith was very much a place of my childhood and I have happy memories of holidays there in the house. I can picture my grandfather now, (disabled after a hunting accident), with his telescope trained on the liners and other ships sailing past and with a recognition manual of the shipping line colours to hand .

The other photo is a picture of me, aged one, in my pram in the garden ‘perched’ overlooking the cliffs, clearly recognisable now from what the Cove was then.

Later on we spent holidays at Tamarisk Cottage. I and our children would go fishing with Sharky, either for shellfish or, in season, mackerel. On one unforgettable night there was a huge haul of Grey Mullet caught with a seine net jointly owned by a cooperative of the fishermen, one of whom would act as a look-out on top of the cliffs to give warning of shoals worth launching the net for. It took much of the night disentangling the fish from the net. The catch amounted to some half a ton in weight and was a record at the time. Perhaps there are still people about who remember the occasion.

I visited Bodrigy in 2012 with a onetime evacuee who lived in Cadgwith during the War (we had a reunion at Truro Station after 70 years) along with a number of other evacuees. Trewithen was a temporary staging point for evacuees on their way to Bodrigy, which my grandparents had made available as evacuee accommodation for children from London under threat from the flying bombs in 1944. We visited the house and met the owner who, if I remember correctly, was a retired architect from up-country (near Salisbury?). The rebuilt house had little to recommend it, but my long-lost evacuee friend immediately recognised the ground floor (there had been, of course, no first or second floors since the fire). The garden and surrounds were a mess, which the owner claimed he had plans for tidying and planting, although he admitted doing a good job was probably beyond his means. He was either a widower or separated and living alone. I understand he has since passed away, but do not know who owns Bodrigy now