CHAPTER SIX
Bucks Mills - A Tranquil Interlude
'Is that Doctor Williams I see?'
The 1920's and 30's were particularly stressful years for Rudston, with a great deal of hard work and many undeserved disappointments, and it is not really surprising that his North Devon holidays became very important to him. On the face of it, Bucks Mills was never a soft option as a holiday venue. Bathing was difficult on the rocky shore, and the only way out of the village was up. Communications were non-existent and the accommodation was basic. But I believe that these shortcomings explain why Buck Mills appealed to Rudston so much. What it had to offer him was so very different from the life he led in London, where he worked in an atmosphere of political manipulation and even animosity, on projects that were at the cutting edge of 1920's technology. Bucks Mills insulated him from all that. The village was built from natural materials; granite hewed from the cliff sides, Welsh slate or thatched roofs from local reed beds, timber from local forests. Technology was replaced by timelessness. But it was typical of the man, with his boundless energy and permanent need to be doing something useful, that one of the first task he set himself was the complete restoration of a cottage.
Bucks Mills is a strange and wildly beautiful village, in a deep valley that faces almost due north across Bideford Bay, not into one of our coastal seas but into the mighty Atlantic itself. When Rudston and Mollie first discovered it, it was almost cut off from land, being reached by a macadam track that wound for nearly two miles down the steep, lush sides of the valley with a gradient of 1 in 7 in places. The village is built along the foot of the valley, on either side of the mill leat that is channelled the length of the village between granite walls and tunnels, and forms the dividing line between two great estates. The houses to the east of the stream belonged until quite recently to the Pinecoffin estate and some have never been sold, though the family house, some three miles away on the cliff top, is now a hotel. The other estate, Walland Carey, was long ago broken up, and the cottages to the west of the stream have been in private hands for very many years.
The village appears not to predate 1588, and the native villagers showed a different lineage from the short, square-built, fair-skinned Devonians who are of Saxon origin. Bucks Mills men and women, the Braunds of Bucks, were tall, swarthy, dark-eyed and handsome. It may well be that the village was settled by survivors of an Armada shipwreck as their galleon was driven along the inhospitable coast by unfavourable winds. It would have been ideal for their purpose, as the valley would have been easy to defend against predators from the land. Surnames were of little use in Bucks Mills as there was effectively only one. They were all Braunds. Consequently, everybody was known by their Christian name in my childhood. It was indeed a wild, romantic place, with echoes in its isolationism of the people of the fictitious Doone valley on Exmoor.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the Braunds were clannish. Although they never had legal title to the village, which probably passed to the big estates at the time of the Land Enclosures Acts of 1780, they certainly brooked no outside interference in their way of life. The head of the clan, James, carried the title King of Bucks Mills until the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, they were probably reasonably prosperous during the nineteenth century; as well as their subsistence fishing, the tiny village had two industries, a granite quarry at the top of Bucks Mills hill and the mill itself, on the beach at the foot of the cliff, which was powered by water from the leat.
It seems that the Carys and the Pine Coffins were caring landlords. Mrs Cary in particular had a reputation as a philanthropist, though her good works were mainly directed at the beautiful nearly village of Clovelly, which she also owned. As was the way of the world at that time, Buck Mills church was built in a location convenient to her rather than to the villagers, who rather resented the three-and-a-half mile round trip up a steep hill to worship. Wesley provided the answer, and the village built itself a beautiful chapel in the centre of the village. The Braunds were God-fearing men, but not necessarily regular church-goers. I suspect, therefore, that the Bucks Mills chapel manifested a degree of defiance against the landed gentry as well as its undoubted role as a centre for village thanksgiving. Class divisions in rural areas were strong, and deeply entrenched. The church up the hill, villagers felt, was for the landlords, and for visitors. Rudston told me of a small pre-war scandal in the village, when a married Braund had an affair with a London socialite. I met the woman concerned, and there is no doubt that this was a true love affair. She was heart-broken when it ended. The vicar of the church, a man of the old school who affected gaiters, was despatched by the big house to break up the affair, and got very short shrift. He was thrown out by the errant husband: 'Get out of here, you sparrow-legged old bugger!'
Both mill and quarry were long gone by 1921, the stream now crashing to the beach in a magnificent 60-foot waterfall. Villagers made their living by mackerel, prawn and lobster fishing with nets thrown from sturdy rowing boats, with a little bed-and-breakfast in the holiday season. The coast is rocky and dangerous, but when the tide is right, there is a natural sand way for the boats up to the rocky beach on to which the boats were winched. At high tide, incoming fishermen were guided, simply but effectively, by two wooden poles embedded in the rocks, steering their boats to align them and keep them to starboard. There were dark rumours that at one time the village had made another living on the side by wrecking; by luring Bideford-bound freighters on to the rocks with lights. I doubt this story. What is certainly true is that the villagers saved a great many shipwrecked lives in their rowing boats, and I am sure, from the many locked sheds around, that there was an attitude of 'finders-keepers' about anything that was washed ashore. The story of these men and the lives they saved is told in a poem written by the village postman in the early years of the last century, a saga of many stanzas of which the first two are given below:
The Braunds of Bucks! The Braunds of Bucks! A race of hardy men,
So full of courage that their pluck eternally remain.
Five generations of this race have not yet passed away.
All born at Bucks, a rocky place in Bideford's snug bay.
On their first trip to Bucks Mills, Rudston and Mollie travelled with their friends the Emptages in a bull-nosed Morris with two-wheel brakes. Rudston found this hair-raising as Emptage insisted on going down the steep hill to the village out of gear, controlling the car on the side brake. By the time they reached the bottom, the inadequate brake drums were virtually glowing. That first time, they stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Reuben Braund. Reuben was the youngest son of the last King of Bucks (James), and many of his brothers were still alive. Brother Ernest lived with his daughter Mamie in the last cottage overlooking the sea. Ernest the fisherman still worked, but as he aged, spent more and more time behind the window of his lookout at the top of the house, gazing out to sea with his telescope. Mamie, a strikingly beautiful woman who nevertheless had never found a man, spent her days in the doorway of her cottage where she could keep close tabs on the pedestrian traffic to the beach. On that first trip, father and mother gave Mamie some silk Flanders poppies left over from the previous year's Armistice remembrance day. She wore them in her long black hair until the end of her life.
It was in 1926, after four visits to stay with Mrs. Reuben, that Rudston began the creation of a holiday cottage of his own for his family. Christopher, one of Reuben's brothers and also a sailor, was the father of Malinda, a Braund who had, in the eyes of the clan, committed the ultimate sin - she had married a foreigner, Bill James, a typical Devonian from the little town of Appledore, about nine miles away. They had three cottages, numbers 4, 5 and 6, at the south end of the village furthest from the sea. They lived with old Christopher in number 5, and let number 6 to supplement Bill's income. He was a roadworker with Devonshire County Council. Number 4 was derelict, roofless and used as a store house for garden implements. Christopher Braund had been in the merchant navy and was a talented primitive artist. His subject was always the same - the sailing ships he had known, and sailed in from Bideford, as a young man around the 1850's.
Bill and Malinda had two fine sons; Ivan, who had inherited his father's looks and build, and Conrad, who was a typical handsome, swarthy Braund. They were much the same age as my elder brother and became his playmates and dear friends of our family.
Rudston entered into a business arrangement with Bill James that held together until the late 1940's. Rudston rented the ruined cottage, number 4, for five shillings a year from the Pinecoffin estate, and rebuilt it. Rudston's projects always reached completion, and his sensitive restoration of No. 4 points to a very good reason - he never believed in unnecessary complication. As found, No. 4 was a roofless shell with four massively-thick granite walls and central front and back doors. The back door led to a little flagstoned yard about ten feet deep, bounded by the granite outcrop of the valley, with an outside earth closet on its left. Rudston simply had the first floor replaced with boarding on exposed joists, and erected a tongue-and-grooved partition wall on the ground and first floors to meet the front and back walls. This provided a fair-size sitting-room reached directly from the front door and, through a door in the partitioning, a snug single bedroom. A second door led to a steep staircase and second single bedroom; a door in the upstairs partition gave privacy to the twin bedroom beyond.
At the back, Rudston brought the yard into the cottage by the simple expedient of extending the new thatched roof to meet the side of the valley. He built out sideways from this windowless room, to create a fourth bedroom on the ground floor. Here he ran into a slight snag. A spring in the valley wall now ran straight into the cottage! The cure was exciting, as it involved blasting the granite cliff away with dynamite to leave drainage space without disturbing the back wall or foundations of the cottage. It was, of course, done by an expert and with complete success. Bill James was discovered to have a hitherto unknown talent as a water diviner. He and his forked twig found a spring of crystal-clear water under the garden of number 4; a well was dug and a tank and pump installed to give number 4 a cold water supply. This spring never failed, even in the hottest, driest summer, and its water was silky-soft. The mill leat, known as the Lake (possibly a corruption of leat) could not be used for water as the village had septic tank drainage which overflowed into it. Many visiting picnickers seemed to be blissfully unaware of this sad fact. Mother and father decorated and furnished the cottage themselves, with some of their own things as well as authentic pieces they picked up in antique and junk shops in the area, even down to improving quotes from scripture which adorned the walls until the end. Rudston had one major advantage over the rest of us in these works - the odious planning officer did not exist in those days.
The deal with Bill James was that Rudston and Mollie could stay in the cottage rent-free. At other times, Bill could let it, and split the proceeds of letting with Rudston. Malinda cooked for the family on the old range in number 5, and Rudston paid the housekeeping. Everybody was happy with the arrangement, which usually ended with Rudston taking money away from the summer holiday. Rudston himself ended the arrangement in 1948. He felt that he had recovered his investment many times over. For the remaining years of their lives, Bill and Malinda kept all the proceeds of letting number 4.
Bucks Mills had no public services until well after the war. There was no gas or electricity; heating was by coal or, more usually, wood fires and lighting by paraffin or candle. Villagers wanting to go into Bideford to shop had to walk the two miles up the macadam road to catch a bus, though there was a little general stores good for most essentials at Bucks Cross, near the bus stop. Maybe it was a harsh life for the villagers, but it was a self-contained paradise for holidaymakers. The world seemed a long way away. The vegetation in the valley was especially lush; thickly wooded, with a breed of thistle (probably ornamental gone wild) growing to ten feet or more. It was a place of great stability. Whatever happened in the world, Bucks Mills was always there, serene and unchanging. Or so it seemed at the time.
Before the war, the family used two cars to travel to Bucks Mills. Rudston transported our nanny and me in his Armstrong, and Mollie carried Henry and luggage in her little Ford. It was quite usual for Rudston to return to Leamington on his own after his fortnight's holiday, leaving his family with transport to enjoy the remainder of the school summer holidays.
I was only four when war broke out in 1939 (indeed, Henry and I were in Bucks Mills with Mollie at the time) so my pre-war holiday memories are understandably vague. I can recall sitting on the knee of a gentle old man with a beard, and of being bathed in a huge hip bath in front of the living-room coal fire, under the oil painting of my Aunt Honor.
There could be no Bucks Mills holidays during the war. For one thing, there was no petrol for the 500-mile round trip from Derby; for another, my parents did not take holidays from their war work. But they used to reminisce of happier times, and such talk invariably turned to Bucks Mills. I was brought up on stories of fishing and sailing the family's model schooner in the Bunkie Pool, of trips to wild Hartland Point and Sandymouth, just over the border into Cornwall, of shopping trips to Bideford's street market and of walks down the beautiful Hobby Drive with its exotic trees. I heard much of the Lutleys, their friends from Wiveliscombe. Lutley was a bank manager with a Norwegian wife, Mai. They had three daughters in the same age group as my brother.
The Lutleys owned a large house in Somerset as well as their summer house at the north end of the village, close to the beach. It seemed that Lutley was quite a lad in his younger days, and there was talk of partying, during one of which Mollie sewed prawns inside the sleeves of his pyjamas. The spines on their heads made it easy to slip the pyjamas on but impossible to take off again without considerable pain.
I was therefore brought up in the belief that Bucks Mills was a very special place. But I was totally unprepared for the assault it made on all my senses in the August of 1945, when I was ten years old. That year, I began a love affair with the village that has lasted the whole of my life.
The war in Europe had ended in May, and with it the feeling that use of petrol bought with men's lives was a crime. The only difficulty was that petrol was in extremely short supply and very strictly rationed. Rudston, though, was determined that his family should go to Bucks that very year to celebrate, and to do so he overcame massive logistical problems. Petrol coupons were ruthlessly saved, and he procured from somewhere an empty ten-gallon oil drum, that he filled with the dreadful low-octane fuel available at the time. To conserve every drop of fuel, only one car could be used, and it was our tired old Ford 10 Prefect that drew the short straw (we could hardly have used Mollie's two-seater Austin Seven).
The Prefect had to carry the four of us, plus a fortnight's luggage for us all. It had a boot lid supported by canvas straps that could be let out to form a horizontal platform, and this had to carry not only our luggage but also the drum of petrol, that would have weighed about a hundredweight when full. As a crowning touch, the family schooner was placed on the shelf behind the back seats, totally obscuring Rudston's rear view (the car had no wing mirrors). The car was grossly overloaded, and one wonders how far it would have been allowed to travel today before being stopped by the police. In the event, it covered the 500 gruelling miles of the return trip, plus some holiday motoring, without incident. We filled up twice from the drum, to lighten the load, and then donated the empty drum to Bill James.
Pre-war trips had been made from Leamington, but we had moved to Derby in 1939, when Rudston moved to Rolls-Royce, so there was a long way to travel. There was so much joy in the anticipation of that first holiday, which actually started as soon as we left Derby. The journey was exactly 250 miles, and took more than eight hours. The problem then was exactly what it is now - traffic congestion. It was hard work getting to Bucks, particularly in an overloaded, ten-horse car, but Rudston made it as nice for his family as he possibly could. The routine developed on that first trip was to split the run into three stages. We'd aim to do fifty miles before lunch, stopping at a good hotel somewhere near Warwick (the first time, we only got as far as Lichfield) and taking our time over a decent meal. Then Rudston would cover the easy 100 miles down the Fosseway to Bath and then on westward before we had our first taste of the West Country - a cream tea in Street, the shoe town near Glastonbury.
It was after tea, with his family becoming tired and fractious, that Rudston's troubles really began. He had a hundred miles to go; first on the A361 through Taunton, crawling up the foothills of Exmoor as one of an endless stream of cars, usually trapped behind an ageing and overloaded Austin Seven, and then straight into the setting sun on the long stretch between Bampton and South Molton. Spirits rose as we approached Barnstaple, where we had our first sight of seawater in the rather muddy estuary. Then it was pure excitement to the end. The lovely town of Bideford, with its well-kept, white-painted cottages, where we crossed the Torridge by the ancient bridge, the stage coach outside Hoops Inn at Horns Cross on the A39 to tell us we were nearly there - and then Bucks Cross, with the telephone box and little shop.
That first year, 1945, it was dusk when we arrived, so my first impressions were of the cottage living room, with coal fire burning, lit by oil lamps and candle-light. In reality, I had travelled back into Victorian times when I entered the cottage, but I had no knowledge of those times, so the experience was new and the impression it made was deep. On the partition wall, above the little shelf where the Aladdin paraffin mantle lamp lived during the day, was Wedded, a Victorian print of the somewhat daunting Roman practice where, as part of the ceremony, the groom had to bite off the tip of his bride's finger. Next to that was a curious silica gel weather predictor; a beach scene that was supposed to turn pink in rainy weather and blue on dry days. It never worked, because the cottage was so damp. It remained unremittingly pink all day, and only turned blue when we lit the Aladdin. And there was Meditation, another bit of Victoriana of a pretty girl in blue thinking pious thoughts. Proudly on the back wall was the heavily-framed print of the Braunds of Bucks saga.
The room had a wonderful ingle-nook fireplace with a magnificent, broad chimney. There was an alcove in the chimney itself, there, I am sure, for baking bread but apparently a favourite hidey-hole for the family's Siamese cat Paul, who used to make the trip with the family before the war. In the angle between the fireplace and the tiny window, with two feet of broad window sill, was a cupboard of treasures - Christopher's mahogany telescope and other nautical things, as well as many of our pre-war toys.
In the centre of the room was a fine Victorian dining table with matching chairs, bearing the Aladdin that was bathing the room in its warm white light. Two little brass portable paraffin lamps with normal wicks were also lit, in case anyone needed to visit the lavatory at the back of the cottage. I felt I had never seen a more beautiful room in my life, with its dark, exciting shadows, nor smelt anything so homely as the wax polish on the table and the strange new odour of paraffin lighting.
Indeed, the whole cottage had been particularly well furnished by Rudston and Mollie, with leather easy chairs in the living room. It had proper beds, with feather mattresses and unbleached linen sheets. It also had a very special smell; a sort of clean dampness that was particularly noticeable in the little lavatory at the back. As well as a basin, the lavatory housed the force pump that raised the well water to a tank behind the cottage. Henry and I took turns at pump duty, which was rather onerous. Rudston was a bit paranoid about water, which he considered a limited resource (I don't believe it ever was). The ultimate crime was leaving the basin tap on. Smaller scale crimes involved unnecessary washing, and flushing of the loo, which had a wooden seat badly swollen by the damp. I remember it splitting when I was sitting on it, and getting a very nasty bite in a tender area.
It was strange and wonderful waking up that first morning to a totally new experience; the sound of silence. The valley is deep, and no sound enters from the main road on the cliff top. Raucous sea-gulls only travel this far down the valley when fish are being gutted. Apart from the occasional soft cooing of wood pigeons, the only sound I could hear was the tinkling and splashing of the Lake as it bounced its way down to the sea past the bottom of the garden. Then Malinda came past with her magnificent breakfast; her soft Devon voice calling us to the table. Malinda was a superb cook. The secret of her roast potatoes, crisp-brown on top with white, fluffy undersides, was lost with her. Breakfast was a gigantic cooked meal; fried bread covered with best bacon, all with a golden-yolked egg on the top. All her wonderful meals, including the delicate heat-treatment of full-cream milk needed to create thick, yellow Devonshire cream, were produced on a little coal-fired range that also was the only source of hot water for all three cottages.
But when I went outside, that first sunny morning, I was struck by the true wonder of the place. In the midlands and east of England, there is always a slight haze, no matter how fine the day. In Bucks Mills, except when the sea mist rolls in so that everything is soaked and the cars won't start, the air is completely clear. Colours are deeper and richer, and the effect is to heighten all the senses to a new level of vibrancy. This was a great wonder to a ten-year-old boy, brought up in the greyness of industrial Derby.
One of the delights of Bucks was, of course, swimming in the sea. It was possible to swim at any state of the tide, but swimming at high tide was decidedly hard work, as the granite and slate pebbles break into razor-sharp shards that are very hard on the bare feet. Low tide with a long spring tide was for strong swimmers only. Some very nasty rocks just below the surface were hazardous to knees, and swimmers were exposed to a surprisingly strong current running round the bay. The thing to do with a very low tide was to take a child's fishing net and bucket to the newly-exposed rock pools, which were full of juicy prawns.
The very best time to swim was on an ebbing tide, just as the sandy beach became exposed. By this time, the Bunkie pool had become shut off from the sea and, with its richness of sea anemones, crabs, prawns and other interesting things, soon warmed up in the sun to make a perfect natural safe haven for young children to sail their boats and paddle. It proved ideal for the family schooner, as there was always enough breeze to work the sails.
Consequently, the family became tide-conscious at Bucks, and we fitted our beach picnics around premium time minus forty minutes. The forty minutes' grace was essential, as it was quite impossible to turn the corner past Mamie's cottage without stopping for a lengthy chat. Mamie was a woman with a strong personality and seemed to be the listening post for everything that was going on in the village. Some of the gossip she retailed was quite surprising and certainly very interesting.
Mollie entered the sea only once in all the years I travelled to Bucks with her. Henry and I both swam, Henry being a strong swimmer, quite able to cope with the currents of spring low tides. Rudston always had a little swim, but was not very good. The best he could manage was a peculiar side stroke, with most of his torso out of the water. I used to suspect that he probably had one foot still on the bottom.
Rudston, the most generous of men with others, was surprisingly parsimonious with himself; probably a result of his make-do-and-mend childhood. For that first holiday after the war, he had unearthed a pre-war dark blue woollen bathing suit; a disgusting garment with shoulder straps and a sort of ballerina skirt thing around the crutch. He assured us that it was in fine condition, but in fact it had not survived the war, killed by moths. He had a theory that moths always went for the areas most likely to cause embarrassment, and that bathing suit proved him right. Mother, who never went far without her knitting, did her best with what she had but unfortunately the only blue wool to hand matched the bathing suit to about the degree that Cambridge blue matches Oxford. Pink windows around the crotch were therefore masked with highly conspicuous sky-blue curtains that probably made matters more noticeable and therefore worse.
The Lutleys were in their summer house near the beach, and two of their daughters were with them. Henry found his gawky playmates all grown up. Ingrid, the youngest, was just seventeen and a gorgeous Scandinavian blonde. Bette, eighteen, was a glamorous, voluptuous brunette. Henry himself was only a month off his sixteenth birthday and in all respects a handsome young man. Add the special sensual magic of Bucks Mills to the mix, and Mollie and Rudston foresaw certain disaster. Rudston muttered darkly that Scandinavia '…was where 'it' (meaning casual sex) all started'.
I have to say that this was grossly unfair. I have made many Norwegian friends in my life. As a race, they are among the most charming people on the planet. But if anything, they are a bit strait-laced, and are far more interested in driving jeeps up snow-covered mountains to see how far they can go before getting hopelessly stuck than they are in sex. Mai was a typical Norwegian. If the girls did believe in free love (sadly, I have no experience that they did, but remember that I was only ten), then they probably inherited the idea from their father rather than from their mother. To me, they were just nice, jolly girls.
Most mornings, Rudston walked the four-mile round trip to the little store at the top of the hill to buy a newspaper. One or other, or both, sons usually went with him. He bought special rubber-soled Dunlop canvas shoes for this purpose that first year; the hexagonal tread blocks made an intriguing squeak as he walked, which amused him. The fortnight's holiday included two shopping trips to Bideford, and a picnic visit to the beautiful beach at Sandymouth, near Bude in Cornwall and the wild, windswept lighthouse at Hartland Point.
One day, we walked to Clovelly; up the hill and along the main road until we reached the entrance of the lovely Hobby Drive, a two-mile journey through exotic woodland with trees from all over the world to the top of Clovelly village. It is a very lovely walk in summer, with its lushness and glimpses of the headlands and sea below.
Clovelly, of course, is unique. It lacks the luxury of a valley, and the houses tumble down the cliff face to a working quay and the Red Lion public house. Rudston bought us tea in the pub, and then, probably thinking that the walk back would be too much for his family, hired a fisherman to row us back to Bucks Mills. Memory is a capricious thing. I remember the beauty of the hobby drive and the village less clearly than I do Mollie's unfortunately loud belch and subsequent giggles over tea in the Red Lion. The taciturn fisherman, with his mahogany leather face and red-rimmed seafarer's eyes, chewed his tobacco as he rowed us home, and, every few oar-strokes, spat his cud with deadly accuracy over the shoulder of my shocked elder brother.
It was wonderful for us, that first summer, to see how Rudston benefited from his holiday. He had worked hard and without a break for six long years, with a gruelling drive in all weathers at the beginning and end of each day. Many nights, his sleep had been interrupted by a civil defence call-out. He must have been desperately tired. At Bucks, he became a new man; someone I had not seen before. He was quite content to spend long hours in Aertex short-sleeved shirt and baggy shorts; not doing much but simply being. His relaxation was so deep that, on our runs out in the car, Henry and I had to take care that he didn't nod off. This was not old age; he was only 53 that year.
Mollie had bought an exquisite tool kit for him before the war; augers, chisels, screwdrivers, hammer, pliers and saw, all fitting securely into the same handle and stored in a pigskin case. It was all beautifully made and undoubtedly of German origin. He brought it to Bucks every year for essential maintenance work, but I can only ever remember it being used to mend fishing nets and other children's toys. The truth of the matter was that Bill James was a brilliant caretaker, so not only did everything always work, but the cottage was freshly decorated before each new season.
Rudston became a different and in some ways a gentler man at Bucks Mills. He had endless time for his family and also for the village elderly who fancied a gossip about pre-war days. Bucks Mills always brought out the best in Rudston. He had an impish sense of humour, which showed itself with a rather pretentious couple who had a white bull terrier called something upmarket like Rupert. The dog was very short-haired, particularly around its rear end. Rudston always called the dog Doctor Williams, for a reason which was obscure until he explained that one of his childhood remedies had been Doctor Williams' Pink Pills. The meaning then became only too clear.
Mamie kept house for her father Ernest, who was usually on the roof of the cottage, at his look-out window, eyes red-rimmed with inflamed conjunctiva, and with his venerable brass telescope pointed out to sea. This was not an indulgence of old age. He was working, looking for a tell-tale disturbance on the surface of the water that showed the presence of a shoal of mackerel beneath. When he located fish, the other fishermen put to sea in their rowing boats immediately. Their first customers were the villagers, and the big fish they sold for tuppence each were often still alive when delivered. Malinda gutted and cooked them immediately. Mackerel lose their flavour very quickly, and I have never since tasted fish as good as that.
The purpose of that first holiday was to have fun, and indeed we did as a family. A high spot for me was a riotous game of Newmarket with the Lutleys, made all the better because, that time, I won (sadly, a pile of sea shells rather than money). There was even fun for me in the yelps of pain from Rudston and Henry as they banged their heads on the door frame between the living room and the back of the cottage (Mollie and I were too short to be in danger).
But the true wonder of Bucks Mills, for me, was that I learned there the joy there is to be found in solitude. With a brother nearly six years older than me, I was already accustomed to spending time on my own, but I had never found it to be so important before. Bucks Mills and I spent hours together on our own. I ran up the paths to the headlands, kept clear by the villagers, revelling in the change from the abundance of the valley to the berried gorse and bracken in the higher ground above. I walked up the hill to the quarry, to climb and play, and look at the many strange plants growing there. I played in the rock pools, poking sea anemones with my finger to see how they closed up, and trying to unseat barnacles before they had a chance to apply their immense vacuum to the granite rocks. And I spent hours outside Mamie's, leaning on the sea wall and looking at Lundy.
Lundy, puffin island, was never the same two days running. Sometimes, it was no more than a dark line on the horizon. On other days, it stood high in the water, with a clarity that showed every feature of its headland. Lundy in those days was a place of mystery; privately owned by a family that did not welcome visitors. Bucks Mills folk used the island as a primitive but surprisingly accurate barometer:
'When Lundy's high, 'tis fine and dry,
When Lundy's low, the winds do blow'.
But when Lundy moved almost close enough to touch, and became a dark and threatening presence, the villagers knew to lash down their boats and close their doors. A major storm was on its way.
Everything I saw and felt around me had been there for such a long time that it was understandable that I assumed, as a ten-year-old, that it would all last forever. In the sixteen happy holidays that were to come, the village became more of a home to me than our family house in Derby. Looking back over the years, it is as if I grew up there. It was at Bucks that I first fell in love as a fourteen-year-old, with the daughter of the owner of a big chain store in Bideford. It was an unrequited passion, as the pretty girl was quite unaware of my interest. In hindsight, this was just as well as she was an outdoor type with a passion for organising energetic beach games that have never been among my primary interests.
The end of that first post-war holiday coincided with another joyous occasion - Japan's surrender, which we celebrated with a beach party organised by Lutley. This turned out to be not a good idea. In fact, it was mildly catastrophic, as the granite boulders were not at all enthusiastic about the bonfire we lit on them, and exploded with devastating effect. The shrapnel was fairly lethal. The world of course, was in party mood; when we reached Cirencester on our return trip in the game Ford 10, we found a massive street party in progress. On impulse Rudston booked us into the King's Head hotel for the night so that we could join in. Sadly, when we got home, we learned that Rudston's beloved Siamese cat, that had always come along on the pre-war holidays, had pined for him in the cattery and had died only a few hours before we got home. It left the dreadful guilty feeling: 'If only we hadn't stopped in Cirencester … .'
I have said that I believed that Bucks Mills was unchanging; I think, perhaps, that is because the village was changing with me as I grew up. The average age of the villagers was rising as the new generation, with the mobility of the car, moved away to find work. Malinda's own two boys found work at the new power station at Yelland, about ten miles away. Other than tourism, there was little or nothing for them in the village. There was only one exception, Granville Braund, son of Charlie and grandson of the last King of Bucks. When I first met him in 1945, he was a pleasant youth of my brother's age. He grew up to make the village his home and, in a way, work for him. He married well and ran, with his wife, a bed-and-breakfast from his cottage. He kept three red cows in a byre by the sea, and drove them up and down the village to their pasture every day, selling their milk to the village and any surplus to the market. He was also the village taxi service, driving the then ubiquitous Austin Heavy Twelve of mid-thirties vintage, with a four-figure DV number-plate. He also had an Austin 7 Chummy, dating from the twenties, which he used as a farm truck. It had no speedometer; a calf had kicked out the drive cable. So, though the village maintained its semblance of immortality, in fact, nearly four hundred years of stability was coming to an end. Time alone would show what the village might become; it could never again be a self-contained entity. To survive, it had to become dependent on the outside world.
Henry and I grew up and moved on to other things. I went every year to follow the Bucks Mills routine until 1955, when I joined my parents for a week's leave from the Air Force. Mollie was very excited at having a son in uniform in the village (I hadn't bothered to change before setting out in my little Austin Seven; the very same car that Mollie drove during the war).
There was a major break from routine in 1952, the year I was seventeen. We had received an invitation to my brother Henry's wedding in Eastbourne that coincided with the second week of our holiday. He was marrying a girl from 99 Vicarage Road, next door to the house where my grandmother and Aunt Marjorie lived. Because of my weekends in Eastbourne, I knew Catherine well, but I believe Rudston had only met her once and Mollie never at all. Henry suggested that we might like to return to Derby after the wedding, as there were only four days of the holiday left, but Rudston would have none of it. He drove us to Eastbourne for an overnight stay and, after the wedding, drove us back over the following night.
The very next day, we bumped into the newly-weds in Bideford. They were honeymooning at Hoops Inn! We tried to keep out of their way (after all, does one really want one's parents and baby brother with one on honeymoon?) but it proved impossible and we spent the rest of the holiday with them, joining them, for a celebration dinner at Hoops on our last night. Henry and Catherine now have four fine sons and countless grandchildren, and have celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. I have never talked to him about such matters, but the fact that he chose it for his honeymoon makes me wonder whether Henry, too, has his special relationship with Bucks Mills.
I visited Bucks Mills in 1960 with my new bride in our two-seater Citroen, for a holiday with Rudston and Mollie, and again in 1963, with my wife Margaret, two-year-old daughter Jane and baby Rachel. None of us had the least idea that this holiday was to signal the end of an era.
When the end came for us, it was sudden. Shortly after the 1963 holiday, Bill James died of a heart attack at a football match in Bideford, and Malinda, after a lot of soul-searching, did the right thing and went to live with one of her sons in Appledore. Rudston tried to buy No.4 but the Pinecoffin estate refused to sell, and also refused his offer of a tenancy with a repairing lease. A very happy era had ended. It was perhaps not before time, as Henry and I had grown up and were living our own lives a long way away from North Devon. Rudston was very despondent; he seemed to connect his failure with Pinecoffin with what he foresaw as the inevitable death of Bucks Mills itself. The sea defences had been allowed to fall into disrepair, and erosion of the cliff was beginning. The paths to the headland were no longer cleared, as there was nobody left to bother with them. Nobody in the village seemed to care particularly. Bill James himself had pointed out that it would be a long time before No.4 was at the cliff edge. The sixties were a terrible decade. Nobody cared a straw for the past. This was the modern era; a time for the megalomaniac planning officer, who insisted that Pinecoffin add a couple of feet to the height of the cottages in order to increase headroom in the bedrooms, and replace the thatched roofs with slate, before he was permitted to re-let them. For me, their appearance was ruined for all time.
Bucks Mills is still there. So is 'our' cottage, No.4, though its prettiness has been rather spoiled by its raised roofline. The quarry, a play area in my childhood, has been sealed off for safety (we were less concerned about such matters when I was young - safety was more of a personal responsibility). The old skittle alley is now a car park. The chapel has become a private house, though its appearance has not changed. The barn where Rudston garaged his Citroen (and I damaged it) is gone; replaced by a very smart architect-designed house probably built of the same granite blocks. The little cabin on the path down to the beach has been restored, and bears a plaque commemorating two lady artists who lived there in the summer (Mollie used to mutter darkly about their ambiguous sexuality). Old Ernest's lookout has lost its window, and the doorway with its polished brass step, on which Mamie sat to view the world, has been sealed off.
But the sea defences are now in good order, though the navigation poles are gone from the rocks. I didn't actually try to walk the paths to the cliff top, but I am sure they are in apple-pie order again, as they now form part of the South-West Coastal Walk. And the Bunkie Pool, with its rich marine life, is the same as ever. Superficially at any rate, Bucks Mills has hardly changed at all. But its purpose has. Its sturdy whitewashed cottages, built of granite by villagers for villagers, are now mainly holiday homes or pretty dormitories for those who travel to work by car. Like most of our English villages, Bucks Mills is no longer a place of work. It has had nothing to offer in the way of viable paid employment for a very long time.
This has caused a major economic change. Bucks Mills is now big business. A Bucks Mills holiday cottage can now earn its owner in one week a sum equal to its market value in the days when a village worker lived in it. Such a cottage, then worth around £300, now changes hands for a six-figure sum. The descendants of the workers who left in the last century could not now afford to return, even if they wanted to.
I visited Bucks Mills just before the millennium, as an elderly man. They say one should never do this. It felt odd having no cars down the village, except for that idiot driving up and down in his Volvo with personalised number plate - in my childhood days, it would have been parked up solid by now. I felt out of place - an alien. But my lovely companion, seeing the village for the first time, said:- 'What a beautiful place!'
The Bucks Mills cottages have now been there for more than 400 years. They witnessed a change in the nineteenth century, when industry brought a new prosperity, but after it went, they and the villagers they housed settled down again to what they always had been - a simple fishing hamlet.
The car changed all that. It carried us in, and the villagers out. And it has all happened so quickly. All the changes I have described have happened in my lifetime. Many took place within the last 25 years. Over a time-scale of 400 years, that is little more than the blinking of an eye.
What might the future hold for Bucks Mills? Without the car, or at any rate the fuel to run it, the village's present economy would surely collapse. Unfortunately, the internal combustion engine itself represents obsolescent technology. Cars are not forever. We might save ourselves a great deal of grief if we accept this, and move on. Or, in a way, move back to the days when the car had yet to be invented. We shall survive, and so will the Bucks Mills cottages.
Will the new generation of occupants be happy and prosperous, perhaps working away from home at their computers, or will the cottages simply be empty and derelict?
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