“Quintessence of sunshine, gorse, and broomy lea,
Privet and carnation, violet and pea,
Meadowsweet and primrose, honeysuckle, briar,
Lily, mint, and jasmine, stock, and gilly-spire,
Woodruff, rose, and clover, clematis and lime,
Myrtle and magnolia, daffodil and thyme
Is our pearl of dainties—and, to end my theme,
Nature’s choice confection is old Devon’s cream.”
Two things in the above, perhaps require explanation; “squab- and mazzard-pie.” Squab-pie is a Devonshire dish composed of mutton, onions, apples, etc., and mazzards are a kind of wild cherry growing in North Devon.
The original manuscript of these verses hangs in a frame in the Bideford Public Library, where there is also a fine oil-painting of Capern in middle life, by the elder Widgery. For the rest, the library contains little enough, being one of those pretentious Carnegie buildings practically without books; an absurdity on a par with a showy restaurant that should provide only the cruets for the hungry to dine upon.
A vast amount of astonished comment has been penned upon the strange thing that a postman should write poetry, but surely it is not so remarkable a thing to find a cultivated mind in the body of a letter-carrier! Culture, it would seem, is held to be the prerogative of the wealthy and the leisured. How dreadful, if it really were so!
CHAPTER XIII
THE KINGSLEY STATUE—NORTHAM—“BLOODY CORNER”—APPLEDORE—WESTWARD HO! AND THE PEBBLE RIDGE
The traveller setting out by road from Bideford to Appledore has a haunting feeling that he is making for some unconsidered part of the world: a loose end ravelling out to ineffectiveness. The map will help him in this impression, for it show’s a tongue of land that is to all intents a dead end, leading nowhere. Nor will the railway journey to Westward Ho!, now made possible by the Bideford and Westward Ho! Railway—an undertaking which belongs to the “light railway” order—help him to revise this opinion. You may see the terminus of it on Bideford quay. There the rails run on to the roadway, and end without the formalities of a station, platforms, signals, or anything of the kind. And the weird-looking engine when it goes off, dragging the one or two carriages after it, glides away with the air of to-morrow being plenty of time to do the work of to-day. The road keeps well out of sight of the river Torridge, and is both hilly and uninteresting, coming at last to Northam. This is the very heart of what has been styled the “Kingsley Country,” rich in the scenes of his “Westward Ho!”, and it is therefore of peculiar appropriateness that a white marble statue of him should have been erected in 1906 on Bideford quay, whence this expedition starts. It is an aggressive-looking Kingsley—and therefore true to the appearance of the original—that stands there in clerical robes, with quill pen poised in hand, ready, as in life, with more honesty than discretion, to do battle for any cause he had at heart. “The most generous-minded man I ever knew,” said Maurice of him: with the fervour of a schoolboy and qualities of heart better than those of head, as the unfortunate controversy with Newman, in which that crafty dialectician had the better of him in argument, sufficiently proved. But although worsted in sheer tactical marshalling of his forces, Kingsley was instinctively right, and the sympathy of honest men went with him, and continues.
Northam is a dusty, gritty village, standing on a ridge that looks one way towards the Torridge, and the other across to the great waste of Northam Burrows, that repeat, on this side of the twin Taw and Torridge estuaries, the features of Braunton Burrows. On the north side of the churchyard is a knoll, known as “Bone Hill,” where a flagstaff has been planted on a cairn of sixty boulders, brought by willing hands from the famed Pebble Ridge. The whole thing forms a homemade loyal and patriotic memorial of the second Jubilee of Queen Victoria, with additions suggested by later events, together with an aspiration that “these shores may never be without brave and pious mariners, who will count their lives as worthless in the cause of their country, their Bible, and their Queen.” But other people beside the mariners must do their part also.
“BLOODY CORNER.”