At Dawlish, however, the traveller first realises himself fully in the West. The view, the colour, the speech, all proclaim it.
Ah! the old familiar cries of the West, they warm the heart with the fires of remembrance. As the traveller comes down the line, so insensibly he comes into the districts where the soft slurring burr of the West of England prevails. You first notice it, if you are travelling by a stopping train, at Swindon, on whose platforms the newspapers—in the speech of the bookstall imps—become “Londun pay-purr”; and when the train draws up to the seaside platforms of Dawlish, the shibboleth has become “Lundee pay.” Long, too, may the fishwives of Teignmouth continue their rounds, with their endearing “Any nice fresh whiting to-day, my dear?” to old and young, gentle or simple.
There are wild and beautiful valleys away behind Dawlish; in especial that vale down whose leafy gullies flows the clear stream of Dawlish Water, which, rising out of the green bosom of Great Haldon, up Harcombe way, comes down by Ashcombe and, reaching Dawlish, is made to perform quite a number of parlour tricks before it is allowed to straggle out over the sands and pebbles of the beach, and find a well-earned rest in the sea.
There are folk of primitive ways of thought and rugged speech up the valley of Dawlish Water, and their characteristics are those of old Devon, of whose peasantry it has been truly said: “They work hard, live hard, hold hard, and die hard.”
“My tongue has two sides to et, like a bull’s; a rough an’ a smuthe,” said a sharp-spoken woman up at Harcombe—or I should say, “up tu Harcume”—and up tu Ashcombe they talk in a way that no mortal man coming fresh to Devon can understand. There is a picturesque rustic church high up on a knoll in the dwindling village of Ashcombe, and there is a quaint old smithy with an equally quaint old couple of bachelor brothers, the smiths of it, who have the simplicity of children, the richest brogue in all Devon, and the unaffected courtesy we associate with great nobles. “We’m plazed tu zee ’ee, ye knaw, ye bain’t a stranger tu Ashcume, they tell me”; while their housekeeper says, “Zittee down, do ’ee,” and with her apron vigorously dusts a chair which, like all else in this spotless interior, is absolutely innocent of dust. It is the rustic way of showing politeness.
As for their speech, all Devonians have that characteristic rich twist of the tongue which one cannot well convey in all its richness in paper and print, and for “stranger” say “strangurr.” Similarly, when, during a conversation with them, an insect of sorts bites you painfully, they inform you it is a “hoss-stingurr.”
DAWLISH.