Better ‘an Heaven

Some books announce their quality straight away. On p.3 of Small Talk at Wreyland, the author tells of an old lady looking out across her garden on a gorgeous summer afternoon. ‘She turned to me, and said, “I were just a-wonderin’ if Heaven be so very much better ’an this: ’cause, aless it were, I don’t know as I’d care for the change.”’

The writer was Cecil Torr, born in Surrey in 1857, whose grandfather lived at Wreyland, in the parish of Lustleigh on the edge of Dartmoor. As a child he often stayed with the old man, and in late middle age, after travelling widely, he gave up his London house, went to live in Wreyland in the house he had inherited, and never left. In 1918 he published the first of three volumes of Small Talk – publishing it privately, ‘sibi et amicis’, for himself and his friends. But its popularity led him to publish the following two books conventionally, in 1921 and 1923, and the three are now always collected in one volume. They consist of a wonderful anthology of the sayings and doings of the people of the village – some culled from his grandfather’s notebooks, others noted from day to day as they occurred – and the result is the most remarkable, endearing portrait of village life in Devon over the century before the First World War. Torr himself remembered the leisurely 1880s, when a man came over to the village to fetch something left for him a couple of days before, only to find it had been stolen. ‘People shook their heads and wondered what the world was coming to, if you couldn’t leave things by the wayside from a Saturday to a Monday without their being carried off.’ Forty years later, Torr saw the first aeroplane fly over Wreyland – where, not too long before, an old man had recalled the first sight in the village of a wheeled vehicle of any kind. Or so he said. The railway, when it came, caused some concern. Trains often passed straight through the station because their brakes couldn’t cope with the incline, and carriages often ran away and failed to stop until they reached Plymouth. At least the railway gave work to local people: asking about one family, Torr was told, ‘Well, one of ’n went on the line, and he became a station-master and ’nother he went on the line, and he became a ganger; and t’other, he were a-runned over by a train; and so as us may say, they was all connected with the railway.’ There was also a muddle about Time, especially where the station clock was concerned: the villagers ignored the difference between solar time and mean time, and anarchy reigned. Wreyland was always a touch puritanical. In the Week of the Aeroplane, a company arrived to make a cowboy film on the moor, just beyond the village. ‘A pair of Stars made love outside the Hall House door, and an old inhabitant who came along was so shamed at their brazenness that he could only gasp out “Well, Now, There!”’ Torr invited a dancer to come over one summer’s day, to perform on the village green: ‘A very pretty sight. But some of the spectators thought less about her dancing than her dress. And their verdict was “Her garments had got no substance to them.”’ Fashion passed Wreyland by. One Sunday morning, Torr met a young girl on her way to church, proudly wearing a new dress. ‘For want of anything better to say, I said, “You don’t go in for hobble skirts, I see.” She answered, “No, not I; a proper fright I’d look in they.” And I enquired, Why. The answer was, “Why, mother says my thighs be like prize marrows at a show.” Three old ladies on their way to church just caught the last remark, and passed on with averted eyes in consternation at our talk.’ The old ladies also looked askance at the local boys who one hot day tumbled naked into the stream: ‘Well, Mr Torr, if this be Wreyland, us might live in savage parts.’ Afterwards, Torr heard a lot of laughter among the children, and asked what was going on. ‘Please, zir,’ came the reply, ‘it be little Freddie a-tryin’ to say swear-words, and he cannot form ’n proper.’ Torr, trying to encourage one infant, told him that he should study well to make a better man than his father, and to know more and do more. That evening the child came to him and asked ‘if his Papa ever swallowed a fourpenny piece. I never dreamed of his motive for putting the question to me. I said No, then he said: ‘This is one thing I have done more than Papa.”’ The villagers’ view of religion was pragmatic: when a child was born with a rupture, the cure was to pass him three times through a hole split in an ash-tree, which was then bandaged. When Torr asked the father whether it had done the infant any good, the reply was ‘Well, as much good as sloppin’ water over ’n in church.’ Sickness and death were taken as they came, with total lack of sentiment. A bereaved husband spoke of his wife in her last illness. ‘Her sat up in the bed, and saith “I be a-goin’ up the Clave [Lustleigh Cleave].” And I saith to her, “Thee canst not go up the Clave; thee be a-dyin’.” And her saith to me, “Ye wicked, dommed, old mon.” Poor dear soul, they was the very last words as ever her spoke.’ Before the radio and Received Pronunciation, West Country dialect was thick, muddy and delightful, with all its variations.

A quantity of plants arrived here while I was away, and among them were some Kalmias and Andromedas. On my return I asked where they had all been put, and I was told that the Camels and Dromedaries were out in the orchards. An old gardener once told me that in his opinion a laundry was better than a garden, ‘as garments had not got such mazin’ names as plants.’ And the maze grows more intricate when Berberis Darwinii is Barbarous Darwin and Nicotiana is Nicodemus, and Irises are Irish, and ‘they English Irish be braver than they Spanish Irish’.

Torr thoroughly enjoyed the local dialect. ‘People in Devon are very dextrous in their choice of adjectives. At a supper here I thought the company had overeaten itself and might feel unwell next day. I inquired in due course, and was answered, “Us be feelin’ lovely.” My finger-bowls came in for criticism. “Gentlefolk don’t soil their fingers a-pickin’ up their meat; and if they did, how could they cleanse ’n in they paltry basons?”’ Villagers were far from rich, and visitors who lodged there had to take what they could get: ‘Us cannot give ’n riotous livin’ on 18 pence a day.’ The Wreyland people loved Torr, confided in him and asked him for advice:

A girl once asked me this: she had been engaged to a young man for several years, but the engagement had just been broken off. She used to suffer dreadfully from toothache, and in the early days of his affection he sent her to the dentist and paid for putting in a plate of teeth. Was that plate of teeth a present that ought to be returned? Rightly or wrongly, I said that it was not; and I see she has it still.

The villagers were also intensely friendly but at the same time respectful – Torr was never quite one of them.

At a harvest supper there was a general desire to sing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ but also a general feeling that it would not be quite respectful: so they softened the familiar term and sang without restraint, ‘For he’s a jolly good gentleman’ . . . I am told that when I go to sleep, I snore. One afternoon I asked why the letters had not been brought in to me as soon as they arrived; and the answer was, ‘I was afraid I might disturb you, sir, I thought I heard you sleeping.’

Cecil Torr was clearly a delightful man, and his book is one of the most delightful of country idylls. It’s good to know he was appreciated in his own country. One day he met the bell-ringers and asked why they never tolled for funerals now. ‘But us do,’ came the reply; ‘sometime. Not for all folk, like, though. But us’ll ring ’n for thee.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Derek Parker 2005