‘Have you thought of renaming it the Tony Blair Room?’ I asked. She gave me a very dirty look.
It seems unlikely that Tony Blair ever wandered down the road to look at the Trimdon Grange memorial. This was a man who did not even know the number of British soldiers killed in Iraq, the war he started. Tom Thubron had been an admirer, a friend even: ‘I liked him.’
‘What do you think of him now?’
‘Power corrupts,’ he replied.
July 2011
The very next week after my visit to Wheatley Hill, a man from Stockton-on-Tees appeared before Hartlepool magistrates and admitted causing unnecessary suffering to greyhounds running on flapping tracks by feeding them boiled cannabis when he wanted them to lose and Viagra tablets when he wanted them to win. The Viagra, he said, made them ‘run their heads off’. He was banned for life from keeping greyhounds but allowed to retain up to twenty ferrets. I am not making this up.
5. Watch the wall, my darling
DEVON
August Bank Holiday: Britain is covered with a blanket of low cloud and gloom, literal and metaphorical. Beset by an economic squeeze and a paltry exchange rate, a large portion of the British population has forgone its customary continental holiday and stayed home, wallowing in the misery of it all.
Much of the North is sodden, the South-East heading towards drought. The South-West is different. Devon, in August 2011, looked exactly the way England ought to look in late summer: a riot of rich green laid out as if to please the fertility gods.
And much of the country – at least those with any dosh left – seemed to know it. They converged on Devon, as of old, especially on the roads along the banks of the Dart leading to the riverside village of Dittisham (Dit’sham). Roads? That’s not the word, really. There are country lanes and then there are Devon lanes. Most of the rural South is characterised by grass verges and hedgerows. Here they have Devon banks, solid obstacles without an inch of give designed to shelter the cattle from the west wind. Overtaking becomes near-unthinkable once you leave the A38. Close to Dittisham, it is difficult to pass a pedestrian without the risk of burying them in the brambles and the far more worrying danger of scratching the wing mirror.
All over the South Hams, locals and visitors were taking part in the traditional holiday-time motorised folk dance to get by without bashing into banks, buttresses and garden walls. It is like a sideways limbo mixed with a Maori haka. The inhabitants are able to execute the steps with practised elegance, if not much grace: the trick is to use a show of aggression, then make the visitors do the reversing – especially if the opposition comprises a nerve-wracked woman from north London with a Range Rover full of infants. In places, especially on the overgrown tracks leading to the beaches or where the spring tide in the creeks laps across the tarmac, it is hard enough even for one car to get by. In Dartmouth, I watched a 30,000-ton cruise liner trying to escape the harbour on what looked to me like an iffily low tide. But that was nothing compared to the terrifying sight of the double-decker 93 bus to Kingsbridge trying to barrel its way through Stoke Fleming.
There was a time when none of this mattered. Dittisham was a fishing village with a sideline in plum growing. Now the old cottages have turned into holiday homes, each with a Range Rover or BMW outside, if the owners can manoeuvre it anywhere close. The locals are not grumbling about this: they took their profits, sold out and moved out. Or they are revelling in it. It was impossible to get served in the Ferry Boat Inn. And outside the poshed-up Anchorstone Café someone – maybe the owner – was yelling into a mobile (Lord knows how he got a signal) that he had never been busier. Someone told me a house in the village recently went for £8 million. No one thinks that implausible.
But the dance season does not last long, at least not at its bank holiday intensity. Less than two weeks later I was back in Devon, walking along the stony beach at Budleigh Salterton, a place straight out of interwar comedy. ‘No one but a monumental bore would have thought of having a honeymoon in Budleigh Salterton,’ a character says in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. And it still got a laugh in London when Alison Steadman played the crazed old medium Madame Arcati in 2011.
The town, it’s true, does seem a little elderly. But on the beach, when I arrived, the scene was very romantic: a Turneresque September day of sun, cloud, wind, spume and spits of rain; pines to the east, sheer cliffs to the west. A lone fisherman was the only other figure on the shingle. Hoping for bass on the flood tide, he was finding only dogfish, which may be a metaphor for life. The Longboat Café was not just closed, but closed with eighteen separate padlocks. It was a signal that summer was over and that Devon was once again guarding its secrets.
Secrets! And lies! Was there ever a place so full of them? Along the coast at Slapton Sands the seas hide one of the greatest mysteries of the war. In 1943 the area was evacuated because the shore was a remarkable facsimile of the Utah and Omaha beaches chosen for the Normandy landings. After the population was dispersed, the Allies undertook months of exercises to prepare for the invasion, complete with live firing for added realism, which had some unfortunate consequences in itself.
Six weeks before D-Day came a full-scale dress rehearsal for the Utah landing, known as Operation Tiger. What happened next was detailed in a locally published account, Preparing for D-Day, by Arthur L. Clamp. The exercise, he said, was very successful: ‘one incident, however, marred this event’. His tone suggested a sharp downpour had afflicted the village fete. Instead: ‘two German E-boat flotillas … stumbled on the exercise taking place during the hours of darkness. Two landing craft full of troops were sunk and one was damaged causing the death of about 700 men – more than were killed on Utah Beach during the actual invasion.’
The disaster was hushed up and relatives fobbed off, which was understandable given the overriding imperative of the moment. But official embarrassment ensured the cover-up continued long after the war. There is what looks like a memorial in the car park at Slapton, close by the ice cream van. But this was a gift from the US Army to thank the locals for uncomplainingly getting out of their way. No word of the dead, nearly all of whom were American. It took a local obsessive, Ken Small, to give them any honour. He spent years fighting bureaucratic obstructionism to raise a tank, lost in the disaster, from the depths. It is now preserved further along the beach, as an inadequate and rather inappropriate monument.
Just south of Slapton, on this east-facing stretch of coast, is Hallsands, once a thriving crab-fishing village. In 1896 an industrialist called Sir John Jackson was given a licence to dredge the shingle there to expand the Devonport dockyard: nearly three-quarters of a million tons were removed. The locals were alarmed right from the start and foresaw that it would destroy first their livelihoods and then their homes. Sir John’s representative assured them there was no danger because sand would come in to fill the gaps. Guess who was right? The village was savagely damaged over the years ahead and piffling compensation was offered, until in 1917 the combination of a high tide and a roaring sou’easter destroyed Hallsands once and for all.
There are still dark rumours that the Lynmouth floods of 1952, which killed twenty-four people, were caused by the RAF playing with cloud-seeding in an exercise known as Project Cumulus. Certainly, the whole scheme was scrapped very quickly thereafter, and crucial files have gone missing. No wonder Agatha Christie was inspired by Devon. It reeks of cover-up and deception. Even visitors play the game. Personally, I’ve found an absolutely scrumptious beach but I’m buggered if I will reveal where it is. And I noticed, as I talked to people for this chapter, that while everyone was friendly and charming and talkative, they were more than normally reluctant to reveal their names.
I think this stems from two separate traditions. One is the wariness of country folk the world over when confronted by a stranger making notes. But in Devon this collides with the even more mysterious and frequently nefarious habits of those who live by the coast and their wits. The salty tang of the sea is mixe
d with a whiff derived from centuries of dodgy dealing: illicit red diesel, smuggled brandy and maybe the hint of something from the marijuana farms that lurk in the remote combes.
If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by.
And it hasn’t all gone away. In January 2007 the cargo ship Napoli ran into trouble in a Channel storm and was beached in Lyme Bay, a mile off Branscombe. Soon afterwards, the containers began floating ashore, awakening atavistic memories from deep within Devon’s soul. By the time the police had got their boots on, everything from empty oak barrels and packs of nappies to 200 BMW motorcycles had been scooped up. The romanticism of this re-enactment of Devonian heritage was somewhat spoiled by the devastation of a Swedish family, emigrating to South Africa to open a winery, who saw on TV their most sentimental possessions (and their barrels) being carted off by scavengers. And the locals found themselves elbowed aside by some pretty nasty gangs from Liverpool and Birmingham.
Still, the incident has become suffused with a nostalgic glow and, more thoughtfully, immortalised by Steve Knightley from the folk duo Show of Hands, a brilliant chronicler of the underside of West Country life. He incorporated Kipling’s poem into a song called ‘The Napoli’, which had the chorus:
Flotsam, jetsam, call it what you like
I got a big oak barrel and a German motorbike.
Lyme Bay to eBay, tell me where’s the sin
Everyone’s a wrecker ’neath the skin.
Sorry, but Devon does make one burst into song a lot.
When Adam and Eve were dispossessed
Of the garden, hard by Heaven,
They planted another one down in the west –
’Twas Devon, glorious Devon.
And that’s the reason why people pay £8 million for houses in inaccessible fishing villages with an uncertain climate. The notion of Devon is embedded in the image of home the British took with them when they built their empire. ‘Devon-shyer’ cream teas (not very nice ones) are served on Australian trains. There are Hotels Devon or Devonshire in Kenya, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Canada, wherever. Other counties have rivers, the sea, moors, hills, all of those. But Devon has hardly any flat at all, except on the high plateaux. It’s all crinkles or, as one local male put it, one long line of breasts.
Just about every town is on the slant, sometimes precipitously so: Modbury, South Molton, North Tawton, Torrington, Totnes, Kings-bridge, Hatherleigh … plus Ottery St Mary, which is not just on a hillside but has streets with a camber that would suit an Olympic velodrome. And that’s just the inland places, never mind the vertiginous coastal resorts. On the Malvern principle, they must be healthy. A friend of mine went to the doctor, who thought he might have angina. ‘I live in Dartmouth,’ the patient replied. ‘I think I’d know if I had angina.’
There are beautiful places all over England, but Devon doesn’t do anything else. I went round and round this large county (surpassed in size by only Yorkshire and Lincolnshire), reversing in the face of oncoming traffic more often than a coalition government, but I discovered only four ugly places: parts of Plymouth (OK, most of Plymouth); Paignton, where a hideous cinema separates the town from the sea; Westward Ho!; and Bigbury. And in each of these cases God was on absolutely ace form but the planners were not. Devonians shudder at the very mention of Princetown, the grim-visaged prison town on top of Dartmoor. True, the housing stock, weary and discoloured, has the unmistakable look of being built to government spec and maintained to government standards. But Princetown is not ugly. Even the prison itself, far from dominating the town, nestles discreetly underneath it. In the Pennines it would pass as a redundant cotton mill, be transformed into an arts centre and be leeched off by the entire community selling cream teas, second-hand books and knick-knacks.
But there is just too much competition here. From Abbots Bickington to Zeal Monachorum, from Exmoor to the Tamar, this is a lovely county. It is still possible to use John Betjeman’s 1936 Shell Guide and revel in his judgement and enjoyments without feeling a sense of utter depression at what has been lost. Mind you, his views are somewhat subjective. DODDISCOMBSLEIGH: ‘The people in these parts are very friendly, and blackberries are juicy and ripe.’
Do you know? I think the old rascal might have scored.
Absent a Doddiscombsleigh wench with ripe lips and an undertaste of blackberry, my Devon epiphany came the day I went to Dartmoor and turned west from Bovey Tracey, past Haytor towards Widecombe in the Moor (pronounced Widdy-combe, as in the name of the politician, dancer and professional virgin, Ann Widdecombe). By the happiest of coincidences, it was the second Tuesday in September, the day of Widecombe Fair, a fact that will either reduce you to blank incomprehension or an immediate rendition of Devon’s most famous folk song.
Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me your grey mare,
All along, down along, out along lee,
For I want for to go to Widecombe Fair,
Wi’ Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney,
Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawk,
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all,
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
Traffic was banned from the village for the day and we had to park in the teeth of a gale, high on the moor near Rippon Tor, and take a double-decker bus, an even scarier proposition in those lanes than in Stoke Fleming. I sat, with childlike wonder, at the front of the top deck, which was clouted so hard by one overhanging branch that I got a headache.
But the view, oh my, the view. In one of the fields above the village, there was a row of silage bales wrapped in a plastic whose green was just a touch jarring. Otherwise, there was nothing that was not totally adorable. And in the midst of the picture, bathed in sunlight, in the lee of the hill – Widecombe, only a little tich of a place, laid out as if for a medieval tournament. There were just a few houses, a couple of pubs sustained by tourists, and a church, St Pancras, ‘the cathedral in the moor’, so improbably grand that it might easily live up to its name with the nave serving as a platform and trains waiting in each of the aisles.
There was no wind here. And for the fair, the village was packed, even on a working Tuesday, with a nice throng of trippers and locals watching the shearing competitions and the bale-tossing and the tug o’ war. In some respects it might not have changed much since the late nineteenth century, soon after there really was a Thomas Cobley Esq. in the vicinity, when the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (author of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’) heard the song and brought it into the national consciousness.
There is probably less public drunkenness at Widecombe Fair now. It has certainly become more self-referential: there is the Uncle Tom Cobley mechanical model; the Uncle Tom Cobley downhill race; the Uncle Tom Cobley junior race; the grand parade of prize-winning horses led by Uncle Tom Cobley, played by a suitably genial and bearded villager. I can find nothing bad to say about Widecombe whatever, except this: just listen to the bloody song – it’s brutal.
Tom Pearce kindly lent them his mare; these seven wretches clambered on, knackered her and left her to rot. It broke his heart.
So Tom Pearce’s old mare, her took sick and died,
All along, down along, out along lee,
And Tom he sat down on a stone and he cried,
Wi’ Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney,
Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawk,
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all,
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
Cobley has passed into the language. And the victim? Forgotten.
Devon is England’s only county with two completely separate coastlines, and the two have very little to say to each other. Separated by the hulking great obstacle of Dartmoor, linked only feebly by road or rail, there is a vast gulf in status.
The north coast is by far th
e fiercer, bleaker, more rugged of the two. South and east of the moor is the rich, red, fertile soil supposed to be characteristic of Devon. North-west of it lie the culm grasslands: heavy clay soils, difficult to work, with about five feet of rain a year belting in from the west – ‘mud and rushes country’, according to Anthony Gibson, for many years the National Farmers’ Union’s south-west regional director. ‘There’s a Bermuda triangle between Hatherleigh, Holsworthy and Torrington into which hundreds of farm businesses have disappeared,’ he says.
‘In the old days you could milk cows on it. But there’s been a big decline in the number. There’s a bit of a switch to beef: the Devon cattle – the ruby reds – do well on rough grassland. But there’s always been a big turnover of farmers here. It’s not like east Devon, round Honiton, say, where most of the farmers can trace themselves back on their farms for centuries.’
There is not much call for B&B and holiday cottages in the triangle. And in the towns, far from the bright lights, one senses teenagers in particular leading lives of quiet desperation. Lord knows, the places are still pretty enough. I took a particular shine to wind-tossed Torrington, with its tight terraced houses marching up the hill. It captivated me when I passed three greengrocers in the first two minutes. There are also two independent butchers, two bakers producing their own bread and the Mole & Haggis Bookshop. One assumed this all comes about because the big supermarkets are only a rumour. Oh, no, insisted the woman in John Patt’s Country Store: ‘It’s the customer care.’
Hatherleigh, according to Betjeman, is ‘unexpected but squalid’. (So he didn’t score there, then.) It seems most unkind. But it was devastated by the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic. And the market, the beating heart of the town since the thirteenth century, lies under threat of development. Already the livestock and the Tuesday pannier market have been separated: the animal sales are dwindling away, while the other has become a West Country phenomenon. ‘There’s a world here the supermarkets don’t understand,’ said Dan Garnett (‘Dan the Fishman’). ‘You’ve got toilets that should be condemned, a café out of Brief Encounter. But the Tuesdays have just got bigger and bigger.’
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