By grace of God and the Great Western Railway. The sub-text here is clear: travel is no longer the perquisite of the nobs, you too can have your fair share, and what's more you owe it to yourself. And another thing: whence the insistence on the superiority of foreign parts? Look at the undiscovered country near at hand!
That being said, these early guides to the West Country display a certain unease. They cannot quite allow it to stand up for itself but have to vaunt its charms in terms of somewhere readily appreciated. Dunster is variously the Nuremberg of Wessex and the Alnwick of the west. Wells is rather startlingly identified as the Bruges of western England. The Grand Tour spread a long shadow. Literary pedigree is seized upon. The Ship Inn at Porlock can claim Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey as habitués, according to the GWR's Wonderful Wessex of 1908.
The Railway Illustrated Guide of 1891 also ropes in Southey to endorse the splendours of the Valley of the Rocks:
Imagine a narrow vale between two ridges of rock covered with huge stones, the bare northern ridge looking like the very bones and skeletons of the earth-rock, imprisoning rock-stone held in thrall by other stone – the whole forming a huge, terrific, stupendously grand mass. I never felt the sublimity of solitude until I stood alone in the Valley of the Rocks.
Even more helpful is R. D. Blackmore's novel Lorna Doone, with its lavish descriptions of Exmoor and a luridly romantic story. Exmoor became Doone country, given further validation by fiction.
Lank Combe running down to Badgworthy Water is still labelled ‘Doone Country’ on some of today's maps; road signs also announce entry to this mythical and literary region. The majority of contemporary tourists are no doubt mystified. Those to whom the name means anything will probably know it from guidebooks and brochures. As it has been ever since its 1869 publication, R. D. Blackmore's novel is still in print, today in editions polarized between that with a scholarly introduction and editorial notes and brash curtailed versions for children. I doubt if it is much read in either form. But Lorna Doone was the great late Victorian blockbuster, outselling The History of Henry Esmond Esq. or The Cloister and the Hearth, running through forty editions in its first forty years of life, with the 1911 edition marking over 760,000 sales. Its popularity continued further into the first half of the twentieth century, though by the mid century many editions were abridgements – the reading public had lost the stomach for a Victorian three-decker.
Its success was phenomenal, startling its author who was always a touch peeved that his fourteen other novels sank far behind, let alone his poetry and his translation of Virgil's Georgics. Lorna Doone is a historical romance, but it is also a regional novel, precisely located in identifiable Exmoor landscape, and it is as such that it brought visitors to the area by the thousand, intent upon finding the watersplash up which young John Ridd climbed to his first encounter with the child Lorna and the church in which she was shot by Carver Doone as she stood beside John at the altar. It has all the essential ingredients for popularity – strong narrative, adventure, arresting characters and a vibrant love interest – and must have been enjoyed by a wide spectrum of Victorian and Edwardian readers, including those for whom reading was not a central activity, such as my grandmother and her family. Significantly, the horse ridden by my great-grandfather in one photograph is named Lorna.
For the contemporary reader, the novel is imbued with Victorian values, despite its seventeenth-century setting. Lorna is the archetypal Victorian child-woman heroine, John Ridd the worthy and hard-working farmer who advances himself to an eventual knighthood after an adroit display of selfless courage – thereby making himself a more suitable match for the aristocratic Lorna. City and country are set in apposition, with rural Exmoor as the idealized Arcadia which the lovers eventually achieve once more after an enforced spell amid the corruptions of London. There is even a side-swipe at the evils of industrialization in the depiction of an ill-fated and exploitative mining venture in the wastes of the moor. The Doones themselves are something of a puzzle – not just as debatable historical fact in the form of a possible early outlaw community, but also because of the ambiguity with which they are perceived in the book. They are a bunch of rapacious brigands, terrorizing the entire area, but they are also held in a sort of skewed esteem because they are of legendary high birth. The clan chief, Sir Ensor, is approached by John Ridd with awe and respect, despite the fact that his own father was murdered by the Doones. And of course Lorna is not a Doone at all by birth but was abducted by them in childhood.
It is still a rattling good read. To the modern reader, Blackmore's insistent Exmoor dialect can be an irritation. Lorna herself is to be endured rather than enjoyed and one sometimes has to curb exasperation with John's self-deprecating narration. But the suspense and setting are as compelling as they must have been for its mass readership around the turn of the century. Then, it conjured up a landscape so inviting that readers flocked to enjoy the reality. Some, indeed, were disappointed and complained that the Exmoor scenery did not match up to the dramatic quality bestowed on it by Blackmore – the hills not sufficiently precipitous, the combes (which Blackmore persisted in calling glens) not as large, gloomy and fearsome as anticipated. Even Baedeker's Handbook to Great Britain was affected. The compiler of the 1887 edition felt constrained to write to Blackmore about the discrepancy between the actual appearance of the supposed Doone valley and the description given in the novel. Blackmore replied: ‘I romanced therein, not to mislead any other, but solely for the uses of my story.’ Fair enough, I'd say.
But Blackmore's romantic and high-flown picture of Exmoor had set a standard. In the wake of Lorna Doone even the guidebook authors get quite carried away by the opening up of the west. A down-to-earth gazetteer of 1910, crisply informative about population numbers, early closing and market days, places of worship and the various fares from Paddington, reaches for another kind of language when advertising the scenic delights of the moor:
Withal there is green, green everywhere, a luxuriant growth rioting in colour, from the moorland to the very foot of the cliff, where the waves kiss the woods, as if here the mermaids and dryads made close alliance, and met each other on common ground amid those many brawling streams that rush over boulder and through bracken down to the sea.
The railway had reached Plymouth by 1848, though the comprehensive netting of most of the peninsula by branch lines was to continue for many years. There were of course far more significant implications than those of increased tourism. The West Country had hitherto been isolated from national life. It was also highly regional – a patchwork of definitive inward-looking localities. The railway revolution not only united the area to the rest of the country but also facilitated internal communications with all that implied for commerce and industry. In that most symbolic of all railway innovations, Greenwich Time supplanted local time. Comment in the region's newspapers expanded to include matters of national concern. Above all, alien accents were heard through Somerset down into the toe of Cornwall. The visitors had arrived.
The creation of the railway system prompted mass movement. Cheap fares, day trips, summer holidays. People began to look beyond their own immediate locality in a way never before possible. The expansion of horizons seems comparable only with that occasioned by cheap air travel in the twentieth century. Maps of nineteenth-century railway construction show those black lines creeping out from the cities to ensnare the country much as air routes net the globe today. A new landscape was created, not least in the private and particular scenery of the railway lines themselves – those isolated habitats which in summer can seem like ribbons of secret unvisited gardens winding their way the length and breadth of the country. Drifts of ox-eye daisies, banks of dog roses. Stands of lupins and rosebay willowherb. The great buddleia bushes that billow at the approach to stations. And perhaps above all that yellow flow of Oxford ragwort which seems like a herbal diaspora to match that of the liberated urban masses. Richard Mabey describes in his Flora Britannica
how a plant was noticed in the Oxford University Botanic Gardens by Joseph Banks in the 1770s, an evident rarity, possibly raised by Linnaeus. Its seed drifted out and began to colonize the old walls of the city:
By the 1830s it had arrived at Oxford Railway Station, and from there it set off down the Great Western Railway. It found the granite chips and clinker of the permanent way a congenial substitute for its natural dry habitats in the southern European mountains, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was well-established in many southern English counties. The slipstream of trains seemed to help the seeds on their way. Now it is distributed over almost the whole of England and Wales, even down to the tip of Cornwall.
Brunel's majestic feat of engineering crept west section by section. The Great Western itself opened as far as Bristol in 1841. Beyond that the several other lines later to be absorbed into the Great Western probed further west and reached out north and south within the peninsula – the Bristol and Exeter Railway, the South Devon and Dorset, the Cornwall and West Cornwall Railway. By 1862 you could travel from London to Taunton in three and three-quarter hours (just under two today) and by 1871 you could change there on to the West Somerset Railway and proceed all the way to Minehead (impossible today). The Exmoor area was easily accessible to anyone with the tourist-class return fare from Paddington (twenty-five shillings by 1910).
The construction of the system had been a matter of mile-by-mile negotiation with landowners and others with entrenched interests. There was intense conflict between those who welcomed the railway and those who did not, those who had a shrewd understanding of all that it implied and those who shrank from innovation. West Country towns and resorts were quick to see that the arrival or otherwise of the trains meant prosperity or decline. Ilfracombe was a well-established ‘bathing place’ on the north coast of Devon during the mid century, but its burghers soon realized that achievement of major resort status depended on a direct line. There were even instances of violence towards the supporters of an obstructing landowner (which culminated in readings of the Riot Act) but in 1870 the Barnstaple and Ilfracombe Railway opened successfully, after which the town reigned supreme on the north Devon coast.
Minehead was faced with a similar problem. The West Somerset Railway stalked towards the town with dismaying slowness. Its initial objective was Watchet harbour, which was achieved in 1862 by way of Norton Fitzwarren, Bishops Lydeard, Crocombe, Stogumber and Williton – that lovely litany of names with which I grew familiar riding the same line in the late 1940s as a schoolgirl. Watchet was not of course a resort but a serious working port trading up and down the Bristol Channel as it had done since Saxon times – the advantages of rail access were obvious. Indeed, at this point in the middle of the century it embarked upon its period of greatest activity with the opening of the West Somerset Mineral Railway in the late 1850s – a twelve-mile inclined railway bringing iron ore from the workings on the Brendon Hills for shipment to the foundries across the channel in south Wales. The Welsh miners too were visitors, many of whom came to stay, but visitors very different from the influx brought by the railway. Minehead struggled for inclusion into the network from the 1860s on but the Minehead Railway did not finally open the eight and a quarter miles from Watchet to Minehead until 1874.
The West Somerset Railway was axed by the dreaded Dr Beeching in 1971. I remember the outcry. I recall the intense pleasure of the journey, the train slowly creaking its winding way from the metropolitan neutrality of Taunton deep into the familiar hills. I got off at Washford, travelling to Golsoncott for the school holidays. That last stretch of the return was to be savoured – release from the horrors of boarding school, a fresh appraisal of the beloved landscape. The train's shadow moved alongside, sliding across the tipping fields, topped with a trail of dark smoke puffs. Sometimes the engine ground to an unscheduled stop and sat wheezing steam while you stared in sudden intimacy at a bank of primroses a few feet beyond the window, or met the affronted gaze of a group of sheep.
The line survives today as a scenic railway, catering for the tourist trade. Back then, it carried much local traffic – schoolchildren, shoppers bound for Taunton – as well as the long-distance visitors. In its early years, these would have had one further change to make on arrival at Minehead, if they planned to penetrate further, to Porlock or to those favoured coastal villages at the foot of the moor, Lynmouth and Lynton. They descended from the train – that triumph of nineteenth-century engineering – and climbed on to a four-in-hand coach for the final leg of the journey, moving in effect from a modern transport system back on to that of the eighteenth century. A photograph of the Lynton coach on the Minehead seafront in about 1900 shows a small vehicle topped with fourteen passengers, never mind the invisible four inside. The horses have that resigned cab-horse droop, as well they might with the one-in-four gradient of Porlock Hill ahead of them – though a contemporary photograph of a coach outside the Ship Inn at Porlock, about to set off for Lynmouth, shows what seems to be a smaller six-in-hand with fewer passengers, so maybe a further change was made at that point.
I realize with a jolt of surprise that the coaches must have been a familiar sight to the young Hewetts. They rode in them, no doubt. And this fact makes their generation suddenly very distant. For my own grandchildren, a steam train is an interesting archaism. For my grandmother, once upon a time, a coach and four was not worth a second glance; not many years later she was the owner of a Standard 8 car – a pioneer woman driver. Her experience of this interface of transport systems gives me a sharpened vision of the way in which a life spans the metamorphoses of its backdrop. The furnishings are superseded, each one tethered to its time. People too are reinvented, adjusting according to temperament and inclination, vaulting ahead of their day, hanging back in distaste. The six young Hewetts would step out of their cluttered late Victorian clothes (up to a point), would assume the mind-set of the twentieth century (to a degree). But subsumed within each of them there would always be a person for whom a form of transport familiar to Samuel Johnson had been a perfectly normal sight.
Recollection cannot be shared – that fragmented vision of elsewhere with which each of us lives. In those old photographs of my young grandmother an incarnation of a person I would one day know looks out at me from elsewhere. The background scenery of Exmoor is today much as it was then, but when I pore over those groups I see them sited not in a place but a time. They invite deconstruction – I can only see them through the lens of my own curiosity. There they sit, people who are both oddly familiar and also absolute strangers; they are themselves – and a great deal more besides.
The Children on the Sampler
My grandmother was a fine needlewoman – both creative and technically accomplished. Her preferred medium was Winchester work – wool embroidery in a subtle and intricate colour spectrum. But she made excursions into other forms and one of her chefs-d'æuvre was the sampler that she made of Golsoncott itself in 1946, which stood as a fire-screen in the drawing room and is now the centrepiece of my study in London.
It is formal and stylized, in the sampler tradition, with the house at the top and beneath it significant elements of the garden – lily pond with goldfish shimmering beneath the blue stitched water, dovecot with white doves, sundial, mole and molehill, frog, toad, dragonfly… Below that is the stable block, horses peering from loose boxes, each named, and a row of prancing dogs beneath – Sheltie and Waif and Merlin and the famous Dingo, a real Australian dingo bought from London Zoo by my aunt Rachel.
At the very bottom is a line of children. Not, as you might think, grandchildren, but the wartime evacuees.
There were six of them – six children under five. Rachel went to London shortly after the outbreak of war to work for the Citizens' Advice Bureau based at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel (then part of the London Borough of Stepney, itself now incorporated into Tower Hamlets) which served as a relief centre for those bombed out or otherwise in need of help as a result of the Blitz. In the aut
umn of 1940 she informed her mother that Golsoncott was now an official war nursery and that six children would shortly be arriving, along with the matron allocated for such groups of under-fives evacuated without mothers. My grandmother took it on the chin and set about reorganizing the house. The old nursery and night nursery were made over to the party, along with the attic rooms that had formerly been servants' quarters. The evacuees ate in the servants' sitting-room next to the kitchen. At night the children must have lain staring up at the night-nursery ceiling on which Margaret Tarrant fairies flew around a mid-night blue sky spangled with stars. The children came from Stepney, a borough where around 200,000 people lived at an average density of twelve per dwelling. From there to Golsoncott. Confronted with this situation, I assume that they did the normal and natural thing – howled for their mothers and wet their beds. My grandmother, who didn't have to do the washing, took a kindly interest and gave them much the same treatment as grandchildren received when there were any to hand – they had the run of the garden and were summoned to the drawing-room after tea where she read to them from Beatrix Potter. She found the evacuees' Cockney accents distasteful and hoped to correct these. (By contrast, Somerset accents were considered entirely agreeable and to be respected – a neat instance of the perceived aesthetic chasm between town and country.)
Perhaps today, somewhere, there is a person of about my own age whose memory bank includes a bizarre fragment in which he or she sits on a cushion in a vast room while a benign madwoman with peculiar diction reads aloud from diminutive books. I'm not sure how long the evacuees stayed but they were certainly there for two or three years and were legendary figures by the time I returned to Golsoncott in the late forties. Naughty and engaging Georgie of the golden curls, who climbed the cedar of Lebanon, got stuck and had to be rescued by ladder. Pert little Maureen, who once scarpered off down to the village and was found hanging around outside the Valiant Soldier. After the war, leftover money from the Anglo-American Relief Organization, which had funded several such evacuee nurseries, was used to pay for summer holidays for former evacuees. Rachel used to oversee this operation and distribute joyous leggy adolescents around the area. The evacuee experience was notoriously various – these must have been among the happier instances. One of Rachel's protégés, a girl called June, was still coming to Golsoncott for a summer stint in the late forties, by which time she was a histrionic adolescent in love with my aunt, spending her time hanging around outside Rachel's studio and the stables in the hope of a passing word. One lad originally billeted on a local farm continued to holiday in the area as the father of his own family and eventually set up as a butcher in Minehead.