FRAGMENTS OF CHILDHOOD, LYMPSTONE, SOUTH DEVON

(UK) My father, born in 1912, was raised in a small coal-mining village in the South Wales Valleys. The pit provided a “job for life” for nearly all working men at that time, but not my dad, who loved mechanics, especially motorcars and bikes. Thus, he left his boyhood village to work for Morris Motors in Cowley, Oxfordshire. He lived in a tent. My mum, born in 1915, who lived in a neighbouring Welsh village, moved to Oxford in her Twenties. She met him there in a pub and joined him after he found a more suitable mode of accommodation! Later, they moved to Croydon as dad worked in the “Ford Dagenham” factory in East London. They got married in Croydon.

My mother holds me in her arms in front of our cottage.

Straight after the war, they decided to move to Devon. Dad went first. He found a garage to rent and a remote cottage on Crown Land for fourteen shillings a week. It was our family home for the next fifteen years. My sister was born there in 1947, and I followed in 1950.

But before that, my father arrived home with a beautiful Welsh Collie pup named Gyp - loyal, intelligent … mum’s dog.

Memories of my childhood home in Devon.

My childhood home, Middlecombe Cottage, sat between Upper and Lower Combe Farm, an old gamekeeper's cottage long neglected and vacated when my father stumbled across it. It offered an escape from grimy, bombed-out post-war Croydon. The Ford factory in Dagenham was duly swapped for a village garage.

My childhood home, Middlecombe Cottage

My mother cried when she saw the dilapidated and unloved cottage - what was he thinking of? Not her, obviously. She stalked off to Exmouth to get some shopping, and my father cleaned the old range in her absence to ease her shock when she saw the state of the place! And she felt better after a cup of tea. Together, they whitewashed the walls inside and out, scrubbed the floorboards upstairs and the stone floors downstairs and added a lean-to, which housed a copper boiler, a mangle and an inside toilet. Modernised a little, but still primitive even then. Walkers stopped to admire Snow White's cottage with pink roses trailing around the garden gate.

The brook that ran alongside the cottage was full of watercress and wild iris. My memories are of swallows nesting in the thatch, barn owls swooping in and out of the roof space, bats at dusk, and the lone blackbird singing at the top of the apple tree to mark the end of the day; hedgerows packed with primroses, violets, miniature daffodils, foxgloves and snowdrops, bluebell woods, windfall apples in abundance, blackberries heavy with juice, mushrooms in fairy rings, cuckoos and lambs in spring, robins in winter. We fished for sticklebacks in ice-cold flowing water, played in haybarns and made dens in woods. Our old Welsh collie stood guard over us, neither needing nor wanting affection, whilst our semi-feral cats brought headless rabbits to lay at my mother’s feet - "good boy" she would say, turning a paler shade of white.

I remember random things - my grandparents visiting in summer, which meant day trips to Brixham, Torquay, Paignton Zoo, the Christmas pantomime in Exeter, and queueing to see the ‘Ten Commandments’, eating a knickerbocker glory in a milk bar, the outdoor saltwater swimming pool in Exmouth, palm trees along the promenade; the floods of 1959, Myxomatosis in wild rabbits, a hornet’s nest under the eaves, being scared riding home on my bike in the dark until I saw Gyp’s eyes reflected in my headlamp and I knew I was safe; real candles on the Christmas tree, apples sitting on newspaper under our beds, coconut matting that never wore out, smocked dresses, liberty bodices and saving our church collection money for the chewing gum machine. I recall, too, the smell of green soap, roast dinners, apple pie and scones on Sunday, honeysuckle on a warm day, cow pats on a hot day, steamed pudding on a cold day.

We were happy and healthy, but we secretly envied the children in the village who played out on the street and had a bathroom, hot water from a tap and could run to the shop. A five-minute walk to school for them, an hour for us in all winds and weathers - a disparity that became an excuse to tease us. Dripping wet clothes, chapped legs, frozen hands, muddy boots. No cars stood at the school gate; there were no lifts to be given, and a visitor to our home was a rare event. We were too isolated for children to come and play. We caught glimpses of televisions as we dawdled past windows, telephones ringing, and electric lights turned on and off at the flick of a switch. If you had asked us, we would have swapped, at least for a couple of days a week. I think mum often felt that way too - hanging washing out at six in the morning, followed by those unforgiving flat irons that could burn your best clothes in an instant. She was always cooking, bottling, and pickling to keep up with the vast amounts of fruit and vegetables that thrived in the rich red soil and along with a variety of flowers, a small but steady income was made at the garden gate. That is, if the foxhunt didn't run amok through our lovingly tended garden, for the cottage and land belonged to the Crown. No apologies from the gentry on horseback, fox or no fox. No fox, we hoped just to spoil their fun.

In the evenings, mum would sit on the front step, a cup of tea in her hand, Gyp by her side and listen to the blackbird, a quiet, contented moment, and then she would dutifully darn socks to death and knit beige cardigans because "beige went with everything". My sister and I would sit on the stairs and strain our ears to pick up the lines of The Navy Lark and Hancock's Half Hour. Mum laughing, needles clicking.

We wished she could find time to play with us, just to sit with us with love, but her life was work, and work her life. One day, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor and thought, "If only I could earn ten bob a week" - a series of physically demanding jobs followed. My father, too, worked all hours in the garage and around the cottage - DIY and gardening, infinitum. This was a version of “the good life” on the back of hard graft.

Back to the Welsh Roots

It turned out, according to mum, that the richer people are, the less likely they are to pay their bills. The garage suffered and eventually went bankrupt.

A shared Welsh heritage drew mum and dad back to their roots - this time to Swansea. The Ford Motor factory had been taken over by Prestcold Refrigerators, where dad secured a job at a managerial level. We lived in a 3rd-floor flat overlooking the sea - Mum hated it for a long time. She found it hard to settle in a flat after the cottage; as much as it was bloody hard work for her, it was a huge wrench to leave it. In particular, she hated the washing line, which was a pulley between a small back window and a rock face opposite - it hurt her back when she leaned out of the window. She wasn’t too happy about the four flights of stairs either! We all found it difficult to adjust in our own different ways. But to my sister and I, it was just an adventure - electricity, hot water, a bathroom, a school bus, neighbours and friends! We never returned to Devon.

A postcard from the 1920s showing the Osborne Hotel in the Langland and Rotherslade Bay in the middle, and our flat is to the far right.

We left Devon when I was ten, and I have never felt the urge to return to country life - for me, it's nice to visit, but not to live there. Memories are enough. (JH)