Small Talk at Wreyland. Second Series

by Cecil Torr

When the railway came, a plan was drawn up showing how the hillsides were to be laid out with winding roads and villas in the accepted Torquay style; and two such villas were built, but happily no further harm was done.—Torquay had spread out with its winding roads all over the unsheltered hills, and was trading on the reputation it had gained when it was all in shelter. After wintering there, a lady told me it was the first time she had wintered in a place where the ink froze on her writing table.

The old houses here are generally down in hollows, as the old people thought more of shelter than of anything else: they never dreamt of building houses in unsheltered places for the sake of views. In 1849-50 a house was built on the hill behind Lustleigh, facing Lustleigh Cleave. My grandfather writes, 5 January 1851, “I told them last summer, when they were talking of their view, that they had not yet experienced a South Wester. Now they have experienced one, they have packed off, bag and baggage: one window blown in and smashed to pieces, wood and all, and others damaged.”

Since then that house has been much altered and enlarged, and now has a set of turrets. Turrets were a novelty here; and, looking at it, someone said to me, “Bain’t shaped proper, like a house: more like a cruet, I call’n.” Architects so often spoil their work by thinking only of design, without considering whether it will suit the district and the site. Two great houses have been built within ten miles of here in recent years. One is by an Oxford architect—now dead—and would look very well in Oxford, in the Broad, or even in the country, if it stood on level ground and had big trees behind. Half-way up a steep hill-side, it is hardly a success. The other is by Lutyens. It stands on a hill-top that was better without it; but, if there had to be a house there, this was the very thing.

Another edifice is by a man I cannot call an Architect: a simple Tect, and nothing more. There happened to be a corrugated iron shed close by; and a man remarked to me, “That is one of the few buildings of which I can conscientiously say that its appearance is improved by having a corrugated iron shed in front of it.”

All over Devon our A1 villages are being converted into C3 towns; but this is being done by people who have only C3 minds and little experience of anything above C3. I hate their works, but resent their want of culture far less than I resent the want of breeding in the people who appreciate a view and build a house where they can see it, well knowing that their house will spoil the view for everybody else.

There was a copse of nut-bushes growing wild amongst the rocks on the way to Lustleigh Cleave. In early years I felt quite sure that Providence had put it there to give us a supply of nuts to take to the Nut Cracker—a logan-stone at the top of the Cleave, so delicately poised that it just cracked the nuts and did not crush them. And now the bushes are cut down and the rocks rolled over, and in their place there is a cluster of corrugated iron huts.

When a War Memorial was projected here, I thought that the names of the dead might be carved on one of the great rocks on Lustleigh Cleave, with the date and nothing more. As it is, they have been carved on a neat little wooden tablet with an inscription of the usual kind, and put up in the church. I fancy our memorial might have been more worthy of them, had their names been on the granite in the solitude up there with that wild ravine below.

We have another memorial here, of which we all are proud. It is at the railway station. “Beneath this slab, and stretched out flat, lies Jumbo, once our station cat.” That cat had many lives: jumped in and out between the wheels of trains, and yet died in its bed.

A tombstone is primarily a label for identifying what is down below; but survivors will not always face that brutal fact. They merely give the name and age; and in after years this may not be enough. I had to find the next-of-kin to an old servant of ours who was over ninety when she died. (She had always kept them at a distance, as they often wished to borrow money that she did not wish to lend.) There was an entry in a Family Bible, say, A.B. born 1 January 1820; and there were tombstones of three persons named A.B. who died at ages answering to that.—They ought to give the birthday and the parents’ Christian names, to show exactly who is there. Instead of that, they usually give texts and verses out of hymns.

This has always been a healthy district, and so very quiet that people had no worries; and they usually lived on till a great age. I have heard it said regretfully, “Ah, her died young,” and then heard it explained, “Her ne’er saw sixty.” Times are changing now. Looking at the tombstones of some kindred of my own, I was observing how the ages fell from nineties and eighties to seventies and sixties. I said nothing aloud, but the sexton read my thoughts and put them into words, “Aye, zir, they do say as each generation be weaker and wiser than the last.”