Villager by Tom Cox

Author:Tom Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800181359
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2022-03-10T16:37:36+00:00

ME (NOW)

The village of Wychcombe is recorded as ‘a manor call Wickcoomb’ in the Domesday survey of 1086. By the thirteenth century, the parish could boast two churches: St Constantine’s, situated precariously and impractically on a granite escarpment 730 feet above the main street and now no more than two ruined walls, and the still-standing St John’s. By the 1500s, Wickcoomb had split into two settlements: Wychcombe and Underhill. After this point, Underhill expanded and Wychcombe stayed more or less the same size, coming to resemble, from above, a densely wooded forked tail attached to the posterior of the larger settlement. The 1921 census recorded the population of Underhill as 666, causing much merriment in the four alehouses the village then possessed, although by the census of 1961 that figure had dropped by 98: a reduction often assumed to be down to the human cost of the fight against Hitler but in fact down to the progress of agricultural machinery and the subsequent decrease in rural employment opportunities, resulting in an exodus of residents to urban areas. Many in the village would come to remember the war as the most fulfilling period of their lives. Most of the wealthier households by this point had a wireless, which had invariably been sold to them and repaired by a Mr Henry Salter of Plymouth, a small man who rarely paused for breath while imbibing liquor and telling his many embellished stories of life on the road and who, on his trips over to charge people’s wet batteries, would often stay on for a few days and organise sing-arounds amongst his drinking companions. Always matriarchal, the village in this period became even more so. Social gatherings were organised by Land Army girls who had taken occupation of the outlying farms and Wychcombe Manor. The manor had until late in the previous century been the ancestral home of the Bambury family, who during the late 1700s kept fourteen parrots and England’s last house jester: a man of barely four feet three inches in height whose routines included chewing the feathers off live sparrows to see if they would still fly (they didn’t). These days the mainline train barrels over the viaduct past the luxury flats the manor has now been converted into, as passengers strive to stifle their irritation at the sound of one another’s antisocial mastication and shrill offspring. Sometimes, a fox, hare or a deer will be visible from a window, but it is a rare commuter who will notice, since most are too deep inside the more compelling universe inside the screens they take with them everywhere. Few look up to admire the abandoned but still very attractive Wychcombe Junction station where some of those very foxes who run alongside the train have been known to sleep and breed.

The passenger railway arrived here in 1847, although it was predated by almost two decades by another, which took granite across my flanks, down to the coast, where it was shipped off and used to make bridges and walls.

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