“Grandad look. The stream, the stream!” There was always a pause for effect. “And then he fell in.” We could never pass that spot in the lane without my Grandad telling me about the moment my cousin Mark, on a visit from Ireland got over excited and ended up going headlong into the freezing cold water. It was part of the ritual in a place where for a few years at least, time stood still and the summers were seemingly endless. Each August we came to the edge of the village where my Great Grandmother had spent most of her life and stayed in the cottage at the end of the lane next to the big barn where the swallows swooped and dived with unmatched elegance across the farmyard all summer long. I just about remember her, not much bigger than me, sitting in the parlour, her skin almost translucent, her white hair in a bun. “Are you a hundred yet Great Granny?” “Not quite yet. Nearly.” Born when Victoria was still on the throne she seemed impossibly old to my childish eyes. Most of the time now she lived in London with her youngest son, Great Uncle Bill, the rich one who’d done rather well in the antiques trade.
On the day of arrival I’d race across the yard and into the fields as soon as I could be excused from unpacking, running towards the brook to explore and paddle, dodging cow pats as I went. Often I’d venture further to the lower fields where the River Tavy would pour across the landscape loudly, sliding down over mossy boulders and spilling into quiet slowly moving stretches of deeper water where we’d swim on hot afternoons. I'd see how far along its course I could go without treading onto either bank, leaping from one partially submerged boulder to another in a game of daredevil hopscotch in an attempt to beat last year's record. Rarely did I return without at least one soaking wet sock and shoe, and very often the ever present herd of bullocks would thwart my progress. In true Mexican stand-off style, they’d fix me with thirty or more pairs of staring brown eyes, blinking silently, never budging an inch, and I’d stare back at them in a state of soft alarm. If I was coming back from the fields I’d be trapped, and more than once I’d traipse around the long way and walk through the village back to the lane, one foot squelching loudly as I went. If Grandad was with me, he’d cry “Get away with you,” in his unmistakable Cork lilt, and wave his walking stick at them, at which point they’d silently part and allow us through.
The summer of ’76 is the one we still talk about in Britain nearly fifty years later. That long hot dry spell brought a glut of enormous blackberries to the hedgerows of Dartmoor, so much so that I overdid it and was sent to bed with an upset stomach, which was by now probably full of all sorts of interesting invertebrate life. So clearly during my convalescence I remember watching through the bedroom window as those first gentle rains finally arrived to repair the cracked earth and revive the walled garden that the neighbour, Mr Edwards tended with such love and care. Apparently the garden belonged to us rather than him, although you’d never have guessed it. With my Great Grandmother mostly away in London, he’d taken command and we were only allowed in by special invitation and firmly instructed not to touch anything. Outside his realm he was far more affable; we’d often take Trixie, his Cocker Spaniel on our adventures across the fields, and he once invited me and my little brother David around to watch the athletics on the television. Brendan Foster was running – he’d got a bronze medal at the Olympic Games in Montreal a few weeks earlier. My parents had allowed me to stay up late that evening to watch it.
A regular treat was to venture up the slopes along the side of the stream to the Combe, to spend the day at the Mill Pond, where we’d swim and hardly ever see another soul. My parents began to make sailing boats by lashing together bits of fallen wood, ripping up old sheets to make sails so that we could race them across the Mill Pond, naming the fastest of their craft the “Ra” and the “Kon-Tiki” in deference to Thor Heyerdahl’s exploits on the Atlantic. And then we invented the sport of Weeble racing. Remember “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down?” We’d each drop our favoured Weeble into the water from a starting point together, and see whose charge made it to the finishing line first. Often the sport would be marred by shameful cheating on all of our parts as our entrants were dislodged from a fallen branch or a rocky impasse and “helped” a few yards along the water when nobody else was watching, and tragically we would regularly lose members of our Weeble population. In the great Weeble disaster of August 1978, Farmer Weeble, Wendy Weeble , Fireman Weeble and Sailor Weeble were all lost in a single afternoon. You would have thought at least that Sailor Weeble might have found his way down into the Mill Pond, but he’s surely still up there, wedged under a rock, taunted by trout. Each time a Weeble was lost, a solemn service would be held and Mum would offer a heartfelt eulogy on the loss of yet another unwitting lump of plastic with a lead weight inside. We often wondered how many of them might find their way down to Plymouth and pop up under the Tamar Bridge on their lonely way to the English Channel. Sir David Attenborough soon crossed us off his Christmas card list when he heard what we’d been doing to the environment.
On the way back, we’d sometimes stop at the pub garden where my parents would drink Theakston’s Old Peculiar and Mum would soon start giggling a lot. If I were lucky, I might be allowed a sip from her glass. Sometimes we might have a pasty too. I’d been teaching David how to do the triple jump in the fields, and one evening he decided to try his technique in that pub garden, landing with both feet very neatly into a cow pat the size of a small dustbin lid. Annoyed at having his Old Peculiar interrupted, Dad frogmarched him back to the cottage by his ear while the rest of us tried to contain our laughter.
When the old lady died, my Grandparents, who lived fifty odd miles away in North Devon kept the cottage and each summer we would arrive for two weeks to rediscover the old haunts and roam across the fields, dodging cow pats and keeping away from the bullocks. I wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere else; I had everything I needed here. And then in 1982 I was told that my Grandmother had decided to sell, despite pleading from the family to keep it. We’d hoped she might let it to visitors, but ignoring the evidence of our own love for the place, she was convinced everyone wanted to go to the seaside for their holidays. A buyer was found, and that October Mum took us out of school for a final two week stay at the place that held nothing but the best and happiest memories. In the last days of that wistful autumn sojourn I’d open my bedroom window over the paddock and watch the swallows flitting in and out of their nests under the eaves of the barn as they made their final preparations for the long journey south to a warmer winter. While the lucky ones would return, for us it was the last time we’d wander over those fields and down to where the River Tavy hid countless Weebles. Never again would we go to the village shop for sweeties, and hold running races along the lane back to the cottage. Never again would Dad fall into the river and lie midstream on his back after three pints of Old Peculiar on a boiling August afternoon, my four year old sister who he was carrying sitting on his chest with a bemused expression, while the rest of the family hooted with laughter. Nor would Mum suddenly cry out “Orange sunset!” and go chasing across the yard towards the fields with her Instamatic, parting the watching herd of bullocks in her wake. Never again would Grandad tell me about when Mark fell into the stream with that old Irish twinkle in his eye. Every year when we came home I felt terribly sad at leaving the moors behind us, but when we finally left on that late October afternoon, the journey back felt like a funeral cortege; the end of an era we'd never be able to return to. It was a loss we never really came to terms with.
But all that time I hadn’t really noticed that a deep and lasting love had crept up and encircled me in its web for the rest of my life. The green fields and the ever rustling trees filled with birdsong; the rush of ice cold water over slippery rocks; the graceful acrobatics of the swallows and even those wretched staring bullocks. The sense of being out there alone, surrounded by Mother Nature’s unmatched beauty. Nothing material could ever match what the natural world offered, and all of the passion the landscape now holds for me was forged in that handful of fields over forty years ago. Everywhere I went in later life would be measured against the benchmark of bucolic bliss that those six childhood summers at the edge of the village had brought. No greater accolade could be made than that of making a favourable comparison to the place where we’d always gone on holiday without giving anywhere else a thought. Dartmoor is still only ninety minutes away on a good day; wild, untamed and unconditionally beautiful, although the village I usually now avoid. Now and again we find our way back to the open moors where the mist creeps over you without warning and then just as suddenly breaks to reveal the landscape in the distance. Just like it did on top of Great Staple Tor when we took our first tentative steps out into the world in the campervan last summer. For a moment we were completely shrouded, lost to the world up there on our own with a flock of grazing sheep, while somewhere down in the folds of the land below us a young boy walked in perfect sunshine along a quiet lane past a blackberry laden bramble hedgerow, one shoe full of river water as he watched the dancing swallows race low over his head and wondered whether just one more search for Sailor Weeble might be worth a try.