Budleigh Past and Present

  Dear little Lithuanian I do adore your dress. Your eyelashes are charming And excite me, I confess. But when I read your history, And learnt from whence you came, It filled me both with sadness And a little bit of shame. © Michael Downes 2015 A new month is approaching and I intend to keep to my self-imposed promise that I would display each month an image relating to Fairlynch Museum. Not just on my blog, but on our smart new noticeboard, kindly provided by Honiton-based firm Duralife Windows. Just as I was scratching my head about what to choose next, Sue Morgan, our Toys, Dolls and Bears expert at Fairlynch kindly gave me some information about a Lithuanian doll in the Museum’s collection. I thought the story behind it was so sad that I was moved to write the above poem – well, my friend Annie calls my efforts doggerel – so, OK –  ‘verse.’ Here’s the story, based on information given by the donor, Miss ...

Image credit: http://www.henrybeston.org/ I knew nothing of this American writer and naturalist, but news from Budleigh Salterton’s sister-town of Brewster on Cape Cod on the far side of ‘The Pond’ always catches my eye. So I thought I’d like to know more about an illustrated presentation on Beston’s life and work being staged in Brewster. It was given by writer and film maker Don Wilding on 7 November at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster. Of course I should have mentioned it before the event! Preoccupied as we are with Remembrance and the Great War, but, Francophile that I am, I was also interested to learn that after leaving Harvard, Beston took up teaching at the University of Lyon in France. In 1914 he returned to Harvard as an English department assistant, but then came back to Europe, joining  the French army in 1915 and serving  as an ambulance driver. His service at Bois-le-Prêtre and at the Battle of Verdun was descri...

Admirers of East Devon author R.F. Delderfield’s work may remember Fairlynch Museum’s centenary exhibition devoted to him in 2012 and the talk given in Budleigh by his biographer Marion Lindsey-Noble. A re-edition of her book Butterfly Moments was published to mark the 100 years since Delderfield’s birth. Since then Exmoor-based Marion has been busy. She’d already followed in the footsteps of Delderfield with her first novel, The Green Sari , published in October 2011.  Set in Bangladesh where the former language teacher lived in her twenties, the book was described by its author as a heart-warming read and a bitter-sweet love story. Now Marion has produced a sequel entitled The Banyan Tree, taking the story forward to the next generation of the Khan family who featured in her first book. A large Banyan tree stands in the middle of the orphanage in Bangladesh where Ali and his American wife Martha have taken up their ne...