Mevagissey Parade

I cannot describe the series of events to blame for the unfortunate encounter with the hasty village locals. It may have been when I pointed out a beaten track and guided the rest of my family in that direction. I had recognised a lady, called Linda, from one of the local churches at Mevagissey harbour and so it seemed wise to follow in her direction. We knew that the parade to celebrate feast week at Mevagissey harbour in Cornwall was going to start from St Peter’s Church. Who better to follow than a church goer? Our bet paid off very well indeed. Keeping a safe distance behind to avoid recognition or conversation we followed Linda and found ourselves outside of St Peter’s. Although we also found ourselves surrounded by a host of other village locals who were all very excited about the upcoming events in the village later that evening. We shared their enthusiasm but we were still cautious to start conversation.

All of this local camaraderie is so alien to a Londoner who lives most of their life suffering from a variant of mute blight. It is widely known that one of the worst things you can do in public is achieve eye contact with a stranger. Let alone start a conversation with one. Don’t you remember what they told us in those outer London schools? “Never talk to strangers, you can’t trust strangers”. How everything changes in a local town.

It could later be regarded as a form of irony that we followed the locals from St Peter’s Church as a procession to the meeting point a few yards away. Waiting at the bottom of the hill was a fully assembled brass band waiting for locals to form their own ensemble. I stood with my family watching the locals prepare themselves for the walk through the village. I must make it clear that although we followed a group of locals, this group was in fact tiny. I am one person in a family of five and we made up a quarter of the locals who met at the church. What made us worried was that despite our efforts as a family to remain as that mute Londoner we felt utterly out of place.

If we were going to see the parade then our position at that particular time and location did not make sense. Why would the band still be getting ready? Why are the locals huddling together in deep discussion? The parade shouldn’t have started yet! All of these questions were quickly resolved when a local lady placed a piece of paper in my hand and exclaimed, “You will need this young man”. To which I replied in a speedy high pitched tone “Oh okay”.

To my shock and horror a hymn sheet lay in my hand. Hymns!? Rotten, vile, traditional hymns, printed on paper that had been handed around church so many times that the ink was rubbing off and the paper had begun to go stale. My mother had already received her hymn sheet and had incidentally burst into tears of laughter, embarrassed laughter. We were not meant to be here! Surely the locals parade through the village, not the tourists??

The brass band started and so the parade began. My whole family were in such a state of shock we, at first, didn’t notice how local police were accompanying us down the narrow village lanes. The parade was made up with a series of meeting points where everybody in the parade would burst into song before moving to the next location to do exactly the same. As the parade went on, so the numbers of people who walked grew and eventually our presence was a microcosm compared to all the other people who had joined.

I had been a part of a local town parade, situated at a harbour which would have been, no doubt, worth its weight in gold during the war. In the crowd were town people who would have lived at Mevagissey Harbour all their life. This parade was their yearly tradition to show off their little town to the world. How dirty that word ‘tradition’ has become to the Londoner. Tradition seems stale, ignorant and nonsensical. How silly I was to assume that this parade would be colourful, glitzy and technical. Past my bemused looks, my disgusted mind at the thought of song and dance was a heart that could feel the warmth radiating from others. Although it would be wrong to assume this was a parade built wholly by locals. The majority of the people were tourists.