High standards of grub are the norm in West Somerset
Wandering through the Vale of Taunton recently, I reflected that few places on earth could be more fair in April-time. The trees were still mostly bare but the blossom was out in many places, and the entire countryside bore an air of expectation and awakening in the pale, tentative sunlight. The carpet of arable, pasture and woodland leans upward from the valley bottom into the Brendon and Blackdown hills, with the Quantocks to the north-east. Not much has changed here in 100 years or indeed 200. The landscape is a magical blend of man’s making and pure nature. Here is farming and nothing else: no industry, few roads of any consequence, a single railway line resurrected from the Beeching massacre of half a century ago, its trains whistling mournfully from time to time. Each farm is connected to the one-lane ‘main’ road by a track sometimes a mile or two long, and is the true link of this rural kingdom. All are named on the Ordnance Survey one-inch map. And such names! There is Oxenleaze farm and Chubworthy farm, High Chieflowan and Uplowman, Windwhistle and Nicholashayne, Garlandhayes and Noble Hindrance, Lovelywell and Slantycombe. What utilitarian but nonetheless inspired poet was the nomenclator of this ancient region?
Some names go back many centuries to times when French was still the tongue of the ruling landed class and Latin the language of documents. The village names reflect those days. There is Beggearn Huish and Huish Barton, as well as Huish Champflower. King’s Brompton is not far from Brompton Regis both part of the royal estates, plainly — and then there is Brompton Ralph. Who was Ralph? The one-time owner of these broad acres, as well as tol and team, sac and soc, and infangentheof. I remember the name because Evelyn Waugh, living in the Vale of Taunton at Combe Florey, and who often consulted the map in search of names for his fictional characters, seized on Brompton Ralph, cunningly inverted it, and produced Sir Ralph Brompton, the sinister left-wing diplomat of Unconditional Surrender, said to have been based on Harold Nicolson. Other names have resonances. Combe Sydenham is the manor house whence came the bride of Sir Francis Drake, and which I painted many years ago. And what about Cuckold’s Combe? That speaks for itself.
The land in these parts seems impervious to the radical changes which are soiling and rending most of our country. The farmers have taken a cruel battering in the last generation, but here they just carry on, cheerfully enough, keeping any bitter thoughts to themselves. You never see a field which has been allowed to go out of use in the Vale. Why do professional politicians (and they are all such now) hate farmers so much? No doubt because they are independent-minded, not easy to push around or regiment; obstinate and resilient. To find a prime minister who really loved the countryside and felt in tune with those who worked there, you would have to go back three quarters of a century, to Stanley Baldwin.
Baldwin not only felt for rural people and things but spoke and wrote about them with astonishing grace — as his cousin Rudyard Kipling said, ‘the real pen in our family is Stan’s’. Kipling added that he ‘spoke such good English because he had absorbed in his youth the best prose and poetry which the country produced’. Baldwin was by family background and training an ironmaster but he liked to keep pigs and be photographed scratching their backs with his stick. I suspect he inspired the famous remark about pigs usually attributed to his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill: ‘A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig treats you as an equal and looks you straight in the eye.’ It is typical of Baldwin that, when asked which was his favourite Kipling story, he picked ‘An Habitation Enforced’, the charming tale of an American couple who fall in love with the English countryside and buy a small estate there, where they are welcomed as belonging. Of course Kipling was writing of Sussex, and for that matter Baldwin was primarily a lover of Worcestershire. But the real English countryside, in whatever region it is found, has certain fundamental characteristics which are the same everywhere. I have no doubt that if Baldwin or Kipling had lived in West Somerset, they would have become as fond of it as I am.
The rich red earth is a great and prolific producer of good things. Just down the road from my house, a farm supplies us with the best eggs I have ever eaten, at not much more than £1 a dozen. It also provided for our Easter dinner a plump roasting chicken almost on the scale of a turkey, which nourished us for the best part of a week. Our neighbour, Tamasin Day-Lewis, the leading food expert in England, has now persuaded me that a Somerset goose, properly cooked in such a way as to eliminate the grease, is another dish fit for the gods. As for the local lamb, it is incomparable.
We live a lordly life in Somerset. We hear by phone when the local sea-fisherman has had a good haul, and hurry to his shed near the beach where his catch is grandly spread out for our choice, still glistening with seawater. The local variety of sea trout, known as Severn Trout, is a princely fish of exquisite and creamy flavour, which always forms the chief ingredient of the annual kedgeree luncheon we offer to our neighbours. Too good to use in kedgeree? Not a bit of it: it is making use of the finest materials which turns this routine Anglo–Indian stomach-charger into a queenly feast.
Here, too, we have the highest quality vegetables and fruit, grown locally, often in people’s gardens, for in West Somerset everyone has a beautiful and fertile garden, or hangs his or her head in shame. The broccoli and cauliflower are ethereal, the new potatoes melting, the asparagus dynastic. All temperate fruits are grown here with triumphant results. Is it true that Cardinal Wolsey was inspired to invent strawberries and cream after a visit to Somerset? Apples seem to grow here to the finest perfection without much effort on man’s part. As for the pears — they are surely the luscious jewel in the West Country’s fruity crown. We have some pear trees growing at the back of our house, each year producing, with no attention from us, a heavy crop — if they can somehow be made to ripen.
Lord Beaverbrook, I recall, had a farm in Somerset whose paramount function was to supply his London table with pears. A photograph has survived of him strolling down a Somerset lane to his fruit farm, a crawling Rolls in the background should the Beaver’s legs grow weary. He was particular about these pears. Henry Fairlie used to tell a tale about lunching with Beaverbrook à deux at Arlington House. For pudding, a bowl of his pears was brought in. ‘Now Mr Fairlie, I will select for you the best of these incomparable pears, and to ensure it is perfect I will slice it in two with this silver knife — thus!’ But, having prodded both halves, the Beaver pushed them away: ‘Not good enough.’ He took a second pear, with the same result. And then a third and a fourth. Eventually only one pear was left, and that too proved unsatisfactory. Beaverbrook pushed the bowl and the detritus away in disgust: ‘Pears no good today.’ In Somerset, you learn to acquire high standards.
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