The Village News

by Tom Fort

  I have never been to a place whose maritime past – for so long its reason for being – has been so thoroughly erased. Even along the Devon and Cornwall coast, where former fishing villages have all been swallowed up by the holiday industry, there is often an inshore crabber or two left to provide an authentic link with the long ago. But in Baytown the history is all that is left, lovingly cherished but ever more remote.

  In the winter months the village shuts down almost entirely, except at Christmas and over New Year, when the lights blaze from the rented cottages and second homes and music is heard. Everything is very carefully and smartly maintained. The ‘authentic features’ inside the cottages are proudly on display among the smart hobs and flat-screen TVs and heated airing cupboards where the duvets and duck-down pillows are stored. The tiny terraces where the fishing gear was stacked have pot plants and trestle tables and ornate cast-iron seats and little beds of flowers. The sheds where the bait was cut and lines of a thousand hooks were assembled have been converted into that priceless extra bedroom. Roses climb over porches, whitewash gleams, the alleyways are swept. There is not a fish scale to be seen, but you may find craft shops, art shops, antique shops, knick-knack shops, a secondhand bookshop, any number of coffee shops and faintly fancy bistros.

  But before anyone waxes indignant about second-homers conspiring to drive out the locals through superior spending power, it’s worth examining the history of Baytown closely. The process of turning it into a holiday village began a long time ago, once its time as a significant centre for fishing was over. There was no alternative economic lifeline – the alum extraction towards Ravenscar had petered out in the mid-nineteenth century. Some families stayed in Bay and the fishermen went off to Whitby and thence to sea. But many moved away, leaving their spray and salt-ravaged stone dwellings empty. Had they not been bought up and looked after, they would have decayed beyond repair. The investment of part-time Baytowners – some of them owners of the same holiday homes going back several generations – have saved the village from ruin. They have also wielded sufficient clout to compel the authorities to maintain and enhance the defences against the sea – most significantly the new concrete seawall installed in the early 1970s and now approaching the end of its useful life. Baytown has become far too valuable as a tourist draw to be allowed to slide into the sea, which might well have happened otherwise.

  It is true that it has long since ceased to function as a village in any meaningful sense. However, the village bearing the name Robin Hood’s Bay has not perished – it has merely moved a little way away. The present version is not at all quaint or picturesque, and it has nothing in the way of old history. But it is alive, which counts for something.

  It is to be found at the top of the road leading down to Baytown, on what has always been known as Bay Bank. Following the opening of the railway in 1885, plots were offered for sale on what was grandly designated Mount Pleasant – ‘splendid sites close to the sea for the erection of superior Villa Residences or High Class Boarding or Lodging Houses.’ No one could call the buildings that resulted beautiful. They were large, red-brick, abundantly provided with bay windows, dormers, gables, tiled floors, front doors with panels of coloured glass in lozenges and other late Victorian decorative features. They had big rooms and big gardens from which the steady stream of visitors could look down on the claustrophobic huddle of Baytown.

  The opening of the resplendent Victoria Hotel in 1897 further enhanced the appeal of the new settlement, sometimes referred to locally as Top of Bay. Many of the original houses did become lodging houses (and are still run as B&Bs today). But others became the homes of master mariners from Baytown who were more than happy to exchange their cramped quarters down the hill for modern comforts and extra space. There was no shortage of room up there; the settlement could expand as it wished. Over time the big, ugly villas were joined by 1930s semis, 1950s bungalows and 1970s houses as it spread along the clifftop and inland.

  The connection between Bay Bank and the Bay itself is tenuous. The primary school and the village hall are both named after Fylingdales rather than Robin Hood’s Bay – Fylingdales being the parish, which covers a large area of moorland and is more usually associated with the RAF radar and early-warning station which is many miles inland. In contrast the bowling and tennis clubs – near the dark and forbidding late Victorian Church of St Stephen – proudly invoke the name of Robin Hood’s Bay.

  However it is designated, this shapeless nondescript mishmash of late Victorian and twentieth-century housing – in look and character far removed from the sweet, old cottages of Baytown – is where the heart of a community beats. Children flock to the school from all around. From inside the village hall I could hear cries and thuds and music advertising a vigorous aerobics session; there is a full programme of bingo and domino drives and other more sedate entertainments. Outside the Grosvenor, a sprawling Victorian roadside pub, posters announced a Tuesday night gig by blues legend Steve Phillips and the Rough Diamonds. The crown bowling green was quiet mid-morning, but come evening the bowls would be purring their way across the velvet turf.

  I went to visit one of the bowling club’s faithful regulars, still playing in her nineties. She lives in a spacious bungalow near enough the cliff edge to have a fine view of the Bay from her smartly tended and luxuriantly shrubbed and hedged garden, but far enough away not to be in danger of slipping over. It was built in the 1950s by her father, whose firm was responsible for a number of other similar dwellings in Top of Bay. She moved up from Baytown with her husband, who was one of seventeen children from an old village family. They were not one of the fishing dynasties, but did almost everything else, from running a farm and the butcher’s shop to delivering the bottled gas.

  She remembered Leo Walmsley, not with affection. There was an old story about a fight involving him in which one of her husband’s brothers or cousins had been blinded in one eye. ‘The family didn’t have much favour for him,’ she said unforgivingly. ‘And he made a lot of that book up anyway. It was as well for him that he went off somewhere else.’

  I asked her why she had moved from Baytown. She waved a mottled hand around her conservatory. ‘Why do you think? A lot of young families moved out when they got the chance. Some went to the new council houses at Fylingthorpe because they were modern and you could park a car outside. You couldn’t have that in Bay.’

  She hardly ever went down there any more, except when her son came over from Scarborough and they took a stroll for old time’s sake. ‘There’s almost no one left I’d know,’ she said. She didn’t seem sad about it, and certainly not bitter about what had happened to Baytown. ‘It’s the way of things,’ she said.

  Later I pedalled back along the Cinder Track then cut down a steep hill to Mill Beck and followed it to Boggle Hole where a handsome stone youth hostel stands within sound of the sea. I looked south to Ravenscar – in Three Fevers ‘that headland whose foundations of rugged ironstone reached out seawards like the forepaws of an immense sculptured lion.’ In the final scene of the novel, the two Lunn sons, Marney and John, take the coble out on their own, leaving their father, Henry, nursing a poisoned thumb. It is a day in late summer and their target is Spinney Hole, below the cliffs of High Butts (Ravenscar), where the salmon and sea trout come in on a high tide to feed in the channels behind the scars. The method is to fix the nets across the mouths of the channels then drive the fish out on the ebb, beating the water with a pole.

  Inevitably a storm blows out of the south-east, the most deadly quarter. Mist creeps across the moorland, and the barometer drops like a stone as the wind picks up. Bolts of lightning split the sky and the rain falls in sheets. The rising seas are running straight across the way into The Landing, threatening to drive any boat attempting to get in on to the rocks. The Fosdyck boat makes it in the nick of time, but there is no sign of the Lunn boys. Henry Lunn and the nameless narrator make their way in haste along the shore to Spinney Hole, where they find a fresh salmo
n with a Lunn gaff stuck in it. But there is no answer to their cries from the roaring blackness in front of them.

  Back at Bramblewick the Fosdycks are preparing to launch the lifeboat, in the full knowledge that they will be risking their lives to save those of their enemies. But all thoughts of the bad blood between them are put aside in the common cause against the sea. Then, through the fog, they all hear the sound of oars from beyond The Landing. The Lunn boat beaches and the sons step ashore into a blast of rage from their father. In the bottom of the boat are twelve salmon, thirty-three seatrout and a dozen cod. The peril over, the family at once get down to discussing the three weeks of the salmon fishing left, and the prospects for the cod beyond that.

  It was a different world then.

  8

  IDYLL

  Chelsfield, Greater London

  London’s suburban spill to the south-east is halted with surprising suddenness less than a dozen miles from Canary Wharf. Orpington is unashamed suburbia. But cycle a little way east from Orpington railway station into Avalon Road and take a right turn into Chelsfield Lane and you are in the English countryside. Even at my cycling speed the change was abrupt. One moment I was passing bungalows and pairs of semis behind paved forecourts and street lamps; the next I was between unkempt hedges with fields of ripening rape beyond and woodland in the distance. Administratively, this is Greater London these days (more precisely, the Borough of Bromley), but in character it remains rural Kent.

  I pedalled along slightly disbelievingly, hearing birdsong instead of traffic noise. The lane curved a little to the left past a couple of 1960s houses. Then I was in the village of Chelsfield, the low grey Victorian school on one side, the pub – the Five Bells – on the other.

  Chelsfield in the Second World War

  The Five Bells, Chelsfield, 1860s

  It is a very small village. At the crooked crossroads in the middle of it one lane goes off left into more open countryside. The one opposite goes past the village hall and the cricket ground on one side, and Chelsfield Hospital on the other, towards the hamlet of Maypole. The road to the right, in front of the pub, takes you past some old cottages and out of the village. There are fields either side as you go, but the rustic peace is soon invaded by the insistent growl of traffic along the Orpington bypass.

  This road, built in the 1920s, was the great injury done to Chelsfield in the name of progress. It cleaved the parish in half, cutting the village off from its fine old Church of St Martin of Tours. To reach it, worshippers for the past ninety years have had to cross the bypass, an undertaking that has become increasingly hazardous with time and increased use (I say this with feeling having been knocked off my bike doing it, and having been very lucky to have escaped with cuts and bruises and a sprained ankle).

  Although the church is (and always has been) a fair distance from the village of Chelsfield – and thanks to the bypass feels as if it belonged somewhere else altogether – we are far from having finished with the name of Chelsfield having reached it. Church Road continues in a south-westerly direction. There are fields and then, on the left, a golf course; and on the right a handsome dark-red farmhouse with the curious name of Julian’s Brimstone. From there the land to the west dips down, revealing Chelsfield Park, a fine example of how responsible and civilised housing developers approached the business of building a housing estate long ago.

  The land, almost 200 acres of it, had formed part of the estate of the Victorian squire of Chelsfield, William Waring. In 1920 it was sold by his son, Arthur Waring, to a company called Homesteads Ltd., with offices in the Strand. They set about creating a settlement that would both be a pleasure to live in and the height of convenience for commuting from Chelsfield railway station – handily placed at the northern edge – to central London. The plots were spacious, averaging two-thirds of an acre each, big enough for a small-scale agricultural smallholding as well as a house. The homes were detached, but modest in size, built in an unpretentious style characteristic of the time, with exposed beams and dormers and lots of little arts-and-crafts touches. Existing mature trees were retained where possible, and new trees were planted, to ensure a bosky, semi-rural feel. A recreation ground and sports club were provided, as well as a refreshment pavilion. Crucially the company imposed covenants on each plot stipulating that no more than one dwelling would be permitted on it.

  Chelsfield Park was pretty much completed by the late 1930s. Subsequently the area to the north and west of the railway station was comprehensively built over as well, although in a more piecemeal fashion. But the land to the east, around the original village, was not touched and has not been touched by the developer’s hand. Perhaps as an act of reparation for being sundered from its church, old Chelsfield has been protected in its rustic setting instead of being swallowed up by Orpington.

  So there are three Chelsfields: the nondescript sprawl attached to the station; leafy Chelsfield Park; and the village.

  *

  One day in March 1921 a little girl, seven years old, alighted at Chelsfield station with her elder sister, her mother and her father to begin their new life. Then, as now, there was a footpath along the edge of the field behind the station that led to Church Road. Then, as now, it gave a clear view across to the cluster of trees part hiding Chelsfield Church and to the countryside beyond. Much later in her life, the girl stated that it was this prospect that first ignited the love of nature and the open air that ran like a stream through the books she would write.

  The family made their way on foot to Church Road, then along it to the top of Chelsfield Hill. Today this looks down on to the A21 link with the M25, but then the view was of woods and fields. ‘Half-way down the steep hill,’ the girl remembered seventy years later, ‘a cart track led off which ended in a south-facing field heavily hedged. These hedges yielded more joy, for under them grew sheets of blue violets and later little spangles of white stitchwort whose seedpods could be popped with great satisfaction.’ Beyond was a wood where ‘wood pigeons clattered from the oak trees, blackbirds fled squawking from the bramble bushes, tits collected the swinging caterpillars from their gossamer threads . . .’

  Their home was at the top of the hill. It was one of the first in what would become Chelsfield Park, a bungalow, newly built of asbestos sheets on a timber frame. It stood well back from the road in a double plot; the girl’s father later sold off half the land for another house. The family kept chickens and goats and grew vegetables. Opposite their gate was a pond: ‘In early spring it was awash with frog spawn . . . there was one large tree, probably a crab apple or wild cherry, which we could climb . . . a flutter of squabbling little tabby sparrows came to drink and splash in the shallows and we were entranced.’

  She had been born in Norwood and spent the first years of her life in the south London suburb of Hither Green. She and her mother had both been stricken with the Spanish flu after the end of the 1914–18 war, and her father, an insurance agent, decided the family needed country air. ‘At Chelsfield,’ she wrote, ‘I came into my own and I have never ceased to be grateful.’

  She was just old enough to go to the school in the village. It was a walk of over a mile. It took her past the low wall in front of the yard beside Julian’s Brimstone, from which the geese would sometimes emerge to chase her, past the gates leading to the big house, Court Lodge, past a row of limes, and another of elms, and into the village with the fire station on the right opposite a cottage where a German couple lived, very quietly no doubt. She passed the three shops and the Five Bells and turned left at the crossroads and there was the school, much as it is today.

  The headmaster, Robert Clark, had arrived a year earlier. He was thirty years old, full of the enthusiasm of youth, and proved to be an inspiration to the girl. He lent her books and she became familiar with Dickens and the other classics. He introduced gardening as a school subject and threw himself into the life of the village. In the church choir he deployed a bass voice ‘almost as velvety smooth as Paul Ro
beson’s’. Thanks in large part to him, she experienced a happiness which remained with her for the rest of her very long life – ‘the place fitted me as snugly as a cocoon and lapped me in warmth, security and friendship. I thrived as never before.’

  But her time at Chelsfield Village School was all too short-lived. After three years she won a scholarship to the girls’ grammar school in Bromley. From an early age she had had the writing itch, and wanted to become a journalist. But her father discouraged her so she went into teaching instead. She worked at various primary schools in suburban London, married another teacher, then moved to Witney in Oxfordshire. After the Second World War she combined supply teaching with bringing up her daughter and – increasingly – writing. She was a regular contributor to Punch, specialising in sketches of everyday country life, and produced many scripts for the BBC’s Schools Service. The literary editor at Punch, H. F. Ellis, said she was his favourite – ‘she has no arrogance . . . she writes about what she knows and never goes beyond it.’

  In 1953 Sir Robert Lusty, a director of the publishing house Michael Joseph, read an article of hers in the Times Literary Supplement and admired it sufficiently to suggest to her that she might have a book in her. The result was Village School, which she regarded as fiction and expected to come out under her own married name, Dora Saint (her father’s name was Arthur Shafe). But Lusty had a better idea. He persuaded her that it should be dressed up as non-fiction, with the appearance of being a memoir by a spinster schoolteacher called Miss Read (Read was her mother’s maiden name). The trick worked nicely and the assumed identity stuck for the thirty-odd books that followed over the years.

  Village School was set in a place called Fairacre (her subsequent stories were divided between it and Thrush Green, which is situated in the Cotswolds and is directly drawn from her time living in Witney). Geographically and physically Fairacre is nebulously realised; Miss Read’s daughter said it comprised elements from Chelsfield and Chieveley, near Newbury, where she lived later, as well as other villages she knew from her supply-teaching days.