The dark clouds over Ilfracombe turned the grass on the great swollen headlands very green. Henry James had tiptoed around the town in 1872 and found it overplanned and a little gimcrack. He usually objected to the settled and bricked-up look of the English watering places, but in Ilfracombe he sighed when he saw the handrails and signboards and the old ladies and sheep, and he wished with all his heart for "something more pathless, more idle, more unreclaimed from… deep-bosomed nature." Of course, Ilfracombe now looked much more used and worn-out than it had then; but not far from it, and on many parts of the North Devon coast, it was easy to find deep-bosomed nature — just that, in fact, because the headlands were magnificent and bosomy and between them was always a steepness that the locals called a cleave.
I walked to Hele Bay and Watermouth Cove. They were wooded and full of pink and blue wildflowers. There were pale spring flowers everywhere. No one could tell me their names. I came to Big Meadow and saw a sign:
Welcome to Big Meadow!
Sorry: No Motorcycles
No Groups of Men
No Dogs
Combe Martin, farther on, was a small village on a rocky bay, in the shadow of two tall hills, the Little Hangman and the Great Hangman. As I walked into it, I could see the whole of it at the head of the bay — the houses, the bars, the hotels, the church — and then I was on its only street, strolling past the cottages. Their windows were open. At one I heard, "… seven more Argentine aircraft have been shot down" from a radio, and farther on, another radio saying that so far four hundred and fifty men had been killed in the Falklands' fighting.
I found a place to sleep, by traipsing through the town in my usual fashion and sizing up the likely places. I had a shower and dinner — a pollock caught a few hours ago off this coast, and apple and bilberry pie. There were English people in the dining room, talking in whispers about food in a shy hungry way as they ate.
It was in little country villages like Combe Martin that I saw the wildest and scruffiest youths, motorcyclists mostly — the sort banned from Big Meadow — who modeled themselves on Hell's Angels. I could not explain why they were most numerous in the prettiest villages in the countryside. They played pool in pubs with names like the Old Haymow and the Ploughman's Inn (these places now had jukeboxes and video machines), and they had tattoos and leather trousers and chains. They were the last people I expected to see in the depths of this countryfied coast, and it was oddest of all to see them, as I did in Combe Martin, drinking the local ale beside grizzled shepherds and fishermen. The commonest nighttime sound in the English coastal village, apart from the endlessly grieving surf, was that of the motorcycles farting down the main road at midnight.
The hotel people in Ilfracombe and Combe Martin said business was terrible this year. Last year was terrible too. They had never known it to be so bad. They had very few firm reservations.
Mr. Deedy at the Bull said, "See, no one wants to make plans ahead. They go on working. It's not only the money. They don't like to go away, because they don't know whether they'll have jobs to go back to."
Then "Falklands Special" was on television, and we dutifully trooped toward Mrs. Deedy's shout of "It's the news!" The news was very bad: more deaths, more ships sunk. But there was always great bewilderment among people watching the news, because there was never enough of it and it was sometimes contradictory. Why were there so few photographs of fighting? Usually it was reporters speaking of disasters over crackly telephones. The English seemed — in private — ashamed and confused, and regarded Argentina as pathetic, ramshackle, and unlucky, with a conscript army of very young boys. They hated discussing it, but they could talk all night on the subject of how business was bad.
"You just reminded me," Mrs. Deedy said. "The Smiths have canceled. They had that September booking. Mr. Smith rang this morning."
"Knickers," Mr. Deedy said.
"His wife died," Mrs. Deedy said.
"Oh?" Mr. Deedy was doubtful — sorry he had said knickers.
"She wasn't poorly," Mrs. Deedy said. "It was a heart attack."
Mr. Deedy relaxed at the news of the heart attack. It was no one's fault, really — not like a sickness or a crime. This was more a kind of removal.
"That's another returned deposit," Mrs. Deedy said. She was cross.
"That makes two so far," Mr. Deedy said. "Let's hope there aren't any more."
The next day I heard two tattling ladies talking about the Falklands. It was being said that the British had become jingoistic because of the war, and that a certain swagger was now evident. It was true of the writing in many newspapers, but it was seldom true of the talk I heard. Most people were like Mrs. Mullion and Miss Custis at the Britannia in Combe Martin, who, after some decent platitudes, wandered from talk of the Falklands to extensive reminiscing about the Second World War.
"After all, the Germans were occupying France, but life went 011 as normal," Mrs. Mullion said.
"Well, this is just it," Miss Custis said. "You've got to carry on. No sense packing up."
"We were in Taunton then."
"Were you? We were Cullompton," Miss Custis said. "Mutterton, actually."
"Rationing seemed to go on for ages!" Mrs. Mullion said.
"I still remember when chocolate went off the ration. And then people bought it all. And then it went on the ration again!"
They had begun to cheer themselves up in this way.
"More tea?" Mrs. Mullion said.
"Lovely," Miss Custis said.
That was the day I left Combe Martin. I walked out of the village and climbed a thousand feet to the top of the Great Hangman. Down below I could see a headland that looked like a dog crouching with his snout in a puddle — the puddle being the Bristol Channel. Across the water, South Wales was a faint foreign blue.
There were steep cleaves, beautiful and exhausting, all the way to Lynton. The hills rose plumply from the water's edge, and the path circled the hollows, treeless here and with such a pitch that, descending them, I usually slid and lost my balance, and, climbing, I found myself taking rapid stabbing steps that made my ankles sore. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to break my fall. In the middle of the cleave, way down and flowing from the head of the long valley, there was always a creek or a river, looking sometimes like a snail track and sometimes like a snake. It was this way for fifteen miles.
At the bottom of one winding path was the village of Trentishoe. In 1891 it had a population of ninety-seven; now it had been reduced to forty-five. The church ("the second smallest in Devon") was the size of a one-car garage. I had said I was not going to do any sightseeing, but the village was nowhere and the church was insignificant and very pretty, so I went in. It smelled of Bible bindings and brass polish. Its list of rectors went back to the year 1260, seven hundred years accounted for. A notice said that a number of the graves in the churchyard were unknown people whose bodies had washed up on the shore in Elwill Bay, below this church, St. Peter's.
I left the path near Heddon's Mouth and took the steepest way across the cut, on stony patches between the clumps of heather, and tugged back by thorns, and on all fours through the wildflowers, and skidding on loose chippings of shale. I found it slow going, but I was in no particular hurry. After that high hill I came to Martinhoe and then to a headland full of trees. These woods were wrecked and looked wonderful. It was called Woody Bay and was littered with fallen trees. They had blown down in the winter's hurricane-force winds and blocked most of the paths, making this part of the coast tangled and wild, with great splintered tree trunks. It was a marvelous ruin — still-alive trees fractured all over the floor of the woods.