Preserving Salterton’s decencies
Thinking of Budleigh Salterton’s nursery school playmates Belinda Lee and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett as I did recently at http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/following-star-from-budleigh-salterton.html , I was reminded of another pair of school chums in the local area from many years ago. Budleigh artist and author Joyce Dennys and her life-long friend, the writer Victor Clinton-Baddeley, both attended Park House School in Knowle although she was some six years older. Known locally as Martineau’s, the school’s results seem to have been uneven. “This seat of learning occupied a pleasant country house with a big garden,” recalls Joyce Dennys. “I was there for a year, was perfectly happy and learnt absolutely nothing.” But as she admits in her autobiography And then there was One , the headmaster – ‘Sir’, as she calls him – must have been a good teacher: Clinton, she tells us, went on to get a double first from Cambridge. Indeed, Eust...