We said our cheery farewells to Phil and Ingrid around midday and pointed Eileen’s nose in a southerly direction. At Cross Houses we didn’t spot any houses looking angry, but we did spot a sign advising that the road ahead was closed. We pulled over to work out which direction to take and almost instantly a chap in a car pulled up next to us and asked where we were trying to get to. We told him, and he chirpily said “right, follow me” and so we did. We wiggled along down very narrow country lanes, sometimes wondering if he actually realised we were in a campervan and not a mini. Finally we did pop back out on the main road and managed to stick to the planned route.
On Friday we started our twelve- day session of spending time, with someone we knew. everyday. I spent a morning with my lovely mother-in-law, Jean. Rodney drove over to Evesham to check out a part for Eileen at the Autosleeper workshop and then came back to eat a tasty lunch with Jean and me. Our next stop was in a campsite near my old home town, Weston-Super-Mare. On advice from Rodney’s brother, Morley to delay our arrival in Padstow until early evening, we decided to spend the morning exploring my old haunts in Weston-Super-Mare. I clicked into an enthusiastic reminiscing mood and had a fabulous time. We drove past my old grammar school, or should I say, the site of my old grammar school. The buildings have been knocked down and there is now a replacement school in the middle of the playing fields. We drove past my last home at Oldmixon and also had a nose around my first home in Severn Road, which was an off-licence (bottle shop) owned by Courage Brewery, but it is now a real ale free-house pub.
It was a wonderful three-storey building with cellars underneath and a barn and stables out in the rear yard. It was only about two-hundred metres to the huge sandy beach and was a brilliant place to grow up in (age 7 to age 16). The beer may be good inside, but the building now looked rather sad. The old ‘Severn House’ sign had been removed and the lovely front window was completely boarded in with a huge sign ‘The Waverley’. The back yard was all fenced in and both the barn and the stables were gone. However I was pleased to see that the stone cherubs were still looking anxious above the front door.
Even though it was raining, we decided to go for a stroll, so we parked Eileen next to Ellenborough Park and strolled past Walliscote Primary School, which brought back fond memories. My headmaster was Mr Bunny, which seems such a wonderful name for a primary school headmaster and it’s a surname that I ‘ve never come across again. We ambled down the High Street and on to the Playhouse, we zigzagged through to the beach front at The Old Thatched Cottage Restaurant, where I worked as a waitress in the school holidays; that was a tough job, but the left-over food, mid-afternoon, was good.
We reached the Grand Pier just as the speakers were booming out the sound of Cliff Richards singing ‘Summer Holiday’; As a child I used to kiss the television when he appeared on it….! The Grand Pier with its Ghost Train, Hall of Mirrors and slot machines burned down five years ago, but it has now been rebuilt to look roughly the same, though curiously still not long enough for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to be based there. When the tide goes out at Weston-Super-Mare, it really and truly goes out, and the Grand Pier is left standing on the sand with no water around it. When I was a child I used to think we sent the sea over to Wales and they then sent it back, twice a day…..doh! I ‘m still wondering why they didn’t rebuild the new pier further out past the low tide mark and move the R.N.L.I. boats to it. When we later drove round the seafront to Birnbeck Pier, or the Old Pier, as we used to call it, I was surprised to find it still standing, though only just standing by the look of it. Walls are gone, roofs have collapsed and most of the decking is rotten, but there is one narrow section that has been repaired to enable the lifeboatmen to still reach the R.N.L.I. Station to launch their boats in an emergency. It all seems a rather crazy set up and very sad to see the old pier in such a miserable state.
As a child I loved walking along on the top of the sea wall, it was too boring just walking along the flat promenade; there needed to be the added excitement of the possibility of falling off. So naturally, I crept a short distance on the wall, but it wasn’t a good idea to go too far at my age with dodgy knees. I managed to not buy any candy floss, toffee apples, or a stick of rock, but I did have a youthful moment when we wandered in to the Winter Gardens. The door to the ballroom was open, so we crept in and I revived my teenage memories. I used to go there on a Saturday night to watch, and dance to, some classic bands: T Rex, Curved Air, Rod Stewart and The Faces, Mott The Hoople, Slade, Procol Harem, oh blimey, I do feel old now with that selection of bands!!!
When Rodney had finally had enough of my reminiscing, we hopped back in to Eileen and drove, on a road that never existed in my day, out to the M5, a motorway that also never existed in my day. Rodney has promised me a night at the Grand Hotel on the seafront one day; maybe my 70th birthday, we probably don’t need to return again before then.
Our next stop was in Padstow, to stay with Morley and Anthea for three nights at their Bed and Breakfast. Eileen had to stay on her own, parked beside Rick Stein’s deli, fishmongers and fish & chip shop, but she had a nice view of the Camel Estuary. Up at the B & B, Anthea fed us extremely well with home cooked meals and a couple of delicious clotted cream teas and on Monday, Morley took us on a long drive to Buckfastleigh in South Devon to see an old pub, The Valiant Soldier.
The place was open, but we had to pay £4 each to get in and we couldn’t even get a drink when we were in there. Apparently, in 1965, the brewery decided there were too many pubs in the town and withdrew the licence. So when the widowed landlady called time on the last night, she promptly downed tools and never cleaned up, she just closed the door and lived upstairs. The doors remained closed for thirty years until the property was put up for sale in the mid-nineties. When the doors were re-opened in 1996 there were still cigarette butts in the ashtrays, unwashed glasses left on the bar, the optics still had alcohol in them and there was even change still in the till. It’s a perfect time-capsule of a pub left for thirty years untouched. It’s quite fascinating.
On Tuesday morning, we returned to Eileen and set off north, leaving Cornwall, crossing Devon and in to Somerset again. I fancied stopping at the Blake Museum in Bridgewater, but apparently it’s not full of stuffed Blakes; it’s a museum about Bridgewater, situated in Blake Street…. shame. Instead we purchased a new bulb for Eileen’s security system and stopped briefly for a bit of shopping in Street (that’s a town) and then checked in to the Cheddar Mendip Heights caravan site, which is nowhere near the source of the big cheese, but up some terribly narrow lanes near the village of Priddy. The campsite manager said he sold the best mature Cheddar cheese in the world and as he was a big man with a big beard, we thought it best to agree with him. We bought a block and popped it in to Eileen’s empty fridge.
I found it hard to fall asleep on our last night in Eileen. Maybe it was the thought that for the next month we would be hopping in and out of our friends’ spare beds, dragging our suitcases here and there. Maybe it was the realisation that we wouldn’t be sleeping in our cosy bed in our little ‘snail house’ for at least five months. Maybe it was the wind and rain blowing around in the trees outside, as if they were trying to say “go home to somewhere warmer, winter is arriving here”. Or maybe it was just Rodney snoring a little too loudly beside me.
