On a typically gloomy Midlands morning in November 1975, having earlier shoe-horned everything we owned into an extremely second-hand 1960-something Sunbeam Imp, and having exchanged hugs and goodbye kisses with Maisie, Pauline’s always-welcoming mum, we drove through the narrow streets of Strelley’s post-war housing estate with its dull-red brick terraces, distinguished only by the green, blue and red woodwork on window frames and doors and headed down Bilborough Road to the A52 and all points south and west towards our new life in Devon.
A few weeks earlier, shortly after Lindinger Gold, our home for the past few months, had tied up in Sharpness at the top of the Bristol Channel, we left our untroubled sea-life behind us. We had joined the ship in Turkey where I relieved a first engineer who had to return home ill. What followed was three busy shipboard months which included stopovers in Bulgaria, Spain, Amsterdam and West Africa, all of which are stories for another day. It was time to think about “settling down” and behaving like grown-ups, so we said goodbye to our Danish shipmates, and I began the serious business of looking for a “real” job.
With my engineering background, and earlier experience in Australia in water treatment plant design, I landed an interview as a project engineer with a small company in Plymouth. The ensuing meeting with the owner of the business went well, I was offered a position and subsequently accepted it.
These were exciting times for us. We bought a car and started preparing for the next part of our life. Who knew what lay ahead of us – a mortgage certainly, and children eventually – but I must not get ahead of myself.
Here we were, with a six-hour journey in front of us, a tiny car laden with our paltry possessions, and perhaps a hundred pounds or so in the bank. What could possibly go wrong?
We were about 45 minutes into our journey when the car began coughing and misfiring. With its nasty little rear engine, I may have missed the warning signs, but after stopping to look under the bonnet (or in this case, the boot), it was clear even to me that the steam and the overpowering smell of burning oil were strong indications that the engine was overheating. I would later learn that this was a notorious fault with this disagreeable little car. After allowing the engine to cool down a little, we slowly spluttered our way into the nearby town of Burton upon Trent where we were lucky enough to find a garage with a mechanic who seemed to know what he was doing. It turned out that we had blown a head gasket. Naturally this required removal of the car’s engine, one of the many irritating features of a car where Step One of even the most basic of tasks appears to have been “first remove engine from car”. A replacement head gasket was of course not immediately available, and with the possibility that further damage had been done to the engine which might require additional work, we clearly would not be travelling any further that day.
There was no point in making a fuss about delay and additional expense. Neither of us knew anything about that part of East Staffordshire, so we decided to make the most of it. We found a nice old pub in the town centre, arranged accommodation for ourselves and spent the rest of the day exploring. That evening we made the most of sampling what it was that Burton was famous for – beer!
The car was ready at a reasonable time the following day, and we had a comparatively trouble-free trip the rest of the way.
By way of a foot-note, and with apologies to Imp enthusiasts everywhere (of which I am sure there are many), it may appear that I am a little severe in my disparagement of the car. Let me be clear – I loathed that car. It was without doubt the most unreliable and awkward car I have every owned (and I include in this list a Renault 12 and a Triumph 2000, both of which were not without fault). It was a nightmare to service, completely unreliable and a complete rust-bucket. I would eventually have to pay to have it taken away, there being no chance that I would ever find a buyer for it. There, I have said it – my cleansing is complete.
My new employer, Aqueous Systems Limited specialised in small to medium sized commercial and industrial water treatment systems.
Many of the company’s clients were located around the Greater London area where the water is very hard and alkaline due to the chalk and limestone geology in the region. In order to prevent scaling of pipework and vessels containing heated water, particularly where boilers are involved, treatment of the water feeding these systems was (and still is) essential. There are many processes which are used to accomplish this, however it is not the purpose of this story to provide a treatise on purification and treatment, there being many more educational and informative resources available than I could ever produce.
That said, I worked with a group of enthusiastic and inspirational people during our three years in Devon and was involved in a number of projects which I’m looking forward to re-visiting in these pages. This will involve talking about some of the engineering challenges we faced, but I promise to keep the nerd-factor as manageable as possible. I don’t think I have yet been described by any of my peers as a “propeller-head”.
But first, we had to find somewhere to live.
We knew little of Plymouth and the surrounding parts of South Devon. We had earlier researched a couple of bed and breakfast establishments and were attracted by the opportunity of a farmhouse stay just outside the village of Cornwood about half an hour’s drive east of Plymouth on the edge of Dartmoor in the South Hams District. It was perfect. We could not have wished for a better introduction to the Devon countryside if we had written our own specification. Our hostess was exactly how we might have imagined her - a plump country farmer’s wife, full of smiles and good humour who made her own traditional clotted cream, the likes of which we had never tasted before, and have never experienced since. She showed us how it was made, but other than being aware that the process required lots of cows and patience, the knowledge has long since escaped me.
It took us no time at all for us to decide that this was the area where we wanted to live, and we started looking at local properties. With a couple of tiny shops, a white-faced pub that was once a coaching house, a school and parish church, Cornwood was a tiny village with a population of a few hundred. A small housing estate with modern bungalows and recent model cars cluttering footpaths was on the southern edge of the town but the village itself with its grey stone houses and narrow walled roads, leading north across the moor to Yelverton and Tavistock and south to Ivybridge and the dual-carriageway connecting Plymouth and Exeter, seemed just the place to be. After a few weeks of inspections and false starts, we found the perfect end-of-terrace home, a mile down the road from Cornwood in the even smaller village of Lutton.
I had a job, we had a few pounds in the bank and our prospects were looking good. The bank agreed, and with that we made an offer of a little over £11,000 for what was to be our home for the next three years. Our offer was accepted, and we were in business. So-called for a feature of the local countryside, our new home even had its own name, “Penn Beacon”. We felt quite privileged having an address that was simply: Penn Beacon, Lutton, Devon.
We loved Lutton. From our back door, it was just three minutes’ walk up the Old Road to the Mountain Inn, an old-style, two-room pub with earthen walls and a roaring fireplace. It was the perfect spot for a quick pint before dinner, and if you were into “Real Ale”, which as someone weaned on Aussie lager, I certainly was not, there was an oak barrel of Wadworth 6X sitting on the counter for the connoisseur. I’m sure it was an excellent ale for the aficionado, but to me it was more like a meal, than a refreshing drink – and even in winter, room temperature has never been how I like my beer. But enough of trying to stir up more controversy. Whatever the tipple, the Mountain Inn was the perfect spot. Sadly, the Mountain closed a few years ago – and at the time of writing there appears little prospect of it re-opening any time soon.
A ten minute walk up the hill from our home took us on to the moor. Admittedly, if we were to travel too far in one direction, we’d be in danger of running into the moonscape which is the Lee Moor China Clay mines but given that Dartmoor National Park covers nearly 1,000 square kilometres, and that the mine was the biggest employer in the region, it would have hardly been fitting for newcomers such as ourselves to carp.
We also loved Lutton because to our surprise and delight, the social life of the local villages was everything we could have wished for. We had not been in the house for more than a few hours, when we had the pleasure of meeting Paul and Deanna, our next door neighbours. Their house was an older established twin gables semi-detached home on a small block between our set of four terraced houses and the local chapel. Paul was a foreman at the clay mine. A generous, gentle man with a love of classical music and the odd pint. He could regularly be found at the Cornwood Inn playing euchre dominoes with the same group he’d sat with for years. Occasionally, if we were out together on an errand which took us past the local pub, I might suggest dropping in for a quick pint. “You got to cut a shovel stick when you sees one,” he’d say, “Mine’s a pint of Bass, thanks Mike.”
Deanna was the local postmistress and since the job included delivering the local mail, there was no one in the village that she didn’t know – and she had a kind word for all of them. We became great friends, and over forty years later we continue to exchange Christmas Cards and keep in touch. A few years ago, when revisiting the area during a brief holiday, we caught up with them both at the Cornwood Inn. Deanna’s open-hearted smile hadn’t changed at all – as soon as we arrived, she embraced us warmly saying, “Oh my, she don’t look a day older, do she Paul!”
Paul was a passionate gardener who had a small allotment a few yards up the hill from his home. He also looked after a couple of plots for one or two of the older villagers. We would often open our back door on a Sunday morning to find a selection of turnips, carrots, runner beans and cabbages on our doorstep. We never tasted anything better. So inspired were we by Paul’s energy for horticultural activities, that we began developing our own little patch in the postage-stamp size area at the side of our house which we flattered to call a garden. Paul provided wonderful advice and inspiration but there was one stomach-churning moment when, instead of the regular selection of fresh vegetables on the door step, Paul generously chose to leave a wheelbarrow load of very fresh manure outside the back door – a delightful gesture, but one which would have made me even cheerier had this act of kindness not taken place the morning after a very late night celebrating at a neighbour’s birthday party. I don’t think either of us ventured any where near the back yard that day. Still, it wasn’t long before we had our own assortment of runner beans and cabbages, cherished and grown by our own inexpert hands. Clearly, they were never going to win any prizes at the local fare, but we were impressed.
The nearest shops of any size were at Plympton, about four or five miles away through the villages of Sparkwell and Hemerdon. In my life, I’ve never travelled on roads as narrow as these. They may have been adequate before the arrival of the internal combustion engine, but there are parts where even a horse-rider has to back up when coming upon one going in the opposite direction. Fortunately, there were many gateways and turn-ins, but even in the Imp, an encounter with a red double-decker bus or a large tractor could result in a lengthy spell in reverse gear.
We had been in Penn Beacon for a year. We painted the lounge room – in the process surviving our first marital disagreement, having discovered that thixotropic paint, for all its wonderful quick-drying, drip-free properties, in fact dries so fast that it constantly looks patchy – leaving us to abandon our miserable efforts, going to bed in dismay, expecting to strip and repaint the following day, only to wake the following morning to a perfectly painted room.
We created our own alcoholic beverages – revolting carrot wine and wine made from various other fruits and vegetables –pressed on to our friends who graciously consumed it without once asking how it was that in this deepest corner of Devon, we had managed to collect so much possum piss.
Pauline was secretary of the Cornwood Ladies’ Darts Team, and I had managed a few games with the Cornwood Village Cricket Team, where I failed in almost every respect to distinguish myself, much to the disappointment of the club who may have thought that anyone with an Australian accent ready to play cricket would at least be able to take a few scalps from a long run-up.
I will eventually get on to the topic of Aqueous Systems and the new job, but I need a few minutes longer on the topic of gardening and the prize cabbage. I say prize cabbage, but in truth, it was prized only by me. We had planted a number of seedlings and slowly watched them sprout and then slowly die off either from lack of skilled attention, or garden slugs or birds – but there was a single exception. A sturdy specimen which, despite my clumsy attempts at brassica husbandry, managed to bravely develop from a small cluster of delicate green leaves slowly winding into a small tight ball, each day growing a little stronger, and a little sturdier soon to be ready for a triumphant harvest.
We were delighted that year to have my father visiting us for a few weeks. He had been unable to attend our wedding in Nottingham a couple of years earlier but had since retired and having been bitten by the travel bug a few years earlier, decided to join us for a visit. At the same time, Pauline’s mother, Maisie had come down to Devon to stay with us for a few days, so we had the welcoming situation of having two parents staying with us at the same time – an interesting dynamic. Maisie had been widowed for a few years, and my father had been separated from my mother for about ten years. They became good companions, and most evenings found their way to the Mountain Inn to enjoy the local nightlife.
It also happened that during this time, Pauline had a minor medical issue that required attention, and as luck would have it, she had to spend a night in hospital for a small procedure which coincided with a work-related overnight stay in Leeds for myself. That evening Dad and Maisie visited Pauline in hospital. As Pauline describes it to me, they sat like statues during the visiting hour, barely saying a word until Pauline asked them if they were getting enough to eat. “Oh yes,” said Maisie, “we found a nice little cabbage in the garden which we had for dinner tonight. It was lovely.” I was very proud of the way I held back the tears when Pauline broke the news to me later the following day.
When we look back at the places we have been and things that we have done together, our fondest memories are always of the three short years that we spent in Devon.
Soft sometimes damp, warm summers on the moor (avoiding cows, because Pauline says they can’t be trusted), occasionally visiting the beach at Bigbury or Torbay, constantly aware that summer was for keeping away from traffic-filled roads full of holiday-makers from the north and the east and cold winters, sliding across the moor on roads where the snow was often several inches thick to watch Pauline throw a few darts in The Royal Oak at Yelverton or The Volunteer at Yealmpton (always pronounced “Yamp’m”).
Evenings in the Guild Hall at Plymouth with Paul and Deanna watching the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and later socialising with one or two of their performers, because one of the second violins was related to Paul who always billeted them when they were in town.
Jiving at rock night at the Windmill Pub at Lee Mill with Paul and Deanna and Jane and Ian and more of the gang, where no matter how cold it was outside, all of us inside were hot and sweaty grinding away to Queen and The Supremes.
Shovelling six feet of snow away from the front door, during the worst winter to hit the southeast of England in forty years – excited because the roads were buried and there was no chance either of us could get to work for at least three or four days.
And I know, that when we go back to visit, I’ll walk into the Cornwood Inn, and one of the locals, playing dominoes in the Snug, will look up as I pass his table and say, “Alright, Mike?” as though I had never been away.
To be continued…
