Everyman's England (17 page)

We went down the main street into the life of the town. There were lights now in the shop windows, there was movement, the quick happy movement of the end of the working day, on the pavements. A notice in a grocer's shop caught our eyes and we stopped and looked at one another and the same thought passed between us.

Maybe you are not fond of cheese, and recognise it only as something that comes tagging along at the end of a meal to be toyed with while you exercise your teeth on biscuits. Do Camembert, Gruyere, Gorgonzola, Cheddar, Cheshire, mean nothing to you; is there no poetry, no music in the sweet roll of their names for you? Have you never thought that a meal would never pass through its tedious courses to leave you alone with the cheese? Then what follows cannot interest you.

Dorset Blue Vinny Cheese – the notice said, and we had never tasted it. We decided to repair the deficiency in our cheese education, and entered the shop.

Dorset Blue is not a cream cheese. It is made from the skimmed milk, and the curds do not press so well as the curds of richer cheeses made from unskimmed milk, so that the ‘vinny' soon attacks the interstices of the cheese, giving it its characteristic blue marbling. Sometimes the blue marking failed to appear and the only remedy, at least in those days when every cottage and farm had its own beer barrel, was to wrap it in a cloth and hang it under the bung to catch the drippings. This invariably improved the taste and brought on the marking.

The shop man did not want to sell us any cheese.

‘You'm come at the wrong time of the year,' he said. ‘It's made during the summer and it's nearly all gone by the end of the autumn. It doan't keep long and the piece I've got is hardly vit to be put on the table. I should have had that notice out of the window but we've been so busy, and I forgot it was there.'

He could not persuade us from our cheese. Good or indifferent, we wanted it and we had it. It was obvious that it had lost its first glory.

‘You know why they call it “vinny”?' asked the shopman as he wrapped it up.

‘No,' I said as I took it from him.

‘It's because of the markings. They're like blue veins and vinny is the Dorset way of saying veiny.'

We walked out of the shop and my companion turned to me.

‘Did you believe that?'

‘About the veins?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why not, it sounds a very likely reason.'

‘Not at all. Vinny means no such thing as you would know if you had ever made a study of philology. Philology is not a matter of guesswork, it is an exact science. Finew is the Anglo-Saxon for ‘to become' or ‘make mouldy'. From finew we get finewed, meaning mouldy. Now no philologist will dispute that the West of England dialect has a trick of substituting v's for f's, so we get vinnewed and finally vinney, and the name of the cheese comes from its blue mould, and not from the veins.'

‘How do you know all this? You're not a philologist.' ‘I know, but I like cheese, and before we decided to come to Dorchester I guessed we might be getting some Blue Vinny so I did, or rather, had done for me, a little research work. You can't appreciate a good cheese only by the taste, you must know all about its name and how it's made. You knew how it was made, but I knew about its name. Now let's go back to the hotel and see about its taste.'

If you want to know what Blue Vinny Cheese tastes like go to Dorset and get some.

CHAPTER 18

This is better poetry than one would expect from a postman, and if it has a little breathlessness then it shows how truly the postman who wrote it has worked his own personality into the lines. So sang Edward Capern, a remarkable man of the nineteenth century, and a very good postman, who was known as the Devonshire Burns. Capern was a Tiverton man, but he was Bideford's postman for many years, and Bideford has decided to adopt him.

That his thoughts as he climbed the Bideford streets and hills were often of Grenville and Raleigh, I do not dispute, yet if I had to do much walking up and down the hills my thoughts would soon pass from matters historical. If you live in Bideford long, I suppose, you get used to the hills and Capern probably took them in his stride.

I like Bideford. I liked it the moment I stepped from the train on to the railway platform, for the platform is one of the best introductions to Bideford. The station stands on a slight elevation on the east side of the river Torridge, which comes rolling down from Dartmoor to meet its sister, the Taw, below Appledore, there to join hands and venture out across the Bar to find the long Atlantic surges. Across the Torridge runs Bideford bridge, the main approach to the town, and rising up the steep bank that fronts the river is Bideford, row after row of houses, dotted with inns, shops and churches, and atop the hill stand clumps of dark elms making distant silhouettes against the sky. Kingsley called it ‘the little white town of Bideford.' In places the cream-washed walls of the houses try to live up to his description, but mostly the buildings are grey and red-bricked, a pleasing jumble of colours.

Bideford reminded me of the plump, busy women who sit in its own market minding their baskets of eggs and bowls of rich cream. It is just like a countrywoman, kindly, but ready to take affront at the slightest sign of condescension, healthy, and proud of nothing so much as its children. And Bideford has a lot of children to clack about, not all of them good, some of them a little mad and one or two no more than dream figures. It takes time to decide which were real and which only fiction. Charles Kingsley, whose statue stands at the end of the quay, has so peopled the town with characters from
Westward Ho!
that nowadays it is difficult, I found, not to imagine that once Salvation Yeo did stand on the quayside showing his wonderful horn and telling his fantastic tales of sea adventure to a crowd of gaping yokels and seamen, while the young Amyas Leigh listened, wide-eyed, from the fringe of the crowd. And poor Rose Salterne, the victim of the stupidness which seems to be accounted a virtue in the heroines of romances, was she never more than fiction and never did actually live in Bridgeland Street?

If Rose did not exist, it was in Bridgeland Street that one of Bideford's mad children lived and died. He was Thomas Stucley, the son of Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, whose brain was turned with overstudy and of whom it was said that ‘When the Duke of Marlborough laid siege to any town in Flanders, Mr Stucley would draw a plan of the place upon his kitchen floor, which, according to the Devonshire custom, was made of lime and ashes; and by the intelligence of the newspapers he would work at the plan with a pickaxe, so that every conquest cost him a new floor.' Still, Mr Stucley and no doubt the Duke of Marlborough, too, had he known, would regard the cost of a new floor as a small price to pay for the glory of a victory.

I walked from the station across the bridge to the town. Bideford, the town by the ford, is now the town by the bridge. Today the bridge is a wide, well-paved thoroughfare, lighted by gas lamps that at night cast little flares of light upon the dark waters of the tide that flows between the irregularly spaced arches. The arches are of different spans because, so it is said, when the original structure was thrown across the river in the fourteenth century, some spans were endowed by rich folk and some by the poor, and the bigger the span the richer the endowment. The truth, I feel, is likely to be that the placing of the spans was dictated by the formation of the bed of the river and the need to build on solid rock.

It was hard to imagine as I watched the stream of cars and omnibuses going over the bridge, that at one time it had been so narrow that pedestrians had been forced to step back into little recesses placed over each pillar to make way for the strings of pack-horses with their swaying panniers full of merchandise, for the bridge was an important link in the great pack-road that came up from Cornwall, through Devon and Somerset towards London. The maintenance of the bridge was of supreme importance and the bridge trustees grew to be the wealthiest body in Bideford, and they did not confine their activities to looking after the bridge. They endowed charities, scholarships, and laid down the finest cellar of wines in all Devon to grace the board at the famous Bridge dinners.

The dinners and the cellar have gone now, and with them a great deal of Bideford's commercial importance. As a port Bideford once ranked as the third in the kingdom; now its glory lies in the past, a distinction it shares with towns of more modern birth.

To anyone who enjoys smoking, Bideford should have an affectionate appeal, for it was in one of its warehouses that the first consignment of tobacco to England lay. I wonder that some enterprising manufacturer of tobacco has not had the sound commercial instinct to take advantage of the advertising possibilities of this fact and name a brand of tobacco after Bideford. As I walked up to my hotel I occupied myself with inventing the name of the brand. The best I could manage was Bideford Bridge Brand, with Bideford Mixture, and the slogan –
The Tobacco that kept Raleigh Cool
– as a runner-up. Through dinner I was working on the wrapper. It was to be simple and effective, a picture of Bideford quay with the town and bridge in a fading perspective, while the heroic figure of Raleigh, in slashed doublet, a sword cocked from his side, smoking a long clay pipe, should stand in the foreground surrounded by a crowd of wondering little boys. So engrossed was I with my scheme that I scarcely noticed that I was being served with the usual unimaginative dinner in which English hotels excel.

The next morning, on my way to the parish church, I called in at a tobacconists for some tobacco and before I could check myself had said:

‘Two ounces of the Bideford Bridge Brand, please.'

The shopman looked at me enquiringly.

‘Bideford—'

‘The Tobacco that kept Raleigh Cool,' I said, wondering at his stupidity, and then recoiling at my own.

‘Don't keep that kind, sir.'

I asked for my usual make and fled from the shop.

The parish church is full of the memories of the Grenville family. There seems to be a certain amount of controversy as to the correct spelling of the name. The greatest of the Grenvilles was Sir Richard, a Bideford man, and it was from the town that he went to die, as every schoolboy knows, near ‘Flores in the Azores.' The story of the
Revenge
is as moving as anything in Homer. I found the brass in the church which had been erected by a descendant to commemorate Sir Richard's death. Few people could read the last words of that courtly Elizabethan seaman and not respond to their noble simplicity.

‘Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind…' How many of us, when the time comes, will be ready to go with a joyful and quiet mind? They were a rough crew, the Elizabethan seamen, barbarous at times, but there is no disputing their valour and dignity in the face of death. They were used to danger, they had faced death close enough more than once while their ships tossed in the great troughs of the ocean; they had stood with only cold steel and the strength of their sails and ropes between them and oblivion too many times to shirk the final combat when it came. They were seldom careless of their lives, yet they never let the fear of death stand between them and what they considered their duty. It is easy to call them pirates, ruffians. They were also men of principle. They lived in an age when force was the wisest law, and if they fought with a wild joy, at least they fought to gain possession of new lands, not from some obscure quarrel of politicians.

For a long time most of the trade with the Americas, Holland, France and Spain came up the silver estuary of the Torridge. It was during the eighteenth century that Bideford's trade declined, slowly losing its importance because of the deprivations of the privateers who harried the shipping in Bideford's Golden Bay, making their headquarters on Lundy Island. The oak screen of the tower in the church is proof of this trade. It is made from the ends of old pews and benches from the church, and the carvings which decorated the seats of the wealthy merchants of the time symbolise the sea and the distant lands that brought them wealth.

I stood before it looking at the carvings. There were grotesque dolphins, sea serpents, feathered Indians, seamen hauling on ropes, strange fruit, flying fish and here and there the arms of the Grenville family. While I was standing there, the church caretaker, who had been polishing the pews, came up to me and asked me if I would like to see the fine silver chalice and communion tankard which had been with the church since the seventeenth century. He took me into the vestry and let me see them. His face was as red and round as a pippin and it shone with pleasure as he saw me admiring the silver work.

‘Here's something else that might interest 'ee, zur.' He pulled from a cupboard an old church register and showed me the actual entries, in the curious Elizabethan script, of the baptism in 1588 and the death, a year later, of one Rawley, a Winganditoian. This Rawley (the spelling of Raleigh has even more variations than Grenville) was a North American Indian, brought back to England by Sir Richard Grenville as his servant. He must have caused a stir among the women of the town, though the men were probably used to his kind from their voyages. Rawley did not survive long in the boisterous climate of Devon.

‘Poor li'l chap,' said the caretaker. ‘'E didn't last long. Reckon he must have died of homesickness.'

I wonder whether it was homesickness or the climate.

I walked about the streets after I left the church and I noticed that in almost every shop which sold foodstuffs there were large bowls of what looked like cooked spinach, of a black and shiny texture. My curiosity got the better of me and I went into a shop and enquired what the stuff was.

‘Laver,' came the answer.

Laver, I was told, is a species of seaweed which is collected locally and is fried or made into cakes. In Bideford it has some popularity, but I cannot say that it looked appetising to me. I was asked to try some. I refused with haste and afterwards regretted my cowardice, until I read in a guidebook that it is a food ‘which some people profess to like.' I fancied there was an ominous intent in that phrase and congratulated myself upon my conservatism.

The train that took me away from Bideford passed along the river towards Barnstaple (a town which, while you are in Bideford, it is not wise to praise, for there is a great rivalry between the two). It was a sad stretch of river. The gallant ships of the seafaring Elizabethans have gone, their timbers mouldered into dust, or overgrown with seaweed on hidden reefs, and now the great ships which bore England's cargoes about the seas before and during the last war are coming home to these quiet estuaries and rivers to end their days, quietly rusting, their decks alive only with the cry of seabirds and the flap of washing hung out by caretakers who inhabit the great corpses like beetles. It was a sad sight, the ships which are wanted no more because there are not enough cargoes to fill their holds, come back to Bideford, the home of so much of England's shipping wealth and commercial greatness, to finish their days by the river down which once swept the vessels of Grenville to find the far Americas and spread the glory of the Virgin Queen across every ocean.