The Inside Story - Anthony Westell

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but my father objected that he could not possibly afford such a thing. Ah, said the doctor, then he might try a handy line of sand dunes which had their own mild weather system. This magical place was Exmouth Warren, now Dawlish Warren, the home of many rabbits in the mouth of the River Exe less than ten miles south of Exeter. The river first broadens into a mile-wide estuary, passing the deer park at Powderham Castle and villages with such splendid names as Starcross and Cockwood, and then swings around in a bay formed by the Warren sand dunes, which project from the mainland. The river flows out into the English Channel through a passage a few hundred yards wide between the end of the Warren and a resort town called, appropriately, Exmouth. Where the Warren begins at the mainland there were, and still are, golf links, and at far end, opposite Exmouth, there was before Second World War a colony of maybe thirty ramshackle summer homes. A couple were on stilts so that the tide could rise and fall beneath them, one of which always flew a line of signal flags which said, we were told, “If you can read this come in and have one.” There was also the beached hull of an old sailing vessel, with windows cut in the sides to make a house, called Kate. But most cottages, as we would call them, were nestled in sand dunes, amid the tall spiky grass.

      It was here that father bought a bungalow called simply The Cabin, for £200 (perhaps $10,000 today). It was built of wood, with a corrugated iron roof, with the bay in front and the sea behind. There was no power on the Warren, so we cooked on primus stoves which sometimes flared alarmingly in our wooden house, and went to bed by oil lamp. We drank rainwater collected in iron tanks and boiled, and the outside toilet was connected to wooden barrels buried in the dunes to function as a primitive septic tank. There was one large living room and a double bedroom, a kitchen of sorts and four tiny sleeping rooms, hardly more than closets. When my father bought it the furniture consisted of one table painted with a poker layout, suggesting that the previous owners had been sporting gents. The family spent fourteen summers there, with our cook and a nursemaid in the early years. There was a store of sorts which sold essentials such as candies — we called them sweets — and a mile or so along the beach, where the Warren joined the mainland, there were a couple of cafés for day trippers. But for serious shopping we had to go to Exmouth, which meant taking a boat. There were boatmen who plied for hire, rowing or sailing across the gap between Exmouth and the Warren, which could be turbulent as the tide squeezed in and out of the bay, and every Warren family had a favorite. Ours was a beery old salt who, at the start of every season, met us at Exmouth, loaded us with all our baggage into his little open boat until the gunwales were only a few inches above the water, and set off. If there was a suitable wind, he raised a tiny triangular lugsail and stuck an oar over the stern with which to steer. No breeze, and he rowed, sweating beer and grumbling. He took us as close to The Cabin as the tide would allow, and we had to to walk the rest of the way across soft sand and up and down dunes, carrying our cases. It was inevitable, of course, that we would soon get our own boat, and the first was a heavy, clinker-built — that is, the planks overlapped each other instead of being edge to edge — eleven-footer, called Devonia, and probably a cast-off ship’s boat. Perhaps my earliest memory is sitting with my father in the stern, dressed in a blue coat with brass buttons, as my brother John rowed along the path cast by the moon on the still sea. I suppose I was three or four. We began to learn to sail in that old boat, and John went on to become a self-taught but well-known boat designer and builder.

      When still in his teens — I use that word although there was no such a thing as a teenager then; you were a boy, a youth or a man — he designed and built for me, in our third floor playroom at home, an eight-foot sailing boat, with paddles for alternative locomotion. He pulled a piece of old black oak out of the rose bed in the garden and shaped it to make the prow, and for a sail we cut and hand-stitched the thick canvas of an old sailing vessel. When it was finished, he rigged a block and tackle and we swung it through the window and down into the back garden. Unfortunately, he used a composite wood for the hull, and no matter how often we painted and caulked, it sopped up water and had to be dried out every few weeks. But I still have a photo of me, aged about ten, scooting along under sail in that little boat. John’s most successful design was a racing dinghy called the 505 — 5.05 metres — and they are still raced all over the world, including here in Toronto. As a youth, he loved to race with the Exmouth sailing club, and as any sailor will tell you, racing skippers who are mild ashore can become tyrants in a boat, so while I often crewed for him, I learned to detest racing — and in fact lost whatever competitive spirit I might have had. But the love of cruising has stayed with me, and with friends I have explored Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and the North Channel of Georgian Bay. When I hear people complain that the lakes are cold even in summer, I think that they should try the English Channel at any time.

      We were able to run free and wild on the Warren, in or on the water almost as much as on land, sailing, rowing, swimming, and enjoying all sorts of adventures with hardly an adult in sight. A mackerel fishing fleet went out on most days from the village of Lympstone — now the site of a huge Royal Marines base — and once they caught a small shark in the nets and brought it ashore to kill it on the beach. They told us they would sell it to a fish and chip shop, but I suppose they were pulling our legs. But what excitement! When porpoises drove millions of mackerel into the bay we could go out with no more than a piece of silver paper and a hook on a string and pull in the little fish until it became boring. Ruthlessly, we pulled soft crabs from their hiding places when they were changing shells and cut them up for bait. I couldn’t do it now. But there was retribution: Once, casting with a rod and line, I managed to lodge a hook in my finger while the weight went seaward. My father had to take me in the boat to Exmouth hospital where the doctor had an easy solution; drive the hook right through the finger, snip off the barb, and pull out the shank. I had the scar for years. Airplanes were not common in those times but one day a pilot lost in the mist landed on the beach. The people in the next bungalow entertained him to lunch while we hovered enviously outside, then pointed him towards the nearest airfield, and off he went. The railway line between London and the southwest ran along the seawall on the mainland facing us across the estuary. At night we could see the lighted trains and dream of where they were bound, north and east to a London we had never visited, or south and west to Penzance near the very tip of England, Land’s End.

      Nowadays when my wife and I visit Britain we take the train to the south west. Just outside Exeter the line joins the estuary and it’s a wonderfully scenic trip for miles, tunnelling through the red sandstone headlands, and following the coast so closely that it runs along the seafront of villages and towns. It used to be, perhaps still is, that if you took a window seat in the dining room of the Courtenay Arms Hotel in the estuary village of Starcross — Courtenay being the family name of the Earls of Devon whose castle is nearby — you could look up at the underside of the trains as they raced by a few feet away. I suppose people were so anxious to get railway service that they would accept almost any condition the Great Western Railway company demanded. The line was built by a visionary engineer with a towering reputation, Isambard Kingdom Brunei, but he overreached himself and lost a huge amount of money when he chose the stretch of line at Starcross to experiment with the madcap idea that engines could be powered by atmospheric pressure. Rather more reliable is the ferry from Starcross across the estuary to Exmouth; it has been running since the twelfth century.

      We children were at the Warren in the summer of 1932 — I was six years old — when my father, who had commuted to Exeter, returned to tell us our mother was dead. She had gone into a nursing home for an operation to remove gallstones obstructing her bile duct, and died from pulmonary embolism, or blood clot in the lungs. I know no more about it than that; it was never discussed and I never thought to ask my father for information. Why a nursing home rather than a hospital? I don’t know, although I believe that the middle and upper classes tended to favour private nursing homes over public hospitals. The death of my mother must of course have been a defining event in my life, but I have few memories of her. I do remember, or think I do, picking raspberries for breakfast with her in the back garden of our first home in Exeter. My father told me that when she dressed as Father Christmas and appeared in the living room, I asked why Santa was wearing Mummy’s shoes — perhaps the first signs of the observant and skeptical reporter. I have a faint sense, more a feeling than a memory, of how it felt to hold her hand, sort of warm and cool at the same time. Less pleasantly, I had for some reason a horror of brown apple cores and I seem to remember her teasing me with a core, pushing

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