ORCHIDS Chronicles Part 11 – The Heart of the Sun
What is it about pubs – some pubs, that is – the draws me to them? Alcohol? Yes, of course, but it must be good alcohol, if possible the best. Like the pint of Bass I drank after my near-death experience up on Round Ring at the Poltimore Arms, Yarde Down, on the little road from North Molton to Simonsbath.
But even the bell-like purity of a pint like that, dropped from the barrel they kept over a well, needs other factors to create something truly special about a given pub.
The Poltimore Arms back then in ’76, was a simple place, standing with its swinging, singing sign, literally in the middle of nowhere. As it still does and, by all accounts, retains an eccentric otherworldly character presided over by a matchingly eccentric, otherworldly landlord in Steve Cotton, whom I have yet to meet, it being many, many years since I set foot in the place.
My first encounter with the pub followed after fleeing from the all-devouring, cosmic plug-hole epicentre of Bampfylde Clump (pictured above), known locally as ‘Round Ring’, which had threatened to add me to its stack of victims, piled in the ossuary of bleached bones held captive between the soaring beech tree trunks. Having resisted, escaped and fled for my life, there, down at a little junction in the road in the late afternoon of that March day in 1976, stood, unbelievably, a pub. In the middle of nowhere.
I tried the door. It gave. I opened it fully and went in. Saved!
At first it seemed empty, uninhabited but for a smouldering fire in the grate to my right. Then I realised there was someone sitting on the far left of the small bar counter who I couldn’t see on first opening the door.
“Is it – are you open?” I asked. “What d’you think?” came the taciturn reply from a man, grizzled and well-weathered in appearance. A countryman and local too from his accent.
I closed the door behind me and went up to the bar and stood there. Expectantly.
After a minute or two of silence, except for the odd spit and crackle of the fire, I turned to my neighbour and smiled.
“What do you need to do for a drink?” I asked.
He looked at me, expressionless, and then: “Brenda!” he called. Loud and suddenly enough to shake my somewhat brittle nerves again.
More silence. Then I heard the sound of footsteps and ‘Brenda’ appeared.
She came right up to the other side of the counter, glanced at me and then turned to my neighbour. “All right, Bill?” she asked.
‘Gen’leman wants a drink,’ said Bill.
She turned back and this time looked at me properly and smiled.
‘What would you like, my love?’ she asked in a low, soft, Midlands sort of voice.
I was intrigued immediately by her face.
About 30 or so, perhaps, her eyes were at once kind and yet guarded. There was hurt there somewhere, marked in fine lines around the eyes and mouth. Yet there was a sensuality too – a woman who had known love and given it, perhaps too generously, and not been treated kindly for it.
“Er – what beer do you have?” I asked.
“Bass,” came the gruff voice on my left. “Best for miles around, in’t that so, Brenda?”
“If you say so, Bill,” she said. “I’ll go and get you a pint, my love.”
“Keeps it above the well, she does,” continued Bill. “Like a bell, ‘tis. Rings on and on. You’ll see.”
Brenda came back with the pint and I thanked her and lifted it, deep and clear and dark as a dew-pond in the peat on the moor.
And it was. A bell. Baritone with tenor notes in monastic fourths. Cool and soft as old stone, resonating all the way down in that first, long draught that stilled the remaining jangle in my spine. A deep contentment began to spread through me.
“It’s wonderful,” I said. “Thank you,” and took another pull.
I looked around again and then back at Brenda and Bill.
“I’ve just had – a strange experience,” I said. They looked at me and waited.
“Up on the hill with the clump of beeches set in a ring.”
“Ah,” said Bill, with a look to Brenda. “You mean Round Ring.”
“Must be,” I said. “Unless there’s another like it.”
“What happened?” asked Brenda.
So I told them about my walk up from North Molton and how, when I touched the gate at the edge of the ring round the tall clump of beeches that had been my aiming point in the long climb up, everything stopped. No birds, no wind, no sound, nothing. Except my heart and the pounding of my blood.
Going in, I told them how I was drawn into the centre and found the life being sucked out of me by the swirling vortex beneath my feet. And fighting my way back out to the edge against the force of it, step by painful step. How the twig snapped off as I sat looking out over the moor, my back leaning against the trunk of the tree soaring up above me. And how, falling from high up in the tree, I watched the twig dance down through the branches until it fell exactly between my feet and, like an arrow or a divining rod, with two arms swept behind, it lay there, the arrowhead pointing directly at me.
How, having left an orange, peeled, the segments spread into a fan as an offering, I denied the wood and fled all the way back across the field, then through the avenue of last year’s leaves the beech hedgerows shook at me as I passed down the road. Until I saw the miracle of the pub I feared might be a mirage. But here I was, much calmer now, with the best pint of Bass in Christendom almost empty in my glass, I noticed, as Brenda held out her hand to fetch me another with a smile.
Bill looked at me ruminatively while we waited for Brenda to return.
“Better tell ‘im ‘bout George, eh, Brenda?” said Bill when she’d given me the brimming glass.
“Oh George,” said Brenda, with a little laugh. “Well, no harm, is there?” And they both looked at me with a twinkle in their eyes.
“You see,” she said, “we’ve got this, well, someone who lives here alongside of us. In a part of the pub that’s not there any more. Knocked down or something a long time ago. And he comes in from time to time, in his nightshirt, when it suits him, through that wall where there was a doorway once. Most of the time he’s fine and doesn’t cause any trouble. But sometimes, when something’s wrong, he gets in a temper and throws things. Smashed a glass in the fireplace the other day, didn’t he, Bill?”
‘So you say, Brenda. So you say,” says Bill. “Don’t mean no harm, though, do ‘ee?”
“No. No harm. We call him George, after the King,” she added. “There being something regal about him.” And after a pause. “So, what’s your story, my love? Where’ve you come from? Where are you going?”
And I explained that I’d been trying to write a book for a publisher but that it wasn’t coming together as I’d hoped or they’d wanted. So I’d gone down to stay with a friend in a cottage near South Molton and decided to walk to Bristol in the hope of clearing my head and finding another way through. Or something different, I didn’t know.
“Oh, you’ll find something different, just you see. Tomorrow, I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Brenda. “Where are you staying tonight, my love?”
“I was hoping I might reach Simonsbath and find a bed there for the night.”
“You’d better get going then or it’ll be dark. You’ll be safe now though. No pixies out tonight, are there, Bill? Don’t worry, my love. You’ll come to no harm.
I finished my second pint and got ready to go.
“Could I use your Gents before I go?” I asked.
“Of course, my love. Just go through there. It’s round the back on the right.”
“Mind the water otter, though,” said Bill. “E’s in the butt out the back. Just pull up the chain if you want to see ‘un. Careful though. ‘E might bite ‘ee. Vicious little bugger.”
I went out through the side door and, sure enough, there was a water-butt with a chain going down into it. I couldn’t resist having a look as I passed and, warily, touched the chain. Nothing. I gave it a little pull. There was something heavy on the end.
When I pulled it out, the old kettle on the end – the ‘water-’otter’ – laughed at me as if to say, “you didn’t fall for that old chestnut, did you?” And I laughed as I released the overflow of what had just flowed in, said my good-byes to Bill and Brenda, and made my way down the road towards Simonsbath, a mere 4 miles away or so, as a starry, frosty night was falling.
Tim walked through Simonsbath on Exmoor
But something in Brenda’s face stayed with me as I walked and stays with me now. The face that told a story that ended some years later in tragedy when she was murdered by her lover up there on the moor.
While I, the next day as she predicted, found ‘something different’ through sticking out my thumb to a car when I wearied of walking up all those hills. The driver turned out to be the Chief Reporter of the West Somerset Free Press who offered me a job. That’s how I found a place called Nettlecombe in West Somerset where I met my wife and a certain Martin Hesp and a whole new way forward in the world, very different to the one I left behind.
So some pubs have something special about them, a life that, by and large, goes a long way back and often, in the best, are still run by the same family, several generations on.
In one such pub, now sadly gone, called the Red Lion in the tiny hamlet of Stoke Talmage, near Watlington in Oxfordshire, my wife Gill and I found a list with the title ‘The Classic Basic Unspoilt Pubs of Great Britain’. It was 1995 and this was the Second Edition, compiled by ex-CAMRA specialist, Rodney Wolfe-Coe, and his team of anonymous ‘inspectors’ from 1993 to the last one in 2005.
Between intense games of what some called ‘Ring the Bull’ or ‘Hook the Ring’ in which you have to swing a heavy ring on a long cord fixed to the ceiling between you and the wall and try to drop it onto a hook screwed at head-height into the wall – not as easy as it sounds – we read through this list of pubs and realised that we were familiar with several amongst the 30 or so listed there.
The Square & Compass at Worth Matravers in Dorset was one (1 star), known to me from childhood and described in my previous post, Part 10. The Seymour Arms at Witham Friary, in Somerset, another that I had often walked to down from Alfred’s Tower, near Stourhead, aged 17 onwards, with its picture of The Diet of Worms on the wall and a serving hatch at the end of the entrance hall where you ordered and were served your pint (also 1 star). The pub we were playing ‘Hook the Ring’ in, as opposed to bar billiards in the room next-door which, like the Seymour Arms still does, required an old florin or ‘two bob bit’ to function (worth 10 new pence to those born after 1968), was awarded 2 stars. But right at the end, the only one with a top-ranking 5 stars to its name, was a pub that had a special resonance for Gill and I. A pub that fulfilled all the criteria and more to qualify as top of the list – even if there are others I would certainly include that didn’t feature at all.
It was some four months after getting married to the young woman I first got to know when we went looking for a lost cow called Amber. She, the cow, not the young woman, had decided to go walk-about from Nettlecombe one day in that Summer of 1976. By the end of our search in which we somehow got separated from the other searchers, we had laughed and talked and although we didn’t find Amber (someone else did, fortunately), we had begun to find each other.
Anyway, four months on from our wedding in May 1979, Gill and I decided it was time to have a honeymoon. The time had slipped by somehow, partly through lack of money, partly because it didn’t seem to matter, partly through my work – an actor with a family can’t say ‘no’ to work. So we asked my Mum if we could borrow her little car, left Leo, aged 5, with Gill’s Mum and Dad in London and set off up North.
We had four days but only enough money for one night in a pub. But it was a lovely early Autumn and we enjoyed the odd night in the straw so there was no hardship there.
We pulled off the motorway on a whim and found ourselves at the Lion and Swan in Congleton. In the bar, we met a canal gypsy who entertained us with tales of times gone by on the canals, illustrated with Romany phrases which sadly I have no record of now. But then the delightfully camp Maître D’ stepped in to announce, my having let slip that this was our honeymoon on arrival, that he had prepared a meal fit for Romeo and Juliet, or some equivalent legendary coupling – most of which ended badly, of course, but we didn’t let that spoil the moment.
He then proceeded to show us, laid out decoratively on his silver platter, our entire meal, which he in his unswerving genius had chosen for us, in its raw, uncooked state, before whisking it off with a flourish to the kitchen. I was then instructed to follow him down to the cellar to choose the best bottle of champagne in the house which we brought back to be chilled, ready for our nuptial breakfast.
It was, indeed, a honeymoon dinner, night and breakfast worth at least two weeks in the white sands and palm trees of the Virgin Islands or wherever one goes for such things these days. And all, when came the nervous moment of truth, for the magnificent sum of £26 and 32p, or £26 for cash.
So we found ourselves, a couple of nights on, knocking on a farm door and asking if we could sleep in their barn that night. After a good, if ticklish, night’s sleep, we pottered off down to the little village below.
It was 11-ish by the time we walked along the side of the quietly flowing River Teme with a row of low stone cottages the other side of the road. On one of them was a barely legible sign. It looked as though it might have been a pub at one time. The door was shut but we wondered whether, just possibly, it might be worth a knock.
The door gave to the touch and inside it was so dark after the bright sunshine outside, I could barely make out what was there. There was what looked like a simple, plainly furnished front room on the right and then I saw, against the far wall of a little room on the left, a settee of some kind, with what seemed to be the small, dim shape of someone lying on it.
“Yes?” came a quavering voice. “What is it?”
“I’m so sorry to disturb you,” I said. “But I wondered if this was still a pub.”
“Course it’s a pub! Always was. Still is,” cried the voice, more strongly now, as the figure of an elderly woman struggled up from the settee. “Well, don’t just stand there. Come in if you want a drink.”
We went in and she said, “It’s in there,” pointing to another doorway behind her. “Just help yourselves. You’ll find a jug by the side of the barrel. You can take un through to the other room and I’ll bring ‘ee some glasses.”
And so we met Flossie who seemed to us then, in 1979, to be a very old lady (even if actually a bit younger than us now!) but with a commanding presence that would brook no nonsense – particularly from anyone with a beard we were informed by a local on a later visit. Fortunately, more or less clean-shaven, I was tolerated and Gill and I spent a happy hour enjoying her ale and the simple room where her long-standing regulars met and talked without the usual distractions designed to disrupt the very purpose of a proper pub.
27 years later, on 15th August 2006, we walked down the same lane, by the same river, along the same, unchanged row of houses and there it was, the sign as indecipherable as ever – the Sun at Leintwardine.
We knocked cautiously on the door, unsure as ever if it was open and, if so, if she, Flossie, was still alive. Could she be? However indomitable she had seemed back then, she was already more than of a certain age and now – she must be 90 if a day. Perhaps we had left it too late. Nevertheless, I pressed the latch. It gave.
Everything was exactly as we remembered it. The room, the tables, the pictures on the walls of football teams in long, baggy shorts and centre-parted hair. The wooden spoon, a trotting horse and, set into the wall, the ‘Mayor’s’ costume with its squirrel coat and cockaded hat, part of an arcane ritual they held there every year or so.
I looked into the little, darkened parlour area and there, against the far wall, the low settee and a shape, under a blanket, with, just above, two twinkling eyes, looking at me.
“Hello,” I said. “Is it all right? Are you open?”
“Well, don’t just stand there,” came the unmistakable voice. A little frailer than before perhaps but Flossie as ever was. “Come in, come in. You’ll have to help yourself, mind.”
We went in and in the room beyond the parlour space was someone clearing and tidying who greeted us and explained that Flossie had had a spell in hospital but was ‘on the mend’ and back in her rightful place, so all was well.
And it was. Although we knew or sensed that it couldn’t last and that we might just have caught her and the Sun itself in its last rays of a rare form of humanity.
We sat and I sketched and wrote some words you can see below and felt privileged and blessed to have come back to the place which had enriched our early life together. Which, since our first visit, had widened to include three more children, our life that is, eight years in Hampshire, four more in France, and another 12 in Oxfordshire, and all manner of changes in our circumstance where work and home life was concerned. While here, time, as told in the loud TIC…TOC…TIC…TOC of the clock on Flossie’s mantelpiece, had seemingly, almost, stood still. If that was possible.
And, of course, it wasn’t. Flossie drew her last pint at the age of 94, on 13 June 2009, three years after our visit. She had ruled the Sun for 74 years and warmed the hearts of all who came there, whether by chance and all too rarely, like us, or her loyal band of regulars who supported and cherished her along the way.
The Sun continues and Flossie is remembered and honoured in the unchanged front room with all the mementoes of her long and happy reign. They have extended it at the back and hold popular festivals and provide food – as long as you go next door to the fish and chip shop, run hand-in-glove by the new owners with the pub itself. It’s still a lovely pub – but, as you would expect, “it’ll never be the same without Flossie”, the heart of the Sun.
And now it’s left to Bessie at the Dyffryn Arms in Pontfaen, near Fishguard, in West Wales, aged 90 and going strong despite the fire a year ago, and, unbelievably, Mary Wright, at the Luppitt, in, yes, Luppitt in Devon, who at 99, is still the doyenne of all. Both pubs are on the list I mentioned. Both havens of a rare humanity, getting rarer by the day. Like some orchids I could mention.
