Dartington and the Macs| 1963: New country, new people
Prologue
By the time John Thompson moved out of the Marmora Road flat I had made another close friend in Nigel Maclening. Thinking of conditions that lead to friendship, it hardly needs saying now that one of our central common interests was beer, in quantity, and the social life associated with it. Proximity and frequency of interaction came through UAC, where we both worked in similar conditions and at similar tasks in adjacent open-plan offices. I introduced him, too, to Russell Baird to buy beer and life insurance in the same year (1963) as he married Margaret at the Mansion House and left for New Zealand. Not one of my better insurance recommendations: I believe he cancelled the policy almost immediately because, as an imminent emigrant and father, he needed all the ready cash he could lay his hands on.
Nigel’s family originated at Shoreham, Kent, but his parents had lived at Dartington in South Devon for many years, certainly since the War. The family consisted of six brothers and two sisters, the majority born and brought up there, living at No 3, Newman Crescent. His father Enos (an unusual name which was passed on to Nigel, who abandoned it) had married Cecile, who was Swiss-French. One of his three brothers Geoffrey had married Cecile’s sister Claire: two brothers were married to two sisters. Both couples had settled in Dartington, living within two minutes’ walk of one another, and only two minutes more from the Cott Inn, a long, low thatched Dartmoor-style building, dating from and claiming to have been an inn ever since 1320. Despite living almost their entire adult lives in a South Devon hamlet a couple of miles outside Totnes, neither sister ever lost her strong continental speech patterns. The main differences between the two couples were these: apart from the bottle of brown ale when he went to the pub on Christmas lunchtime to be with the family, Geoffrey didn’t drink. Enos (known in the family as Father or the Old Man, outside it as Mac or Mr Mac) generally drank enough for both of them and certainly until the cows came home. Geoffrey and Claire had no children, while the other two had eight. The family called Cecile Mother or the Old Lady and everyone else locally knew her as Mrs Mac.
Nigel usually spent his annual Christmas-New Year holidays at home in Dartington, a slot that I came to fill after he’d gone. In the summer of 1963 Margaret was pregnant and they’d arranged to leave for New Zealand. They both left their London jobs and moved down to Devon for the final few months before they sailed, Nigel working behind the bar at the Cott. Margaret was booked to sail in September and Nigel the following month. After we’d seen Margaret off at the docks in London, Nigel suggested I take a week’s holiday in Dartington before he sailed. I’d been fascinated by the stories he told about the family and I’d been agitating to go down there for ages. He told me recently that he agreed to this to cure me, thinking that, having seen them in the flesh once, I would not want to see them again. Having met my parents and become aware of my home background, he inwardly feared that I might find the relatively unbuttoned style of the Maclenings more than I could handle.
In fact, the very opposite occurred. That first visit began a long, close association with people and places that I’d never imagined likely or possible. In that single week, the combined experience of the Macs, the Cott Inn, Dartington and Dartmoor embedded itself deep in my spirit, remaining a vibrant emotional component of my life ever after. I suppose it must have happened when I was least expecting such a thing, and yet perhaps needing and subconsciously waiting for something of the kind to fill an undefined void. I could not have been more utterly receptive to everyone I encountered and everything I did during those few stunning days of magnificent self-enlargement. Channels and roots of feeling were tapped in me that, until then, I’d never known existed.
The year 1963
Thus 1963 becomes another pivotal year in my life, an unexpected event outside my control transforming its substance and direction. Others found it pivotal too, especially where death was concerned. Those who breathed their last during this year included two major poets, Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath; singer Edith Piaf and Hindemith the composer; writers Aldous Huxley, CS Lewis and William Carlos Williams; the Pope, John XXIII and the England cricketer Sir Jack Hobbs, both aged 81; Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour Party leader (succeeded by Harold Wilson, the youngest ever leader of the party) and Lord Beveridge, architect of the British welfare state. It depends on who and where you are, and the nature of your priorities, but the most internationally newsworthy death of the entire year was the assassination in November of the US president, JF Kennedy, in Dallas, Texas, followed two days later by the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of killing him. Only in June, Kennedy had visited the Berlin Wall where he declared in his major speech ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. His death was to produce a long-running flow of speculative writings and films, as well as a monumental report on the government investigation. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a man given to earthy turns of phrase, became the 36th President of the USA. Among all these deaths was the birth of Quentin Tarantino, eventual non-mainstream film director, most notably of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
During this year, the British people were rubbing along on an average wage of £16. 14s. 11d. while the figure of over 600,000 unemployed people was the highest since 1947. The Beeching Report came out in March, announcing the closure of over 2,000 railway stations and many branch lines. Fortunately for me at that time, the line from Paddington to Penzance via Totnes was untouched, but the new policy did make rail travel much less appealing, so encouraging increased use of private cars. As though in direct response, the first Ford Anglias were produced in the same month. Any possibility of enhancing our economic position by joining the European Common Market was demolished by President de Gaulle’s veto on British entry.
Political life was shaken by the messy Profumo scandal, and we eagerly awaited more of its murky details in each day’s newspaper. Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, lied to the House of Commons about a relationship with ‘call girl’ Christine Keeler, who was also having an affair with a Russian naval attaché. It all became complicated by still further murky factors and dodgy characters, with the result that Profumo resigned for deceiving the House, Stephen Ward, an osteopath involved with some of the cast of this affair, committed suicide, and Keeler was later sent to prison for perjury. Within the year, the strain of it had caused Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to resign, leading to the curious figure of Sir Alec Douglas-Home ‘emerging’ as the new Prime Minister, a decision quite as inappropriate as the much more recent one of Iain Duncan Smith as Tory leader.
Into a new country
It’s a beautiful Friday evening in late September. I catch the train from Paddington between five and six o’clock. The return fare to Totnes is exactly £5 for a journey that must be a good four hours. I have a front-facing window seat on the left-hand side of the carriage. The further we go from London the more I’m drawn through unfamiliar territory towards a destination whose exact details I can’t possibly guess. When I was about eight, we’d gone by GWR from Shrewsbury to Penzance on our family summer holiday, and I’d remembered a particular thrilling stretch on the journey where the railway runs alongside the sea. You were right on the beach, you could see the people, many of them waved as the train went past, and you could see the sea, all of the sea, stretching towards the sky. And now, in my early adulthood, I see it again, the same as before. It’s at Dawlish, a strangely thrilling name in itself. This time, though, the beach is empty except for a few dog-walkers and the arrogant gulls, strutting and swooping. But the enchantment of this uncommon juxtaposition is as strong as ever.
Reaching Exeter now, I realise we’re close, and, floating high on the anticipation of this new land, the West Country, I conjure the romantic rural image of Totnes station as a platform with a narrow flower bed in front of a white-painted picket fence. This sort of thing doesn’t happen often, but, as the station-master calls out ‘Totnes! Totnes!’ that’s exactly what I see as I get off the train. It’s the first delightful message to me from some kind of South Devon guiding spirit, almost as though telling me: ‘You got that bit right. Now wait till you see the rest of it.’
Approaching ten o’clock, here on the edge of the town, there’s no bus or taxi in sight. Over the railway bridge all I can see is the Cow and Gate milk depot with its rows of standing lorries and floats waiting for their rounds early tomorrow morning. It’s a couple of miles up the hill to Dartington and, having sat on the train for hours, I welcome the walk, taking in the night-time smells and the quiet presence of the countryside around me. Living in London suburbs for the past four or five years, I can absorb everything the country wants to give me just by its being there. As for the layers of pastoral idyll, I can create them for myself as I go along, where small villages are sign-posted Staverton and Rattery, and hamlets are called Week and Cott. I walk up steep Barracks Hill, then along the ‘top road’ towards the village. There are woods to my left and, as the last light fades on my right, I can just make out the low-walled fields, sloping down and away, back towards the town and beyond it. In a few minutes it’s completely dark on this narrow road, with high hedge banks, overhanging trees and no street-lights, one of my first tastes of the total darkness of the countryside at night. (In the late 1990s, I’m reminded of this when I hear Neil, landlord of the Queen’s Arms in Littondale, Yorkshire, telling drinkers at the bar: ‘Those city folk, until they get somewhere like this, they don’t know how dark dark is.’).
I take the right fork where the road is reduced to lane width and the walk uphill continues. By now my bag has become much heavier. I change it from hand to hand, hang it over one shoulder, then the other. I reach the highest point. A stand of tall beech trees crowns this summit, looming around me. Now, to one side, there’s a light from a small cottage window, then another, as the lane begins to go fast downhill now near the group of dwellings that I come to know as Hunter’s Moon. Finally round a sharp corner and past the hedge, a long oasis of light declares itself on the left. It’s the Cott Inn, white-washed and glowing beneath its thatch with warm, inviting lights at every window. I make it just past closing time and I’ll be lucky to get a drink now. No matter, or not much matter. The main thing is arriving. I believe I know what I’ll find inside: Nigel behind the bar, with the Old Man and four of the brothers, finishing the pint they ordered just as the last bell was rung. I know who’s who and what they’ll look like. I met them all together for the first time - except for Edward, who won’t be here - at Nigel and Margaret’s wedding in London earlier in the year. One or two came up to town that recent weekend when Nigel was searching for Charles Thompson. The hazardously low doorway to the Public Bar (which takes its toll over the coming years) bears the enduring legend in Gothic script Duck or Grouse. ‘Time!’ has indeed been called. Half a dozen voices together call out a greeting to me, followed, naturally, by predictable comment about my bad timing. It’s as though I’ve walked into a place where I’ve been known for years. At the very least, in this place I’ve never seen before, I do feel, strangely, that I might belong. Over the years, I adopt the whole place and it adopts me becoming, for me, a second family in a second home.
Beer and the Macs
The Maclening family home in Newman Crescent is one of a small curve of chalet-style council houses, finished in white-painted clapboard under steeply pitched grey tiled roofs. The prospect to the rear is open, a large cultivated garden with a sharply sloping field beyond, peppercorn-rented from the Cott, stocked with the family’s chickens and a few geese. The house has two bedrooms upstairs and Mr and Mrs Mac sleep downstairs in the front room. It’s rumoured that one reason for this is to prevent accidental falling on the Old Man’s part late at night returning from the Cott. Fortunately the bathroom is also on the ground floor. Daytime family life takes place in the back living room and the kitchen with its permanently hot range, spilling onto the back step in the summer. For years, this house has hosted the growing family with all the necessary re-arrangements of bunk beds and bedroom sharings. For the period of my stay the house is already full, so Nigel and I are billeted with his sister Audrey at Redlake, up the steep hill behind the Cott.
The morning after I arrive, Nigel had gone down the hill early to start work behind the bar, clearing up from the previous night and bottling up the shelves. I wandered down to Newman Crescent with Audrey to see the Old Lady, thinking that around mid-day would be soon enough for my first pint. Saturday with no one at work, I suspected the family would be at the bar by then, mob-handed. They were. I reflected quickly on the implications of this, and was determined to take it steady. The Old Man, four brothers and me makes six of us, plus anyone else who might join the group, leading to a six pint session minimum before closing time at three. The Old Man said: ‘They’ve got Worthington ‘E’ here, Bruno, from the wood. Like a pint of that?’ I looked over the bar where he was pointing and saw the inviting little barrel, sitting there in its cradle on the floor, anxious to gravity-feed me my first pint. Nigel had already moved over to it with a glass and was about to turn the tap. ‘Yes, please.’ I’d had plenty of it at the George in Fleet Street, though I wondered whether this version from the wood might be stronger. The Old Man drank it occasionally instead of his usual brown and mild, but none of the brothers seemed to touch it. Instead, they downed gallons of light and bitter or brown and mild. Edward was said to be up to twelve pints of light and bitter or more in a single evening and not feel too bad on it.
I forget what one of the boys said about drinking ‘E’, but it appealed to my sense of the macho. I was the only one drinking it, which made me slightly special in this company. As one round followed another, all the next round-buyer had to do was call out: ‘Bruno, pint of ‘E’?’ My first lunchtime session in the Cott powered on, chatting, jokes, family stories and pints of ‘E’. I loved it all: the banter, the laughing, the uninhibited style. And I can see again only too clearly the discomforting moment when at least one full pint of ‘E’ sat on the bar untouched. It could only be mine. We were near closing time now and a bravado attempt was needed to finish off my outstanding beer before we left the pub. I picked up a pint but knew it was beyond me. I couldn’t do it, and everyone could see that I’d had magnificently too much. We opened the door to the lane at the back and all my verticals shifted and went rubbery. I could hardly walk. Lifting my head caused the world to rotate and swirl. Whatever I might register through my eyes, I could not make sense of. My arms were flung over the shoulders of Nigel and Bill, and they dragged me between them, staggering up the hill to Redlake. There I was dropped gently down into the corner of the settee and left to sleep. Powerless to do anything about it, I know I felt ashamed of it, but realised later that the family was not entirely unused to this sort of thing. Audrey herself would not have been completely amazed to find that yet another friend of her brothers had the tendency to become completely legless. I came round again quietly, sheepishly and uncertainly, just as the ITV wrestling programme was coming to an end.
1963 continues regardless
But one young man getting drunk in Devon for the first time – though certainly not the last - could never compete with the headlines in the wider world. While the Profumo affair had verged on the criminal in several respects, there was nothing ambiguous about the criminality of the Great Train Robbery in August. Some £2.5 million were lifted in mailbags when the train carrying them was stopped by a small gang just south of Leighton Buzzard. Bits and pieces of loot were discovered later, though there was never a large-scale recovery of the stolen money. It was said around Blackfriars that the man we knew as Alec, landlord of The Windmill pub immediately behind our office, had harboured a minor member of the gang for a night or two, along with a hold-all containing some of his new pocket money. Among further bad news were the murders in a coup of the President of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, and the assassination by army rebels of Iraqi President Kassim. The Yugoslavian city of Skopje was destroyed by a massive earthquake, and the Vietcong shot down 5 US helicopters over the Mekong Delta, killing 50 American troops.
By the end of the year, the Robbins Report proposed that more universities were to be established. The value of the 11+ examination was to be reviewed in the light of growing approval of comprehensive schools as a serious alternative to the existing bi-polar selection system. The Beatles’ first LP ‘Please, Please Me’ was released, Jomo Kenyatta was elected as independent Kenya’s first Prime Minister. A treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere was signed in Moscow, and Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to 200,000 people in Washington, urging a future of non-violent protest against racism. Patricia Neal won the year’s Oscar for Best Actress in the excellent Paul Newman film Hud, the Best Film was Tom Jones and Sidney Poitier became the first black actor to receive an Oscar.
Talking of films, I find tucked inside the cover of my Penguin edition of Joyce’s Dubliners my 7/6d ticket for the Metropole, Victoria on 10th November 1963 to see David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, with Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. Above and beyond those showbiz triumphs, we in Britain saw our first episode of the BBC television programme Doctor Who, with William Hartnell creaking away in the eponymous central role, piloting the then equally creaky Tardis through the infinite folds and interstices of time. As time itself revealed its unfathomable mysteries, villainous intergalactic characters emerged from its fastnesses: the Ice Men, Davros, the Cybermen, the Master and the Daleks. Only in 2005, over forty years later, the programme was revived to considerable acclaim from both new and former viewers.
The family
Audrey was the younger of the two daughters, and very close to Mother. In fact, everybody was very close to Mother in their own way. She it was, despite her complete lack of sympathy with the beer-drinking culture that riddled the family from top to bottom, whose very being contained and nurtured the family’s soul – and they all knew it. Whatever happened and whatever they may have done, their ultimate loyalty was to her. Nearly every child, as they each grew up, remained working in the locality and living either at home with her and the Old Man, or nearby in the village. At this time, only two had left home completely: Nigel to London, returning every Christmas; and Cecile, whom I rarely saw. She’d married a quiet man called John and had become post-mistress in a small Sussex village. She’d obviously rejected the Dartington family life-style, preferring a more orderly, civilised and ‘normal’ approach, where trying to drink the pub dry needn’t be top of the daily agenda. I only met her twice: once when she came down to Devon for a few days one summer many years later; again, even later, when we visited her house while Mother was spending the last few months of her life there.
Audrey came down the hill to see Mother every morning, not as a duty but because it was simply one of the family things you did. As years passed, and the boys married and lived in the village, they all did the same. There was never a day when you didn’t call in to see Mother. They came by to give her news, do a bit of gardening or other odd jobs, to seek her advice or to provide their own version of some incident involving themselves or one of the others. Audrey had married John Neville, known as ‘JJ’, a Scotsman for whom drinking a lot was a bad idea, tending to encourage belligerence. No one in the family liked him much. This, with his record of unpredictably assertive behaviour, put him rather on the edge of the family’s social territory. He never became one of them and, indeed, progressively alienated each of the brothers, one by one. A few years after Nigel and Margaret had gone Down Under, Audrey and John also emigrated, but to Western Australia.
Brother Bill had come home after several years in the Royal Navy. He’d been all over the world, had an enormous eagle tattooed across his rather narrow chest in Hong Kong and brought home an expectedly rich fund of stories. As was Bill’s way, these tales came out time and again. By my time, the point had been reached where he was encouraged to repeat some of the favourites so that one of the brothers could stand behind him, mimicking the facial expressions and gestures they’d all come to know and cherish. They did the same with the Old Man, who was another compulsive repeater of stories, literally word for word, with accompanying actions. During a session in the Cott, one brother or another would sidle up to me and say: ‘Ask the Old Man to tell you about the time during the war when . . .’ I would ask him, he’d begin the story and the rest would cluster around him, waiting for the key words, the catch-phrases and the actions, miming them behind his back. How far he and Bill knew they were being wound up I don’t know, but it doubled the entertainment value.
Bill was the senior barman at the Cott, with a line in constant patter with his customers that had to be admired for its spontaneity, speed and inventiveness. He drank steadily through the day as though it was one of the conditions of employment there. It almost was. The Cott was owned by a two-man partnership. Nigel Shortman, whose name matched his physique, was a smooth, dapper businessman type with a keen eye on the bottom line. Neville Yeadon was a big lumbering alcoholic from the Midlands. He drank brandy, Bill’s own preferred spirit, which they both got stuck into after closing time at night, not every night for Bill at that time, though he stepped up the pace damagingly over the years.
The Old Man was a master builder, often working on the same job with Edward and Gerald, who were nearer the labourer end of the trade. Somebody’s van would collect them in the early morning, each clutching a substantial lunch-box which Mother had prepared even earlier. Edward was the next younger after Bill. He was currently engaged to Liz, a schoolteacher with whom he was now living in Surrey. He returned home forever after their marriage had broken down. He remained the least intellectually developed of them all, drinking absolute gallons of beer every night. Edward’s central interest remained this and going to bed with girls. He said to me only a few years ago, in his mid-sixties, that he’d really done nothing in his life except those two things, and still saw himself as an unreformed eighteen-year-old. He was right. Ed never really grew up.
Gerald was my age, and probably more like Edward than any of the other brothers, both very gentle and kindly types. It doesn’t really need saying but he was another good drinker, and later turned out to be the gay brother. I suppose that, out of six, one of them was likely to be so. As far as I can see, not many eyelids were batted when this became apparent, at a time when eyelids might generally have been batted quite a bit. There was a little sniggering about the ways Gerald had become much more domesticated, but nothing more that I could detect. He’d met a guy called Keith Simmonds, who moved in with the Macs, and the two of them shared one of the bedrooms, even keeping a tank of tropical fish in there. Later they took a huge old London pub, the White Horse in Fetter Lane, now demolished, which I always visited on my trips to the Smoke after I’d moved to Norfolk. Eventually Keith got a job as butler to a very wealthy landowning old queen in Sussex. Gerald got the job as general handy-man, and they had their own cottage on the estate. As I heard it, when the old man died he left everything ‘to my butler’, and Keith and Gerald became millionaires.
The two youngest, Gordon and Andy, were, along with Nigel, the brightest of the brothers. They both worked at Baldwins Garage in Totnes, under a prat of a manager called Norman Rogers. They knew the work inside out and could do it blindfold. Andy was getting together with an attractive young girl called Doreen, then only just sixteen. She worked in Nigel’s office in London, and Andy had met her on a London visit. She lived with her parents Bunny and Jo in Chislehurst where they ran a greasy spoon café. Around this time Andy left Dartington to live with them for a while, and held down a job there for some time. They married and naturally returned to Dartington, where they’ve lived ever since. Even then, only about 20, Andy was capable of becoming blackly unpleasant after too many drinks and, though perfectly OK most of the time, can still put on some objectionable performances. Starting the day with a bottle of 7% cider is frequently a warning of unpredictable behaviour later.
Gordon managed not to let the booze get such a complete hold, and met a girl called Julia, who ran a very tight ship where personal relationships were concerned. She didn’t have much time for the family’s heavy drinking culture and, as time went on, less and less. For a while, they lived in a flat at Dawn, the big white-painted house behind the Cott where the entire Maclening family had once lived years before. Gordon finally got a job in Taunton, and they moved there for good, with Julia increasingly having nothing whatsoever to do with the Macs. Put all these brothers together, along with the Old Man who had taught them all he knew about it, and you had one of the strongest beer drinking teams imaginable. This animated, spontaneous and uninhibited family was my home for a week in 1963, and later on annual visits for much of the rest of my life.