In the early postwar years, people started taking holidays away from home again and there was a period between and when Cynthia (Morrison) and I went on various holidays with our respective families. The Morrison family were then living in Harrow and the Roper family in Chingford. With the war over, petrol rationing relaxed and the Morrison and Roper males released from military activities there was a window of opportunity to make much longed for seaside holidays again. This era ended when the Morrisons moved to South View in Sussex and my father bought a dairy farm in nearby Robertsbridge leaving them much too busy to think about holidays.
I know very little about my wife’s holidays except she went on fairly conventional seaside trips to Pagham and Climping both in West Sussex. We have a photograph, perhaps from , of Cynthia and her sister Barbara skipping along the road from the sea at Pagham holding their small Pomeranian dog.
The first holiday I remember was several days over Christmas at the Devil’s Punchbowl Hotel at Hindhead in Surrey with both my parents and grandparents perhaps in . It was a very sophisticated, adult kind of break but I remember enjoying it in a rather bewildered sort of way as a nine year old child. Essentially it was my well-off grandfather Butler splashing out a bit. Before the war, we would probably all have gone on a cruise. After that we usually had memorable Christmas gatherings for the wider Roper and Butler families at 5 The Green Walk in Chingford.
Sometime before my grandmother Butler died, we had a holiday at the Imperial Hotel in Torquay (I remember rolling in a black bearskin ‘carpet’) with its private beach and I recall going to Blackpool, but remember no details. I do, however, remember being driven by grandad Butler in his huge black Daimler for short breaks in Brighton (the Grand Hotel) and Eastbourne (The Queens Hotel). In the case of the latter we used to drive from Brighton to Hastings to see my great, great aunt Mary, mother of Jack Holroyd, brother of Alice and Emily who were my great aunt and grandmother respectively. She lived in St Matthews Gardens and, years later, Cynthia and I called in to see her. On the way to Hastings and back I used to stand on the front seat of the Daimler and put my head out into the slipstream through the open sun roof. My grandfather would have been arrested for allowing that today.
My first holiday with my mother and father was in Birchington on the Isle of Thanet in Kent where we stayed at an hotel at Minnis Bay, one of the three Birchington beaches below the chalk cliffs. These cliffs have been much tunnelled over the centuries mainly by smugglers and, walking along the beach one afternoon, I found a narrow slit in the cliff. As a slender ten year old I could easily squeeze through this and found myself in a large chamber with, at the end, an old 44 gallon drum lying on its side and firmly fixed to the ground with iron bands. I suspected there was an entrance from above and reported it to my father who came and had a look but could not get through the narrow entrance. I shall never know the secret of the Minnis Bay cave.
One afternoon my father and I set out on the three and a half mile coastal walk to Reculver with its Roman remains and the twin towers of the ruined St Mary’s Church. The path from Birchington ran across the low-lying Wade Marsh then beside the river Wantsum which nowadays divides Thanet from the rest of Kent. It was a splendid walk with the sea to the north, the vast reedlands and the wind and sky-held birds to the south. It was easy to imagine the time when Thanet was a proper island with a wide navigable sea lane separating it from mainland Kent.
The following year, 1949, I persuaded my parents to take a seaside holiday in Mundesley on the Norfolk Coast. At eleven I had just started developing an interest in butterflies and moths and thought that Mundesley might be a good place to see the British swallowtail butterfly, an endemic subspecies. This iconic insect is now confined to Broadland and the closest it was likely to occur near Mundesley was 10 miles or more to the south on the Broads, so explorations of the local countryside with my father proved fruitless and I spent most of my time on the long, sandy beach.
The low lying sea cliffs between Mundesley and Paston have been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest and, though I explored these cliffs, I was blissfully unaware of their significance as, I suspect, are most of the current tourists in the area in their caravans, holiday parks and other accommodation. In places there are holes in the soft rock – colonies of sand martins. The official SSSI description runs as follows:
The cliffs along this stretch of coast provide some of the very best sections in the Pleistocene Cromer Forest-bed Formation, especially in Cromerian marine and freshwater deposits, and freshwater sediments of the early Anglian Cold Stage. At both Mundesley, and Paston – the type locality, marine and rarer freshwater deposits of Pastonian age are particularly well-developed. A nationally important site for its extensive Pleistocene sequence.
The small museum in Mundesley, housed in a coastguard lookout built in 1928, has many fossils from these cliffs, which are much subject to landslides, including those of mammoth, elephant and hippopotamus. The Pleistocene beach at Mundesley must have been quite lively a place.
In my pursuit of the swallowtail butterfly I remember walking the three miles to the inland village of Trunch. This was mostly along lonely hedge-bordered lanes beside vast open fields. Today nearly all the hedges have gone leaving a gaunt landscape with solitary twisted trunks of oaks and other trees that were spared by the hedge-grubbers. Trunch village has 14 listed buildings, mostly ancient barns and farmhouses, and seems to have been very little changed by tourism (though there is a ‘Counting Sheep Glamping’ site) in contrast to Mundesley which has been developed, more or less, by the demand for seaside breaks and retirement homes on the coast.
As well as the trip to Norfolk, I have a ghostly memory of a few days spent with my family at Southend-on-Sea on the Essex coast. Whether we went there for a holiday or short break I cannot now recall. I had heard about its pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world at over a mile, and was curious to visit it. When I did I ran the whole outward length and returned on the pier train. The pier, a Grade II Listed Building, has suffered many vicissitudes since it was first built in the early 19th century. It has survived several drastic fires, had ships crash into it, been used for prisoners of war and been struck by lightning, but I am pleased to say it still functions as a public attraction and small boys can run along it.
Somehow or other intelligence had also reached me about Belfairs Wood Nature Reserve (now Belfairs Nature Discovery Centre) in Hadleigh to the west of Southend and we went there to meet the Forest Keeper, quite an old man. He seemed to know we were coming so I think there must have been some prior communication, perhaps through my father. Despite being almost surrounded by densely packed suburban housing the woodland, much of it ancient, seems to have survived ramblers and joggers, school parties and dog walkers and remains rich in birds, butterflies and other wildlife. Congratulations to those who manage the area. Specialities include dormice, heath fritillaries and wild service trees, the site being one of the best in Britain for the last of these species. On my visit I saw no fritillaries, dormice or wild service trees, but it was enough to encourage further my growing interest in wildlife.
In 1950 I persuaded my parents to go on holiday to Burley in the New Forest. I had read that this was a mecca for wildlife and insects in particular and, with the previous year’s failure to find the swallowtail, I thought the New Forest might be more productive. We stayed in the fairly luxurious Burley Manor Hotel, a mid-Victorian brick structure of some elegance. It was commissioned by a Colonel Esdaile, a New Forest verderer from a Huguenot background. There were several naturalists staying there including an American mycologist, Dr Sam W. Clausen and his wife Lucy. He was immensely kind to me, showing me how to collect and identify fungi and take spore prints. After their return to New York on the Queen Mary they sent me a splendid American book on life in ponds and streams1 which I treasured for many years and still have. In 1978, on my way to Exeter, I made an overnight stay in Burley Manor to remind me of this happy childhood holiday.
During our 1950 stay we made several forays with the older naturalists into different part of the forest looking for fungi, of which we found a great many. One of our group was an ornithologist and he had hoped to see honey buzzards on their annual southward migration which was due at this time of year. We had no luck but on the last day of the holiday I walked up to the open heathland of Pigsty Hill and Broadoak Bottom to the south east of the hotel while my parents were packing and a pair of honey buzzards appeared. They sailed gently through the air and landed among the heather to rest or feed. I rushed back to the hotel to tell my ornithologist friend, but we had to leave and I never found out whether he saw the birds or not.
There is a chance that what I saw were the much commoner buzzards rather than honey buzzards, but I had been carefully schooled on identification and was in the right place at the right time so I will always remember the birds as honey buzzards.
My last holiday with my parents was a tour in 1951 across middle England to North Wales when I was thirteen in the summer before I went to boarding school and my parents left Chingford, my childhood home, for good.
Our route across the middle of England took us to Stow-on-the-Wold and Great Malvern. I wanted to visit Stow because of its four part name, but did not seem to get the best from it. At 800 feet it is on a hill and also at a cross roads which includes the Roman Fosse Way. A Civil War battle was fought here in 1649 and there was a running fight in the streets of Stow, though rather less destructive than the Israel/Gaza war currently in progress.
From the Cotswolds we drove across the Severn Valley to the Malvern Hills and found a red brick guest house to stay in Great Malvern. The Malvern Hills look splendid from the distance and later in life I often saw their dramatic grey silhouette like some huge sleeping animal as I drove on the A5 from Birmingham to Bristol or vice versa. He word ‘Malvern’ is said to be correctly pronounced Mal-vern and not Maul-vern and there is a Malvern Way in Hastings far from the Hills in which the first syllable is pronounced Mal and not Maul by the people who live there, but use of the Maul version seems to be widespread.
On my first visit to Great Malvern I found it rather dull though the hills themselves and the surrounding countryside get fulsome praise in the guides and are recipients of many designation like Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and sites of Special Scientific Interest. They are ringed at day excursion distances by many populous towns and cities and currently receive some 30 million day trippers annually. A good moment to quote William Langland’s famous line in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that in the Malverns he saw “A faire felde ful of folke”. As well as Langland other famous residents or visitors were Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Edward Elgar. Elgar found Great Malvern not an easy place to live. He often felt excluded as “only a musician” and ostracised as a Roman Catholic. The Narnia stories of C. S. Lewis are said to have been partly inspired by Great Malvern’s ornate Victorian street lamps while his friend J. R. R. Tolkien wove many aspects of the Malvern Hills, which he called the White Mountains, into his books such as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
Malvern is famous for its mineral water filtered through the ancient rocks of the hills and there is also a ‘Malvern’ sheep’s milk cheese and, being close to the Vale of Evesham, the local fruit and vegetables are of incomparable quality. Award winning Malvern Gold cider, made by the Aston Manor Cider Company is reckoned to be the World’s best medium dry still cider. It uses proper cider apple varieties like Yarlington Mill and Dabinett both originally from Somerset. However, despite the cider’s name, the company has its HQ in Birmingham and I suppose Birmingham Gold might sound a little less drinkable than Malvern Gold. Aston Manor was a local authority district to the north of Birmingham with Aston Hall at its centre. It has now been absorbed into Birmingham but not before it gave half its name to Aston Villa football club formed in March 1874 by members of the Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel in Handsworth. But I digress.
The following day forth I forayed in foremany famous footsteps on a walk along the backbone of the Malvern Hills. Starting at North Hill the way was clearly marked by the trodden line previous walkers had made. I was soon out in the fresh, grassbent wind between the famous views of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire and kept going up and down all day over Iron Age camps, holy wells and Roman forts (where British chief Caractacus may have fought and lost) eventually arriving at Wynds Point and the Herefordshire Beacon near the southern end of the hills where I telephoned for my father to come and pick me up. This was the first of many long and solitary walks I have taken over the years and has left a good memory in my psyche. Now it would be much more busy and some kind of rationing system may have to be introduced for the most popular tourist places, though there are ways of avoiding the crowds – traverse a hill, for example, rather than climbing to the top. Take a walk round a housing estate.
After we left Malvern we travelled a broad stretch of the West Midlands and moved on into Wales. I was immediately struck by the strangeness of the place names after we had crossed the Welsh border over the River Ceiriog or Afon Ceiriog at Chirk or Y Waun, the Welsh alternatives immediately becoming apparent among the English. ‘Ceiriog’ is Welsh for ‘cherries’ and Y Waun means ‘The Moor’. As we moved along the A5 I saw more evidence of this strange language in confirmation of arrival signs for places like Froncysyllte, Glyndyfrdwy, Ty’n-y-cefn and our final destination for the day, Betws-y-coed. This was the start of a lifelong interest in the Welsh language and Wales generally: my visit to the National Eisteddfod in Ruthin in 1973, weekly Welsh lessons in Wrexham in the late 1980s, involvement with Ferodo in Caernarfon including the investiture of the Prince of Wales (now King Charles III), a family outing to Holy Island, online lessons with Duolingo from 2019, ten pin bowling in Newport and continuing. My knowledge increases slowly. I can read fairly simple prose and have a reasonably good knowledge of basic grammar. I understand some of the conversations on the Welsh TV station SC4 but I would have difficulty conversing in the language because my brain doesn’t work fast enough. Sadly I am unlikely ever to return to Wales to get some practice. I find learning a language an engaging mental exercise though – a kind of yoga for the mind.
We found a hotel in Betws-y-coed and in the evening I walked with my father up a steep path through the Gwydyr Forest to an open area at the top. When we turned back it was nearly dark and among the trees about halfway down the track we met a figure of an old woman coming up the path. Both my father and I felt a cold shiver as our paths crossed in silence and my father said afterwards, “that was queer wasn’t it?” The figure was probably someone on their way home, and might have been just as spooked as us, but so far as we were aware, there were no houses higher up. This experience is the closest I have ever come to an encounter with what many would describe as a ghost.
Betws-y-coed had been a well-established tourist destination by the time of our visit but it was not as crowded as it would be today. It is on the A5 London-Holyhead road and much subject to crawling traffic (I was once caught in a lengthy jam on my way to Anglesey). We spent the second day of our stay touring Snowdonia whose name and that of Snowdon the mountain are currently being debated. Should the National Park be Eryri and the peak Yr Wyddfa as they are in the Welsh language? Trouble is the tourists would be unlikely to take to them quickly so it might be a bit like killing the goose. On our tour we also visited the celebrated Swallow Falls, a foaming cascade in the woods. The stream divides in two as it falls and is said to look a bit like a swallow’s tail, hence the name though, inevitably, there are alternative explanations.
From Betws-y-coed we headed south along the Cynllwyd Valley and, for some reason, I remember at a stop walking alone through the green filtered light of a vast overtopping bracken bed, feeling my contact with the earth and, marvelling at the thought of being in Merionethshire, imagined it as an enchanted place. On the edge of the teen years my mind was beginning to expand and wonder about the wider world. In our family car we climbed the dramatic mountain and moorland road which wound upwards and over the Pass of the Cross, Bwlch-y-groes (545 metres 1,788 ft) to descend precipitously into the Dovey Valley where we booked in to The Brigand Inn in the village of Mallwyd. This former coaching inn built in the 15th century was once associated with Y Gwylliad Cochion, the Red Bandits of Mawddwy who were active in the 16th century. The inn is also reputed to have a female ghost and I was reminded of the woman we had seen in Betws-y-coed the previous evening. Today the inn has gone rather more upmarket than my recollection of it and it illustrates a kind of cognitive dissonance in the world of tourism. Countryside hotels, through their websites, illustrate the comfort of bedrooms and bathrooms and the quality of the food available, whereas tourist boards, whose job it is to promote their areas, generally tend to highlight outdoor activities in beautiful countryside. When I stayed there the Brigand Inn had a rather brown and comfortable feel and a distinctive Welsh character. One old gentleman, I was told, was monoglot and only spoke Welsh.
The area around Mallwyd is renowned for its river angling and on one of the days of our stay I was given a crash course in fly fishing on the Afon Dyfi (the river Dovey). An elderly local was my tutor and, while we walked down the lane to the river, he told me of the famed fishing fly known as the coch a bonddu. There is some dispute about the correct spelling and, indeed, what the Welsh means. My personal interpretation is red with black base. This fishing fly has a thick, black body and usually red hackles. It is made to resemble a day-flying chafer beetle, various species of which can be common in early summer and often fall into the water where they are much appreciated by the trout. The earliest to emerge is the garden chafer, Phyllopertha horticola, followed by the aptly named Welsh chafer, Hoplia philanthus, one of whose strongholds is in the Dyfi valley.
The river was alive with water roller-coasting in foaming plaits under the 18th century stone bridge, the Pont Minllyn, into a miniature gorge filled with jagged, moss-capped grey boulders. Once over the constraint of the arch and gorge, the water settled down into brown rapids and calm, insect-haunted bankside pools accompanied by the sounds of the river and the breeze in the nearby trees. My fishing tutor and I found a quieter stretch of water a short way downstream and amid the scent of water mint and mud he showed me how to attach the fly, a small bundle of coloured feathers, to the line. Then, most difficult of all, we tackled the art of casting. The line, terminating in the fly, has to be flicked into the air then, using a backwards and forwards motion of the rod, the line is coaxed into a sort of animated s-shape before releasing it with a gentle thrust so that it snakes above the water to land the fly in part of the stream some yards away where you thought fish might be lurking. One then jerks the fly, now underwater, gently backwards and forwards to make the fish think it is a living invertebrate; mayfly nymph, worm, caddis fly, bandersnatch.
After many casts my fishing endeavours were at last rewarded when my line came out of the water with a four-inch wriggling salmon parr attached. It was unhooked and returned to the water. Salmon have five stages: egg, parr, smolt, ocean, and mature adult. The first three are spent in rivers before the smolts migrate to the sea until mature when they return to their home rivers to spawn. The fresh water parr are so called because they have a row of dark marks down either side of their body supposedly resembling fence posts; parren in Old English. The parr lose these marks as they turn into silvery smolts prior to their journey to the sea (the word smolt meant clear or bright in Old English).
At the end of the day, my tutor showed me his dry fly technique where the fly is cast so as to rest on the surface of quieter riverside pools of sunset brown water, tempting the fish to rise from the depths to what they thought was a meniscus-stranded insect. He caught nothing. Afterwards we walked slowly back up the lane to Mallwyd, to dinner and to bed. I had enjoyed my days fishing but decided thenceforward to give it up. In the morning we headed home across mid-Wales to Welshpool then in long curves to Shrewsbury and north of Birmingham to the skein of roads around the A1 running down to London and home in Chingford. Childhood’s end: in a few short days I would be taken from my family and friends to boarding school in West Sussex.
