in Exeter, and died in a house in the ancient Close surrounding the cathedral. Exeter’s Guildhall, where the city council met, is Tudor, as is Mol’s Coffee House in the cathedral Close, and the nearby Ship Inn where Elizabethan sea captains swaggered with bags of Spanish gold. Sir Francis Drake, greatest of the Elizabethan exploring adventurers, is supposed to have said that after his own ship he most liked the Ship Inn in Exeter. The city sent three ships down the River Exe to fight the Spanish Armada, and Queen Elizabeth rewarded it with its motto, Semper Fidelis, or Ever Faithful.
Among numerous churches there is St. Olave’s, thought to have been originally the house chapel of Gytha, Countess of Wessex, sister-in-law of King Canute who sat on his throne on the beach and ordered the tide not to rise. Was he really trying to command the tide, or was he demonstrating to his sycophantic courtiers the limits of his power? I prefer the latter version. Gytha was also the mother of King Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon King, who died with a Norman arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Norman conqueror, William, handed Gytha’s chapel over to French monks, and built his red sandstone castle on a hill in the city. Naturally, he called it Rougemont, now also the name of a hotel. I can’t say that as a child or even as a young man I was much interested in the city’s history; familiarity bred not contempt but indifference. But growing up in such an environment must surely have influenced how I came to view time and change. The past was everywhere. By contrast, in most Canadian cities everything is new, or soon will be. Attention is focused on the future rather than on the past, on mastering change rather than accepting and enduring it. (I exclude from this sweeping generalization the Aboriginal and Québécois peoples who are steeped in folk history. Perhaps that is why the rest of Canada has so much trouble understanding and coming to terms with them.) Arriving in Canada when I was thirty, I was excited by the newness of the country, even if the cities were drab and the suburbs appallingly raw. But with roots in the Old World, I probably don’t think about time and change in quite the same way as someone raised in Toronto or Vancouver. Europeans have been in North America for about four hundred years, which might seem to guarantee permanency unless you have grown up with the fact that the Romans remained in Exeter, which they called Isca, for about four hundred years, then marched away never to be seen there again.
When I was born my stomach was not fully developed, which meant spending a few months on a diet, preferably in a mild climate, and this led me to another and vastly important part of the physical environment in which I grew up. The kindly doctor’s first idea was that mother and I might spend some months in the south of France, but my father objected that he could not possibly afford such a thing. Ah, said the doctor, then he might try a handy line of sand dunes which had their own mild weather system. This magical place was Exmouth Warren, now Dawlish Warren, the home of many rabbits in the mouth of the River Exe less than ten miles south of Exeter. The river first broadens into a mile-wide estuary, passing the deer park at Powderham Castle and villages with such splendid names as Starcross and Cockwood, and then swings around in a bay formed by the Warren sand dunes, which project from the mainland. The river flows out into the English Channel through a passage a few hundred yards wide between the end of the Warren and a resort town called, appropriately, Exmouth. Where the Warren begins at the mainland there were, and still are, golf links, and at far end, opposite Exmouth, there was before Second World War a colony of maybe thirty ramshackle summer homes. A couple were on stilts so that the tide could rise and fall beneath them, one of which always flew a line of signal flags which said, we were told, “If you can read this come in and have one.” There was also the beached hull of an old sailing vessel, with windows cut in the sides to make a house, called Kate. But most cottages, as we would call them, were nestled in sand dunes, amid the tall spiky grass.
It was here that father bought a bungalow called simply The Cabin, for £200 (perhaps $10,000 today). It was built of wood, with a corrugated iron roof, with the bay in front and the sea behind. There was no power on the Warren, so we cooked on primus stoves which sometimes flared alarmingly in our wooden house, and went to bed by oil lamp. We drank rainwater collected in iron tanks and boiled, and the outside toilet was connected to wooden barrels buried in the dunes to function as a primitive septic tank. There was one large living room and a double bedroom, a kitchen of sorts and four tiny sleeping rooms, hardly more than closets. When my father bought it the furniture consisted of one table painted with a poker layout, suggesting that the previous owners had been sporting gents. The family spent fourteen summers there, with our cook and a nursemaid in the early years. There was a store of sorts which sold essentials such as candies — we called them sweets — and a mile or so along the beach, where the Warren joined the mainland, there were a couple of cafés for day trippers. But for serious shopping we had to go to Exmouth, which meant taking a boat. There were boatmen who plied for hire, rowing or sailing across the gap between Exmouth and the Warren, which could be turbulent as the tide squeezed in and out of the bay, and every Warren family had a favorite. Ours was a beery old salt who, at the start of every season, met us at Exmouth, loaded us with all our baggage into his little open boat until the gunwales were only a few inches above the water, and set off. If there was a suitable wind, he raised a tiny triangular lugsail and stuck an oar over the stern with which to steer. No breeze, and he rowed, sweating beer and grumbling. He took us as close to The Cabin as the tide would allow, and we had to to walk the rest of the way across soft sand and up and down dunes, carrying our cases. It was inevitable, of course, that we would soon get our own boat, and the first was a heavy, clinker-built — that is, the planks overlapped each other instead of being edge to edge — eleven-footer, called Devonia, and probably a cast-off ship’s boat. Perhaps my earliest memory is sitting with my father in the stern, dressed in a blue coat with brass buttons, as my brother John rowed along the path cast by the moon on the still sea. I suppose I was three or four. We began to learn to sail in that old boat, and John went on to become a self-taught but well-known boat designer and builder.
When still in his teens — I use that word although there was no such a thing as a teenager then; you were a boy, a youth or a man — he designed and built for me, in our third floor playroom at home, an eight-foot sailing boat, with paddles for alternative locomotion. He pulled a piece of old black oak out of the rose bed in the garden and shaped it to make the prow, and for a sail we cut and hand-stitched the thick canvas of an old sailing vessel. When it was finished, he rigged a block and tackle and we swung it through the window and down into the back garden. Unfortunately, he used a composite wood for the hull, and no matter how often we painted and caulked, it sopped up water and had to be dried out every few weeks. But I still have a photo of me, aged about ten, scooting along under sail in that little boat. John’s most successful design was a racing dinghy called the 505 — 5.05 metres — and they are still raced all over the world, including here in Toronto. As a youth, he loved to race with the Exmouth sailing club, and as any sailor will tell you, racing skippers who are mild ashore can become tyrants in a boat, so while I often crewed for him, I learned to detest racing — and in fact lost whatever competitive spirit I might have had. But the love of cruising has stayed with me, and with friends I have explored Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and the North Channel of Georgian Bay. When I hear people complain that the lakes are cold even in summer, I think that they should try the English Channel at any time.
We were able to run free and wild on the Warren, in or on the water almost as much as on land, sailing, rowing, swimming, and enjoying all sorts of adventures with hardly an adult in sight. A mackerel fishing fleet went out on most days from the village of Lympstone — now the site of a huge Royal Marines base — and once they caught a small shark in the nets and brought it ashore to kill it on the beach. They told us they would sell it to a fish and chip shop, but I suppose they were pulling our legs. But what excitement! When porpoises drove millions of mackerel into the bay we could go out with no more than a piece of silver paper and a hook on a string and pull in the little fish until it became boring. Ruthlessly, we pulled soft crabs from their hiding places when they were changing shells and cut them up for bait. I couldn’t do it now. But there was retribution: Once, casting with a rod and line, I managed to lodge a hook in my finger while the weight went seaward. My father had to take me in the boat to Exmouth hospital where the doctor had an easy solution; drive the hook right through the finger, snip off the barb, and pull out the shank. I had the scar for years. Airplanes were not common in those times
