Staverton, Devon
8 — 12 JULY 2021
8
After psychoanalysis on Zoom — in my mother’s study, no less — I feel a little shaken. I tell Phillipa that this is an odd space to be in; I am looking around and examining the art, books etc, letting my thoughts rest on them. A wooden statue by Sylvette David, a sombre picture of me as a little boy etc.
After, I go to fetch good eggs for lunch as I plan to make omelettes for Faye’s arrival, with a little salad, wine. The Walled Garden have none in their box, so I go to Louis’ instead, and see her in the garden pruning a rose bush. “The eggs are brilliant at the moment!” I shout, and she, ever dour, like her brothers, replies, “Well, then something will happen and the chickens will stop laying. And then I don’t know what to do.” “Make stew!” She laughs a great deal at this. I buy 18 eggs, some for omelettes, some for mayonnaise.
We are all rather merry when Faye arrives, tumbling from her taxi with a gigantic suitcase First, we take her around the garden in the insipid sunshine. “This is the meadow… this is my vegetable patch… this is where Lo’ had her 16th birthday… over there is the copse, across the leat is the railway.”
The omelettes, simple but with excellent eggs, are delicious and we all drink quite a lot of red wine, even my mother, and after lunch the girls go swimming and I — head heavy from lunchtime drinking — cycle to Totnes for a few more ingredients. Home and try to cook a little, but the time to leave for the pub to watch the football comes soon, and we’re in a car with Casper and Pippi zooming along toward Bovey Tracey, “the gateway to the Moor.”
The game is exhilarating and hopeful and we are all shocked by how much we care, jumping up and down with fag in mouth shouting. Faye gets up to pee just before the first goal, which is scored as she opens the door, and from then-on she is greeted as the pub’s mascot.
9
Tonight I’m cooking the first of my supper clubs at the Old Bakehouse in Totnes, a beautiful small space, with white tiles marked by age and soot and, in the corner, the old bread oven. I am still surprised that people will pay me to cook for them, since cooking is such intuitive joy, and more surprised that I put myself through something horrible like trying to write.
Spend the day cooking, with Faye and Lo’ popping in and out, chatting, demanding food, making pasta, Faye draws me an illustrated menu on a blackboard. The dinner itself goes incredibly well, with Calypso, my sister, helping me — a calm and very collected waiter, very sensible and very diligent. I hear lots of talk of mortgages and favourite Netflix shows from the dining room — everyone seems very childish here until they are suddenly entirely grown up. The menu is:
Butter bean & king oyster broth
Strozzapreti & sage pesto w/ Cornish ‘parmesan’
Ricotta & fennel galette, golden mayonnaise, red salad
Apple cake & thick, cold, custard
(I undercooked the strozzapreti ever so.)
10
I wake and am somehow not hungover, nor tired, but very well-rested. I go down to the kitchen, and cook, and cook. Everything goes smoothly, aside from me leaving the custard til the last minute, and having to put it in the freezer to chill.
About five and I get a call from Felix, who's driving from his uncle’s in Dorset, — he has parked his car at the station and is walking up the hill toward Dartington. Later I hear that my grandmother had watched him do this from her window; and that he sat on his suitcase and rolled down the hill after talking to me.
This evening’s dinner goes off very well — the crowd are happier and more talkative than the night before, there is more generalised excitement, a hubbub, clinking of glasses and laughter. Felix helps me in the kitchen, wonderful friend, though bossy. Lo’ says she spends the evening telling Faye the plots of horror movies, Faye sitting there like an excited little girl. Her friend from art school has come to the dinner: she has the broadest Devon accent I’ve ever heard, used to wrestle men for money and is now a private investigator. Home and we drink wine and play cards (some people being a little brash.)
11
Wake earlyish to the noise of F— bashing around downstairs, talking to my father — his inability to sleep is a cause of consternation. We have bacon, eggs and then drive his MG to Riverford where we buy a chicken etc, including a two foot long sausage, and wine for lunch. There is nothing quite like driving in the passenger seat of a little, loud, fast car and I imagine we look like the most lovely young gay couple.
For lunch we have snails, artichoke hearts, broad beans and cabbage to start and then a gigantic, extremely delicious chicken, cream and sage gravy, boiled carrots, steamed cabbage and roast potatoes. Grandma comes, so with Faye, Felix, Calypso, Casper, M&P, Lo’ and I we have a table of ten, a terribly happy one too. Grandma says that when she turned 21 her mother gave her a set of very ‘spicy’ underwear. She is being very sweet. Faye is picked up by her taxi, and we have a sort-of hazy drunk then sobering afternoon, then to the pub with a laptop to watch the football. We make friends with the chefs and watch the final, horrible penalty shoot out on their gigantic TV in their living quarters. Not something I ever realised, that the staff of isolated country pubs often have little sleeping cells because of the difficulty of commuting for their long shifts. Walk home deflated, drunk.
12
A little, but not terribly, hungover from the pub, I eat a sausage and black pudding sandwich with Felix before he’s off to his mother’s, in Wiltshire.
Go through the process of readying myself for a long cycle ride and set off at about 11:30. Within minutes I’m met by a torrent of warm summer rain beside the Old Schoolhouse, stand beneath a thick tree and watch it. Healing rain. Then up out of the village, through Littlehempston and over the untrammelled road that goes either to Berry Pomeroy or Totnes — I take a wrong turn and end up at the top of Bridgetown. This turns out to be a good thing as I’ve never been this far up, save driving past, and I enjoy peaking at the many beautiful Victorian villas, the most interesting of which is a house called Wrinklehorn, which has a veranda looking onto the Dart. To Berry Pomeroy then — before getting into the village proper there is a graveyard, sans Church — an overflow I suppose — which is very peaceful and calm. There seems to have been a fashion for rough-hewn pieces of stone to act as gravestones in the 1930s and 40s, and the one I look up is for a wealthy family, the husband being the son of the Baron whose building firm built the houses of parliament. Then to the church proper and find it locked up, but surrounded by rather beautiful houses. What I did not know was that Longcombe cottage, in a hamlet up the road, is said to have been the venue for William of Orange’s first parliament. I shall have to return.
Out of the village and down the long path to the Castle — odd for a castle to be so far downhill, feels counter intuitive, and then one comes to it, nestled before a little lawn with thick forest and steep cliffs with marshland below them — a limestone outcrop about an impenetrable valley. It is very pretty: it is of the English picturesque, so hidden here. A sign declares that it is looked after by English Heritage but still owned by “his Grace” the Duke of Somerset. The current Somersets used to live in a lovely house in the village and take in students from the Spanish Language school. On benches outside two families chat, a woman from Hartlepool says that she will never come back to Devon after having been there for a week, with rain every day. Sad since the forecast is now brilliant. Down into the valley and from there the castle takes on its real beauty, rising high above ponds and bright green foliage. Down a lane I find a little house, all alone, with horses and giant rhubarb: here is deep deep country. Away I go.
Up steep hills, passing thatched cottages. Stop in at Red Post Equestrian to look at the fetishistic horse-equipment, then to Broad Hempston where I buy bread and a local cheese with a Cornish name, St Endellion, after a village there — it is deliciously creamy, and I find the packet’s lack of boasting or description very gratifying, very local. This I take to the churchyard, where I sit beneath a tree and wash it down with ale from Dartmoor. While I sit there an older chap on a bike comes in, and we chat a little; he tells me he would like to rip Boris Johnson’s head off and stuff it down his throat.
Back at home and my mother tells me that my grandmother has stage 3 cancer.
Sleep very well after cycling twenty or so miles.
Jago Rackham is a writer.