Western Morning News (Saturday)
Writer evoked the past with great honesty
DAVID Hill, a long-standing and much-loved writer with the Western Morning News, as well as an accomplished poet, has died suddenly at the age of 75.
He passed away on the very day his last piece for this newspaper was published last week – a typically beautiful and evocative feature about the autumn display of harvested produce at Heligan and the memories it brought back of the harvests of his childhood.
David was born in 1947 in Barnstaple to Annie and John Hill of Knowstone – a village that was to feature in so much of his work in later life. A farmer’s son, he went on to become a school teacher and head of English at Ernesettle School, in Plymouth, which has since closed.
With his wife, Kathryn, also a teacher, he settled for a time in Saltash before the couple moved to the home and its ‘wilderness’ garden that they were to occupy until his death, in the village Bowling Green, near Bugle in Cornwall.
After teaching David became a freelance writer and wrote works of fantasy for major national publishers Armada and Fontana. He was a publisher’s reader and consultant on fantasy literature too. But it will be as a writer of beautifully crafted Country Notebooks and longer pieces drawing on his childhood memories for which David will best be remembered by Western Morning News readers.
He was a lover of wildlife and created, with Kathryn, a beautiful wildlife garden around their home, which included six ponds. Their conservation work and the creatures it helped to bring to the garden won national recognition and a major award in 1992.
David’s special skill as a writer of both poetry and prose was an ability to bring the past to life with a freshness and an eye for detail that lifted it above mere ‘nostalgia.’ He contributed to the WMN for more than ten years, starting with pieces for the Country Notebook column before developing longer articles that were to enthral and delight readers across the generations.
His works were collected together in book form under the title The Farmhouse Tree, the childhood name for the Knowstone farmhouse where he grew up and which he always imagined as a tree, with its many rooms the branches. He later published a further volume, Final Footsteps Down the Lane.
In a piece in the first collection David describes how the analogy of his home as a tree came about, telling his beloved maiden Aunt Nell, a regular presence in much of his writings, that the house was “so old that sometimes I imagine I am living in a tree. It just seems to grow out of the earth like an oak tree. And each room and outbuilding are branches and the cob walls are the trunk...”
That image, one of thousands conjured up by David in his writings, demonstrates his incredible memory for a time, now vanished, of ploughing with horses, milking cows by hand, turning apples into cider and relishing village and family life.
Every event, every village occasion, every experience, and every boyish emotion, David rendered in his writings with a rare skill that will be sadly missed. He was a brilliant writer, a hard-working conservationist, a community-minded citizen and a very good friend. He will be sorely missed. David Hill’s funeral will be held at the Church of Holy Trinity, St Austell, on November 10 at 1.30pm – the church where he and Kathryn were married 53 years ago.