Lorna Doone - and whatever happened to bathcubes?

 

I got my walk in early today and then Keith and I got the paper and had another shorter walk to stretch his legs.  I was aching from painting yesterday, and also from barrowing the contents of a large planter, the flowers of which might be dangerous to cats, so it got pushed under the paddock fence and down the bank into our rough bit of woodland. Another will follow it when my back has stopped complaining!

    Tam has gone to her boyfriend's, so I sat down with my x-stitch, and found out that Lorna Doone was showing again.  It was a repeat of the BBC drama from a few years back (we have the DVD too, and have watched it several times.  Quite my favourite film.) I'd missed the first half but thoroughly enjoyed the story, and the romance, and the music.  It was a book from my childhood (Collins version)  and I can remember buying the Ladybird book of Lorna Doone for Tam when she was 4 years old and she loved me to read it, especially the part where Jan Ridd tumbles down the waterfall. I used to have this as a story cassette too which I listened to as I do the ironing. R D Blackmore based the story on real life. In the Dartmoor village of Chagford, Mary Whiddon was married at the church of St Michael's on 11th October 1641. There is a memorial to her inside, stating that she "died a matron, yet a maid". Legend has it that she was shot (by a jealous lover?) as she left the church.  She was buried in the churchyard with the following epitaph:

Reader, would'st though know who here is laid,

Behold a matron, yet a maid

A modest look, a pious heart

A Mary for the better part

But dry thine eyes, why wilt thou weep

Such damselles do not die, but sleep.

Modern brides often lay a flower from their wedding bouquet on her tomb after signing the register.

Below is a photo of St Michael's from a post I did years ago.

Indeed, I was thinking of where I bought my childhood copy of Lorna Doone this morning, after two words set me off down memory lane: "Paraffin heater". Keith and I were discussing how we kept warm in our homes as children. For us both it was an open coal fire in the sitting room, and a paraffin heater somewhere else in the house. In our case, it was in the scullery (mum never called it the kitchen), and this was carried upstairs (unlit of course) to the bathroom once a week to bring the temperature to something a little above semi-freezing for the weekly bathnight. I only have to catch a whiff of paraffin to be transported back 50 years to the house where I grew up, or else to the local ironmongers, which sold the "pink" paraffin we used. Beauchops it was called, the shop that is, and it was separated into two parts. The smaller side sold a few balls of wool (but could order it in requisite amounts for jumpers or cardigans), soap, talcum powder, bath cubes (whatever happened to those?),  eau de toilette (I remember 4711) . . . toilet rolls, hair nets, hair grips, brushes and combs, compacts and pressed powder and powder puffs, dressing table sets (another rarity these days), and, to part me from my pocket money on occasion, it had a shelf-full of the Collins sets of childrens' classics. 

I can remember going in to the shop and asking to buy a book with horses in. Black Beauty was an instant hit, and Children of the New Forest. Then the shop keeper began to get desperate and in this way I read my way through almost all the children's classics including Lorna Doone (still a favourite with me and I think of the strawberry roan Winnie, who was outlaw Tom Fagus' mare, who, when ridden by Jan Ridd as a lad, jumped him back and forth over the farm gate); Last of the Mohicans (lots of horses but never mentioned by name and even rarely by colour); Heidi - very disappointing - I think just one horse got briefly mentioned in passing but I loved the story and wanted to live in a hay loft like she did; Little Women (I think there may have been a horse pulling a sleigh, once but I loved the film and the book and wanted to look like June Alysson for years); Hans Anderson's Fairy Tales (hrmphh but good stories); and Swiss Family Robinson, where I had to be content with Grizzle the donkey - until the snake ate it! 

In the other side of the shop, you instantly became aware that it wasn't the feminine knitting and nice-smelling side, because the overwhelming perfume was paraffin. I can remember inhaling deeply. The smell never changed. I wouldn't mind betting that if you walked back in there (although it is a small Tesco now, sigh) you would still catch a little stray whiff of paraffin. Where the aisles of bakery goods and cereals are now, once there would have been lengths of that wonderfully slightly-stretchy plastic covered wire which held net curtains up, and the hooks and eyes that fastened it. Trays of nails and screws of every dimension and length, glue, ladders, picture hooks, cutlery drawer dividers, enamelled plates, pie dishes and mugs for the kitchen, tin openers, rubber things with a slit cut in them to take the thrust end of a teatowel, dustbins and stepladders, tin baths and buckets, string and twine, packets of seeds and spring bulbs. It is long-gone now of course, except in my memory, where it is like yesterday . . .