First and Last Loves

(Locus Petroci) they have a statue of him, a more lively one than the little stone one in Padstow church. It shows a benign, bearded man in a spangled cloak, in one hand he holds the gospels and with the other he strokes a thin, nobbly little deer which has jumped up to him and put its forepaws on his breast. Blessed St. Petroc! He was the chief of all Cornish saints, a man of pervading gentleness.

St. Petroc may be neglected in Padstow today. But the Hobby-horse is not. Whether it came in with the Danes who sacked the town in 981 and drove St. Petroc’s monks to Bodmin or whether it was a pagan rite which St. Petroc himself may have witnessed with displeasure, I leave to antiquarians to dispute. The Padstow Hobby-horse is a folk revival which is almost certainly of pagan origin. Moreover, it is as genuine and unselfconscious as the Morris Dancing at Bampton-in-the-Bush, Oxfordshire, and not even broadcasting it or an influx of tourists will take the strange and secret character from the ceremonies connected with it. For this is what happens. On the day before May Day, green boughs are put up against the houses. And that night every man and woman in Padstow is awake with excitement. I knew someone who was next to a Padstow man in the trenches in the 1914 war. On the night before May Day, the Padstow man became so excited he couldn’t keep still. The old ’obby ’oss was mounting in his blood and his mates had to hold him back from jumping over the top and dancing about in No-man’s-land.

Now imagine a still night, the last of April, the first of May. Starlight above the chimney pots. Moon on the harbour. Moonlight shadows of houses on opposite slate walls. At about two in the morning the song begins.Here are the words.

With a merry ring and with the joyful spring,

   For summer is a-come unto day

How happy are those little birds which so merrily do sing

   In the merry morning of May.

Then the men go round to the big houses of the town singing below the windows a variety of verses—

“Arise up Mr. Brabyn I know you well afine

  You have a shilling in your purse and I wish it were in mine.”

And then on to a house where a young girl lives—

“Arise up Miss Lobb all in your smock of silk

  And all your body under as white as any milk.”

Morning light shines on the water and the green-grey houses. Out on the quay comes the Hobby-horse—it used to be taken for a drink to a pool a mile away from the town. It is a man in a weird mask, painted red and black and white, and he wears a huge hooped skirt made of black tarpaulin which he is meant to lift up, rushing at the ladies to put it over one of their heads. The skirt used to have soot in it. A man dances with the Hobby-horse carrying a club. Suddenly, at about 11.30 in the morning, there is a pause. The Hobby-horse bows down to the ground. The attendant lays his club on its head and the day song begins, a dirge-like strain.

“Oh where is St. George?   Oh where is he, O?

He’s down in his long boat.    All on the salt sea, O.”

Then up jumps the Hobby-horse, loud shriek the girls, louder sings the crowd and wilder grows the dance—

With a merry ring and with a joyful spring

   For summer is a-come unto day

How happy are those little birds which so merrily do sing

   In the merry morning of May.Ilfracombe

Ilfracombe is the end of everything. The express train had only three carriages left which had wound so long and crowded out of Waterloo. Parts of it had been dropped off at Exeter and Barnstaple. Here at Ilfracombe staion, the end of the line, we seemed to hang in air on a cliff top, with the town two hundred feet below us and silvery slate cliffs, sea and the far-seen coast of Wales beyond.

It was hard to believe there was going to be a town after all those miles of bleak North Devon fields with their high stone hedges, black thorns, foxgloves and hardly a house in sight. There might perhaps be a village, quite a big village, but not a town. Ilfracombe seems enormous. It has several churches, lines of Welsh-looking lodging houses, hills and valleys filled with houses, shops, cinemas and loud speakers giving off crooning. It is the Blackpool of the West, the Douglas of North Devon, the noise and the glitter dazzled me at first so that I could not sort out Ilfracombe nor discover why it had ever been built and if it had to be in North Devon, why not at some more spectacular place like Heddon’s Mouth or Lynton where Exmoor rises to nearly a thousand feet and cascades in rocks and bracken to the Bristol Channel? Why is Ilfracombe here where there is no sand and these great hills, grass on the land-ward side, slate on the seaward, hide much of the town from the sea?

I went up Torrs Walks and from 450 feet looked back on the town. My son and I set off in a speed boat swirling past