First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  And on a piece of level ground saved from inundation by a pebble beach stands Sidmouth. Wooded glens rise inland. Huge cliffs, shaved down almost sheer, stretch pinkly to the east until they change to the white chalk of the Dorset coast. Westwards to Devon there is a mile-long beach below Peakhill where at low tide the stretch of sand changes from pink to gold as it goes further west. I could say that of all the seaside resorts I have seen on this tour, Sidmouth has the best sea from the children’s point of view. That pebble beach is only a high tide affair. At low tide there is accommodation west of the town for all the population of Devon to play rounders by the salt sea waves. And ah! to bathe as I did in warm summer water, and swim towards the great pink cliffs and creamy stucco esplanade!

  Despite these ample sands and hot-house garden walks, there are few chars-à-bancs. The crowds are neither vast nor noisy. No giant wheels nor kursaals intrude, no pier takes iron strides into the sea. The roads to Sidmouth are twisty, and the streets of the town are far too narrow even for private motors to move with ease, let alone chars-à-bancs. Sidmouth is indeed an exclusive place. It excludes the vulgar throng. No hideous jazz chain-stores, nor gimcrack concrete cages defile the quaintness of its older quarters.

  The town is mostly Georgian with few newer additions than those put up in King Edward’s reign. The style of the newest Sidmouth is a sort of red-brick Devonian baroque with green copper domes, and several humble terraces of yellow and red brick near the gasworks. The older and more gracious Sidmouth is Devonian too—low, two-storied stucco villas with green ironwork verandahs, some with pointed windows; some houses are Greek, little Parthenons among ilex trees, with hydrangeas by their front doors. Devon Georgian is the simplest, gayest, lightest, creamiest Georgian of all. I doubt if anywhere on the south coast there is a prettier Georgian stucco crescent than Fortfield Terrace which overlooks the cricket ground and sea, nor a more romantic fairy-tale-Gothic seaside house than Royal Glen a few hundred yards away. And round the Parish Church of St. Nicholas (mediæval and fairly high), and the newer Church of All Saints (Victorian and very low) are many stuccoed and barge-boarded villas, and beyond them villas of a latter age, Bournemouth in style, and many rare trees, wide gardens, flowering shrubs and carefully concealed tennis courts.

  What a place to live in in the winter! Those old people I saw in the shops were clearly living on in a calm and civilised world which still lingers throughout the year in this equable climate. How they or anyone else have the money to keep up those big villas among the wooded glens, I do not know. Perhaps great sacrifices are made. If it is so I am glad it is, for they make Sidmouth civilised. What I am certain of is that in summer it is the hotel life that counts in Sidmouth. It is a town of vast hotels. From our table in the dining room, I saw beautiful button-nosed blondes who smiled secretly at young men in club blazers at neighbouring tables. Tennis-girl queens of Sidmouth! What romances must have started over coffee in basket chairs in the lounge, or on the hotel court during a strenuous single! What last walks there must have been at the end of the holidays, while in one of the glittering hotels in the valley below, parents are trying to like one another over a rubber of bridge. Sidmouth! silvery pink and creamy Sidmouth! Farewell!

  Looe

  I came to Looe by unimportant lanes. No main roads for me. I used a one-inch map. No hill was too steep, no village too remote or too full of witches. Thus I was able to taste the full flavour of the inland country behind Looe. Burnt brown August hedges were high as houses either side of narrow lanes. Grey-slated farms with granite round their windows hung on hill slopes. Little fields descended in steps of grass to deserted mines, to meadows heavy with the smell of mint.

  On the hills above the lushness it is bleak indeed. Anything that dares to grow to any size is blown backwards from the sea. Ash trees and sloe bushes form a tunnel of twisted branches across the lane. Woods of oak and elm and beech belonging to mysterious country houses just peep above the hills and—phew!—the gale catches them, turns their leaves brown with salt and slices the tree-tops level with the hill.

  Then, down, down, down for nearly two miles into Looe. I had a glimpse through oak trees of dark green river-water flecked with white wings of gulls. I saw overhanging woods enfolding the Looe and West Looe rivers, and in the mud the rotting hulks of ships.

  Looe is two towns, East Looe and West Looe, one on each side of a steep valley. The oldest parts of the two towns are down on the waterside. Yachts, dinghies, and fishing boats are anchored in the river. There are wharves. They have old roofs of wonderful silvery-grey slate, and so have the older houses behind them. In East Looe, the bigger and more prosperous of the two old towns, the old streets are along the quay-sides. In West Looe the prettier and less-visited town, old houses climb a hill from an octagonal market house (1853), now a grocer’s shop. The pavements on this hill are made of big brown pebbles; on either side of the road are white-washed cottages, black-tarred at their bases. It is quite easy to see how these two places grew, just from looking at the villages. And the best way to see them is not by road, but by water.

  When I first came into Looe by road I was disappointed. I could hardly see the two old towns, and the long Victorian stone bridge which joins them—I could hardly see the houses for motor cars. Motor coaches from Manchester, new private cars like sleek sausages (priority for Government officials), battered pre-war motors belonging to failed literary gents like me, there they stretched along the quays in thousands. Wherever there was a space in either Looe for a car park there was a car park. And it was full. You could hardly hear the wail of seagulls above the dance music relayed from wireless sets in the new motor cars. Wasps gnawed at synthetic cakes in cafés. The fizzy lemonade that we drank with our fish and chips was warm. We could hardly move in the quaint old main streets of East Looe, for the thousands gazing into windows of Ye Olde Gifte Shoppes; chain stores jammed their flashy fronts into old houses. No guide books to Looe were available in any of the shops. And where, oh where was the sea? But the way to see the towns is by water.

  As I put out the noise fell away. There were just the chug-chug of an outboard engine, the wail of gulls, the old and silvery wharves of Looe slipping past us as we headed up-stream for Trenant woods and those great lakes of dark green water I had seen as we entered the town. It is easy to see how the towns grew. First the ancient fishing ports either side of the water. They had their Mayors and Corporations, and sent Members to Parliament—the old rotten borough of pre-progressive days; birth-places of famous sailors, brave Elizabethans. Then a few Georgian houses were built inland, among these great enfolding woods where the two rivers divide and wind to nothingness deep in inland Cornwall. Then came the railway down the valley from Liskeard, in the wake of the new town hall and the ugly Victorian church of East Looe—the old parish church of St. Martin’s, a splendid building, is more than a mile away up among the hills—and the town had started to change from fishing port to watering place. We turned the boat round and slid fast with the tide back along the quays. All up the cliffs above the town were perched the boarding houses, Plymouth-style in grey cement or cream, drain pipes and bay window frames painted green, the name of the boarding house writ large on a board above the second floor windows. Most houses have a view above the old towns and out to cliffs and open sea. And here we were sliding past the Banjo pier and the tiny sand beach behind it, and out to open sea ourselves. We went round Looe island with its three houses and woodland belt of elder bushes. We saw the sloping cliffs by Talland church. We saw the cliffs stretch east to Downderry and Rame. They are not the great rocky heights of the north coast. They are greener, earthier, more sloping cliffs—but equally impressive. Looe was out of sight behind its headlands. Only modern bungalows beyond West Looe—with those detestable red roofs which look so ugly in the slate and granite of old Cornwall—only the bungalows remind us that we are not back in the ancient marine kingdom of Cornwall.

  St. Endellion

  Saint Endellion! Saint En
dellion! The name is like a ring of bells. I travelled late one summer evening to Cornwall in a motor car. The road was growing familiar, Delabole with its slate quarry passed, then Pendogget. Gateways in the high fern-stuffed hedges showed sudden glimpses of the sea. Port Isaac Bay with its sweep of shadowy cliffs stretched all along to Tintagel. The wrinkled Atlantic Ocean had the evening light upon it. The stone and granite manor house of Tresungers with its tower and battlements was tucked away out of the wind on the slope of a valley and there on the top of the hill was the old church of St. Endellion. It looked, and still looks, just like a hare. The ears are the pinnacles of the tower and the rest of the hare, the church, crouches among wind-slashed firs.

  On that evening the light bells with their sweet tone were being rung for practice. There’s a Ringer’s rhyme in the tower, painted on a board. It shows Georgian ringers in knee breeches and underneath is written a rhyme which ends with these fine four lines:

  Let’s all in love and Friendship hither come

  Whilst the shrill treble calls to thundering Tom

  And since bells are for modest recreation

  Let’s rise and ring and fall to admiration.

  They were ringing rounds on all six bells. But as we drew near the tower—a grand, granite, fifteenth-century tower looking across half Cornwall—as we climed the hill the bells sounded louder even than the car. “St. Endellion! St. Endellion!” they seemed to say. “St. Endellion” their music was scattered from the rough lichened openings over foxgloves, over grey slate roofs, lonely farms and feathery tamarisks, down to that cluster of whitewashed houses known as Trelights, the only village in the parish, and to Roscarrock and Trehaverock and Trefreock, heard perhaps, if the wind was right, where lanes run steep and narrow to that ruined, forgotten fishing place of Port Quin, “St. Endellion!’. It was a welcome to Cornwall and in front of us the sun was setting over Gulland and making the Atlantic at Polzeath and Pentire glow like a copper shield.

  Ora pro nobis Sancta Endelienta! The words are carved in strangely effective lettering on two of the new oak benches in the church. Incidentally, those carved benches, which incorporate some of the old Tudor ones, are very decent-looking for modern pews. They were designed by the present rector and carved by a local sculptress. But who was St. Endellion? She was a sixth-century Celtic saint, daughter of a Welsh king, who with her sisters Minver and Teath and many other holy relations came to North Cornwall with the Gospel.

  There was an Elizabethan writer who lived in the parish, Nicholas Roscarrock. He loved the old religion and was imprisoned in the Tower and put on the rack and then imprisoned again. He wrote the life of his parish saint. “St. Endelient” he called her and said she lived only on the milk of a cow: “which cowe the lord of Trenteny kild as she strayed into his grounds; and as olde people speaking by tradition, doe report, she had a great man to her godfather, which they also say was King Arthure, whoe took the killing of the cowe in such sort, as he killed or caus’d the Man to be slaine, whom she miraculously revived.” Nicholas Roscarrock also wrote a hymn in her praise:

  To emitate in part thy vertues rare

  Thy Faith, Hope, Charitie, thy humble mynde,

  Thy chasteness, meekness, and thy dyet spare

  And that which in this Worlde is hard to finde

  The love which thou to enemye didst showe

  Reviving him who sought thy overthrowe.

  When she was dying Endelient asked her friends to lay her dead body on a sledge and to bury her where certain young Scots bullocks or calves of a year old should of their own accord draw her. This they did and the Scots bullocks drew the body up to the windy hilltop where the church now stands.

  The churchyard is a forest of upright Delabole slate headstones, a rich grey-blue stone, inscribed with epitaphs—the art of engraving lettering on slate continued in this district into the present century—names and rhymes set out on the stone spaciously, letters delicate and beautiful. From the outside it’s the usual Cornish church—a long low building of elvan stone, most of it built in Tudor times. But the tower is extra special. It is of huge blocks of granite brought, they say, from Lundy Island. The ground stage of the tower is strongly moulded but the builders seem to have grown tired and to have taken less trouble with the detail higher up, though the blocks of granite are still enormous.

  I can remember Endellion before its present restoration. There’s a photograph of what it used to look like in the porch—pitchpine pews, pitchpine pulpit, swamping with their yellow shine the clustered granite columns of the aisles. Be careful as you open the door not to fall over. Three steps down and there it is, long and wide and light and simple with no pitchpine anywhere except a lectern. A nave and two aisles with barrel roofs carved with bosses, some of them old but most of them done twelve years ago by a local joiner, the village postman and the sculptress. The floor is slate. The walls are stone lightly plastered blueish-grey. There is no stained glass. Old oak and new oak benches, strong and firm and simple, fill, but do not crowd, the church. They do not hide the full length of these granite columns. The high altar is long and vast. At the end of the south aisle is the sculptured base of St. Endelienta’s shrine, in a blue-black slate called Cataclewse, a boxwood among stones. The church reveals itself at once. Though at first glance it is unmysterious, its mystery grows. It is the mystery of satisfying proportion—and no, not just that, nor yet the feeling of age, for the present church is almost wholly early Tudor, not very old as churches go, nor is the loving use of local materials all to do with it. Why does St. Endellion seem to go on praying when there is no one in it? The Blessed Sacrament is not reserved here, yet the building is alive.

  There is something strange and exalting about this windy Cornish hill top looking over miles of distant cliffs, that cannot be put into words.

  Down a path from the North door, bordered with fuchsias, is the Rectory. The Rector of St. Endellion is also a Prebendary. This church is run by a college of priests like St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. There are four prebends in the college, though their building is gone and they live elsewhere. They are the prebends of Marny, Trehaverock, Endellion and Bodmin. Each of the Prebendal stalls has a little income attached to it and is held by local priests. The money is given to Christian causes. For instance, the Parish of Port Isaac, formed out of St. Endellion in 1913, is financed with the income of the Bodmin Prebendary. How this heavenly medieval arrangement of a college of prebendary clergymen survived the Reformation and Commonwealth and Victorian interferers is another mystery of St. Endellion for which we must thank God. It was certainly saved from extinction by the late Athelstan Riley and Lord Clifden. Episcopal attacks have been made on it; but long live St. Endellion, Trehaverock, Marny and Bodmin! Hold fast. Sancta Endelienta, ora pro nobis!

  The Rectors of St. Endellion have long been remarkable men. There was Parson Hocken, a blacksmith’s son from St. Teath, who grew roses, was a Tractarian of the Parson Hawker type and when jeered at for his lowly origin hung a blacksmith’s shoe over his pulpit and preached about it. There was Parson Josa, whom I just remember, who started as a choirboy in St. Peter’s, Rome, and then joined our own Church of England; there is the present Rector, Prebendary Murphy, a joiner and scientist, and above all, a sound theologian. I can safely say, as an experienced sermon-taster of over forty summers, that he is the most interesting and sensible preacher I have heard. But sermons are not everything as all the rectors of St. Endellion have known.

  I take a last look at St. Endellion standing on a cliff top of this Atlantic coast. The sun turns the water into moving green. In November weather, if the day is bright, the cliffs here are in shadow. The sun cannot rise high enough to strike them. The bracken is dead and brown, the grassy cliff tops vivid green; red berries glow in bushes. Ice cream cartons and cigarette packets left by summer visitors have been blown into crevices and soaked to pulp. The visitors are there for a season. Man’s life on earth will last for seventy years perhaps. But this sea will go on swi
rling against these green and purple rocks for centuries. Long after we are dead it will rush up in waterfalls of whiteness that seem to hang half-way up the cliff face and then come pouring down with tons of ginger-beery foam. Yet compared with the age of these rocks, the sea’s life is nothing. And even the age of rocks is nothing compared with the eternal life of man. And up there on the hill in St. Endellion church, eternal man comes week by week in the Eucharist. That is the supreme mystery of all the mysteries of St. Endellion.

  Port Isaac

  Can it really be that a town is half a mile away? I have walked between high Cornish hedges from St. Endellion, once the parish church of Port Isaac. The tower dwindles. The lane winds. The slate of the hedges is overgrown with grasses, bed-straw and milky-pink convolvulus, pale purple scabious and here and there darker valerian. From several places standing on a hedge or looking through a gate, I can glimpse the sea. The sea is there all right, the great Atlantic, emerald green, wrinkled, glittering, sliding streaks of water, spotted dark blue here and there with reflections. It was a full tide, tamed and quiet for the moment, sliding round this inhospitable coast of North Cornwall, with white crescents of surf floating close inshore. From here on these high-up fields, where blackthorn is sliced by the sea wind and leans inland, I can see all along the rocky cliffs to Tintagel Head. Behind me is even grander coast to the Rumps Point and Pentire. Cliffs and ocean are fine to watch from these high, windy fields as cloud shadows race over them. But where can there be a town? Less than half a mile and still no sight of it!