Budleigh in Books: Part 4
After my
survey of Budleigh as used by so many authors as a ‘small town’ setting I’m
left wondering what the future holds. I
was going to stop after Part 3, but a friend told me the other evening that
he’d enjoyed my rambling in previous instalments so much that I thought I’d now
go a bit imaginative in this one. If you haven't seen my previous postings they are here for Part 1, here for Part 2 and here for Part 3.
The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, 23-24 August 1572. Painting by François Dubois, a Huguenot painter born circa 1529 in Amiens, who settled in Switzerland. Although Dubois did not witness the massacre, he depicts Admiral Coligny's body hanging out of a window at the rear to the right. To the left rear, Catherine de' Medici is shown emerging from the Château du Louvre to inspect a heap of bodies. Image credit: Wikipedia
For
example, will the budding creatives who gave us Summer Storm transport us back
to the age of Sir Walter Raleigh in next year’s publication, with a gang of
Famous Five young Devonians intent on a mission to save the Huguenots from
their evil oppressors? For information about the ambitious Budfas Young Arts programme click here
On second thoughts, maybe the St
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre isn’t quite suitable as a subject for primary school
pupils.
The Rolle Arms, overlooking the sea, was one of Budleigh Salterton's grandest hotels
Even less suitable
would be a racy novel set in the Edwardian era, when, so I’ve been told by a
highly respected Budleigh historian, the goings-on in the town’s grand hotels
would make even Noel Coward blush.
And the
story of how love bloomed on a Budleigh beach for an unhappily-married princess
is more chick-lit for readers of romantic fiction than edifying material for a
Famous Five adventure recounted by 11-year-olds.
Well, it
was certainly one of the selling-points of a book called Princess in Love in
which journalist Anna Pasternak told us about the doomed affair between Diana, Princess of Wales, and a dashing officer - no, not the one in the photo - who becomes her lover. The first print-run of
75,000 copies sold out within hours of its publication on 3 October 1994.
I tell this
story during my ‘Walk with Words’ tour of Budleigh as a counterblast to the
awful things that Noel Coward wrote about the town in his play Blithe Spirit.
I mean, who
could deny the romantic nature of a walk hand-in-hand over the pebbles towards
the sunset as you set out from Steamer Steps? Out of season, on a deserted
beach, with a stormy crashing sea to convey to readers the violent, passionate
and ultimately destructive nature of your secret adulterous liaison.
The title page of The Moonstone
Let’s go
back in time to find something more suitable for the 11-year-olds.
Could
Budleigh’s Anglo-Indian heritage provide a thriller on the lines of Wilkie
Collins’ The Moonstone? For people who
don’t know, that’s the 19th century work which is reckoned to be the first
detective novel. I’ll
quote a summary from Wikipedia: “Rachel
Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her
eighteenth birthday. It is a legacy from her uncle, a corrupt British army
officer who served in India.
The diamond is of great religious significance as well as being extremely
valuable, and three Hindu priests have dedicated their lives to recovering it.”
Maybe a
sacred ritual sword originating from Poona
and presented to Fairlynch by the 21st century descendants of a brutal East
Indian Company general - or perhaps by amateur archaeologist George Carter,
whose daughter co-founded the Museum - could arouse passions even more violent
than those stirred by the Elgin Marbles.
In the early 20th century Carter had spent time out in the Indian
sub-continent, in what is now Pakistan.
He’d carried out archaeological excavations,
investigating customary practices and cosmological beliefs, collecting, recording,
interpreting and translating myths and stories, writing a string of published
papers on these subjects.
More of him
later.
You can meet this spookily realistic figure of Jack Rattenbury in the Smugglers' Cellar at Fairlynch Museum
Then
there’s smuggling of course. Jack
Rattenbury, born in Beer in 1778, seems to be the smuggler that everyone’s
heard of - we even have a talking version of him at Fairlynch. But reading
about the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn
the other day made me wonder about the possibilities of using East Budleigh’s
smuggling vicar, the Rev. Ambrose Stapleton as the central character of a book
set in the Lower Otter Valley. Dr Syn was the smuggling hero of a series of
novels by Russell Thorndike first published in 1915 and based on smuggling in
the 18th century on Romney Marsh in Kent,
where brandy and tobacco were brought in at night by boat from France to avoid
high tax.
We know so little about the Rev
Stapleton that I feel he deserves some attention, even if it means
fictionalising a bit of his story. There was tragedy in his life: all his sons
died before him.
A lonely track on Woodbury Common
Could our own Woodbury Common
compete as a setting for dastardly deeds in a smuggling novel? Or any other
kind of novel for that matter.
I love the wildness and vastness of the Common,
the buzzards and the prospect of spotting a Dartford Warbler in all that yellow
gorse and purple heather.
But I also sense something
menacing there. Maybe it’s to do with the hidden and mysterious Bronze Age
sites, or the fact that it’s been the site of military encampments, whether of
General Simcoe in the Napoleonic era or constructed as WW2 preparations for the
D-Day landings. Something menacing and lethal.
Not too many people know that the
gorse has apparently been responsible for two deaths in recent years, including
that of a young and healthy Royal Marine recruit.
The first edition of Hardy's The Return of The Native
When I heard those stories on the
news I was reminded of my own reading of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the
Native, where his Egdon Heath is given a similarly threatening presence. The
lethal element is conveyed in the adder bite from which the character Mrs
Yeobright dies.
The Heath is considered by some
Hardy critics to be the leading character of the novel: “profoundly ancient,
the scene of intense but long-forgotten pagan lives” - just like our Woodbury
Common! For some of the characters it is “a benign, natural place.” In the eyes
of the heroine it becomes “a malevolent presence intent on destroying
her.”
Or, if you enjoyed the adventures of Indiana Jones, how about a plot inspired by Professor Chris Tilley's East Devon Pebblebeds Project, and especially the series of fine photos of sunrise and sunset, with his commentary on celestial events and the fire rituals in which our Bronze Age ancestors took part on the Commons?
You can read about the Project at http://www.pebblebedsproject.org.uk/
and see the intriguing photos at http://www.pebblebedsproject.org.uk/sunrise&sunset.html
Incidentally, going back to George Carter, pictured above, the website acknowledges the debt that today’s anthropologists owe to him. In his time he was much maligned as an eccentric by conservative types. “He did not have much time or patience with establishment archaeological ideas and positions and fell out with some of the leading archaeologists of his day who did not appreciate the value of his work,” writes Professor Tilley. “Sadly he is now a forgotten figure in British archaeology. He was a man with ideas and interpretative approaches well ahead of his time.” http://www.pebblebedsproject.org.uk/gc&thearchaeologyofed.html
I reckon that the young authors
of a Famous Five’s Adventures in the Bronze Age could play their part in
helping to rehabilitate George Carter and his far-out theories, but it would
involve some long-distance time-travel.
The people of Budleigh Salterton
themselves will always provide an intriguing backdrop to any novel.
The title page of W.F.R. Macartney's book Walls have Mouths
Summer Storm featured the
fictional Gwen Watson, a retired MI5 secret agent living in Budleigh. But
recently I discovered that a real ex-spy, Wilfred Macartney, was a resident of
Marine Parade. His autobiographical 440-page Walls have Mouths had been sitting
on my bookshelf for over 40 years when I came across mention of him on the
internet as a declared bankrupt in 1944.
The Exmouth Journal of 14 August 2014 thought
that his eventful life made rather a good story. After all, Special Branch were
keeping an eye on his home, noting that five women were staying with him, one
of them being the wife of Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the British
Communist Party.
W.F.R. Macartney had a notable
role in the Great War as well, which I’ll deal with in due course on my WW1 blog at http://fairlynchgreatwar.blogspot.co.uk/
By contrast with such
excitements, so many concealed sadnesses, I feel.
Take for example, the large
numbers of spinsters recorded in the pages of past town directories. How many
of them had lovers or admirers who died in World War One, I wonder in this
centenary year, and came to Budleigh for its reputed tranquillity, for
consolation? There were certainly plenty
of war widows living in the town, many of whom never remarried. One of them
lived in our house.
Some were plain eccentric. Consider
the picture of Miss
Henty, the elderly daughter of the Victorian author G.A. Henty, as remembered
by the poet Meg Peacocke and recorded in Anthony Meredith’s wonderful biography
of her brother Sir Richard Rodney Bennett.
When they
moved from London
to Budleigh in 1939 Meg, pictured here, was happy, especially in the “rambling and
dilapidated” house owned by the author’s daughter which the Bennett family
rented for a time.
“Miss Henty
was an amazing personality, really quite mad,” Meg Peacocke recalls. “Among her
many eccentricities, for example, was a terror of getting bats in her wispy
grey hair. But the house was thrilling! I used to sneak about, taking
everything in, and I went up to the attic once and it was full of assegais,
masks and marvellous red-leather volumes full of paintings of butterflies and
insects.”
Sometimes I
think of how many other rambling, dilapidated but thrilling large houses there
must have been in the old Budleigh Salterton before they were replaced by
apartment blocks.
Meg
Peacocke will give a talk on Monday 13 October at 7.30 pm in the Peter Hall,
jointly presented by Fairlynch
Museum and the Otter
Valley Association. The subject is
‘Budleigh in Wartime - a child’s viewpoint.’
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