Tremarnock – Facts

The novel takes place in a fictional village in Cornwall. Cornwall is a ceremonial county in South West England, bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by Devon, the River Tamar forming the border between them. Cornwall is the westernmost part of the South West Peninsula of the island of Great Britain.

Liz has a cleaning job in the morning in Plymouth. Plymouth  is a port city situated on the south coast of Devon, England, approximately 60 km south-west of Exeter and 310 km west-south-west of London.

One Sunday Rosie and Liz go to Plymouth and they have a walk around the Barbican harbour area. The Barbican is the name given to the western and northern sides of Sutton Harbour, the original harbour of Plymouth in Devon. It was one of the few parts of the city to escape most of the destruction of The Blitz during the Second World War and the preceding era of slum clearance following the Public Health Act 1848. Two or three streets still retain some of the architecture of a historic fishing port. The Barbican has the largest concentration of cobbled streets in Britain, and contains 100 listed buildings.

Liz and Rosie also sit on a bench on the Mayflower steps. The Mayflower Steps are close to the site in the Barbican area of Plymouth, south-west England, from which the Pilgrim Fathers are believed to have finally left England aboard the Mayflower on 6 September 1620, before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to settle in North America.

Rosie is a lovely girl and when she was a baby, she was diagnosed cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy (CP) is a group of permanent movement disorders that appear in early childhood. Signs and symptoms vary among people and over time. Often, symptoms include poor coordination, stiff muscles, weak muscles, and tremors. There may be problems with sensation, vision, hearing, swallowing, and speaking.

When the doctors discover she has a brain tumour, Liz fights for giving her a proton beam treatment. In the field of medical procedures, proton therapy, or proton radiotherapy, is a type of particle therapy that uses a beam of protons to irradiate diseased tissue, most often in the treatment of cancer. The chief advantage of proton therapy over other types of external beam radiotherapy is that as a charged particle the dose is deposited over a narrow range of depth, and there is minimal entry, exit, or scattered radiation dose.

Liz and Iris are good friends until the latter cheats her out of her lottery money. Once before the lottery affair, Iris took Rosie to Tintagel, where King Arthur is believed to have been born. Tintagel or Trevena is a civil parish and village situated on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall.  The village and nearby Tintagel Castle are associated with the legends surrounding King Arthur. The village has, in recent times, become attractive to day-trippers and tourists, and is one of the most-visited places in Britain.

Liz buy a lottery ticket, and when it wins, Iris steals the ticket from her by not telling Liz that she has won 2 million pounds. The National Lottery is the state-franchised national lottery in the United Kingdom. All prizes are paid as a lump sum and are tax-free. Of all money spent on National Lottery games, around 53% goes to the prize fund and 25% to “good causes” as set out by Parliament.

After Iris gets the money that should be Liz’s, she and her family move to Looe. Looe is a small coastal town, fishing port and civil parish in south-east Cornwall.

Perranport is where Robert and the others do the parachute jump to help Liz raise the money she needs for Rosie’s treatment. Perranporth  is a seaside resort town on the north coast of Cornwall.