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Totnes, South Hams

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The name ‘Totnes’ comes from the Saxon for fort or lookout on a ridge. It had been a fortified Saxon settlement and later appeared in Domesday Book. Its medieval and Tudor prosperity came from the export of wool and tin from the local area, especially Dartmoor. Its useful position at the head of the River Dart estuary made it both the highest navigable port and the lowest bridging place. The town is rich in architecture from the 16th century onwards, such that, in 1965, the Council for British Archaeology placed it on their list of the top forty towns ‘so splendid and precious that the ultimate responsibility for them should be regarded as a National concern’. Notable buildings include the East Gate Arch and fine merchants’ houses on Fore Street, where the town museum is housed in a Tudor example. The Butterwalk and Poultrywalk on High Street at the top of the hill are two covered pavement arcades with stone pillars that carry the overhanging storeys of the houses above. Leechwell Lane contains the three ancient wells where the spring water was believed to have medicinal properties, at one time a pilgrimage destination for lepers seeking a cure. There are good views over the town and its surroundings from the Norman castle, one of the largest examples of English motte-and-bailey construction.

 

When I first saw it in the early 1960s, Totnes was doubtless much the way it had been right through the 50s and the 40s, and before: an undeveloped town of small, dull shops, a place where nothing much seemed to have happened for decades. There was a local county set living in large secluded houses on the slopes of Dartmoor or in old village rectories and refurbished farmhouses. They favoured the town mainly on market days and stuck out like sore thumbs. Otherwise it was not a moneyed town, and it showed. You felt that, like so many English towns at the time, things had always been like this and could continue this way forever. The dramatic economic developments of the future were not even suspected. Once the M5 motorway had been built and potentially 13 million Midlands people were put into easy contact with the West Country at a stroke, things looked up considerably and fast and have never looked back. This South Hams area of Devon is now one of the country’s prime locations for second or retirement homes and holiday cottages, and Totnes has scrubbed up extremely well in the process, host to both the well-off and to thriving ‘alternative’ cultures. Like Lewes in Sussex, it even has its own currency.

 

In the early Sixties there was a shabby neon strip-lit Black and White Milk Bar down by the bus station on The Plains, a sure sign of the distressed post-war culture to be found nationwide. The pubs that ran down Fore Street, the town’s steep, narrow spine, mostly shared in this relative lack of prosperity. Today, there are bistros, coffee bars, chic arty shops and Indian restaurants, one on the bank of the River Dart, called ironically The Ganges. In the early 60s there were pubs, not themed, not half-pub half-restaurant, just simple, mainly slightly unkempt pubs. From the top, the Kingsbridge, the town’s oldest pub, the Bay Horse, which I went in possibly only once, the Bull which we often used, the King William, which, after the Cott, the boys had almost grown up in, The Oxford, now a shop, and the Royal Seven Stars Hotel, the town’s former coaching inn, now hugely renovated.

 

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Down at the club

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Across the river in Bridgetown was the big Seymour Hotel, veering periodically and always uncertainly between functioning and being closed awaiting another purchaser. It’s now a trendy riverside apartment complex. Further up the hill is the Albert, a small flourishing local, and down on the curve of the river the Steam Packet, another one popular with the boys. In those days of stricter enforcement of limited licensing hours, a pub quickly became popular with the family if it was prepared to close the curtains, turn off most of the lights, lock the doors and carry on serving after the end of the legal session. If the police should come round checking, and they tended to target some pubs more than others, the agreed story was that a ‘private party’ was in progress, at the landlord’s invitation, with no money changing hands.

 

The following year Bill and I and any of the others who were game would frequent the Sea Club, a so-called ‘supper club’ down by the Dart. It was a big old Edwardian house in its own wooded grounds, where, somehow, a chubby old lush from way back, known as Bill the Bar, had managed to get himself a so-called supper licence for the place. This meant he could serve drinks after normal closing time as long as food was being served as well. As far as we knew, he never served a supper all the time he was there. Another Mac, one of the Dartington characters called Mactaggart, who did some bar work at the Cott, used to take us down there in his rattling grey van when the Cott had closed some time after eleven. He hardly ever drank at any time, and seemed perfectly happy to sit there for hours as we knocked it back, and then drive us home afterwards. Someone suggested that he would rather do anything than actually go home because his wife was not the most delightful of people. By the time we rolled up at the Sea Club, Bill the Bar would be well into the whisky. It was part of the etiquette of the situation that we only drank spirits there, most of us on Scotch and Bill Mac on brandy, never failing to put one in for Bill the Bar.

 

Now and again our host would rightly get a bit paranoid about the police. He’d claim to know that the word was out on the street that they were going to check him tonight, probably some time after 1 am. He would be constantly looking down the drive for a set of headlights approaching. Occasionally one did, though it was only ever someone like us, known to Bill the Bar, on the same errand as us. Seeing the car coming, he would lower the grille, down the lights and shove us into the back kitchen to be very quiet indeed. As soon as he knew who it was, we were recalled to the bar, but often he thought it best to keep the grille down. This meant passing our money and drinks through the diamond-shaped apertures in the grille. Once he was so convinced and petrified that it really was the police, that he said we’d better have some ‘supper’ on the table to justify our presence. In the kitchen he presented us with cold, and probably old, meat pies from the fridge, still inside their transparent plastic wrappers, with cutlery, salt and pepper and a bottle of HP sauce. Again, nothing happened. The pies went back in the fridge, and we went back to the bar.

 

This fake supper club was the scene of one of Bill Mac’s most spectacular drinking moments. When engaged on a session, he liked to sit on a high stool at the bar. A point eventually and inevitably came when he took all the change out of his pocket, and hurled it magnanimously onto the bar with the forceful statement: ‘When I drink, everybody drinks!’ By then, you knew he was well away. One night, his conversation with Bill the Bar was so long, detailed and intense that it got in the way of his drinking. As others had been buying their rounds, several consecutive brandies had been poured into his glass but had remained surprisingly untouched. At his elbow stood this large glass full of brandy when somebody said we probably ought to be going. ‘Hang on,’ said Bill, and grabbed the glass, leaning backwards to tip its entire contents down his throat. As he leaned backwards, so the stool he was sitting on leaned backwards too. Bill went over with it, the glass never leaving his mouth. As he landed on his back on the carpet, he had finished the whole glass with not a drop spilt. From his supine position he waved the empty glass aloft triumphantly. Then we went home.

 

 

Up on the Moor

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Nigel was mainly working in the pub during the first of my many weeks in Dartington. On his day off we took the bus to South Brent, trying out the Pack Horse Inn, one of Bill’s favourites, run by a well-worn old London drinker and lecher called Arthur, and a big dingy pub on the main road called The London. As we seemed to have used the only bus of the day, we walked back home from there, picking seasonal produce from the hedges: blackberries, hazel nuts and sloes (known in South Devon as ‘bullum’).

 

Monday was always Bill’s day off, and the first one of these set the pattern for many future Mondays. By now I’d recovered from my first Saturday’s excesses and Bill’s first words to me after breakfast that morning were: ‘Want to go up on the moors, Bruno? I can show you one or two nice pubs up there.’ Between them the boys owned an old white Ford Consul convertible, which got very little use because none of them could drive and they depended on their local mate Brian Lake (Lakey) to drive it when needed. He would take Mother into town for shopping, or them to some pub or other, to the ten-pin bowling at Paignton or for a trip on the moors. Its age, lack of maintenance and infrequent use meant it was potentially unreliable. There was one afternoon when I’d taken Mother, Nigel and Bill into Totnes - Mother for shopping, us for a couple of pints while she did it. We’d parked down by The Plains and had just got it going for the return trip when it stalled, right in front of the bus station. We put the bonnet up and the three of us stood around it, looking into the engine compartment, none of us having the faintest idea what we were looking at, or what to do to get it going again. Bill got hold of some loose bit of wire, and messed about with it for a minute in a random sort of way. ‘It’s done this before,’ said Bill. ‘Yes, quite often,’ said Nigel. Mother, sitting in the back seat in silent splendour, wore the facial expression I came to recognise so often in later years. It said: ‘Absolutely typical. It doesn’t matter what they do. Let the Maclenings buy a car and it’s got to be a clapped out old thing that keeps breaking down, and no one knows how to mend it. None of them can even drive the thing.’

 

Bill’s suggestion of a day out on Dartmoor excited me. I’d never been there and, though I couldn’t have foreseen the effect, it grabbed me viscerally that day and for the rest of my life. Along with my first, admittedly romantic, sighting of Totnes railway station, the Cott Inn and all the Maclenings, Dartmoor was the other grand, magical element in my West Country conversion.  The one thing that took the edge off that first experience was the lurking possibility of the old Consul letting us down in a narrow lane, or halfway up a steep bit on the moors. In the event, it behaved as well as it could manage.

 

That day we took the route that served us later on so many Monday trips in all weathers and all seasons, and long after the Consul had gone to the knackers. First along the River Dart up and down the small rounded red-soiled hills to Buckfastleigh, following both the river and the line of the Dart Valley Railway from Totnes. Joining the A38, then far from the fast dual-carriageway strip of today, on to a point just outside Ashburton for a sharp, steep, narrow left turn and up to Holne Chase, where the road climbs high above the river in its rushing gorge. We’re in the moor now, though the road still runs between hedges and low stone walls. The first ‘place’ after Holne is Poundsgate with its old, white-washed stone Tavistock Inn. We were always too early to go in there, something I’ve still never done. So we continued up the steepening climb before descending to Dartmeet where, having flowed down independently from their sources high on the moor, the East and West Darts become one. By now the road has opened up on all sides, to sweeps of heather, gorse, granite outcrops, sheep and the famous ponies.

 

The hill up to Dartmeet from this side is steep and twisty and the only way to get the Consul up there was to gun it hard as soon as the gradient was about to become challenging and not let up. It was slow and steady but it managed. The way out on the other side is across a very narrow bridge, not enough for two cars to pass. Immediately you’re over the bridge, there’s an extremely sharp right-hand bend and an exceptionally twisty road with a 1:4 gradient. It seemed almost vertical and, despite giving it everything just over the bridge, the Consul went up there so slowly that I thought it might just stall with all the effort before we reached the top. Again, it managed, and we were on the way to Huccaby Bridge, where we could divert to the Forest Inn at Hexworthy. This area has all sorts of historical remains: a blowing house, hut circles, stone crosses and ancient enclosures, all signs of human activity from pre-historic times onwards. We were the first customers of the morning and Bill did what he often did when we arrived at a pub. He reminded the person serving us that he was Bill Mac, senior bar staff at the Cott Inn, Dartington, as though everyone all over Dartmoor and South Devon must have heard of him. Sometimes it was someone he knew but often it wasn’t. Of course, everyone had heard of the Cott, but not necessarily of Bill.

 

Then on to Two Bridges where we took the minor road into the high moor past the old powder mills towards Postbridge and the East Dart Hotel. Here we found the famous clapper bridge, one of several on the moor, a popular spot for coach parties full of day-trippers, who would - and still do - stand on the clapper bridge to have their photograph taken. Like many Dartmoor pubs, the bar contained a variety of regalia and trophies related to hunting such as stuffed foxes and large birds, horse tackle, guns and hunt-related paintings. After a pint or two there, we went on to the Ring of Bells at North Bovey, a beautiful 14th century place in a tiny village with a small green, surrounded by tall trees, and accessed by just about the narrowest, most sinuous lanes on the moor. Then down to Moretonhampstead, by which time I was ready for driving on roads that both allowed you to see if anything was coming, and would also let you pass what was coming without having to pull into the ditch or reverse to the previous passing place cut into the hedge-bank.

 

On all subsequent trips we went to the Warren House Inn, up on the higher territory beyond Postbridge, near relics of the much earlier tin mining industry. Bill and I first went there on my next visit, during the Christmas holidays of 1963. We found a small stone and timber building that, on this bleak slightly snowy morning, looked more or less derelict. Its one claim to fame then was its peat fire, apparently never allowed to go out since it was last lit one day uncountable decades before. There were no lights on inside, but the door was open. Inside we found the peat fire glowing dully, as expected. The bar was not much more than a hatchway and the whole interior had the look of a run-down 18th century wayside inn. A tall middle-aged man appeared from somewhere, clearly surprised to find that he had customers at this deadest time of the year. ‘We’re just up from the Cott Inn at Dartington. Bill Mac.’ The landlord wasn’t hostile but not the slightest bit impressed by this. He didn’t have any draught beer at all and reached behind him for a few dusty bottles. It really was as though no one had been here for months as he wiped the dust off them so we could see which we might like. I don’t recall what we had, but we each had one bottle and a bit of very desultory chat with mine host, and got on the road again.

 

When we came here the following summer, all was changed. The Warren House had been bought and refurbished to an unrecognisably high standard. Apparently the boys had got wind of the new management and the new life of the pub, and had made a few trips up here. Its new owner was yet another Charles, a rampant queen who deployed the full repertoire of stereotypical camp mannerisms. He claimed to have lived on Dartmoor for something like twenty years, and he may have done, though no one appeared to know what he’d been doing, or exactly where he’d been doing it, before coming to the Warren House. He spoke lovingly in his faux-Chelsea style about life ‘on the Moor’ as though born and bred there, but it always sounded false. He dressed foppishly, wore silk cravats with loud shirts, check jackets and cavalry twill daks, smoked with a cigarette holder, and drank spirits like the proverbial fish – another landlord who preferred every round bought to include one for him. The place was obviously thriving and its additional attraction was to stay open until 3.00 pm, while all the other pubs on our moors route closed at half-two. For that good reason, wherever we’d been earlier in the day, this was the place to come to last. As with so many outfits in the pub and catering trade, three years later Charles had moved on.

 

The game to play in these days of pubs being closed in the afternoons was Spot the Market Day. At least one pub in a local town centre would be open all afternoon on market day, and I think it was Monday for Newton Abbott. Bill and I certainly ended up there more than once at the end of our moors trip, having broken off for something to eat at a respectable café called Madge Mellors. Plympton hosted us once or twice and we always used The Bull on Totnes market day. It was run in a very friendly and welcoming way by a little chap called Jack and his wife, where they had a bar game I’d never seen before or anywhere else, called Close the Box, something to do with rolling dice in compartments. They still have it at the Albert today, so it may be an exclusively South Devon thing. The Bull was a staging post during one particularly long day when I calculated afterwards that we’d been on the go, gently drinking with gaps for driving between places, for about fourteen hours. It began with the Dartmoor trip, then off the moor and eventually back to The Bull, up to the Cott at six, and finally down to the Sea Club at eleven thirty until the early hours.

 

 

Pubs, people and a new life

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We went to other pubs. Gerald and Gordon favoured the Carew Arms for a time because they admired the landlady’s charming daughter, though she never seemed to be there when I went with them. This was always a good spot for an afternoon curtain-drawing. Despite the local historical importance of its name, the pub is now called something else entirely irrelevant. For a long time The Ship at Ugborough was popular, with its nice high stools for Bill to sit on. Peter Fitzgerald came here on his one famous visit to Devon, when the seasoned drinkers had to admit they’d never seen one person shift so much whisky. One evening there Bill was chatting to a fairly plump girl for some time. He’d reached the stage when his small change was littered all over the bar and he was buying a round for everyone in sight. When he’d got all our orders placed, he turned to the fat girl and said: ‘Now what would you like, lumpy?’ In a single movement, and without a word, she got down from her stool, lifted Bill bodily into the air and dropped him on the floor.

 

The Pack Horse at South Brent was one of Bill’s chief favourites. Arthur ran a flourishing pub with probably little regard for many of the legal aspects of the trade. He was a great drinker himself, a great laugher, an ex-South Londoner in his fifties at least, with an undisguised longing for succulent young women. It was here that Bill met the woman who became his wife. He and I went there one morning to find Arthur preparing the bar for the strip show he was putting on that evening. The only people in the bar when we arrived were an attractive Scandinavian blonde and a very dark young woman of Mediterranean complexion. We discovered that the blonde, called Venna, was the wife of a naval officer who was currently away at sea and the darker girl, Tessa, was her Maltese au pair. Venna was bored stiff living in her house at North Huish and she and Tess had come over to South Brent on the bus looking for something slightly more interesting than just sitting at home with nothing to do. They’d found us.

 

We sat and talked and had drinks with them. It became clear from what was said that Venna might well tend towards the alcoholical temperament, and said that her husband would flay her if he ever discovered that she’d come out to the pub. When Arthur closed up for the afternoon, we drove them back to their house in the Consul. Venna made sandwiches and Bill and I both promptly fell asleep on the settee. We met them at Arthur’s strip show that night and Bill managed to make a tremendous impression on the Maltese au pair. They arranged to meet at some other pub the following evening, and the one after that, which needed me to go along as wallflower to drive them there and back. One of the current top ten on the jukebox took Bill’s fancy, which he immediately related to this romantic business. It would remind him of these evenings forever, and, to the evident regret of everyone in the pub, he played it about twelve times every time we went there. That was it: the relationship developed fast, and Bill and Tess ended up married to one another until her premature death more than 40 years later.

 

Following that first visit in the autumn of 1963, I seemed to have moved seamlessly into the vacant place left by Nigel’s departure for New Zealand. Bill and I saw him off from London Docks, going on to have a seriously beery day in London. Each year I went down to Dartington for a week at Christmas and for a week or two in the summer. The Christmas visits were always exceptional in some way, and deserve separate treatment. In the summers I sometimes worked behind the bar myself, including one notable summer when there was nothing else to do as it rained non-stop, day and night, for the entire fortnight. For several years we went sea fishing with Gordon to Paignton and Beesands, over to the little old pub on Burgh Island, up and down the Devon lanes from one village pub to the next, right across Dartmoor time and again, all round the edges of it too, and the length of Fore Street, Totnes. My more serious discoveries on Dartmoor, apart from its pubs, came much later.

 

When I had to leave at the end of that first visit, all the boys wanted to come to the station to see me off. Lakey agreed to drive us all down there in the back of his van. Having lingered a moment too long in the Cott, we arrived at Totnes station to see the train just leaving the platform. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Lakey, ‘I’ll beat it to Newton Abbott and you can catch it there.’ Lakey drove like one possessed, up and down the rounded hills and through the treacherous twists at speeds the van didn’t know it could reach. As the train drew in at Newton Abbott station, the boozy bunch of Maclenings, Lakey and I rushed onto the platform to greet it.  Then I was away, waving from the window until they were all out of sight.

 

Settled into my seat, I began to recall it all, and to reflect on it, and knew that something important had happened to me. At that time in my mid twenties I couldn’t conceive of my life without those rich and sometimes wild weeks in Devon. But the question remains: how and why did it all make such a deep and lasting impression on me, one that would last, through its repetition year after year, for my entire life? I’ve already suggested that, without knowing it, I was probably ready for something, wanting something, anything that would enrich my life to make it fuller than it was. I know I was mildly frustrated for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on. It was possibly similar to the motivation that made me give up my job years later and embark on a full-time degree course at age thirty-two. Some kind of different life was needed, an adventure that would absorb me and take me beyond the self that I knew. I was sometimes convinced that I might die young, disappointed and unfulfilled.

 

That first Dartington trip did the trick, and in returning – and always being made so completely welcome - at least twice a year, I reinforced and built on it every time. I was telling a friend about it recently, and he said that, apart from anything else, it sounded as though I was never really anywhere near sober for that entire week - or for any of the weeks after the first one. I have to admit that it must be part of the answer. Inhibitions relaxed, I was free-wheeling, released, ready for whatever turned up, absorbing new influences spontaneously. Yes, pretty well everything was viewed through the glowing haze generated by a few pints of bitter, sometimes rather more.

 

The key to it all is the people, the family. I’d fallen under the spell of a big family, unconventional - to me, at least - which made such a dramatic contrast with my own home background. I was the only child of serious, disciplined, intellectually inclined lower middle class parents. I’d lived away from home for a few years now and had let rip to some extent, developing the structures of my new independence. But the background influence of my upbringing was still very strong. I certainly hadn’t rebelled. I visited my parents regularly, received the wisdom of their world-view, and their presence was unquestionably embedded in my deeper psyche. Now, with no effort on my part, I’d been drawn – instantly and completely, it seemed - into a family group that could not be more different or more thrilling. I shared the brothers’ sense of humour and was always able to make my own contribution to whatever bit of nonsense was going on. The unwritten rules of how a family operates differ considerably between families. I soon sensed the way this one worked and fell in with it easily, and it refreshed me.

 

Before I realised it, I’d become an honorary Maclening brother, expected, like Nigel, to be visiting them once or twice a year as he had done. ‘You should call us Mother and Father like everyone else, Bruno,’ the Old Lady told me, ‘then we all know where we are.’ Through those few warm words, I’d received a new identity. (Her Christmas cards to us over the years were always signed “From your Devon Mother”). If the family was the key to it, then Mother was the key to the key. I loved her, as everyone else did. Through the coming years, she and the Old Man would come out to the front gate and see me off as I went away in Reg Denham’s taxi to catch the train back to London, having always stayed a day or two more than I’d first intended. There were tears in my eyes every time, as there are now, writing about it. The urge to go down there is still strong, not quite as strong now as during the Old Lady’s lifetime, but magnetic nonetheless. Regardless of all the changes over fifty years, the sight of the Cott Inn, a walk up Fore Street and a day on Dartmoor will always bring it rushing back, reviving and restoring memories too dear to lose.

 

 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Not very long after Mother’s death in 1991, the house in Newman Crescent was demolished - the only one as it turned out - to provide access for a small development of bijou maisonettes for incomers, built on the sloping field behind the house where the family had kept their few chickens and geese for years. To my mind, the new settlers arrived here forty years too late and missed all the best of it.