For myself, I have come to Thurlestone at a time when there are no voices, save the cat-like screaming of the gulls and the horrible squawking noises of the cruiser setting out to sea from Hope Cove, and bidding a series of half-suffocated good-byes with her steam-whistles, dreadfully like some one being very offensively sick. Noises are not common on Thurlestone strand, and I would even say it was lonely, save that the millions of sand-fleas inhabiting the shore forbid the thought.
I have bought a piece of Dutch cheese and some biscuits, and disregarding the inmates of the one hideously plastered boarding-house recently built here, take off shoes and stockings, and sitting on a convenient rock sliding down into deep water, come into intimate touch with the infinities, and make these notes. Two pennyworth of Dutch cheese, with biscuits to match, a comfortable seat on a rocky ledge, your feet dabbling in the clear water, and sunshine over all, will bring you into close relation with the Infinite. Here I hew off in the rough a slab of the Simple Life, and enjoy it hugely. It is, I suppose, the sunshine and the solitude in collaboration. At any rate, it is obviously enough not the white ale.
There are cornelians and lovely pebbles on this lonely strand, and sea-anemones, to the eye appetisingly like fruit-jellies, on the rocks. Alas! they are not good to eat, and as fairy gold, we all know, turns to sere leaves, so the translucent pebbles of the wet sea-shore become the commonplace opaque stones that the next day we turn disgustedly out of our pockets. In short, it is life in little you find reflected here, and reduces the heady optimism of a summer noon to something like tears. I don’t expect, or hope, every one who comes to this salt margin of Devon will feel thus. This it is to be cursed with temperament, to be, against your will, a snivelling sentimentalist, whom the lowing of the cattle at eventide, the distant tinkling of the sheep-bells, or the very beauty of day or place will suffice to reduce to a chastened melancholy.
Thurlestone church is neighboured on the hillside in these expansive times by a golf club, which, in the interest of golf-balls, has actually had the impudence to spread wire-netting over the charming little rustic stream that here flows to the sea; and near by are the ornate brand-new villas built and furnished by speculators with an eye on the possible huge profits to be earned from letting them for the summer season, in these times of a revived appreciation of the countryside. It is with a malignant joy that the wayfarer perceives the speculators to have overreached themselves, and the villas—“white elephants” says the ferryman at Bantham—to be unlet. How, indeed, should Thurlestone become a place of resort? It is remote, and its sands, unstable and shelving steeply to the sea, are extremely dangerous.
The dark, stern, upstanding Perpendicular tower of the old church looks down grimly upon these white and red and yellow upstarts. It is a fine, large church, the successor of an earlier, as the great Norman bowl-font of red sandstone would seem to prove, and the designers of it designed in a fine, large, broad style, suited to the coarse-grained granite and limestone of their building-materials. That Rev. Mr. John Snell, chaplain to Charles I., who was with the Royalist garrison in Salcombe Castle, was rector here, and although one of the articles of surrender declared that he was not to be disturbed in his living, he was plundered of his goods, and his farm-stock was twice carried off by the Puritans, so that he found it prudent to leave. Unlike so many others, he lived to return to his parish, and, I have no doubt, rendered things in his turn, extremely uncomfortable for some. One little natural human touch of him remains, in the entry in the register under his hand, against the years covered by the Commonwealth:—
“Monstrum horrendum informe,”
Horrible and shapeless monster.
“This is youre houre and ye power of darkness.”
The iron had evidently entered into his soul.