Through a fog darkly

Because it's hard to get together, what with geography and Covid and three of us being key workers, we decided we'd travel to Dartmoor to scatter my parents' ashes on the one day we were going to coincide, which was Christmas Day. And in fact, given that almost all of my Christmases have been spent in the company of my parents, it felt fitting to share at least part of the day with them one last time.

I'd imagined a chilly, possibly frosty morning, with shaggy cattle and ponies grazing the scrub and our breath coming out in clouds and hanging on the air. The BBC weather forecast had other ideas, and stubbornly predicted rainy showers and sunny intervals for days in advance, and I decided that would do, being fairly typical of Dartmoor. My main concern was that it would be clear enough to make out the Teign estuary to the east. This was because it was my father who really wanted to be scattered from the main outcrop at Haytor Rocks; my mother had hinted she'd be quite happy in Rose Bed No 2 at Canford Cemetery, but in the absence of a firm decision, the general family feeling was that they should be together. I was hoping I could point her in the direction of Shaldon, where she'd spent long and happy hours knitting in the sun, and tell her to make her way down there, rather than hang about among those grim granite pillars that never really formed part of her inner landscape. 

In the event it was wet, though from 10am it would be sunny and showery, according to the forecast. Taunton came and went in a spray of rain, then Exeter, then Bovey Tracey. Finally, as we climbed past the turning for Parke, it stopped raining, only for fog to descend like a security shutter. You couldn't see as much as a glimpse of the tor, a scant quarter of a mile away, from the top car park. 

We pressed on, keeping to the middle of the wide grass path so we wouldn't go astray. Eventually, the rocks came into view and we made our way towards the easternmost outcrop which, on a clear day, has the best coastal view. 

My father had long expressed a preference to have his ashes scattered from the top; I'd always joked that he shouldn't leave it too long as I wouldn't be capable of climbing it indefinitely. In the event, he lived till he was 95, and the fog dispelled any lingering notion that I might actually attempt to fulfill his wish. Instead we made for a promontory at its foot. 

Someone had tucked a rose into the rocks right where we stopped. I imagine it's a popular place to commit the last of someone close to the elements.

My father went first, per ardua ad astra, as befits an RAF veteran.

For a moment his ashes described a horse hanging on the air, the one we couldn't see for fog.

Then my mother. Unfortunately the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, and she was more likely to end up in Exeter or Crediton than Shaldon. And despite our best efforts not to do a Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski while scattering the ashes of Donny, it was so blustery a dusting of ash did end up on my son's coat. Still, I'm hopeful an atom or two of her will make its way to the seaside. 

And then Son the Younger sprinted up the tor to appease the shade of my father, just in case, while I willed him not to miss his footing in the fog.

On the way back to the car an invisible raven called from an invisible sky. Then it was back through the rain to Bristol and our Christmas dinner and presents and light and warmth and a very happy collie called Cwtch. 

A eulogy for my father

Lionel Raymond Harvey

11th March 1922 - 21st January 2018

Lionel Raymond Harvey was born on 11th March 1922 at 41 Cobourg Road, Montpelier, Bristol, the second son of Graham, a railwayman and veteran of the Somme, and Ida. His elder brother, also Graham, had died the previous year at a few weeks old; his sister, Audrey, was born 18 months after him.

Before long the family moved to Herbert Street in Totterdown, and then, in 1926, to the new council estate in upper Horfield. One of Dad’s earliest memories was of moving day. His father, riding on the van, assumed he was with his mother; his mum, busy with baby Audrey, was certain he was with his father, and four-year-old Lionel was left behind at the old house, to be taken in by neighbours until his parents realised and re-crossed the city to retrieve him.

Life wasn’t always easy in Macaulay Road; in particular, money was in short supply. Dad remembered his mother hiding a jar of Shippams fish paste behind the skirting board to avoid a confrontation with his father, and he vowed at a young age never to argue about money with his future wife. Once married, he duly handed over his pay packet to my mother every Friday.

On his seventh birthday Dad was given a football, and instantly he was the most popular lad on the street. He became an agile player with swift reactions; aged 13, while working at his first job in a shoe shop down the Gloucester Road, he trapped a rat under his foot and held it there until the shop cat could be found. He and his father regularly watched Bristol Rovers play at Eastville, and his mother could work out the score by looking at their faces as they turned into Macaulay Road on their way home.

When war broke out, Lionel was working at the BAC in Filton, and although this was a reserved occupation, he enlisted in the RAF as soon as he was old enough, seeing action in Palestine, Egypt, Tripolitania and Italy.

Like many veterans, Dad didn’t talk much about his war service. He mentioned getting the  bumps in the Western Desert on his 21st birthday, and how hard it was to play football on sand dunes, but kept most of what he went through to himself. The friendships he forged during this time were renewed decades later in the 1990s, when my parents attended RAF reunions in Stratford-upon-Avon, and these gave Dad the chance to talk with people who had been there with him, the men he called his brothers, and he valued this.

Once demobbed in 1946, Lionel embarked upon a series of jobs, which included office work at Maggs department store, a spell as a Co-op insurance man, and a return to the world of aviation, working as a section leader at Rolls-Royce, responsible for ordering and despatching engine parts for Concorde.

During his free time, Dad continued to play football, as well as cricket, tennis and badminton, mainly at Eden Grove; and it was here, in 1949, that he met a sporty young woman, six years his junior, from a large family in Bishopston. My godmother, Betty Daveridge, remarked how she knew something was going on between my father and her best friend, Sylvia Hill, because as he drove their group of friends home at the end of get-togethers, he started dropping my mother off last, even though this made his route rather more scenic than necessary. My mother adds that once they became engaged, Dad sold his car. I suppose it had served its purpose, and anyhow, he had to pay for the ring.

Dad was still a huge football fan. In 1946 he’d gone AWOL from RAF St Athan to watch a derby match between Rovers and City, incurring a fortnight’s ‘jankers’ when his absence was discovered. (Sadly for Dad, the match was a nil-nil draw.) And Mum recalls that upon his return from the 1953 FA Cup Final at Wembley, he woke her at 3am to describe Stanley Matthews’ legendary cross from the right wing that resulted in the winning goal, and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as he was.

But of course, Mum was into rugby really, and after meeting her three older brothers who all played, Dad decided it might be wise to show an interest in their sport too. Thus began his allegiance to Bristol Rugby Club. Both Mum and Dad held season tickets until Dad was well into his 90s, and after they’d called it a day, he’d listen avidly to radio coverage of each fixture, and enjoyed trips to Ken and Hilary’s apartment to watch televised matches on Sky.

Dad also loved singing. He was a founder member of Filton Glee Club, which later became Filton Male Voice Choir, and an enthusiastic participant in the many exchange visits with the men's choir in Witzenhausen, Filton's twin town. During his final years he sang with the Filtones, last attending choir practice, here in this church, the Wednesday before his death.

Germany aside, Dad didn’t do much long distance travelling after he left the RAF, though he was often to be found with his nose in an atlas. His skill with the compass, and innate sense of direction, stood him in good stead for when he and Mum did their coast-to-coast walk, from St Bees Head to Robin Hood’s Bay, with their friends, Charles and Kathleen, whom they’d met years earlier on the beach at Shaldon in South Devon.

Dad had first discovered Shaldon, with my mother and elder sister Linda, in 1960. He would describe how he’d walked onto the beach, looked across the river Teign, and felt a strong sense of coming home. This was confirmed 35 years later when a chance sighting of some family history revealed that Dad’s great-great-grandfather, a boatman from Weston, had lived and worked in Teignmouth during the 1830s, marrying a woman from St Marychurch during his stay.

Both Linda and I recall how we were marshalled onto the beach every morning on holiday, and there we would stay until dusk, whatever the weather. That is, apart from the obligatory trip to Dartmoor – always the same route, Haytor, to Widecombe, to Dartmeet, with a detour to Princetown, before heading for Postbridge, where Dad would stand on the clapper bridge and look up the East Dart in contemplation.

‘He could be an irascible old bugger, though, couldn’t he?’ said his great friend Georges, just after his death, and yes, Dad wasn’t always easy to be around. He was a stickler for right and wrong as he saw it, refusing, for instance, to accept any corporate hospitality or even claim his expenses when he was a parish, and later district councillor, and he expected all those around him to adopt the same high standards.

Yet he wasn’t above a bit of vandalism. He could never walk past a patch of wet concrete without inscribing his and his companions’ initials in it. Linda reports that the letters LH and DH from a walk my father and I took along the sea wall at Holcombe in 1987 have survived all intervening storms, at least until her most recent inspection last summer. And whilst the Beatles were all ‘scruffy individuals’, Dad himself kept his hair long on top, earning himself the nickname ‘Curly’ and many return trips to the RAF barber on the orders of his sergeant major.  

Curly was also the name his seven grandchildren knew him by, as his magnificent black and white mane gradually turned silver before thinning away altogether. He enjoyed their visits, and was latterly a devoted dog-sitter while I was at work.

Dad was well looked after by Mum for 66 years, from the day of their wedding in 1951 to his death. We are thankful he was spared a long decline and that when it came, his dying was quick and apparently painless. My enduring late memory will be of him sitting up in bed as the on-call nurse checked his temperature and blood pressure the Friday before he died. He felt horrible, he said, but nevertheless, there he was, taking his medals out of the tin he kept on the bedhead and telling her the details of each one, while she tried valiantly to sound his chest.

Occasionally Dad and I would talk about death, and I’d like to finish with a short poem by the great American poet Langston Hughes which gives beautiful shape to our conclusions:

Dear lovely Death

That taketh all things under wing—

Never to kill—

Only to change

Into some other thing

This suffering flesh,

To make it either more or less,

But not again the same—

Dear lovely Death,

Change is thy other name.

À La Recherche de Shaldon Perdu

During the four days I spent in Devon over the long weekend, I wandered the village of Shaldon a fair bit and realised I hadn't actually stayed there since I was ten, when my parents bought a caravan on the site across the River Teign and a couple of miles up the coast at Holcombe. 

Yet of all the places of my childhood, Shaldon has perhaps shaped me more than anywhere else barring my home city of Bristol. All that red sand made an indelible stain on more than just my white socks. 

It seems that every passage and alleyway holds memories, from the clacking of my plastic beach shoes on tarmac ... 

... to the inky business of fetching my father's paper, which necessitated going through School Lane and which I hated because who wants to think about school when you're on holiday? 

The duck pond's still there, minus its ducks (mallards, mandarins and chloe widgeons) and the low wall you could sit on replaced by railings. The gunnera still grows in the same spot, though - 'Look at the rhubarb, Mummy!' - and the fish wouldn't disgrace a safari. 

Clearly the telephone box has seen better days, and the Ness Gift Shop with its corrugated plastic awning is no more. 

We holidayed in lots of different places before The Holcombe Epoch. I was a baby when we stayed in the cottage at the Ringmore end of the village. 

It had two entrances on different levels in separate streets, and freaked my mother out because she thought she was on the top floor but could hear someone dragging their lame leg across the ceiling. 

I do remember the draughty old Manor House in pole position on the Strand, now divided into apartments. The flat above the Clipper cafe and gift shop, which was as close to staying on the beach as you could get, and is currently an upstairs annexe to the restaurant. And Chez Nous, a B&B owned by Mr and Mrs Cordon and their Jack Russell, Jo-Jo, and now seemingly the local headquarters of UKIP. 

I was envious of Jane and Sarah Woolley because they got to stay in the Dairy which was cool and dark, and had corridors, crannies and window seats. They used to keep their collections of pink and white top shells on the meeting rails of the sash windows.

It's long been a private dwelling. 

The most spectacular change has been the transformation of the caravan park by the bridge - we stayed in caravans and chalets there - into a development of modern cottages cunningly designed to resemble the other Georgian dwellings in the village. 

The first time I saw them, I really did think I was dreaming as it looked like they had always been there. The only giveaway is the width of the roads and their names, Oystercatcher Court being rather more high-falutin than Albion Street, Middle Street and Coronation Street. 

All this change is not without melancholy. Walking the back streets I saw familiar houses with unfamiliar names or, in  the case of Lan Y Môr and Sandy Nook, no name at all. A door I must have entered dozens of times opened and an unknown face peered out. 

And the voices of the old are gone. More Waitrose than West Country these days.

The wind still sounds oceanic in the woods on top of the Ness ...

... but you know you really are getting on a bit when the headland itself has undergone a fundamental change.  

I can't help wondering whether seven-year-old me would look at today's somewhat stumpy Ness at the mouth of the River Teign and still see some sort of god. 

Drewsteignton, Fingle Bridge and Castle Drogo

One last holiday jaunt before returning to Bristol. Having cleaned up and loaded the car, we set off for Drewsteignton and a favourite pub of mine, The Drewe Arms, where we stopped for lunch.

I'd decided the time had come to take my partner in poetry on what is perhaps the greatest of all Dartmoor Newbie walks, the wander from the inn at Fingle Bridge along the banks of the River Teign via Fisherman's Path to the road leading to Castle Drogo, then back along Hunter's Path to our starting point.  Except that we were going to set out from Drewsteignton itself and vary the route a little further by doing it in reverse.  This involved traversing a field of cows (again) which didn't make me Ms Popular (even though I was at pains to point out that it wasn't anywhere near a different field in Drewsteignton  in which I'd encountered a very testy bull back in 2003).

Having reached Hunter's Path we turned right, away from Fingle Bridge. This was partly to get most of the walk done before any further drinking opportunities arose, and partly so that the first view of Castle Drogo my partner would get would be the one from Sharp Tor, where it rises from the granite as if it had miraculously grown of its own accord, rather than been built.  By Lutyens.

Meanwhile, Ted was staking his claim on all he surveyed.

As we advanced along the path, there were lots of other fabulous views, like this one over the Teign gorge, with Kes Tor a wart on the horizon.  (You won't be able to make it out in this size picture.)

At Sharp Tor we paused ...

... ready to drink in the glory of Castle Drogo, and instead saw the biggest tent in the world. Buggrit. Restoration set to continue for a few more years yet. 

Looking back up the gorge to Sharp Tor

It was a warm day so we were glad to come down off Hunter's Path, which is pretty exposed, and return along Fisherman's Path - not an easy walk, due to the roughness of sections of the track and the need to climb a lot of steps to circumvent the foot of Sharp Tor where it meets the river - but pleasant all the same.  

Teign by turns fretful and placid  

As elsewhere on the moor, the stone in the gorge is granite, but here the effect of sun on moss turned it to gold. 

Hard to tell here which part is stone and which is wood. 

What was once The Angler's Rest is now the Fingle Bridge Inn. We stopped for a breather and took in the scene - more people than almost anywhere else on Dartmoor, I suspect, but still quite peaceful.

 

At this point, having left the bridge, I remembered something about this walk that I forget in between each attempt at walking it, and that is what a bastard climb it is up through Drewston Wood to regain Hunter's Path.  The photos don't do the gradient justice.

It was a question of picking a tree up ahead and marching straight at it, followed by a prolonged lean against its trunk while hips, knees, ankles and lungs recovered.

Ted didn't appear to be struggling, however. 

Once on the higher path, we recovered in the cool of the trees.  I was ultra impressed by the venerability  of this beech tree.  They seldom seem to live long enough to swap magnificence for character, but this one has both.   

We then wound our way through to Rectory Wood, where there's a sculpture by Peter Randall-Page from his Granite Song series.  I paid homage at all the sculptures on the trail about fifteen or so years ago, and this one is probably the least prepossessing, but I love the way it interacts with nature, being set over a stream and engineered in such a way that the water bubbles out through a hole in the top of the boulder. 

I suspect it might be time to start revisiting the rest.  

By the time we'd hobbled back up the holloway to the village, I was in a lot of pain, having packed my Co-codamol in the bottom of the boot without first taking any, but the day was not yet done for when we arrived back in the village car park, it was to discover that my front tyre, driver's side, was completely flat. Whereupon we adjourned to the pub and the landlord's lovely partner took pity on me and changed the tyre in exchange for a rather sweaty hug. Told you it was a great pub.