in case the meals at the pub at Branscombe were not always up to scratch, and an ox tongue and Stilton cheese, and lettuce, tomatoes and spring onions, and loaves of bread like cannon balls and Huntley and Palmer’s Oval Water Biscuits, and home-made mayonnaise, and Ventachellum’s Sweet Sliced Mango Chutney, and fresh fruit salad, and to drink there was Whiteway’s Dry Devonshire Cider for the grown-ups, and for me lemonade, made at home by Ellen. After which everyone except myself had ‘forty winks’.
Meanwhile I climbed one of the mounds, and looked out over an endless, undulating stretch of grass that looked like a heaving sea and reminded me, perhaps because I had eaten too much, of the real sea, also under a cloudless sky, the time we had gone to Sark by ship and my mother and I had been dreadfully sick, partly because of the heavy swell that was running, partly because we had eaten something called haricot mutton in the dining-saloon. Then, below deck, we had been ministered to by terrible-looking women dressed in black, called stewardesses, who handed us earthenware vessels a bit like chamber pots to throw up in, and who called me ‘ducks’.
While we were having the picnic, in answer to my question my father told me that the mounds, on one of which I was now standing, were really tombs and there were dead people under them and probably treasure, too. And as the one on which I was standing was already eroded on one side so that the chalk showed through I got a bit of stick and tried to dig my way into it with the intention of looking at one of my ancestors, and perhaps finding a crock of gold. However, in spite of these incentives, I soon gave up and simply sat on top of the tumulus, listening to the larks’ song rising and falling, looking out at the sheep lying close together, like white rugs on the green grass, until it was time to take to the road again.
On to Salisbury (one of my father’s detours), where we visited the cathedral, and we were taken over it by an extraordinarily enthusiastic white-haired guide. At one moment we were up under the roof with him among enormous timbers that made it seem like a forest of leaning trees; the next he was lining us up, numbering us off from right to left, and teaching us bell ringing with handbells in the vestry.
We had tea in Dorchester, then drove on into the eye of the now declining sun, with occasional entrancing views, ahead and away to the left, of the shimmering sea, in Lyme Bay. At Morecombelake we visited what looked to me like a very old factory in which local women were rolling out what looked like huge musket balls of dough on wooden tables. Put in the oven they emerged later as what are called Dorset Knobs; and my mother bought a large tin with a lovely red, white and blue label on it ornamented with towers and castles.
Not long afterwards we descended a very steep and winding road with a notice reading ‘Engage first gear’ at the top of it, and entered a pretty little seaside town at the mouth of a deep valley. This was Lyme Regis and here we were to spend the night at an inn where my father had taken rooms. Why he had chosen to do so when Branscombe was only about twelve miles away was a bit of a mystery. He may have thought we would arrive much later, allowing for punctures and mechanical breakdowns. Whatever the reason it was quite an expensive decision, but it might have been worse. I was half price and did not qualify for dinner, having eaten a large tea. I would be content with a hot drink and some Bovril sandwiches. And Lewington and Kathy would both qualify for the special terms offered for chauffeurs and servants, which included supper, bed and breakfast. Only my parents paid the full rate for their double room, dinner and breakfast.
But our arrival at Lyme Regis did not mean that it was the end of the day for me. Before it was time for bed I had already ‘done’ Lyme Regis. I had seen the studded door of the old lockup with its inadequate airholes, now incorporated in a picturesque but more modern building; I had visited a museum full of fossils and what called itself a ‘fossil depot’, where one could actually buy them, except that they were very expensive. Nevertheless, in the course of the evening, thanks to Lewington, I acquired a collection of my own. Walking along the beach after the abortive visit to the fossil depot and climbing over a number of groynes, we eventually came to some dark and crumbling cliffs. By this time of the evening they were already in shadow and made a striking contrast with the enfilade of great sandstone cliffs which stretched away beyond them towards Portland (one of them the highest of its kind in southern England), the summits of which were glowing like golden castles in the evening sunlight and would continue to do so for some time after it had departed from the remainder of the landscape. That evening, by some strange chance, perhaps because there had recently been a heavy rainstorm, fossil ammonites could be seen protruding from the stiff clay of the cliff, and by dint of some energetic scrambling, prodding with long bits of driftwood, and some stone throwing Lewington, who was young and active, managed to dislodge several fine specimens, making his blue serge chauffeur’s suit rather muddy in the process. Altogether, apart from not having been allowed to bathe when we reached Lyme Regis, from my point of view it had been a thoroughly successful day.1
(The inn at which we stayed that night, or another very similar inn, was the scene, more than thirty years later, of a disgraceful incident in which I was myself involved. Not long after the Second World War, while on a walking holiday with a great friend along the coasts of Dorset and Devon in the depths of winter, the two of us arrived at Lyme Regis where we put up at one or other of the inns. It happened to be New Year’s Eve and, in the course of the evening, having fulfilled a lunatic ambition to visit every pub in the town, and previously weakened by having walked some twenty-five miles, we became stupendously drunk. It was as a result of this that in the early hours of the morning, being incapable of finding the light switches, we both peed down the bend in the staircase from an upper floor on to what I recall to have been the visitors’ book on the reception desk, under the impression that we were in some sort of lavatory. How we escaped detection is a miracle and a mystery only explicable by the fact that the staff of the hotel must have been revelling too.)
The next morning when I looked out of the window, Lyme Regis was more or less obliterated, filled with a chill mist that was funnelling up into it from the sea, and in spite of various local prognostications it failed to disperse before we set off.
Sitting in the back, in spite of having our own windscreen and the travelling rug, we were glad of one another’s proximity as the car groaned in bottom gear up the hill which seemed almost as steep as the one by which we had entered the previous evening, past bow-fronted buildings and more classical edifices. As we climbed above the town I had fleeting glimpses of rustic houses, partially hidden by flint walls and foliage, some of them with pretty verandahs. One house, which had a steep pitched, thatched roof that came down so low that it had to be supported by posts, looked as if it was sheltering under an over-size umbrella, and was so minute that it seemed impossible that any grown-up could enter it, let alone live in it; this was Umbrella Cottage, Lyme Regis, which still stands.
Then we left Dorset for Devon (a sign told us so), crawling along in high, open country with the headlights on, alone in the sea mist, as if we were the only living creatures in the world, apart from an occasional cluster of cattle at a hedgerow gate, or a couple of horses, their breath steaming; seeing not much else but an occasional tree, the telegraph poles as they came looming up one after the other through the mist, or the vague outline of some building, the mist clouding the windscreen so that several times Lewington had to stop, get down and clean the glass. It was mysterious and exciting. It was the kind of weather, I heard my mother tell Kathy, that one expected in ‘the West’.
We descended steeply to the River Axe, crossed it by a narrow bridge, then waited for some time at a level-crossing for what looked like a toy train when it finally appeared to emerge from the mist and chug across our path, whistling mournfully, before being swallowed up once more; then climbed to another upland where, if anything, the mist was thicker, my father busy with the map now, until suddenly he told Lewington to turn into a lane on the left that was almost invisible in such conditions.
At first it ran between hedges through the same flat, upland country, then after a little while it began to descend and all at once we were out of the mist and before us was an enchanting, arcadian prospect,
