“A book of mine with the rapturous title, Love in the Sun was published in this country in August of the fateful year 1939, three months before the start of Hitler’s war.

It was the story, based closely on fact, of how my wife and I, then very poor, found an empty and derelict army hut on a lonely creek near Fowey in Cornwall, rented it for three shillings a week, and made it into a home, making our own furniture, chiefly from driftwood and ships’ dunnage, growing or catching most of our food …”

I was both confused and entranced by those opening lines. Leo Walmsley’s novel, Love in the Sun, was everything that he says, and quite wonderful, but what was this book. It read like fact, and yet it stood next to Love in the Sun on the Cornish Fiction shelf in the library.

It was fiction, I discovered as I was propelled forward by Leo Walmsley, but clearly fiction that was just a whisper away from fact, and written in a very different world.

Love in the Sun ended with the birth of a child and the publication of a book. Since then, I learned the couple had prospered, moved back closer to their roots in the north, and their family had grown. But there were dark shadows. The war, of course and the couple’s relationship deteriorated. Different attitudes to life, to how to bring up their children took their toll.

It was an utterly real story, one that must have been told so many times, but I was drawn in by the emotional honesty and the simple clarity of the storytelling.

Eventually she took their children and left him.

He retreated to Cornwall, to the army hut by the river where the couple had been so happy. To lick his wounds. To make a holiday home for his children. And maybe, just maybe, to win his wife back when she brought the children down.

The restoration of that home echoes the first book beautifully.

When the children come they love it.

So many lovely small details bring a simple story to life, and real emotional honesty makes it sing.

The children grow up, of course, and so over the years summer holidays in Cornwall and their father’s role, change.

But then maybe a different future calls ….

At the beginning of Paradise Creek I was disappointed that the idyll of Love in the Sun had ended. But I was quickly caught up, emotionally involved, as the story of that end unfolded and I was taken on a very different journey.

The storyteller was flawed, but I saw into his heart and I recognised a real, fallible human being.

Everything rang true. And as I read on I realised how cleverly the structure of this book echoed its predecessor.

It works as a companion piece, and it stands up on its own. Because it is a wonderful piece of storytelling: emotionally involving, simple and utterly believable.

This is a book that will remain in my heart.

I picked up Love in the Sun purely by chance, as I browsed local fiction in the library. I am so, so glad that I did. it is a gem.

The first clue was Daphne Du Maurier’s introduction:

“”‘Love in the Sun’ will make other writers feel ashamed. And, curiously enough, old-fashioned too. It is a revelation in the art of writing and may be one of the pioneers in a new renaissance which shall and must take place in our time if the novel is to survive at all. While we struggle to produce our complicated plots, all sex and psychology, fondly imagining we are drawing modern life while really we are as démodé as jazz and mah jong, Leo Walmsley gives the reader a true story, classic in its simplicity, of a man and a girl who possessed nothing in life but love for each other and faith in the future, and because of these things, were courageous and happy…”

How could I not bring it home after reading that?!

The story is indeed simple.

A man and a woman from Yorkshire are in love, and they run away to Cornwall. Life had become complicated, and they just want to build a life together and be happy.

“We were in love and we knew what we wanted. To have a little house close to the sea, a garden, a boat…”

They lease an old army hut – previously only used as temporary shelter – for their home. They create a garden and grow vegetables; they catch fish too; they collect driftwood to burn for fuel, and so they survive and build that life. So that he can write his novel and she can have their baby.

Yes, it really is that simple. But it works beautifully, because it is honest and true.

There are little incidents, and many ups and downs, along the way. A roof that cannot keep out the Cornish rain. A kitten rescued. A boat lost to strong tides. Desperate attempts to avoid a familiar face from home. An unexpected friendship. A failed attempt to sell surplus produce. All things that you can imagine the couple recalling fondly in later life.

A baby arrives, and so does a book. There are dark shadows: the man struggles to come to terms with the time and attention that the woman must give to the child, and with the pressure to produce a second book after the first is published.

But all of that falls away when the couple’s future is threatened. Their love comes to the fore, and with a little luck they will pull through.

It is impossible not to care: the man and the woman are utterly real, and every detail rings true.

We make life complicated, when it could be so simple.

Love in the Sun is simply lovely.

“”Yes,” she cried. “Yes, I’m certian of it. Everybody will want to read it. Everybody will want to buy it. How could people not help  liking it? It’s so real. There’s nothing dull about it… It’s a grand book.”

“God!” I cried. “You’re right. It ought to go. It ought to sell in thousands.”

Words from Love in the Sun, but they could equally well be said about this sadly out of print novel. I plan to email the Leo Walmsley Society, and I’ll see where that takes me.