Yesterday someone phoned to tell me about the death of a middle-aged man. The person who called had a lovely rich Exmoor accent and she said: “The last thing he told me was that he’d taken to walking to the church where he would sit and think for hours on end.”

The last time I saw the man, he was a big raw friendly youth. But news of his passing reminded me of a great many things. The fact that he has gone, for me, marks the true end of an era - the likes of which this country shall never see again. I am talking about a time that you could describe as ‘ultra-rurality’. A four or five thousand year period of remote country-living in which people existed so far away in the backwoods and hills, that they forged their very own ideas of reality that turned out to be very much at odds with the modern world.

His passing also reminded me of a chapter of my latest novel - The Lemon Tree Forest - written during the first coronavirus lockdown. It’s purely fictional. Or almost. But news of the man’s death took me directly back 30 years…

Please have a quick read - AND IF YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW A LITERARY AGENT PLEASE TELL THEM ABOUT MY HUMBLE EFFORTS…

I am walking down to the pub one summer’s evening when I meet two men coming the other way.  It was raining earlier and perhaps that could be why they are covered in black plastic dustin sacks.  Their heads and arms have been pushed through holes in the bags and baler-twine has been used to tie the plastic to their bodies.  The older one is small and wiry, the other is a large youth with a clumsy plodding gait.  Both wear cloth caps.  I have never seen people dressed in dustbin sacks before - which makes me think they’d been caught out in the rain and this was their way of keeping out the wet.  The oldest is the one who does all the speaking.  He does so in the strongest Brendon Hill accent I have heard, referring to me constantly as “My Boy”. He delivers his words in a rapid machine-gun patter, constantly swishing his stick to and fro and beating it on the ground as if to add emphasis to the strange things he is saying.  

It only takes a moment for me to assume these are the people the village has been talking about.  The rumour is that they are coming here to live in one of the council houses, either just up the road or in the neighbouring village across the hill… Apparently, they’re being thrown out of the farmstead higher up on the escarpment where their family has lived for a thousand years. “Out over” as that area is known. Someone is having them evicted.  No one knows for sure, because no one really seems to know anything about the Bampfyldes.  Except that they are odd.  Eccentric.

When I ask the old man if he is Mr Bentley Bampfylde, he seems taken aback.  “You don’t know nothin’ about me, My Boy. How can you? You lives ‘ere and we lives up yonder past Goose Common! Us haven’t been down yer for years.”

But I carry on, being as courteous and pleasant as I can, and eventually the old man relents a bit and takes an interest in who I am.  He says he knew my great aunt a long time ago - and when I tell him I make a living by writing, he becomes excited. “You gotta come up our place, My Boy, and see how wonderful - how very wonderful - life is Out Over.  You gotta come up and see our well - which they say is polluted and that’s why we has to leave. You gotta come up and meet my dear lady wife. Her I eloped with fifty years back!  Can you imagine that, My Boy?  Eloped, us did!  In the night!  You can come up any time and maybe you can write about us up there and maybe that would stop they buggers who’s going to evict us.”

There it was. Eloped. There was the bell that echoes. The Sasha bell. A word - an idea - that rings and resounds like the chime of some remote Buddhist temple in the mountains. A chime which echoes right into the depths of my soul.  Strange, that this weird, outlandish, old man - a wild-eyed ambassador from another century - had eloped with someone.  It seems incongruous somehow.  That he’d done such a thing, just like Sasha had run off with Cosmo from their hometown in the Italian mountains. 

For that, and for many other reasons, I was drawn to the Bampfyldes. And so I went up there one day to see the place where the family had lived for centuries. 

Rural idyll is an odd phrase, but it is a description that has overtaken Bentley Bampfylde’s home to such an extent that it has actually become the sylvan glade. Trees grow out of its roof and animals walk in and out of various apertures. The house has become countryside, or maybe the countryside has become the house.

The long track which brought me to this pastoral scene seems to peter-out in a small paddock partially surrounded by thick, dark woods. A sandstone cliff climbs, in a verdant, leafy way, to a height of forty or fifty feet at one end of the paddock, and out of its soft, orange face grows the building which, I imagine, houses the men-in-plastic-bags. As I say, you can only really guess that it is, or was, a house. The place is almost entirely submerged in ivy and honeysuckle so that you can only just make out things like windows, eaves and doors.

An owl appears in one of the upper apertures, despite it still being full daylight, and takes an unhurried meandering flightpath away to the dark stand of conifers that curves around from the old quarry face.  I spot a family of badgers rummaging and rolling around in a muddy area at the far end of the paddock - and close to them, on the rim of some sort of old tub, stands a slender heron.  Two hinds are grazing in the overgrown meadow to one side of a copse, but now they are alert and nervous.  I am guessing they don’t see many cars in this place.  Near the deer, half-a-dozen scruffy looking ponies are milling around, paying no heed to the car or anything else. 

No sign of the modern world reveals itself in the clearing.  With the exception of my car, the place remains almost untouched by any form of technology.  No cables bring electricity or telephone wires to the house, no other vehicles give the century away. Not even a tyre mark has imprinted itself in the mud of the track.  A thin smear of wood-smoke rises from what I assume is a chimney, hidden by a bush somewhere up there on what might be the roof.  I don’t know why, but there is something unexpected about the scent of wood smoke in summer.  A hint of winter in the heat - a fragrant envoy from a world of white and frost. 

To one side of the clearing there’s a pool, into which a clear fast-flowing rivulet runs down from the pine forest. Having filled the pool, the same stream continues its journey south, across the meadow to disappear again into another pine wood.  A few birds - ducks, but also a curlew and a gang of rooks - strut around the edge of the pond.  At first, I fail to notice the man standing knee-deep and motionless in the middle of the pool.  With his legs akimbo and his arms stretched very slightly away from his body, Marmaduke Bampfylde is gazing into the deep woods as if in a trance.  He is dressed in characteristic mode, but with just one black plastic bin liner through which he’s pushed his head and arms.  Below the plastic, a pair of grubby old trousers have been rolled up above the boy’s big red knees.  But not quite far enough to keep them dry.  Around these trousers some form of aquatic commotion stirs in a ripple and a splash.  

He turns toward me and smiles a big sweet, red-faced, country smile. He raises one hand and waves. With that, there is a thwack of wood upon metal, which makes me jump.  Bentley Bampfylde stands, stick in hand, on the other side of the car, grinning. 

“Tis the young writer,” he shouts to no-one.

I am invited in and wish I had a film-camera.  This is going to be an experience - one which I’d assume few people will believe without photographic evidence.  It is, indeed, difficult to judge where the wilds of Exmoor end and where the house begins.  The hard, dry, outdoor mud continues from the floor of the yard into the first room.  So does the ivy, but the honeysuckle remains outside where its sweet perfume mingles with its gypsy-scented friend, the wood-smoke.  The room is dark after the bright late afternoon outside, with the exception of a single sunbeam which makes its way through the one window which faces west.  The green-tinged ray of light flickers as it passes through the filter of leaves.  And it ends its one hundred and fifty million kilometre journey by illuminating a small person.  I am startled when I see her and realise that she is real flesh and blood.  Because for a moment I think maybe she is some kind of doll, so like white-china is the skin of her face.  But the porcelain moves and creates upon its surface a thousand little cracks and wrinkles.  The porcelain moves because the woman - for that is what this thing is - issues what can only be described as an explosive titter.  A quick, nervous laugh which ends as abruptly as it starts.

She can’t be much more than four feet in height, but there are no obvious physical signs that she is tiny.  Like Mrs Grimes, she doesn’t have any of the characteristics of dwarfism, but she is quite a bit smaller even than the ancient woman who “does” for Sir Fred.  It is only when you see her in relation to objects such as tables and chairs that you realise how tiny she is.  Apart from the smallness, she is a perfectly formed, miniature person. 

For a moment I remember what old Doc Harding has told me about the people of the hills.  It was something about how unusually high levels of minerals in the geological make-up of the area had caused some physical abnormalities in the local population. Especially among those who drank water straight from their own wells.  Rickets was a common problem, and there was also something about a lot of the men having high shrill voices.  And the doctor said the mineral imbalance can cause a slow down of physical development, with the result that some hill-folk were unusually small.  

Delphine Bampfylde is tiny, but there are two other things which make her appear extraordinary in that green sunbeam.  One is her seat, which I can see is an old wooden high-chair made for a baby, but with its food tray removed.  The other is her fantastic attire.  In contrast to the male Bampfyldes, she has spurned the utilitarian values of the bin-liner to dress herself in what I am guessing was once expensive haute couture.  The haute couture of 1910, perhaps.  She wears a red dress - silk by the look of it - classily finished with a neat white collar.  But over this she is wearing - eccentrically, given the warmth of the day - a long, black, Astrakhan coat. This is for the most part buttoned-up, as if the woman is about to leave the premises. A coquettish hat, white kids gloves and a handbag complete her unlikely outfit.

“I’m sorry to arrive unannounced - were you on your way out?” I ask.

A second laugh explodes, and ends, before the woman speaks: “Whatever could make you think that? I so rarely go out.”

Her piping voice has something aristocratic about it… That is what I am thinking as the room darkens momentarily.  The large bulk of Marmaduke comes through the open door.  He enters and stands behind the woman I assume to be his mother, although I wonder how such a diminutive person could ever have managed to give birth to such a large son.  They look like representatives of two different species.  Confusing. Because old Bentley is on the smallish side as well.  So where had the lad come from?  Perhaps some sort of cuckoo spirit once haunted this house in the woods. 

Slightly unnervingly, as if reading these thoughts, Mrs Bampfylde pipes up: “I used to be big,” she wheezes - and then she does one of her explosive laughs… “But I have been shrinking for years! 

“One day there’ll be very little left and a bird - like that one - will pick me up and take me away,” she adds, pointing a tiny, white gloved hand at a house martin which has swooped into the room.  She gasps these last words as if in some kind of private rapture, but Bentley seems worried by the prophecy…

“Don’t ee talk like that, dearest,” he shrills in his sing-song Brendon dialect. “I shall always be here to look after ee. All our lovely lives long...”

She smiles a smile of love, affection and obvious devotion. It really was one of those smiles.  I could tell that even in the gloom.  And now she peers across at her protector and husband and says: “Ah, for all the trials and tribulations which life has brought me, I am the surely the luckiest woman alive.”

It is a touching scene. Here indeed is love of the very first order.

“Mummy,” says the son. “I love you too.”

He puts a great red hand on her shoulder.  So big is the rough, chapped fist, that for a moment I think its weight alone might be enough to snap the tiny bones under the Astrakhan.  But she puts her own gloved hand on her son’s - a hand which, in its entirety, is no bigger than his thumb.

There is a silence, filled only by the noise of the location’s enormous bird population. I always feel uncomfortable when silences go on too long, so I tell old man Bampfylde that I can now see and understand why he had eloped with a person who has such obvious qualities.

“I saw ‘er down Brendon Horse Fair one day, and that was that,” he tells me. “I knew then I had to ‘ave her and make ‘er my wife. But ‘er folk didn’t want that and neither did mine.  My old father wanted me to marry the daughter of the Queen of the Gypsies.  They ‘ad some horse deal tied up wi’ it, is what I always said. Anyways, ee were adamant I shouldn’t marry Delphine, and ‘er folk over Lynmouth way were even more anti the whole thing.  Twas a great shame for two young people so much in love.  Some bugger told ‘er father I’d been going’ down there a-courting - and you will never guess what er did!  He locked her up!  Would not let ‘er out the house!  And ee sent word to my father that he’d shoot I, if I ever dared go near the place agin. 

“But I ‘ave my ways. I knew a way of getting a message to her, even if she was a prisoner in that dark old farmhouse.  And I also ‘ad a friend who was an old country parson.  Fond of the bottle, ee was.  And I’d done un a favour with a horse the month afore. 

“So I got the old vicar ready to marry us - and off I went over The Chains one full moon in the middle of summer. Two horses I took.  Our best two horses.  Cos if I was going to be in trouble wi’ my old man, I may as well be hanged for a pound as for a penny.  Didn’t take I long to get down to that lonely old farm of theirs.  Desolate, ’twas called.   Can you believe that, My Boy?  She lived in a place called Desolate! ’Twas a matter of following the stream up to the old manor farm, all quiet like… And because I’d got word to her, she were waiting for me.  Up there in the open window, I could see her beauty in the light of that moon.  I was all ready for it.  Planned the whole thing.  I ‘ad hessian sacks which I tied round the big horse’s hooves to keep the bugger silent. And I led un up to the house, quiet as a mouse - and by standing up on the saddle I could just reach her feet as she climbed out the window.  I got ‘er down safe, and then we were off up o’er the moors. 

“Cor…. Didn’t us ride! Like the wind we went over they Chains… The most dangerous bit of Exmoor - did you know that My Boy?  The most dangerous landscape in the kingdom!  Full o’ bogs and runnels.  But they was good ‘orses and the dear old things never put a foot wrong.  Out over, we went.  Out over and beyond.  Until we comes to the house of the country-parson-vicar who was as drunk as a lord.  I’d seen to that, see!  But I marched un down the chapel and the old bugger married us there and then. At dawn.  Wi’ only mice and owls as witnusses.  But that is how ‘er Ladyship here became the wife of Bentley Bampfylde.

“Don’t you think that’s romantic, My Boy?” shouts the old man bringing his stick down on the table so that it creates a great cloud of dust, which unfurls itself golden and billowing across the sunbeam. “I reckon tha’s the most romantic thing you’ll ever ‘ear anywhere up in these yer hills. Ever!”

I agree.  It is the most romantic thing.  And I think of Sasha and Cosmo. They had also done the most romantic thing.  But for them, it hadn’t lasted.  For Bentley and Delphine, it had. But I ask the old man if there were any repercussions after their marriage. 

“No, course there weren’t. What could ‘em do? What was done, was done. ‘Er father disowned ‘er, so she ‘ad to come up ‘ere to live.  And my father charged me five pound for each horse, saying I’d ruined ‘em with that ride through the bogs.  Er was more upset about his arrangement wi’ the Queen of the Gypsies than he was bothered about me getting ‘itched.  Bugger the Queen o’ the Gypsies, I told un. I got the Queen of Exmoor yer to be my lawful wedded wife.”

With that he puts down his stick - for the first time ever, as far I know.  I have never seen him without it before - and he reaches out for Delphine’s white-gloved hand. She looks across at me and says: “I remember that moonlit ride over The Chains as if it were yesterday.  I do not know much about the ways of the world, but I would think that a young couple running away like that would be a rare thing in these days of telephones and the like.  What do you say, Mr Writer?  I have never used a telephone, but I’d imagine a young couple today could arrange an elopement without the use of a horse and a ladder.”

What can I say?  That I know a couple who’d done the same thing - a car and a ladder - and that somehow I had become involved and ruined the whole romantic story?  This is not the place or the time for that - and anyway, tiny doll-like Delphine has not waited for an answer… 

“And how could I have known - in the whirlwind of that night - that my dear Mr Bampfylde would bring me here to this earthly paradise?  You can see what a special place it is.  That is because my darling sweet husband knows things that have been forgotten by the world.  Important things.  The secret ways of nature.  It is not something he has learned - it is something he was born with.  They are things he has always known.  Now they say that we have to move away from here.  But it will mean the death of both of us,” she sighs, her little voice petering out into silence.  

Then she appears to wake up and she finishes the thought… “We shall be gone from this earth as certainly as the spinning of the planet is about to extinguish that sunbeam.”

How she knows the sun will disappear from the room at this very moment, I cannot tell.  But she does. As she voices the final word the beam of light vanishes as if someone had turned off an electric switch.  Just like that.  Gone, like it never was.  Another silence ensues - and because silences make me nervous, I eventually ask Marmaduke what he’d been doing in the pond earlier.

“It’s the fish that live there,” he says softly, in his West Country burr. “They nibble at my toes and at the hairs on my legs. I like the feeling when they do that.”

He smiles and I realise in the darkening room why I’d thought Marmaduke’s smile was sweet.  It is because the youth usually carries an expression which is ever so slightly clouded with tragedy on his big rough face - but this vanishes in a trice when the smile wipes it away. 

“We will drink elderflower cordial,” announces the woman from high on her chair. At this, Marmaduke mutters approval, turns and disappears through what I can only suppose is some kind of internal door.  Bentley also leaps into action.  In another corner of the dusky kitchen, he lifts a trapdoor and throws a bucket on a rope into the black void beneath.

After a second or two the bucket reaches its destination with a splash and Bentley begins the laborious business of hauling it back up.  I wonder why they have no kind if winding apparatus.  Maybe too modern.  Looking around the room, you get the impression that the passing of time has no place here.  The pewter-ware on the ancient oak shelves looks of an age which speaks more of Norman invasions than modern departmental stores.  The furniture is all hand-made; the one exception being Mrs Bampfylde’s singular perch.  There are six chairs in all, and five have been bent and formed from hazel boughs lashed together with honeysuckle vine.  One, nearest the door, still clings to life and sprouts leaves.  The table is a massive affair which probably weighs the best part of half-a-ton, so thick are its rough planks. 

But it’s the three denizens who impress me most.  The air of timelessness also hangs about them, like gossamer in early morning mist.  You could imagine Bentley being at large in the hills way before the Huguenots had landed, before the Vikings came to rape and pillage along the coast, before the early Christians came and built their lonely chapels in the remote sea-coombes.  Before Christ himself.  Bentley Bampfylde has that about him which speaks of ancient runes and standing stones.  You have the feeling that - not only is he aware of the dryad in the spring and the naiad in the wood - but that he actually belongs to some older more ancient race himself. 

There is nothing in this darkening room that reminds you of the century we dwell in. With one glaring exception, apart from Mrs Bampfylde’s voguish, out-moded clothes, that is… I refer to the anomaly of the bin-liners.

“Do you mind if I ask why you wear those dustbin bags?” I ask.

“We never used to,” puffs the Bentley, as he pulls the rope.  “But someone keeps leavin’ ‘em at the end o’ the track. For a while we took no notice, and just left ‘em there.  Then one day ‘twas rainin’ and Marmaduke put one on ee’s ‘ead. 

They works very well against the rain, you know.”

I think about the council refuse men who must be leaving the sacks down at the end of the lane, and how they must wonder why no dustbins are ever placed out for them to collect.  And I wonder about things like rates and community tax.  Surely, nothing like that ever gets paid by these people.  Then, close to where I stand, I notice that, in the darkest part of the room, a flight of wooden steps leads upstairs - or it would do if the aperture through the ceiling had not been blocked by a panel of wood fixed into place with enormous wedged-shaped nails.

“We can’t go up there no more,” says Bentley when I ask. “Not since the White Lady moved in. We’ve ‘ad to nail ‘er up to keep ‘er out o’ harm’s way.”

I ask if she is a ghost.  “In a way she is, but I’m afraid it’s far worse than that,” pipes Mrs Bampfylde in one of her talking bouts of laughter.

“The White Lady is very, very bad indeed,” says Marmaduke, who has reappeared from the dark hole, holding the sort of jug archaeologists find in ancient tumuli. “She was doing bad things and we had to nail her up.”

For a moment I wonder about that owl I’d seen flying from one of the upstairs windows. Was that bird the thing they called the White Lady? In fact, I wonder about everything to do with the Bampfyldes. 

“Some might say she’s a witch, but us don’t think about her in that kind of way” concludes Bentley. “We never asked the old bugger to come yer, but she’d a-come anyways. And then she caused problems, so we ‘ad to nail ‘er in.”

Mrs Bampfylde’s cordial is poured into pewter mugs by the big red hands of Marmaduke, while Bentley adds the cold water he’s drawn from the well. 

I have never tasted anything like it.  It is sharp and sweet all at the same time, but there’s also the pungent haunting perfume of creamy white elderflowers.  It is the taste, the very essence, of late spring.  A spring day with a kick in its heels.  After I drain the mug I feel a little odd and wonder what else had gone into the potion.

Bentley is talking about his gypsy friends from years ago.  They had known how to deal with spirit-folk who caused trouble.  Especially the woman he called the Queen of the Gypsies.  He says she was at war with them, once upon a time, a long time ago.  

“In was a little boy first time I see’d ‘er.  She came in Ralegh’s Cross back-bar an’ hupped ‘er pint down like a man,” says the little man, excited by the memory. “Caw! What a woman she was! Even a little boy like me could see that. You didn’t never want to argue with her, that was vur certain!”

His father had horse-traded with the Romany-folk for years, and Bentley declared they were good people.  If you treated them right.  He had always done so and they had helped his family with some of the troublesome spirit people who haunted the hills.

“There’s things behind they hedgerows, my boy, that most folk never do see.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Like the gentleman-hare I saw not five-yurs ago - dancin’ wi’ a lady in the field just past the wood...”

Bentley tells me he’d been walking in the field one morning when he noticed that the sheep had arranged themselves into a semi-circle.  A big horse-shoe.  Everything had stopped still - at least in the old man’s mind.  The birds in the sky, the water in the rivulet.  Even ‘the summer’s play’… Which he explains is the shimmering mirage which ripples the air close to the ground in hot weather. All these moving things stopped still as if time itself were frozen.

Then he’d observed something moving in the corner of the field. A woman was entering through the gate down by the lane. 

“A proper old-fashioned washer-woman,” he says, explaining how a hare had also run into the field by another gate.  Soon, both these moving things were entering the great horse-shoe of sheep - but the strange thing was that, as the hare came closer, so it began to walk on its hind legs like a man.  In fact, it soon became a man - except that it kept its hairy animal legs.  But the top half metamorphosed into what Bentley claimed was a handsome human being.

“What a fine man ee was!” the old man says, as if awe-struck by the memory. “A proper country-gentleman-parson.  And they came together and they embraced and then --- caw… Did’n ’em dance!

“I’ve never seen dancin’ like it My Boy!” shouts Bentley, “Not in all me life!”

His bright, impish eyes are glazed with the memory.  Quietly now, he adds: “I’ve had a long and happy life up yer on the hills, My Boy. Very happy.” And now shouting again: “But the love and affection they ‘ad for one another! I never seen ort like it! They showered love upon one and t’other...”

Now all three Bampfyldes are in tears.  I am.  Silent tears.  An unexpected emotional backwash or turbulence which, perhaps in my case, has been heightened by whatever mildly hallucinogenic substance is in the cordial.  I can hear only the evensong of birds.  Had anyone else told such a story, it would have sounded like the ramblings of a mad man.  But when the words are delivered in the old man’s high-pitched Brendon Hill sing-song, they ring true as the bells of the churches in the vale.

There is necromancy, sorcery, magic here. That is what I am thinking as I leave. 

I turn as I walk across the grass to my car and Marmaduke is there - standing in the black gap between the leaves of ivy and honeysuckle where the kitchen entrance is, waving slowly and smiling his big sweet smile.  

Above his head, in the dark place where the owl had been, something white flits quickly out of view.  Whatever it is, it is not a bird.  Something else. Eloping, perhaps, from this life to the next.