“Sorry,” Jamie barked with a thick west country drawl, “As you can see I’m absolutely wired.” He was leaning forward clinging the steering wheel with white knuckles, staring at the road with saucerlike eyes. He looked crazed like Neal Cassidy, racing the Merry Pranksters in his multicoloured bus called Further. But there were no drugs involved here - Jamie had just had a stressful day at work fitting air conditioning units.
“Ah, it was alroight though,” he added cheerfully, still clamping the wheel. That was his strapline. I told him I was from London.
“London? It’s mad there innit? People always foightin’ an’ that. Like the Wild West!” He didn’t go to London much. “Ah, it’s alroight though!” He didn’t much like going much further east than Dartmoor really, though in his youth he’d thumb his way to raves all over the country. He preferred the quiet life now. “There’s a lot less work down ‘ere, though. Much slower an’ that. It’s like 5 years behind everywhere else.”
We were driving up the side of Dartmoor to Tavistock, in the far west of Devon. Over the bare moorland, you could see a tall mast poking over the hill. Jamie told me it was Dartmoor Prison. Though we couldn’t see the eery granite walls from where we were, I remember seeing them as a child and being haunted by the sight. No doubt it would have been even more haunting for the French prisoners who first populated the prison during the Napoleonic wars. The conditions were shocking and by the time of Waterloo over a thousand had perished inside. Today it has some 600 prisoners, a tenth of the 1815 total.
“Full of paedophiles now,” Jamie informed me with a nod, “Hundreds of ‘em in there.” We looked quietly at the brooding land around it. He wasn’t wrong. About seventy per cent of the inmates are sex offenders. “Should be shot really!” Jamie piped, taking me by surprise a little. We contemplated grimly before he broke the silence again, “Ah, it’s alroight though.”
Soon we were off the moor and coming into Tavistock, passing the green in the centre of town which Jamie told me had hosted Tavi Pride the week before. “It’s good really,” Jamie thought, “People get all offended though. It’s like you’re not allowed to be different!” He dropped me on the edge of town and I was sad to leave him, I’d enjoyed his company.
I stood in the Tavistock housing estate watching as the few cars that passed didn’t stop. It didn’t feel like anyone was going to either and the drivers eyed me suspiciously in their mirrors.
It was a long while before a car pulled out of the culdesac behind me and a teenage girl wound down the passenger window. I’d seen them driving off earlier so was a little wary that they’d come back - that sort of thing’s usually a redlight when hitchhiking. The man on the backseat looked at me with cold eyes, his cheeks were gaunt, pale and spotty and for the first time, I felt a slight pang of discomfort.
I told them I was going to Launceston and asked where they were going.
“Well nowhere…” the girl replied. We all looked at each other a bit awkwardly and for a moment I almost declined. Somehow though they looked a nice bunch and I quickly realised they were just kids and weren’t dangerous. “We’ll take you to Launceston if you like,” she told me, “We’ve got nothing else to do.”
“Are you sure? It’s about 40 minutes away?”
“Yeah, no problem!”
“We could do with getting out of Tavi, to be honest,” the driver chimed glumly. So I chucked my bags in and joined the sallow-cheeked lad in the backseat shrinking under his big coat. His name was Scott, the girl was Xena and the driver was Stephen.
“What do you do, Scott?” I asked as we set off on our mini road trip.
“Fuuuuck all!” He laughed like a hyena, “Work and get wreckked!”
“What about you, Xena?”
She thought for a moment, “Errrrr…Not much to be honest.”
“Stephen?”
“Yeah, nothing really mate.”
They had all just left college and were in their late teens. Stephen’s car was the only thing they had to do besides the occasional poorly paid shift. They regularly emphasised the severe lack of things to do.
Scott had a drug problem and he cackled crazily about it. He mostly did cocaine but had overdosed three times when it had been laced with heroin. His landlord was on his case now and he reasoned that if he could get a car and park it on the drive, then he’d think Scott was going places and leave him alone. Metaphorically that is, Scott couldn’t drive. They talked about ways he could buy one.
They gassed away together about odd bits and bobs: Mazda MX5s, their mate Lewis and his crazy foster mum, and which was further away, Yorkshire or London. Scott recounted how when they’d been at school his teachers and classmates had used to tease him and Xena for being cousins.
“How are you related?”
“Ancestry shit an’ that,” Xena informed me from the front.
“Used to say it to wind me up,” Scott sulked as he rubbed the side of his head. “Made me sooo angry! Especially when we were going out.”
My uncle had put me in touch with an old friend of his who lived just outside Launceston. They had some farmland and had kindly agreed to let me pitch my tent in their field. The teenagers dropped me off at the bottom of the track and I walked up to knock on their door.
Chris and Deb were lovely. They lived in a converted cattle barn that had a sweeping view across the fields to Launceston and its Norman castle high on the hill. They took me into their kitchen and Deb served up a hearty, delicious and much-needed supper. Orwell once wrote a defence of the much-maligned English cuisine. “You practically don’t find good English cooking outside a private house,” he wrote and though things have certainly changed since Orwell’s day, homecooked bangers will always hit the spot.
Chris had retired from farming their land himself but took me off to show me the woodland he planted on the farm 20 years ago. 12,000 trees ran along the fields in a thick belt. “You don’t plant trees for yourself, but for the next generation,” he said proudly as he pointed out hazels, aspens, sessile and peduncular oaks. He described how spindle was once used to make spinning wheels, and that buckthorn is poisonous to sheep so has to be watched carefully.
As we drove alongside the wood we spoke about the recent trend of rewilding. Despite having a deep respect for the natural environment, Chris wasn’t convinced. The Ukraine crisis has exposed the fragility of international food networks and in his opinion, we ought to use all the farmland we have.
There was a large patch of the wood that looked as if it had been burnt down. Branchless trunks stood gormlessly to attention. Thanks to ash dieback, Chris’ 2,000 ash trees had had to be felled. Tragically, the fungal disease will likely kill around 80% of ash trees in Britain and its knock-on effects on habitats will be dreadful. That night, tucked up in my tent, I slept like a log myself.
In the morning, saying a warm goodbye to Chris and Deb, I walked up the hill into Launceston. The hill was so steep that a bishop in the 16th century, when sweating his way up, had mistaken the choir singing at the top for a heavenly host of angels. It has been known as Angel hill ever since but sadly, there were no angels on my arrival, just grey drizzle.
Despite the rain, Launceston was a charming town. For centuries it served as Cornwall’s capital and being right on the border acted as a frontier, dominating as it did the hilltop overlooking England to the east and Cornwall to the west. The town’s medieval Southgate, made of dark, imposing granite, had been the metaphorical entrance to the county and the roads beyond were so bad that officials from the capital would rarely venture further. It had been a gaol too, famed for its horrendous conditions.
Launceston, Loyal and Royal as their motto ran, was the site of a Civil War battle but more recently, the market square witnessed a different kind of battle during the Second World War. Thanks to an act passed by Churchill’s cabinet, the American troops based in Britain were allowed to exorcise Jim Crow within the US military, despite racial segregation on British soil being firmly illegal. Apartheid was widely practised throughout the British Empire but most Brits were utterly shocked by the way African-American soldiers were treated by their white counterparts. The tabloids regularly raged about the issue, siding with the oppressed.
One September evening in 1943, a group of black American soldiers, excluded by their white comrades from a Launceston pub, began a shootout in the square, unleashing a volley of machine gun fire at some white Americans. Bullets ripped through the town. Two white sergeants were injured and jeeps and buildings were left riddled with holes. The incident became known as the Battle of Launceston but it didn’t stop there, continuing on into the courtroom and the press. It was front-page news for three days and the British people were outraged. 14 African-Americans were sentenced to hard labour but because it was kept so quiet, many assumed they’d been executed, exacerbating the issue further. One local remarked that there’d been nothing like it “since the days of the smugglers.”
The real reason I was in Launceston wasn’t the shootouts, the angels or even the Norman castle. It was in fact where my forebears were from. The surname Lethbridge is fairly common in these parts. As I wandered about I spotted a book in a shop window called, Behind the Eyebrows by a certain Richard Lethbridge, who, unsurprsingly, had fantastic eyebrows. Sadly I didn’t inherit the genes.
I was en route to a nearby village called Tregeare and getting there in the rain was a bit of a chore. I waited for half an hour on the edge of Launceston being glared at by unfriendly motorists. One rubbed his fingers together meanly, signalling, I guessed, something to do with money. Luckily, I was saved by a young woman called Maisy who told me about the rocky few years she’d had, losing several jobs to Covid and lockdowns etc. Like many Cornish, the initial collapse of tourism had been a real blow but things were back on their feet now and she’d just come back from a much-needed holiday.
Chris had put me in touch with his cousin, Peter, who still farmed the land around Tregeare and Maisy dropped me off at the bottom of their farm track. Though not a man of many words, Peter was just as kindly as Chris and he and his wife Iris took me in for a cup of tea. As dairy farmers, they were rather flummoxed when I said I was lactose intolerant, offering me in vain a cup of milky tea, a cheese sandwich, cream of tomato soup and a slice of cake. Having exhausted all possibilities, all there was was a cup of black tea and a plain cream cracker (surprisingly they do not contain cream) and I apologised for being a useless guest.
Peter gave me a comprehensive tour of Tregeare that afternoon. He certainly knew it well, he’d lived there his whole life. We drove along the same wooded tracks where as a lad the old Mrs Lethbridge would pay him and Chris half a crown for every squirrel they shot and the field where the old major kept his horse. We drove past the handful of cottages that made up Tregeare and he recalled fondly “…old Bill Bluett, uncle Bill we called him, lived in that one…and that’s where they used to milk the cows by hand every morning…” and so on. The village’s past sprung vividly to life.
We got out to look around the graveyard of a small methodist chapel. Again Peter took me through the names and he explained nostalgically how as boys he and his brother would come and mow the grass here.
Across the graveyard, there was a small birdbath above a block of stone and an urn of interred ashes. Peter pulled back the encroaching grass to reveal the inscription. “This is my brother’s grave,” he told me quietly. He explained how growing up his brother had always yearned for the excitement of the city. As a young man, he’d finally left the farm and its steady routine, drawn instead to London and to Soho with its bright lights and thriving gay community. It could hardly have been more different from Tregeare which didn't even have a pub. I looked at the date on the stone, 1989, and my heart sank.
“He caught HIV and in them days there was nothing for that. He came back here towards the end and died back home at the farmhouse. The conservatory you saw, that’s to remember him.”
The rain was nearly horizontal and the trees were pulsing in the gale as we went to look at the house old Mrs Lethbridge and my forebears had lived in. It was a handsome place and we met the very friendly owners who showed me around. It was gutted by a fire in the 80s so not much of the original remained.
There is something reverential about going back to where one’s ancestors used to live. It feels like it’s where you’re from, though of course we’re made up of many more places than one. We went to the tiny church up the road and I spotted some familiar forebears on a murky brass plaque and recalled what I could about their distant lives. I thought it funny how to most they’re just unknown names. The more imaginative may be inspired to dream up characters in their minds speculating on the lives they once lead, but I doubt many even notice the plaque. I doubt many even go into the tiny church.
Peter and I drove back through Tregeare together, through the trees, hedges and fields as they jostled for space, grown full of summer. It was wonderful to have him as a guide and through his deep connection to the place and his long memory, a fleeting bridge had stretched right back into the past. He dropped me on the main road and wet through from the rain, I caught another ride. In the excitement of a new conversation, Tregeare shrank quickly into the distance.