Marie Corelli and Combe Martin, a seven mile walk via Berrynarbor and Ilfracombe

When Marie Corelli, the best-selling Victorian novelist, visited Combe Martin for the first time, she should have gone by sea. Marie delighted in boats, keeping a genuine Venetian gondola, “The Dream”, on the Avon near her Stratford home, and a genuine Venetian gondolier to paddle her about. Marie, in one of her signature white floaty dresses, would have made a fine sight sailing into the little cove, hopefully surrounded by a flotilla of admiring fisher folk. Sadly, it is more likely that she and her “companion”, Bertha Vyvers, drove along the coast road from Ilfracombe, where they were staying in 1895.

Let us hope for the sake of this most romantic, and often ecstatic, of writers, the road was not as it is now, but more of that later. Marie and Bertha wanted to visit the church, but they found more than that in Combe Martin, and there are reports that they stayed at a house called “Waverly” in the village, and that Marie wrote some of her novel, “The Mighty Atom”, in a room at that most eccentric of pubs, “The Pack of Cards”.

“The Mighty Atom”, published in 1896, was a smash hit, selling thousands of copies, as might be expected from a writer who sold as many books as all the other popular novelists like Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard put together. “The Mighty Atom” is a truly dreadful book, combining the usual Corelli stylised description of nature in extremis with an attack on rationalist education and with a plot of repellent mawkishness. The Victorian attitude in fiction to the death of children has always made me queasy, ever since reading “The Water Babies” as a small boy, but “The Mighty Atom” is something special. Lionel Valliscourt is an eleven year old boy, living in Combe Martin, who is being privately educated according to a rationalist scheme of his atheist father. The “mighty atom” of the title is the originator of the universe.

After a three hundred word overture of storm description which regular Corelli readers know all too well - “A heavy storm had raged all day on the north coast of Devon. Summer had worn the garb of winter in freakish fit of mockery and masquerade…” - the book begins with the sacking of Lionel’s present tutor, a young man far too fond of taking Lionel, for the liking of his domineering father, rowing in the bay and on to cottage cream teas.

Wandering around the churchyard, Lionel is smitten by a little girl, Jessamine, who is the daughter of the sexton, Reuben Dale, but the poor lad is soon hauled off by his new tutor for a holiday at Clovelly. When he returns, Lionel seeks out Jessamine, only to find her father burying her after she has died of diphtheria. Here is Marie in overdrive, spraying exclamation marks and dashes with her customary gay abandon, as Lionel pours out his heart to Reuben Dale.“ No – no! – not dead! Don’t say it! – not little Jessamine! Oh, you’re not – you’re not going to put her down there in the cold earth! – not little Jessamine! Oh, hold me! – I’m frightened – I am indeed! I can’t bear it, - I can’t, I can’t – oh, Jessamine!...she isn’t dead, - not really – oh, do say she isn’t,  - it would be too wicked! – too cruel!...”

Too everything! In his distress Lionel decides that there is only one way for him to confirm the heresy of the “mighty atom”. He writes a farewell note to his tutor. “I think that it would be better for boys like me if you could teach them that the First Cause was God, and that he loved everybody, and meant to explain the universe to us some day…”

Later that evening he hangs himself. “Lionel’s grave was closed in, and a full-flowering stem of the white lilies of St John lay upon it, like an angel’s sceptre. Another similar stem adorned the grave of Jessamine; and between the two little mounds of earth, beneath which two little innocent hearts were at rest forever, a robin-redbreast sang its plaintive evening carol, while the sun flamed down into the west and night fell.”

The success of the novel brought hordes of Corelli fans to Combe Martin and made a celebrity out of James Norman, the sexton and model for Reuben James. Very sensibly, James had postcards printed of himself and sold them from the churchyard. He lived but two years to profit from his fame, and his death encouraged the “Daily Mail” to publish a totally false story that Marie would provide a memorial for the poor chap but only if it bore the name of the fictional “Reuben Dale”.

Well, nothing much has changed there then, but I doubt if Combe Martin remains as Marie knew it. Approaching the village from inland, there is a long straggle of unattractive cottages, reminders that Combe Martin was once a mining community. Eventually the little harbour is reached, which is charming as long as you keep your back turned to the gift shops and caffs which despoil any seaside resort. The caffs were packed with ladies with tight grey curls, some escorted by swains in sad anoraks, and two huge charabancs were drawn up on the quayside. They probably had travelled from Ilfracombe in Marie’s and Bertha’s footsteps but I doubt with the same sense of intense romantic discovery. After a cursory look at the view, a cup of coffee, a slice of cake, and a charity shop or two would probably satisfy their needs.

Our plan was to walk in a circle to the outskirts of Ilfracombe and back, via the village of Berrynarbor, using as much of the South West Coastal Path as possible. It was a stiff pull out of Combe Martin as we walked up the A399 but at the top we turned left into the quiet lane which led along to Berrynarbor. Berrynarbor is a charming village, sheltered by its surrounding steep hills, and we quickly spotted a pleasing weather “cock” atop the church in the shape of a fox. We walked down through the churchyard of St Peter’s with its handsome tower, and turned right, which took us past the “Globe Inn”.

 

You need to have your wits about you to turn left and right to take the Goosewell Lane out of the village, otherwise you would be in danger of finding yourself back on the main road within yards of where you left it. This hill will make you puff but perhaps not quite as much as the horse of the cheery and amply-proportioned lady who passed us, exercising her nag by cantering it up the tarmac road. He must have had lungs like the Albert Hall organ pipes and joints of cast iron.

We left the village behind us and passed under a redundant bridge whose purpose was buried by time many years ago. The hedges hung thick with blackberries as big as grapes and, suddenly, there was a clink behind one of them. It was Ilfracombe Golf Course, and soon the town and the sea appeared below us. Approaching the main road, we took a footpath to our right which led us past Hele Mill. The water wheel still survives, but at this time of year the mill and its tearoom are open only at weekends. At the foot of the path lay the main road and beyond it the beach.

And here began our struggle. At this point the coastal path is the pavement of the A399 but, as we turned east, a couple walking in the opposite direction warned us that much of the path which passes round the coast was closed for repairs. So it proved and, in fact, virtually the whole coastal path back to Combe Martin was barred to walkers. The signs cheerily advised us that we could catch the bus if we liked. We did not like, and I should have followed my lifetime instinct to ignore all signs of prohibition and to plough on until one fell into an abyss.

Experience teaches that, in this part of the world, any sign threatening closure of a path or a road should be ignored, firstly as a gesture against officialdom and, secondly, because usually the sign tells a barefaced lie. We spent a frustrating hour or more, dicing with the traffic, while being miserably aware that no repairs were being made on that sunny morning. Two hundred yards from Combe Martin, at last back on the footpath, we saw a bus passing along the road.

Even if the path had been open, it would not have followed the coast all the way, and we would have spent much time on the busy A399. We passed numbers of caravan parks and Watermouth Castle, a Victorian folly and “theme park” which challenges one to “visit the gnomes.” The only gnomes visible were busy constructing a pavement on the main road opposite the castle, the only sign of coastal path construction work between Ilfracombe and Combe Martin. Watermouth Cove, framed by its distinctive hillocks, was crowded with boats stranded by low tide.

We came back into Combe Martin along the path which led to the beach.

“Turning away from the principal street of the village they bent their steps towards a small thatched cottage, overgrown from porch to roof with climbing roses, fuchsias and jessamine, where an unobtrusive signboard might be just discerned framed in a wreath of brilliant nasturtiums, and bearing the following device, CLARINDA CLEVERLY PAYNE. NEW LAID EGGS. DEVONSHIRE CREAM. JUNKETS. TEAS PROVIDED.”

("The Mighty Atom")

 

Miss Payne’s establishment, however, which entertained Lionel and his tutor, Mr. Montrose, in Chapter I of “The Mighty Atom”, was no where to be seen.A few steps above the centre of the village, we found “Devon Fayre”, a small tea shop which looked much more pleasant than the bigger caffs, now deserted after the earlier invasion of the silver hordes. We had a warm welcome, and were served a topping cream tea with scones as light and fluffy as a Marie muslin, proper clotted cream and good jam, and lashings of strong brown tea, all for £4.25 each, the most modest price we had found all summer. The people at the adjacent table had some excellent fish and chips in front of them.

After our tea, we drove back through the village to the church, which has its own car park; although a sign rather uncharitably threatened us with clamping if we were not on church business. Fortunately no clerical gentleman appeared with the dreaded metal shoe under his cassock and we visited the church unmolested.

 

We searched for the grave of James Norman without success, but we may have been misled by the graveyard index and map we discovered in the church. Subsequent reading suggests that we were on the wrong side of the church.

There were compensations within, however, in the form of a splendid rood screen with panels painted in Tudor times with portraits of the apostles.

Our visit to Marie Corelli’s Combe Martin had not been a great success, thanks to the prohibitions of Devon County Council. A better walk would have been eastwards towards Great Hangman, but we had done this before for our “Exmoor Pubs & Walks” site.

You may find it at http://exmoorpubswalks.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=combe+martin along with more about the “Pack of Cards”.

For more about Marie Corelli and a walk at Porlock Weir see the post of October 12^th 2013 on this site.