Devon is Heaven . . . the only blight is the Home County softies who move here and moan!

This week a Mail writer sparked fury by saying life in the West Country was such hell she fled back to Surrey. Now for a blistering response ...

IN WEDNESDAY’S Mail, writer Shona Sibary caused a storm when she wrote that uprooting her family from Surrey to Devon was one of the worst mistakes of her life. Rude locals, awful weather and a cultural wasteland with no Waitrose or Wagamama left her feeling so depressed, she wrote, that after four years she decided to move back to Surrey. Here, a writer who also moved to Devon — but loves it — bites back … T HE screeching bang in the street woke me from an already restless night’s sleep. I peered through the window of my West London home and saw a car turned upside down.

It had ricocheted off several parked cars before coming to a halt. Joyriders high on drugs, I later learned.

I stroked the swell of my stomach — the life which had been growing inside me for three months — and decided there and then that we were leaving London for good.

Sleep was impossible. Sirens, noisy neighbours and planes from nearby Heathrow Airport, their engines loud enough to make the windows vibrate, made life intolerable.

I buried my head in my husband’s chest and started to cry. ‘I can’t take it any more,’ I sobbed.

‘It’s all right,’ Adrian reassured me. ‘We’ll move. Let’s start looking.’

And so began a journey which ended where I am today, living more or less as a single parent in the remote wilds of North Devon with Rosalyn, our 22-month-old daughter. Meanwhile, my 39-year-old husband, a business executive, works in London during the week to pay the mortgage and the household bills.

This week, writer Shona Sibary gave an unflinching account of how moving from the Home Counties to the hell of ‘godforsaken’ rural Devon had destroyed her family life and left her a broken woman.

Rude locals, terrible weather, crippling boredom and a cultural wasteland with, shock-horror, no Waitrose or Wagamama, conspired, wrote Shona, to drive her out of her mind and all the way back to Surrey after what she described as four ‘catastrophic years’.

Reading her account, anyone who has not visited this magical part of the British Isles could be forgiven for thinking that Devon is the capital of the small-minded and the downtrodden, where the wind howls, the rain lashes down and the sea is too cold to enjoy — except, if you’re lucky, for two days of the year.

Well, my experience could not be more different.

In the 18 months since I moved, with a newborn baby, to one of the most beautiful, but isolated, places in England, I have encountered kindness, strength and a sense of community spirit which has left me truly humbled.

Sure, there has been the odd night when I have been pushed to the limit, nights when — spooked by whatever it is the dogs are barking at outside — I have armed myself with an axe. Trees have fallen down in storms and there have been power cuts, plunging us into chaos.

But there is nowhere I would rather live than where I am now. For me, it is paradise — albeit one with an atrocious internet connection and no mobile signal. I can’t help but feel