A few Sundays back I took a trip out with my step nephew Denzil up to Codden Hill He happened to be passing by Ashord Strand and popped in to ask if I wanted to come along. He was on his way up there to fly his new prototype model plane. It's a Stealth Bomber whose stability he wanted to test in the thermals up there. I had to take his word for it as aerodynamics is not exactly my specialty. So with the tempting offer of a pint in the Three Pidgeons thrown in I decided to tag along. It was beautiful up there, the skies were clear blue and the view was at it's best. North Devon in all it's glory on a fine May day stretched out before me. Dartmoor loomed on the South Westerly horizon and in a westerly direction Brown Willy could be seen majestically poking up over the valleys of the Tamar. In the East, Exmoor, strewn with blossoming heather, rose up like a great purple bruise and out to sea Lundy basked in a salty haze. Ah Devon. The only thing that spoilt this was the drone of Denzil's bleddy plane. I told him I thought Stealth Bombers were supposed to be silent and rather irritated he explained that such technology had not trickled down as yet to the model enthusiasts level.
Fortunately, it wasn't long before his fuel ran out and as a squall could be spied out over Hartland we decided to get back down to the pub.
I always have fond memories of the Three Pidgeons as back int the days of the CB club we held a few charity functions out there. We'd all drash out there in convoy, I remember I had a lovely Ford Zephyr Zodiac at the time, eyeball in the car park and then head on inside for skittles and a chip supper. The place has been spruced up a bit in recent years but it was good to see that they were doing a fair old trade. Usual Sunday roast crowd and desultory hungry locals propped up at the bar gawping at the passing plates of meat and two veg. I was glad to see that Davey Kelly was one of these and I tapped him on the back as he was about to snaffle a few teddies and a piece of meat of one of the plates that the waitree was removing from a vacated table. Bleddy gannet that bloke. Davey as always seemed gald to see a friendly face and he was even happier to see us after Denzil got him in a Guinesss and black. Davey's from a familly of Irish Travellers from way back way back when, way before the term even existed. Back then they were plain old diddcoys or diddies in a more familiar term of address for those that weren't strictly gypsy gypsies. In Daveys case his clan never travelled too far away from Pearcy's scrap metal yard on Seven Brethren Bank. I don't think Daveys been any further abroad than Minehaed. Still he's a bleddy case that's for certain. Back in the seventies he used trade on his dark looks and long curly black hair by walking around town dressed as a cavalier from the English Civil War he wasn't part of the Torrington sealed knot lot, he just liked the look, thigh lenghh boots, fancy buttoned jerkin, ruff and wide brimmed hat all topped off with a bright pink plume. Later due to an accident when someone had his eye out with a pool queue in the Gaydons he became a pirate, same old garb but now with added eye patch and he lost the plume but gained a parrot. He then moved to Combe Martin where he posed for visitors on the front for a few seasons that is until the pop singer Adam Ant popularised the look and then no one wanted to have their photo take with a seedy looking Ant Person with a mite riddled parrot. Still it was good to see him, he still has the parrot and the eye patch but the has lost some hair but with the remaining locks tied back in a bony tail covered by a headscarf and the leather waders you could say he still had a piratical air about him.
We had a natter for a bit catching up on things.He told me how he'd moved to Bishops Tawton a few hers back and he filled me in with a few goings on in the village and he was eager to tell me about his new allotment. I pressed him on this as I have had me name down for one for years now and I wanted to know how he'd managed to get one so quick. Turns out that the newly reformed Bishop Tawton Allotment Association (BTAA) had taken on the task of reclaiming the old alotment field between the river and the church which had been left to rack and ruin after the demand for allotments had tailed off sometime around the end of the last series of the Good Life. However, as we all know allotments have once again come into great demand. It's a fashion statement so I've heard. A bit like it was back in the 70's a lifestyle choice but no bugger's ever in it for the long term save a few old boys. Still in order to meet burgeoning local demand the BTAA decided to get to grips with the old field and put it into some sort of order. Davey always one to sniff out an opportunity lent a hand clearing it out. I akled him if he used his Pirate's cutlass and it turns out he did. No joke. As they hacked into the overgrowth they came across the old allotment shed which everyone forgot was there. It turned out to be remarkably intact inspite having been abandoned for thirty years. Inside everything had been left just as it had been when it was last in use. It must have been like finding Scott's hut in Antartica, old tins of slug repellant, a bag of compost, some seeds in original packets, there was even a tin of Huntley and Plamers biscuits and a thermos flask next to an original glass milk bottle and a Daily Mirror from 1981 with Sam Fox on the front. Along with this treasure trove there was a fine collection of old tools which must have dated all from that era and rather odly an artificial leg. Of course some of the members of the BTAA were rather excited by this discovery which provided a link to the history of the village all of thity years ago. Which, as Davey pointed out was something for these folk as they were all blow ins and had a warped sense of history and felt the need to stamp some sort of mark in the annals of village life. Anyway, bys the by, live and let live, they gathered up the tools and other artefacts and transferred them to the new community shed, where they exhibited them on the wall so people would be able to see how people in the village lived thirty years ago.
Davey then went onto tell a rather peculiar tale. He was in the pub a while ago when the chairman of the BTAA came tearing in, blathering inchoherently about someone singing down at the shed. After settling him down wtih a brandy he was able to tell them how on approaching the shed that evening he'd heard a man singing from inside. Initially, he'd got in a huff as he thought some homeless people had moved up from their tents by the railway line and moved into the shed. Indignant at this trespass he flung open the door to find no one there. A little beside himself and flummoxed he locked up the shed and thought he'd come back later just to take a look and keep an eye on things. Later that evening in the twilight as he approached the shed he could here a maniac cackling sound, some loud crashing followed by a belicose rendition of the Song of the Western Men. "And shall Trelawney live and shall Trelawney die. There's twenty thousand Cornishmen will know the reason why." This time fearing for his own safety he turned tail and skeddadled back to the pub, running mazed all the way along the main road. He was still a trembling and his eyes wild with fear and as he recounted his tale. Davey his interest getting the better of him swallowed down a large brandy for Dutch courage and full of bravado swaggered off down there to have look for himself. He found the community shed all locked up as usual, he took a look around and could find nothing untoward but just as he was about to leave he heard a voice coming from the old shed. "Get on you bugger. Bleddy thing. Get on" He catiously approached it all was quiet but as the eery silence shattered by a train rattling passed Davey threw caution to the wind and entered the old shed and was astonished by what he discovered. All the old tools, the artefacts were all put back just as they had been found a fewdays before. Everything was in exactly the same place just as they had been left all those years before. However, even more oddly there was one thing missing, the artificial leg. The shed was cursed, evidently someone not of this life had become very upset about having their things moved.
Davey later reported his findings back to an extraordinary meeting of the BTAA He said that he didn't think the ghost was particularly malevolent just a bit pissed off. However being better safe than sorry he thought it best to leave the old shed as it was and stay clear of it for the time being. He then told them that he'd gladly take on the allotment with the shed on it as he was now a familiar of the spirit. At this point he gave me a rather exaggerated wink. So intrigued was I that at the time I thought nothing of it.
As it happens I did recall some rather tragic occurrence some thirty years ago at Bishops Tawton allotmnets which had led to the discovery of a decapitated bod. It was the date and more specifically the singing and the false leg that had triggered something but try as I may I couldn't quite recall the full facts of the matter. Fortunately, I knew someone who would be bound to shed a bit more light on things, Anne Cawood. So I called her up and managed to get hold of her before she took the dog out. I gave her the incidental facts that I had to hand and quick as a flash she was able to draw upon the encyclopaedic knowledge that she has of strange and mysterious happenings, solved and unsolved in the North Devon area. "That'll be Ernest Lovering" she said. "You remember Mr Lovering from school, the music master". That was when it all fell into place. Funny thing the mind. I only need a few pointers and I turn into Mr Memory. I'd got it. So I interrupted Davey and Denzils conversation on the next weeks Demolition Derby up at Mullacott Cross and asserted my belief that the spectral goings on down in the shed was bound to be the restless spirit of Mr Lovering, the music master. Davey remembered him and all. Adding enthusiastically how he'd tell us lads the tale of how he managed to loose his leg while fighting with the Chindits in Malaysia. At the end of this tale he'd always allow for a few minutes reflection and he appeared he got lost in the mists of time before, snapping out of it, walking over to the piano and thumping out The British Grenadiers or perhaps more pertinently in this case, The Song of the Western Men. Stirring stuff no doubt,but also the ghostly chorus which had been heard coming from the allotment shed.
Upon his retirement Mr Lovering, a confirmed bachelor, had devoted most of his time to his allotment which had become his pride and joy. He'd spend all his spare time down there and consequently his produce was of the highest quality and won prizes year in year out at shows as far a field as West Down and Woolfardisworthy. As I now recall, it seemed there was hardly a week that went by when there wasn't a photo of old Ernest in the Journal smiling proudly festooned in his prize winning veg. Such was the fame that he brought Bishops Tawton Allotment Association they decided to cede him a vacant plot next his original one and to mark this unprecedented and magnaminous step Ernest decided to build himself a bigger and better shed. However, it wasn't long before tragedy struck, when one day not long after the Royal Wedding, as it happens, the decapitated and monoped corpse of Ernest Lovering was discovered lying prone, you couldn't exactly say face down at least, amid his potato patch. Initially, the Police were mystified. Foul play couldn't be so easily dismissed, as he'd hardly gone and chopped off his own head. But who could be responsible for such a ghastly act perpetrated upon such a well regarded pillar of the local horticultural community? So this line of enquiry had to be pursued. But it led nowhere, no escaped lunatics, no wild beasts and it had all gone quiet on the local axe murderer front. It was thought that he'd gone off to pastures new. They simply had no leads. That was until a few hours into the enquiry a blood smeared sheet of rusty old corrugated iron was found embedded in the neighbouring railway embankment. This discovery, combined with the recent summer gales, some of the worst in recent memory, led the D&C Police to establish the facts behind such a dreadful occurrence.
Evidently, during the storm one of the sheets of corrugated had come loose and aware of this and the potential damage to his seedlings Ernest had gone down to the shed during the storm in order to secure and make good the roof. While in the middle of making good the damage it was assumed that a further sheet of metal became completely loose and took off in the wind high up into the sky before planing down upon Mr Lovering and despatching his head from his body. Denzil with his aeronautical knowledge was able to give us an illustration using a beer mat of how this may happen. Apparently, it all a question of windspeed and lift. The corrugated combined with metereological conditions could easily have set off this unfortunate chain of events. With the corrugations acting like ailerons, the sheet would have soared off very much like his model stealth bomber upon a gust high up into the sky and once the wind dropped gravity would have come back into play and the sheet would descend rapidly, on the wing so to speak, back down to earth cutting like a bacon slicer through anyone or anything within it's trajectory. A further gust would then once again launch it away up into the air before winging it's way back to earth at a great velocity and plunging into the embankment.
At the subsequent inquest although Ernest Lovering's horticultural skills were never called into question his construction skills were and a few people described him as a bit of a bodger and ultimately this fact led to his unfortunate demise.
Davey and Denzil were rapt by this tale. Davey concluded "Well I never. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but those BTAA feckers by moving his tools into the new community shed must have awoken his restless spirit. Bleddy restless I'd imagine as he'd been forced to hobble about the "other side" for all these years on one good leg after his other one was unceremoniously dumped and later entombed in the shed after the body was removed under the assumption that he was hardly going to need it"
"Exactly", I said reaching for a spare roast potato from the stack of plates being carried by a passing waitress.
