Hello everyone. I hope you’re all well and finding life pleasant. Things are easier for me too and I’ve been able to get out and about and make the most of a week of wonderful warm, sunny days—as if summer just turned around and looked back as she was strolling away from autumn. Sharp mornings have given way to soft, golden-lighted days, heat in the sun and a last minute, lazy feel to life. Days just begging you to be outside.
On Tuesday we packed up lunch and set off early to spend the day on Dartmoor. A place we both love and the bright, clear day was perfect to make the most of the wide open landscapes. We drove down to Yelverton first, skirting the moor and visiting Buckland Abbey, erstwhile home of Sir Francis Drake, and hidden in a valley in the south.
The Abbey rests on eight hundred years of history, beginning life as a Cistercian monastery founded in 1278, and run by wealthy monks as a religious centre and a farmed estate with a Great Barn to store wool, fleece, cattle hides, and food crops. It all came to an end during Henry VIII’s Reformation, when the monastery was dissolved as a religious house and altered to became a 16th century Tudor mansion. Owned first by the Grenvilles (explorer and coloniser) and then sold to Sir Francis Drake, he of Elizabethan hero fame, sea captain, privateer (pirate) and slave trader. The first man to circumnavigate the globe; the treasure he acquired on this voyage allowed him to purchase Buckland. If you know your English history you will know that he defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. Buckland remained in the ownership of the Drake family and their descendants until 1946 when it was handed to the National Trust.
After a coffee we drove up on to the moor. Another of my special places. It’s wonderfully barren here, along the road between Yelverton and Princetown. At this time of year it’s a yellow/green/brown landscape of moor grass, tussocky and thick, soggy in places, very few trees, and the feeling is wild and free and open. We walked up to Leeden Tor and it felt like being at the top of the world. We saw no-one, a few sheep, a few ponies, a kestrel hunting over the common and a weasel darting between the rocks as we arrived. From the rocks there are views of many other tors - King’s Tor, Sharpitor, Ingra Tor, Black Tor, Leather Tor…and the huge TV mast at South Hessary—a landmark for miles around—you get a real sense of the high moor even though the road is only half a mile away. I find it awesome, in the true awe-inspiring sense of a word that has largely lost its meaning. If it was meant to be used anywhere, it is here on these wild expanses—beautiful, raw, dangerous, unforgiving. I don’t like taking photographs up here, it feels somehow far too grand and magical to be captured in a digital oblong—diminishing, somehow.
I’m reading so much at the moment that there’s scarcely any time to write. Every time I look at Substack Notes there are great recommendations for books that I know I’m going to love. This week
(who last week caused me to buy four new books) introduced me to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, and made a novel sound so inviting (and so me) that it went immediately on The List. And then , she of the glorious Substack that is The Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society, wrote about F M Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter and I was hooked again.I’ve just finished reading Avril Horner’s biography of Barbara Comyns, A Savage Innocence. Anyone who reads me regularly will know that I love Barbara Comyns’s novels and I waited patiently to get to this biography, which I’ve had for a few months begging me to read it. There’s an excellent review of it here by Norma Clarke. It’s a fascinating story of a curious life. I had no idea how autobiographical Comyns’s novels were. The hapless, rackety lives of her female protagonists often mirror her own hapless, rackety life. She seems to have made random, ill-thought through decisions about everything—(un)suitable husbands; (un)suitable lovers; where and how to live; what to do with her children. My head was spinning at the number of times she moved house for instance, it seemed like every few months she was moving into a new flat, or house, or part of a house, in London, in the countryside, in Ibiza, in Barcelona, in Andalucia—it was a full-time job; goodness knows how she found the time to write. Her first husband was a feckless, petulant Peter Pan of an artist who didn’t factor in supporting a wife and child to his idea of marriage, and they soon split up. She had a long term affair (and a child) with a man who was not available and, interestingly, was a life-long ‘friend’ of his more permanent partner. The (wealthy) more permanent partner was totally stoic about Barbara and the child and often supported them herself with handouts and paying for rent and education etc etc. Meanwhile, Barbara harried her with unpleasant letters, claiming precedence over her in her lover’s affections. During the war she became the lover of what then might have been called a ‘spiv’—buying and selling, interior decorating, ‘restoring’ grand pianos, doing up bomb-damaged houses—he became the inspiration for her novel Mr Fox. Her second husband was also rather weak when it came to supporting his dependents (and Barbara seems to have been a life-long dependent on somebody). Working in the Foreign Office when she met him, he was an associate of Kim Philby, was ‘let go’ and subsequently ‘watched’ suspiciously for many years. He failed to obtain any meaningful work after that, a bit of article writing here and there, short-term office work, teaching, and they lived pretty much hand-to-mouth, even when her own writing became relatively successful. So, I still love her books, but goodness she would have driven me mad. I was surprised by her helplessness and total reliance on men. I know we are talking about different times (1920s onwards), but crikey, she could be annoying! Avril Horner has done a great job of showing us the real woman who was not only behind the books, but inside them too. I recommend it.
Yesterday I picked up a set of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels, including the short stories. It’s many years since I’ve read the originals, having become very familiar with the BBC adaptations with Joan Hickson. I’m looking forward to making my way through them and reacquainting myself with the original narrators. I’m on a bit of a mission to obtain all of Christie’s crime/thriller novels and so I am replacing those old ones that I have with new sets where I can, and when I can afford it. So many books, so many books.
That’s it for this week. I’ll write soon. x
Lolly Willowes is a top favourite of mine. Try “One a thing Leads To Another” as well. A collection of short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I’m heading to Dartmoor at the beginning of October.
Thank you for the full and candid review of the Comyns biography. I’d like to read it, but I have so many books TBR, including a few by Comyns I haven’t read. My favorite of hers so far is Spoons.