The Newlyn boy who watched a supertanker burn in 1967

Michael Darracott, a Newlyn boy born and bred, was ten years old when the sky out past Land’s End turned black with smoke and the sound of jets rolled in over the water. He was watching the military bomb a stricken oil tanker back into the sea. Fifty-nine years on, that memory, and the whole of the Cornish childhood either side of it, has become a book, and Michael wants as many Cornish readers as possible to get their hands on it.

A Newlyn boyhood, and years in Mousehole

Michael was born in Newlyn and spent his early years living at Trereife Lodge, before later working as a chef at the Lobster Pot hotel in Mousehole. His memoir, Proper Cornish Childhood, is built from that stretch of the 1960s and 70s, seen through a child’s eyes: learning to cook with his mother in the family kitchen, Christmases at home, and the annual switch-on of the Mousehole lights. He also covers the change from old money to decimal currency, a detail that will land differently depending on whether you remember it happening.

The day Cornwall watched a tanker burn

The book’s biggest chapter is the one that shaped the coastline for years afterwards. In 1967 the supertanker Torrey Canyon struck the Seven Stones reef off Cornwall, the world’s first major tanker disaster of its kind. As a boy of ten, Michael watched the ship being bombed on the reef, an attempt to burn off the remaining oil before it could do more damage. It didn’t stop the slick reaching Cornwall’s shores. Beaches and harbours on both the north and south coasts were left thick with lumps of oil for years afterwards, a piece of Cornish history that Michael says he watched unfold from close enough to remember every detail.

Writing it down against the odds

Getting the book finished has not been straightforward. Michael was a passenger in a car crash in 1976 that left him with brain damage, and five years ago he had a heart attack. He now lives with coronary artery disease and six metal stents keeping his heart going, at 70 years old. He says it’s that history, his own and the county’s, that pushed him to get the memories down on paper while he still could.

Getting Proper Cornish Childhood into Cornish homes

Proper Cornish Childhood has been on Amazon for several years and currently sits at a 39,000 overall sales rank, and 559 in the Cornish History category. Michael’s ambition now is bigger than a book chart position. He wants a copy in as many of Cornwall’s 585,000 households as possible, and he’s asking people to buy one, gift a spare copy to a neighbour or a local school, and share the book in village Facebook groups and at the pub. Proper Cornish Childhood is available on Amazon and from bookshops.

“Kernow bys vyken,” Michael says. Cornwall forever.