With such administration it is not surprising that the rates in Bovey parish have risen to 8s. 10d. and 9s. 5d. in the £, or 18s. 3d. for the year—an inordinate sum for any rural parish. And no drastic reductions can be made now, as £1600 a year is required for interest and sinking-fund on loans, which will not be completely cleared till 1952. All the money that is squandered by the Councils is charged upon the rates; and nobody is ever punished for his blundering.
Take one case as a specimen of what is going on. A retaining-wall was being built, half a mile from here, under the direction of a District Council official. There was plenty of granite close at hand, but he was having stone of an inferior kind brought down there by steam lorries from a quarry nearly three miles off; and it came in lumps of insufficient size for a retaining wall. On seeing how the wall was being built, I wrote to say that it would certainly fall down, and the work had better be stopped, especially as there was scandalous waste of money in sending to a distance for inferior stone. But the work was carried on; and a few days after it was finished, the wall fell down exactly as I said it would. It was rebuilt in such a way that part of it will probably fall down again. The ratepayers are paying for the building of that wall and for its rebuilding, and the official goes scot free.
To take another case. Four years ago the District Council laid a water-main across some private property without complying with the forms prescribed by law; and as soon as it was laid, the owner told the Council to take it up, though it had cost about £240 to lay. He was within his rights; and he frightened the Council into an agreement to pay him a way-leave if he would allow it to remain, and to take it up if he gave six months’ notice. He has given notice and then withdrawn it on condition of the Council’s doing something for him which the Council was not really bound to do; and, so far as I can see, he may repeat the process as often as he likes. The ratepayers find the money for it all.
If a District Council needs a loan for carrying out large works, the plans and specifications and estimates have to be submitted to the Ministry of Health before the loan is sanctioned. In these matters the Ministry follows the practice of the old Local Government Board; and when a loan was needed for the Moreton sewage scheme, the Board sent down one of its inspectors. He held an inquiry at Moreton, and went over the ground; and he passed the plans and specifications containing the outrageous blunder I have mentioned. Hence the sewage fountain on the road.
In spite of all formalities, works are not always carried out according to the plans passed by the Ministry or Board. On the plans of the joint sewer here (Lustleigh and part of Bovey) there is a settling-tank for the sewage and an effluent to irrigate the fields below; but the tank has never been built, and raw sewage is run out upon the land. The tank appears upon the plans that were endorsed on the agreements with the landowners; and they can compel the Council to build it—at the ratepayers’ expense. The ratepayers imagined that the tank was there, and had been paid for from the loan the Board had sanctioned for carrying out the plans.
Amongst the works for giving Bovey more water (at a cost of upwards of £11,000) there are three horizontal shafts, or ‘adits,’ driven into Haytor down; and one of them is more than a quarter of a mile in length. The work was carried out in lavish style—these shafts remind me of the entrances to royal tombs that I have seen in Egypt. The water from the shafts must be quite pure; but water was also taken from an open stream that runs through Yarner wood, and may have dead rabbits and other unpleasant things in it; and this water goes into the same main without filtration. That being so, the shafts were hardly worth their cost. And although the water from them is so very pure, it is a little ‘sour’ (as moorland water often is) and therefore picks up lead in passing through lead pipes. As lead pipes have been laid, there is now a danger of lead-poisoning in Bovey, and so also in Lustleigh with its moorland water and lead pipes. And in both these places the lead pipes are in accordance with the plans and specifications passed by the Ministry of Health.
In the old days here, when drinking-water mostly came from wells, the population must have swallowed masses of unwholesome stuff. There is a well (now closed) in Lustleigh town-place just where the ground slopes downward from the churchyard to the Wrey. Here at Wreyland there is a well in front of the Hall House, now used for horses drinking at a trough, but formerly for all mankind. There were two pig-sties five yards from it and a third within ten yards; and it was on the lowest ground here, so that things would easily drain in. This house is higher up, but the well was on the lower side of it; and my grandfather had the present well sunk in 1839.
His well received great praise, as I am told. “Th’apothecary man come here and saith as he must anderize the well. And I saith, ‘Well, if you must, you must.’ And then he come again and saith, ‘I’ve anderized that well, and if you drink of that, you’ll live for ever.’” That was the substance of what he said, but not (I believe) the form in which he said it. People here are apt to put things in the form they would have used themselves. A lady of great dignity once noticed a donkey here, and remarked what a fine animal it was; and she was perturbed at hearing that the villagers were saying she had praised the animal in detail, ending up “and if there be one part of’n as I admire more than another, it be his rump.”
From time to time the County Council appoints a ‘rat-week’ for a general attack on rats. Rats have a good deal of sense: they abandon places where they are hunted down, and congregate in places where they are left alone. A rat-week frightens them away from these infested places; and in the following week there are more rats than can be managed in the places that were nearly free of them before. So a rat-week is rather a nuisance to anybody who has always kept rats down.
When there is an attack on any kind of creature, there is always an outcry that every kind of creature has its use, and we shall suffer for upsetting Nature’s plans; and one naturally gets impatient with the silly folk who have all cobwebs swept away, and then go grumbling that their rooms are full of flies. But rats are not indigenous here—England did very well without them until about 1350, like Australia without rabbits until about 1850. I am quite sure rats must be killed, and I get traps and poisons; but when it comes to killing one, my sympathies are with the rat, and I always have a secret hope that it will get away.