The blue painted, ex US army Dodge lorry that swept past looked vaguely familiar. Where had I seen it before?
I mused for a while, then, as such mysteries do, it wafted away to the back of my mind, buried there perhaps forever. A day or so later I was in my local newsagents and as I turned towards the magazines rack, ping, the blue truck came barrelling back into my mind. On the magazine cover was. Catherine Zeta Jones.
Blue lorry, Pop Larkin, The Darling Buds of May, Darling. The Darling Buds of May.
Whether Pop Larkin was driving that vehicle, I very much doubt. Another age, another county. But I saw this lorry just outside East Hoathly and if there is an East Sussex village to rival the Larkin’s Kent home, this is it.
Actually, you buy one and get one free because when you mention East Hoathly, you have to include its very near neighbour Halland.
East Hoathly and Halland. And so it is.
Halland is the smaller of the two but probably has the bloodier background. Alfred the Great was said to have fought the Vikings at the village in a terrible bloodletting battle. It is also said to be the site where Henry III’s fleeing army made a last stand in May 1264 and were then massacred by
Simon de Montfort’s troops.
The Pelham family lived here in the sixteenth century. Sir John Pelham captured the King of France at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and was given the King’s belt buckle in recognition of it. The buckle is worked into many church doorways in the area and can still be seen today.
These twin villages of Halland and East Hoathly are today the epitome of village life as people imagine it, but which has all but disappeared throughout most of Britain.
The East Hoathly village fete in the rectory garden, a spring flower show, visits to various residents’ hidden gardens are all traditional activities and I bet somewhere there’s an orchard where al fresco Sunday lunch is being served to a large family and a dozing ex-major.
The villages are pretty. That’s actually an understatement. They’re beautiful and the local church, while mainly rebuilt in the 19th century is late Saxon or early Norman and complements the three ancient pubs, each one as good as the other.
East Hoathly (West Hoathly is in West Sussex) now home to a population of 1500, strangely does not appear in the Domesday Book. Its Saxon name meant a heath or common as well as a clearing in the forest, while its church seems to have been going during the time of the first national audit. Halland likewise, despite its pre-Norman existence. Ah well. Can’t have everything.
The famous ‘Trug’ garden basket was first designed and made in East Hoathly, although there is at least one other claim to that particular throne.
Idyllic though they are, these villages have sent out their offspring around the world to fight battles and cause mayhem.
One of the first to go walkabout was an East Hoathly man known as the Cannibal of Sussex, Colonel Sir Thomas Lundsford, a renowned soldier and sometime poacher. He might well have been a smuggler as well, because stories of him kidnapping, eating small children and then stuffing his victims’ arms and legs in his pockets were later deemed to merely be scare stories to ensure that prying eyes kept their distance.
The colonel went one step too far in his poaching one day, however, and in 1649 set off for Virginia after being charged with trying to shoot
Sir Thomas Pelham’s deer and then attempting to assassinate him at the village church.
Just a few years later, another resident John Dann sailed off to the West Indies and became a notorious pirate with famous buccaneer Henry Every, taking part in the biggest ever recorded pirate raid on a Middle East treasure ship on its way to Mecca. Every’s ship headed a small flotilla of vessels flying the Jolly Roger, into the raid.
The haul was the equivalent of £90 million in today’s money. But the authorities, who had turned a blind eye to privateers in the past weren’t willing to ignore the maritime equivalent of the great train robbery and pursued the crews with a vengeance.
Dann was arrested in Kent, consequently turned King’s evidence and was pardoned after five of his shipmates were executed. He ended up as a banker in London.
Hoathly’s expats, colourful though they may have been, were nowhere near as boisterous and fun-loving as those who remained at home.
Thomas Turner was the owner of a general store in the village during the 1750s.
Turner kept a diary which went on to become known as the classic work for life in a small English village of the Georgian period.
Turner acted as undertaker, coroner, schoolteacher, accountant and a dozen other civic posts while running his shop. The life he led also belies the notion that Hoathly contains the serene vicarage-fete-loving folk of today.
Turner has an almost constant hangover from partying with local dignitaries including the vicar.
Their parties would sometimes last a couple of days and Turner tells of how he tried to sneak home for forty winks, only for the party-goers to turn up, pull him out of bed, make him don his wife’s petticoat, dance jigs, pull hats from reveller’s heads and generally keep drinking the wine and brandy until they ran out.
But while suffering his hangovers he derides the fact that he keeps company with neighbours, intimates, acquaintances, gossips, lovers, haters, foes, frisker’s, cuckolds and all sorts of Christians.
Apart from constantly partying and drinking, the villagers also gambled steadily on cards, horse racing and cricket matches. Far from sedate activities but shedding light on the village life almost 300 years ago.
Turner also hilariously records putting up a few shillings to defend a smuggler in case the man’s testimony revealed that as a store owner, Turner had some under the counter dealings with the man, especially for the French brandy so beloved by he and his fellow villagers.
It’s a far cry from the varied village activities of today. There’s the usual array of sports including cricket, a dramatic society, of course a bonfire society, village plot group (grow your own veg), preservation society, Morris dancers and…. the list goes on endlessly.
Very rural and very genteel.
I wonder what Turner and the vicar would have made of it as they stumbled home in the early hours from yet another 24-hour party?
From his recorded self-flagellation over his excessive drinking and his remorse during the severe headaches he suffered from a hangover, I suspect he would have said, “Love It”.
Come to think of it, so would Pop Larkin.
The Darling Buds of May, Darling. The Darling Buds of May.
Turner has an almost constant hangover from partying with local dignitaries including the vicar