Wendy, Sue and I set out for Cornwall early afternoon and I got a feel for the pattern of the days. Everything is a reason to stop for a cup of tea and probably a slice of cake. (The English have a real gift of the cake.) I think our first stop was to celebrate having gotten away at all and it turned out to be for lunch at The Monks Yard just off the A303 at Horton Cross. I know this because I was obsessed with toggling from the paper map to Google maps.

I ordered for all of us at the counter where I noticed a gluten-free Victorian cream cake, which I did not have room for but ate a slice anyway. Another pattern begun. The counter person said “And would the ladies like like sugar in their tea?” I looked across the room to where Sue and Wendy sat at a corner table. I wanted to say, “Oh, do you mean them?” But I didn’t.

At the gift shop across the way I found Pip & Ettie waxed wraps, something on my list for Christmas gifts. It turns out that Sue and Wendy know Pip and Ettie (they are a friend’s two daughters) so I bought a lot.

We skirted Exeter and went across the top of Dartmoor on the A30, slipping into Cornwall around Launceston without the grand entrance over the Calstock Viaduct down by Plymouth. I looked up from the map just in time to see the sign saying we were entering Kernow. It was one of those longed–for moments like when I would watch for the first sign for Walla Walla when I went back to school. I was back in Cornwall. Everything began to look Cornish: the narrow roads, the high hedgerows, the occasional glimpse of the green quilt of the pasture enclosures, the dots of white sheep.

Wendy did all the driving. Sue doesn’t drive and I won’t drive in the U.K. It was her call as to what road to take and when to stop. She went straight through to the coast. We stopped at Pendeen for what we thought we might need until we did a proper shop the next day in St Ives.

Pendeen is tiny but it had the closest shop to where we were staying. It’s a “Cost Cutter” shop. The shop in Butleigh is a “Londis” and the one up in Port Ellen was a “Spar.” These are franchises run and supplied a bit differently than the Co-ops. That about ends my interest in them; it’s just that they are so much of the landscape now. The privately run Green Grocers are dying out although there was one in St Just and another in St Ives. I remember when there were Green Grocers in London neighborhoods. Dark, funny little places with fruit and veg that looked like real food out of the garden, not airbrushed and waxed for the supermarkets.

We needed three kinds of milk for our tea. Sue drinks lactose-free, Wendy drinks skim and I wanted whole milk. Last time I was here I told them I wasn’t drinking that thin white water in my tea.

I would have really liked double cream, which is like our whipping cream but Wendy had shamed me out of that on my first night: we had had raspberries and cream at dinner. The cream pitcher was all glommy with leftover cream. I scooped a spoonful into my tea.

“Cream in tea?” Wendy said. “That’s not very British.”

Nothing could stop me in my tracks quite like telling me that. It’s too bad she couldn’t have said that eating sugary food and sitting around all day wasn’t very British.

A mile down the road from Pendeen was our destination, Morvah, and a holiday cottage called “Trebeigh,” one of a series of old stone cottages and a farm, all owned by our hosts, Sue and Alec. We met Sue (hereafter known as Morvah Sue) before we were scarcely out of our car. She bustled over from her home across the yard.

“There you are. So glad to see you. Long journey? Sue, Wendy, Elena, oh you’re Cornish are you? With an American accent. Now the key is in the lock. You try it. Here’s a second set. Just a few rules of the house. Here’s the lounge. It’s a bit musty from the chimney. Just open the door and a window to clear it out. The wifi information is there. DON’T TOUCH the modem or we’ll all lose our internet service. Here’s the kitchen. Funny story, we bought this tablecloth in guess where?”

We looked in silence at the tablecloth, which had drawings of cats on it.

“’Mouzul,’of course. She looked at me, “‘Mouse-hole’ to you. Well, I’ll love you and leave you. Oh. Mysterious story. The two ladies who first lived here were Maude and Laurie Annie Noye. My sons were born on the same days that they died.” She nodded solemnly. “Well, I’ll love you and leave you.”

When she loved and left us for the last time, we looked at each other and blinked. Finally Sue said, “I didn’t think her stories were either funny or mysterious.”

I said, “I’m offended that she didn’t think I know Mousehole is pronounced ‘Mouzul.’”

But Morvah Sue was a good sort and so was her husband Alec who we were to see often in the ensuing week.

Across the road from Trebeigh is the Morvah Parish Church and churchyard. I chose the room where I could see the church and the old headstones and monitor Alec’s enormous cow, Doubtful and her chunky little calf, Neptune in the pasture beyond. The official name of the church is St Bridget of Sweden after a 14^th century mystic whose followers were the first to inhabit St Michael’s Mount.

St Bridget’s Church, Morvah

We got ourselves reasonably settled, ate something or other, had our cups of tea with three milks and settled in to watch a DVD. Sue couldn’t get the DVD player to work. While she and Wendy fussed over it, I went out in the black night using the flashlight on my phone to find Alec or Morvah Sue. Alec was chopping something in the kitchen and said he’d be over “dreckly.”

Alec is a cheerful Scottish man from Ayrshire who has lived in Cornwall since 1967. He and Sue were married in the parish church at Zennor because the Morvah church was too small. Over the years they acquired most of the cottages until now they pretty much own the village. He came in and looked at the remotes. “Which one is it?” he asked. He picked up one and then other and pushed buttons. “Well it’s not working.” Push, squint, push. “That’s not right.”

Finally he worked out that we needed a new DVD player and he went off to get one. We speculated that he had a whole room full of things like DVD players and teapots for all the cottages. When we finally got the DVD player sorted, I had a piece of my own private Christmas cake.

Last Christmas Wendy’s sister Joy had made me a gluten-free Christmas cake that was so heavy the postage to send it was prohibitive. A British Christmas cake is a fruitcake frosted first with marzipan and then with royal icing. The royal icing had hardened and kept the cake preserved. Neither Sue nor Wendy were interested in sharing it with me so I got the whole thing to myself and had my first tasty piece that evening. And so ended the first day of the Cornish holiday.

My Christmas Cake