Publisher's Synopsis
For 80 years Joan Bellan lived in or within a few miles of Buckland Monachorum, cradled between the austere heights of Dartmoor and her beautiful river Tavy. Her memories went back to the turn of the century and beyond with the stories that her parents had told her. In her seventies, she passed them to Joy Lakeman, a freelance journalist and West Country native who has recorded them here. Eleven when the Great War broke out, Joan remembers the high infant mortality, the flu epidemic of 1919, local belief in the powers of wart-charmers and pixies and her mother's omnipresent yeast cakes. From tales ranging from cleaning the cutlery with emery powder and washing pig skins in the brook, to her engagement to Paul Bellan, known locally as 'Hellfire Jack' on account of his motorbike, emerges a portrait of a vanished age.
