A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby

scrambling, prodding with long bits of driftwood, and some stone throwing Lewington, who was young and active, managed to dislodge several fine specimens, making his blue serge chauffeur’s suit rather muddy in the process. Altogether, apart from not having been allowed to bathe when we reached Lyme Regis, from my point of view it had been a thoroughly successful day.¹

      (The inn at which we stayed that night, or another very similar inn, was the scene, more than thirty years later, of a disgraceful incident in which I was myself involved. Not long after the Second World War, while on a walking holiday with a great friend along the coasts of Dorset and Devon in the depths of winter, the two of us arrived at Lyme Regis where we put up at one or other of the inns. It happened to be New Year’s Eve and, in the course of the evening, having fulfilled a lunatic ambition to visit every pub in the town, and previously weakened by having walked some twenty-five miles, we became stupendously drunk. It was as a result of this that in the early hours of the morning, being incapable of finding the light switches, we both peed down the bend in the staircase from an upper floor on to what I recall to have been the visitors’ book on the reception desk, under the impression that we were in some sort of lavatory. How we escaped detection is a miracle and a mystery only explicable by the fact that the staff of the hotel must have been revelling too.)

      The next morning when I looked out of the window, Lyme Regis was more or less obliterated, filled with a chill mist that was funnelling up into it from the sea, and in spite of various local prognostications it failed to disperse before we set off.

      Sitting in the back, in spite of having our own windscreen and the travelling rug, we were glad of one another’s proximity as the car groaned in bottom gear up the hill which seemed almost as steep as the one by which we had entered the previous evening, past bow-fronted buildings and more classical edifices. As we climbed above the town I had fleeting glimpses of rustic houses, partially hidden by flint walls and foliage, some of them with pretty verandahs. One house, which had a steep pitched, thatched roof that came down so low that it had to be supported by posts, looked as if it was sheltering under an over-size umbrella, and was so minute that it seemed impossible that any grown-up could enter it, let alone live in it; this was Umbrella Cottage, Lyme Regis, which still stands.

      Then we left Dorset for Devon (a sign told us so), crawling along in high, open country with the headlights on, alone in the sea mist, as if we were the only living creatures in the world, apart from an occasional cluster of cattle at a hedgerow gate, or a couple of horses, their breath steaming; seeing not much else but an occasional tree, the telegraph poles as they came looming up one after the other through the mist, or the vague outline of some building, the mist clouding the windscreen so that several times Lewington had to stop, get down and clean the glass. It was mysterious and exciting. It was the kind of weather, I heard my mother tell Kathy, that one expected in ‘the West’.

      We descended steeply to the River Axe, crossed it by a narrow bridge, then waited for some time at a level-crossing for what looked like a toy train when it finally appeared to emerge from the mist and chug across our path, whistling mournfully, before being swallowed up once more; then climbed to another upland where, if anything, the mist was thicker, my father busy with the map now, until suddenly he told Lewington to turn into a lane on the left that was almost invisible in such conditions.

      At first it ran between hedges through the same flat, upland country, then after a little while it began to descend and all at once we were out of the mist and before us was an enchanting, arcadian prospect, so enchanting that my father ordered Lewington, who although perfectly happy to stop for a motor accident was singularly obtuse when it came to such phenomena as views, to stop, so that we might admire it further.

      There was no more wind and the mist was now above us on the high ground. Far below in the bottom of a narrow, sheltered valley and in the mouths of a couple of lesser combes which contributed to it, was a long, straggling village of thatched houses from the chimneys of which smoke was rising in tall, unruffled columns. The steep sides of the valley were decked with woods that seemed to hang above it and from the trees came the sound of a thousand disputing rooks. Even as we looked the mist began to dispel from the high tops, revealing long ridges running inland.

      By the time we reached the village square, if the conjunction of three small roads at the point where a general shop and a butcher’s stood could be dignified with such a description, the sun was shining from a clear sky. We had arrived at Branscombe and it was going to be a lovely day.

¹ It was in these cliffs at Black Ven, or Vein, on a coast that is the epitome of Victorian romanticism in the West, that Mary Anning, then aged twelve, the daughter of a vendor of curiosities, known as the Curi-man, in 1811 discovered in the Lower Lias (the lowest series of rocks of the Jurassic system) the first known skeleton of an ichthyosaurus, a marine reptile twenty-one feet long with a porpoise-like body, dorsal and tail fins and paddle-like limbs of the Mesozoic era that began 225,000,000 years ago and lasted for about 155,000,000 years. It took ten years to remove it from the cliff and it was acquired by the British Museum for the sum of £23. Mary Anning subsequently discovered the first known specimen of the plesiosaurus, a creature with a long neck, short tail and paddle-like limbs, and of the pterodactyl, a flying reptile having membranous wings supported by an elongated fourth digit and, if reconstructions are anything to go by, of a terrifying aspect. A painted window in her memory was put up in the church at Lyme Regis, partly subscribed for by the Geological Society of London who described her in an obituary address as ‘the handmaid of geological science’ on her untimely death at the age of forty-seven.

       CHAPTER SIX A Walk in the Sun

       (1925)

      Behind the Mason’s Arms, the pub which stood next door to the cottage my father had taken for the summer and of which it formed a part, there was a yard surrounded by various dilapidated outbuildings and a piece of ground overgrown with grass and nettles which concealed various interesting pieces of rusted, outmoded machinery, the most important of which was an old motor car smelling of decaying rubber and dirty engine oil. The stuffing of what was left of its buttoned leather upholstery was a home for a large family of mice. This yard was to be the scene of some of the more memorable games I played with my best friend in the village, Peter Hutchings, whose mother kept a grocery, confectionery and hardware shop on the corner opposite Mr Hayman, the butcher’s. It was from Peter Hutchings, who was killed while serving as a soldier in the Second World War, and whose name is inscribed with the names of fourteen other village boys who died in the two great wars on the war memorial at the entrance to Branscombe churchyard, that I learned the broad local dialect which was so broad that by the end of that first summer at Branscombe no one except a local inhabitant could understand what I was saying. ‘Sweatin’ like a bull ’er be,’ was how Peter Hutchings described to me one day the state of his sister, Betty, confined to bed with a temperature, and it was in this form that I passed on this important piece of news to my parents.

      There in the inn yard, in the long summer evenings, we used to sit in the old motor car, either myself or Peter at the wheel, taking it in turn, the driver making BRRR-ing noises, the one sitting next to him in the front making honking noises – the horn had long since ceased to be – as we roared round imaginary corners, narrowly missing imaginary vehicles coming in the opposite direction, driving through an imaginary world to an imaginary destination on an imaginary road, a pair of armchair travellers. In the back we used to put Betty Hutchings, if she was available, who wore a white beret, was placid, said nothing, apart from an occasional BRR, and was in fact an ideal back-seat passenger. Sometimes, if we felt like doing something ‘rude’, we used to stop the car and pee on the seats in the back, and Betty would pee too. This gave us a sense of power, at least I know it did to me, as I would not have dared to pee on the upholstery of a real motor car belonging to real people. Less courageous than my wife, who confessed to having peed on the back seat of a ‘real’