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| Looking over towards Exmoor |
We spent a couple of days this week down in North Devon, on the edge of Exmoor, where (many moons ago!) my husband was at school at West Buckland. He had been invited back to give a careers talk to the senior pupils there and we had a fascinating tour of a school which now presents a very different face to the world from that which he knew in the 1960s!
But for me the visit held a different interest. Many years ago I read "To Serve Them All My Days" by R. F. Delderfield, who had been a pupil at West Buckland just after the First World War and who used the school and its history as the basis for the book. I'm now rereading it, and loving it as much this time as I did before. Delderfield was a master of description and the passages about the moorland in particular paint beautifully vivid pictures of that scenic part of the world; his use of the story of David Powlett-Jones to illustrate the changes in education and the social turmoil of the inter-war period makes for a very engrossing read. If you're not familiar with the book, it's well worth having a look at.
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| A part of the old school Delderfield would have known |
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