My personal tribute to a devoted countryman

MARTIN HESP describes the special talent of WMN correspondent David Hill, who died last week, aged 75

ICON: a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol. The writer David Hill, who passed away at his Cornish home last week, would have hated the idea of being described as an icon – but he was most certainly a representative symbol of something a great many of us hold dear… He did more than almost anyone else in the region to represent this highly pastoral peninsula’s immediate past.

A past which so many readers of this newspaper will remember with great fondness.

For many years David wrote unceasingly, and with great passion and skill, about the rural Westcountry of yesteryear – or, to be more precise, the Devonshire life which was to be found in the remote village of Knowstone, tucked into rolling hills just south of Exmoor, where he spent an idyllic childhood.

As WMN readers will know, these beautifully-honed word-pictures were minor masterpieces of nostalgia. David not only had a quite amazing memory, but he had that all-important sense-of-place... Not everyone has it – an exxagerated and finely honed sense-of-place is a rarity – but, for a few, it colours and directs everything they do. And it could be argued that those fortunate enough to be born with a strong geographic radar make better writers and artists than those who have to struggle in their bid to embrace the very real world around them.

If you don’t believe me, then find

a copy of David Hill’s book The Farmhouse Tree – it is an outstanding example of a word portrait which depicts a certain place at a certain time. What David does in 200 pages is describe a half-forgotten world that will lurk, like some Victorian miasma, in the bones of most WMN readers over the age of 50 who grew up in the countryside west of Bristol.

The Farmhouse Tree is a paean – a thanksgiving, a poem even – that kneels at the altar of rural life. Not a hymn of the all-things-bright-andbeautiful genre – but a song of praise that reflects a bygone age in warts-and-all-ish fashion. And so, on the one hand, we have beautiful eulogies lamenting long lost highdays and holidays. There’s an account of a boyhood picnic spent alone with an adoring mother that is almost a poem in its own right.

Page after page, David describes unique elements of his childhood life…

“In the afternoon heat above the cabbage patch, a flurry of butterflies dancing in the haze in a silent shimmer of summer snowflakes,” wrote David, remembering how his father would pay him a farthing for each Cabbage White caught and despatched in his butterfly net. “As he paid me .... my father gave me his simple philosophy – caterpillar, butterfly, life, death. Once by mistake, I killed a Brimstone. The look of sadness in his eyes.”

And so always with David there was the other side of the multi-layered patchwork which is sometimes hailed as the ‘rural idyll’.

There was his sense of loss, his discomfiture over the distance between ‘back then’ and now. A loss which David did not moan or groan about or disdain in anyway, but which caused his writing to sing with a sense of haunting and melancholy.

Like the chiaroscuro that you see in a Devonshire wood in midsummer, there was always light pervading his prose, but it was sometimes edged with just a little dark.

As he once said to me as he took myself and WMN editor Philip Bowern for a walk around this childhood parish: “The name for a woodland devoid of shadows is a desert…”

But when David wrote about the distant almost mystical realm of his boyhood, what he described was a place every bit as rich and fertile as a rainforest.

Which is why I borrow the word ‘icon’. You can visit museums to find out what the Westcountry was like back in the days before the internet, motorways, or mass-communications – or, for a highly detailed and very humane view of post-war village life, you can read the works of David Hill.

He will be greatly missed – his writings remain forever.