Sunrise

A place apart

In the eighteenth century ‘gentlemen and ladies would sooner travel to the south of France and back again’ than venture down to the West Country (according to Gentleman’s Magazine, quoted in my Gothick Devon). This was because of the state of the roads, described as ‘all mud, which rises, spues and squeezes into the ditches’. Devon (and Cornwall) therefore remained as places apart.

    Belief in the supernatural for instance lingered long after it was scoffed at elsewhere and even in the twentieth century people remembered the old stories – of pixies, wild hunts, black dogs, hairy hands, devils (many of these stories documented by Ruth St Leger-Gordon in her 1964 book The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor).

    James Ravilious (son of war artist Eric Ravilious), who had trained as an accountant and then taught art in London, moved to Devon in 1972. Having recently taken up photography, he was asked by the Beaford Art Centre in North Devon to start a small archive of local pictures. So entranced was he however by what he encountered that the project took seventeen years. He realised that he was documenting a vanishing rural way of life and went on to take similar pictures in France, Italy, Greece and Ireland.
    The 5,000 photographs he took of Devon are now recognised as an internationally important collection. Do check them out (www.jamesravilious.com ). They’re funny, moving and quirky. (I won’t reproduce any here as they’re in copyright and, as an author suffering from illegal downloads of my books, the last thing I want to do is infringe anyone else’s rights.) The pictures are available as cards too, which was how I came across them.

    When I first came to Devon in 1971 I thought it was a bit of a dump. It rained all the time and there were no shops. I returned however in 1976 and grew to love the place. Whenever I passed the blue ‘Welcome to Devon’ sign on the M5 or the ‘Devon’ sign on the A303, when returning from some visit to family in the south-east, my head would clear and my heart would lift. I would feel free again. It was something to do with the space and the lack of people and the fact that everyone was poor so money didn’t count for much.

    Now I don’t want to moan (then again, perhaps I do), but that doesn’t happen any more. Devon is now like everywhere else. The population has doubled in the last forty years. They are building a new town a few miles away from where we live and we can see the lights at night. A phone mast stares in at our bedroom window. The hedges are enclosed in fences, the wild patches are disappearing. People rush around in smart cars.

    At the end of December Frog bought a Telegraph. (I know, I’m sorry. He says it’s a good read and ‘you don’t have to believe it’.) We hardly ever buy newspapers but he wanted to look at the New Year’s Honours List. I browsed through it and came across a page of aphorisms from famous people – their favourite of the pieces of advice they’d been given over the course of their lives. Most of the advice gave me that awful weary feeling that New Year’s Resolutions do but one piece I loved. It was from the writer Susan Hill and it went something like, ‘If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.’

    Sorry, this is turning into rather a long post, but I will get to the point eventually, I promise.

    As an inflexible Taurean, I run my life on military lines – lists of goals, daily ‘to do’ lists, one job finished before another is started, etc etc. Frog on the other hand is a slippery Piscean. He only ever does anything when it’s urgent. He has hundreds of jobs on the go at once. If I make him a list he loses it or writes something silly on the end like ‘Be happy’. 'Nature is strong,' says another Piscean, a sister-in-law, when I wail at the development of Devon.

    So what I’ve been thinking is this. What you see reflects what you are inside, so maybe it’s me I’ve built over. It’s me who’s becoming too civilised. Maybe I need to take Susan Hill’s advice and do nothing occasionally. Take a break at the end of the 'to do' list.* Wait before starting a new one. Sit down. Watch the birds. Even if I can no longer find that place apart outside, I can still find it inside.

    And at least the mud never goes away.

*It occurred to me while out walking Dog this morning (Sunday) that I could even take a break in the middle of a 'to do' list, or even - heaven forfend - before starting to tackle one. Would the world survive without me? I shall just have to see.

Anguish in the soul

I love all my aunts but Aunt Susan, my father’s elder sister, had a special place in my heart because she was my godmother and because she saved my life when I was only a few hours' old. I was born at home and Aunt Susan was staying to help out. Glancing into my cot, she saw that I was turning blue so picked me up by a foot and shook me till I started breathing again.

    Their mother died of pneumonia when Aunt Susan was eight and my father six. (There were two younger children too, one of whom was to die of muscular dystrophy.) Aunt Susan was always a good talker, a fount of hilarious stories, but in her later years she started to tell me about that time, about how desperate she was, how she prayed and prayed, how she was sent away to boarding school because they thought a change of environment might help her. (It did.)

    She married a Staffordshire farmer and had four boys. I used to love going to stay there, but I think Aunt Susan missed the city-life she’d known when young. As the children left home she began to suffer from depression. Religion still played a big part in her life, but – like me – she took refuge in reading. The library van came every fortnight to Abbot’s Bromley, the village to which she and Uncle Philip had retired. She would walk the mile or so to the van’s stopping point with her tartan shopping bag on wheels and then drag it back home laden with books.

    She died in her eighties and Frog and I went up to the funeral. She was buried in the traditional way, in the village’s lovely country churchyard. It was a beautiful October day, and throughout the ceremony as we stood round the grave and the vicar spoke the service a blackbird sat in a nearby hawthorn tree and sang. I knew it was her way of telling us she was all right at last.

In the last post but one I mentioned ‘golden eras’. My golden era was the year I spent working and travelling in Australia in my early twenties.

    ‘What is it about this place?’ I asked a fellow Brit, whose reactions were the same as mine. ‘Why are we so happy here?’

    ‘The people don’t have anguish in their souls like we do,’ she replied.

    Yes, I thought. She was right.  

     What did the Aussies’ lack of anguish stem from? (I won’t say ‘does’ because I fear they may have changed.) I would say that at least in part it stemmed from the landscape which was still untamed, still so much bigger than human civilisation. It had presence. It gave perspective and meaning.

   What our anguish stems from I don’t know. Guilt perhaps, for what our country has done and is doing to other countries, for what we are doing to the environment. A dearth of spiritual certainty.

    All I know is that Aunt Susan's anguish at least is gone.



Aunt Susan, my father (right) and Bill, who died



A cobwebby morning

A sense of place

On the Wednesday before Christmas I found myself aching all over and unable to squeeze out another word so I took a break from my computer and watched a television programme I’d recorded called ‘The Other Irish Travellers’. It was by a film-maker called Fiona Murphy and in it she examined her Anglo-Irish roots. I was interested in it because I too have Anglo-Irish roots.

    The part of the programme which has stuck in my mind is Fiona Murphy’s uncles talking about the war years. These were a golden era for them as they left the English public schools to which they had been sent and returned ‘home’ to Ireland. Not all the family thought of themselves as Irish however. Most of them in fact thought they were English and some (including the film-maker herself who lives in London) didn’t know which they were.

    My Anglo-Irish ancestor was a sixteenth-century French Protestant refugee – a Huguenot – who was set up in Ireland by Queen Elizabeth (in order, sadly, to organise the expropriation of land from Irish Catholics). The family then had to flee yet again – to Scotland – in the Irish Troubles of the 1920s.

    So, on that side of the family (my mother’s father) I am twice-refugee’d with allegiance to four countries. Not only that, but my mother’s mother was Norwegian.

    If you’ve been reading this blog since the beginning (poor you), you may remember a very early post in which I mentioned possible Jewish ancestry on my father’s side. This has now been confirmed by my aunt who has been doing some research. The family fled Prague in 1770, most members going to America but one going to London and founding a business in the City (at which my father still worked). Through the American branch I am related to Martha Gellhorn, war correspondent and wife of Ernest Hemingway. Her mother’s maiden name – Fischel – was the same as mine. (I’m terribly proud of this, so I hope you will excuse a little boasting.)

    More refugeeism.

    I’m a refugee too. Although I was brought up in Kent, I’ve been living in Devon for thirty-seven years – for reasons which I had perhaps better not go into here. At Christmas - in Devon; just me, Frog and Dog - I spent a lot of the time going for long walks, and I realised that the places I found beautiful were the places that reminded me of the Kentish North Downs, and that although I love Devon I’ve never felt that I belong here.

    Fiona Murphy’s programme made me realise how important it is to belong somewhere. But where do I belong? I may have been brought up in Kent but I’m far from being Kentish. I may hanker after the Kent countryside but the M25 now goes slap-bang through the middle of the my childhood meanderings. And, given my ancestry, perhaps the problem goes deeper than a choice between two counties.

     Tom Petty sings ‘You don’t have to live like a refugee.’
    Oh but I do, Tom. I do.