Lizzie Walters, Spring 1888

End cottage, Burn lane, Brentor, 5th April 1888

Dear Master Cowling

Our teacher, Mrs Gerry, has told me I must a write a letter to a local person to express my Christian gratitude for their diligence for our community. I was coming into the school room, late, past the mirror she has hung up. There is a sign above it, asking “Am I clean?”, and we are supposed to tidy ourselves before entering her presence. But I looked in the glass, and answered, “none o’ your business”, only Peter Tatchett ran telling tales and now I’m for it.

Of course there’s plenty to choose from who work for our community: the stokers on the new broad guage line from Tavi, the wheelwrights, or one of them fancy plant hunter gardeners up at Langstone House, but I want to write to a stone mason. Dad says this place was built on stone and you know where you are with it. Father says girls can’t be stonemasons but I’d love one of them great mallets when my little brother Jimmy is pinching me blanket.

Mother says you was one of the masons what made repairs to the crypt up at St. Michael after the floods, when the coffins was all bobbing about in the water like boats on a lake. Did you see any DEAD PEOPLE? Or better still a ghost?

Her is a right tartar Mrs Gerry. She never leaves off moaning that she’s the worse paid head mistress in the country when a kings ransom would not repay her for the grey hairs we’ve gived her. Her says she remembers you, and asks, will you even be able to read the Queen’s English when you left the school, head in the clouds, and it don’t surprise her you’ve ended up doing no better than breathing stone dust for the rest of your days. I said, what’s wrong with stone? Weren’t St Peter who stands at the gates of heaven named after a rock and that shut her up. As you will know yourself, the best way to crack something hard is to put your chisel in the right spot.

I’ll post this before she sees it. Kindly write back, speaking highly of my eloquent command of English and limited need for further lessons. The ploughman up at Burnville is offering 18 pence a day for mother’s biscuit tin if I work from 7 till 4.30 picking stones out his field. Mother needs cheering up as she says the pains with this baby is worse than with Jimmy. I been putting the night soil out on her geraniums as she’s stopped bothering, she lost the last two babies when they was just a few days old and frets. She was sat just staring at the stove all this morning and father didn’t never even go near the Herring Arms last night.

Yours sincerely

Lizzie Walters, aged 7 and three quarters.

Lizzie Walters, Summer 1888

End cottage, Burn lane, Brentor, 3rd May 1888

Dear John,

Your letter worked a treat. I did two full weeks in Burnville’s field and Jelly-face Gerry weren’t too sour about it. Especially when I said we needed to buy a bonnet for the baby.
I kept some of the stones from the field in my pinny pocket and crept upstream through the thicket to the boys conveniences. I must have had a good aim cause there was a scream and a splash and Peter Tatchet had to run home for a dry pair of breeches. That’ll learn him.

Thank you for the urn. Me and Jimmy planted it up so that the red and orange geraniums are like a blaze of fire. We pushed it by the window so Mother can see it if they open the curtains. Father’s been coming in late and the light hurts his eyes. He said he’s wetting the baby’s head, but can you do that when the little thing is cold and wrapped in a shroud in the butter trough? Mother is sad and tells us to play outside. She says Jimmy and me are to put ourselves to bed. I don’t know why people bother with babies, but I am a bit sad too. She would have been a little sister for me.
Yours sincerely
Lizzie Walters

Lizzie Walters, Spring 1909

Moor View, Brentor, 28th March 1909

Dear John Cowling,

How goes it at the stonemason’s yard? Your old friend Lizzie here.
So Shackleton has made it to the magnetic South Pole. I don’t know what folk like him want with icebergs and snow. The Dartmoor drafts whistling down the nave of St Michael’s are quite enough to contend with, in the thin bodice and corset I must wear now I’m respectable. I quite miss my scratchy school pinafore.

Married life is suiting me well thank you. Mother has got over the fact that my Walter is Cornish. No one’s perfect. We have corresponded long enough that he won’t mind me sharing the details of my health. The quickening started last week and I am sorely relieved. Mother says what happened to her, carrying, birthing and losing four children in five years was common last century but it is a brave new world these days. She still frets, though, when it rains too long. I know she pictures their little coffins in the crypt sitting in cold water.

Please pass my regards to your wife Mellony. How are you both finding Mary Tavy? I hope your urns and cornices are doing a good trade. Your young Harry must be twelve now, a year younger than you were when you started your apprenticeship, and I expect young Frank and George keep her busy. I saw that old buzzard Mrs Gerry at a market in Hunscott on Saturday. She was quite the soul of magnanimity, noticing my condition, and enquiring how many weeks remained till the happy day. Though she couldn’t help observing how clean I looked these days. She was at pains to tell me she enjoys three times the salary in her new post as mistress of Hunscott School, and the children are a third as bad, so it is quite the promotion all round.

Did you read about the White Star Liner sinking off Nantucket in America? I wish you would change your plans to cross the Atlantic with that reckless Ernest Martin. Mother says he’s tripped in the mason’s yard and banged his head off one too many tombstones. I don’t know how you can think of it with a healthy growing family to leave behind. What if a bear eats you both?

Your pen pal

Lizzie Holwill

Lizzie Walters, Autumn 1911

Moor View, Brentor, 5th November 1911

Dear John,

Little Francis Walter is well, and enjoyed your letter. His lips are sealed about the Rye Whiskey incident, mostly because he can’t talk yet. As I write this, effigies of Guy Fawkes are burning out on the tor. Are similar activities afoot in the Common Wealth? If so, I imagine them against a backdrop of snow.

Mellony is all anticipation for your return next month. Harry is doing well, wielding his chisel and following in your footsteps. He talks of nothing but your adventures, and how, once he has his own trade, he will join you on your travels. Hard to believe he is 16 next year.

If your feathered friend Florence has truly taken you in hand, fear not, you will find there are new, temperate pursuits available to the working man in Brentor. Your relative George Cowling has been instrumental in the building of a Men’s Reading Room. Sam Rice has rested his wheelwrighting tools and constructed the timber frame. And most astonishing of all, my own father has become one of the new establishment’s most regular patrons. He takes advantage of the comfortable chairs, manly conversation, well-stocked book shelves and up to date newspapers. In fact he comes home and regales Mother with his opinions on the latest discussions in Parliament. She says she preferred it when he was permanently half pi-

I won’t offend the Canadian postmistress by finishing that sentence.

Happy Bonfire Night,

Lizzie Holwill

P.S. It won’t be a secret by the time you get home: Walter and I are expecting another baby. I am praying for a girl this time.

Lizzie Walters, Autumn 1914

Moor View, Brentor, 5th November 1914

Dear John,

I hope yourself and Chris Postlethwaite are having better luck with the gold this time around. Is it snowing yet in Ontario?
Do the Canadian papers report this new war in Europe? We’re all mobilising in England and it is effigies of the Kaiser they burn on the tor now.

My husband Walter has joined the 8th Battalion Devonshire Regiment, so mother can’t doubt his Devon credentials now. I had hoped he was too old at 41 but somehow he fooled the enlisting officer and is destined for France.

Homes hereabouts have received some immigrant children from Belgium. Pale skinny little things they are. They look fairly dumbstruck when they first clapped eyes on St Michael’s on the hill. I suppose everywhere is flat where they live. Mrs Tapley is mistress at the school now and despairs of their English, though I should like to see any of our young Dartmoor ruffians attempting Flemish.

I don’t wish to distress you, John, but Mellony was in my kitchen in tears yesterday. The youngest age for active service is 19 but your Harry is adamant he will sign up as soon as he is 18. He wants to be intrepid like his dad. They say the war will be over in a few months but what if it continues two years? I know we are all supposed to be proud of our soldiers and ready for the fight but I hate the whole business. Can’t you write to him and tell him to wait? Won’t stone masons be protected trades if the Hun starts bombing us in our houses?

I would tell you to hurry home, but they say the Atlantic bristles with German battleships. I have nightmares of your steamer becoming a burning beacon on the dark waters. But please send word to your Harry that he is too young.

Your worried friend,

Lizzie Holwill

Lizzie Walters, Winter 1963

Moor View, Brentor, 30th January 1963

Dear Frank Cowling,

Please bear with an old friend of your father’s, writing this letter, but I’ve had little else to do these last days of being snowed in. What a blizzard! What howling winds! We thought we’d be blown to smithereens when Kruschchev put his missiles in Cuba this autumn but it feels like Armageddon came after all.

Thank heavens my daughter Moira visited last week with coal and food from the village shop. What would we do if we didn’t have that shop? Knew she’d grow up in the end. After I finished everything in the larder I found some cans of carnation condensed milk. My goodness, I should have welcomed a nuclear apocalypse rather than eat another tin! Reminded me of rationing.

My writing desk is on the first floor but the snow was so high that the crystals pressed against the casement. Now they are starting to dig out, I can see young men moving through canyons of snow, like great crevasses which threaten to topple down on their heads. Quite incredible to see the cottages at the level of the railway line with only their chimneys poking out, like periscopes above a sea of snow. I do hope the sheep survive. My chickens are bundled up in the outhouse.

Impossible, of course, in so much snow, not to think of your father, my friend John Cowling, who contended with the snow drifts of Canada for three winters. Did he tell you we were correspondents for many years?
He was always intrepid, not content with the simple life of a stone mason. Even after he came home he explored this moor, finding ancient pots and stone coffins, travelling through the millennia this time, instead of across the Atlantic. The hardest journey he undertook was the struggle to make peace with your brother’s death, so close to the end of the war. The joy on his face when you demobbed from the Air Force the following year!

Looking at so much bright white reflected light, St Michael’s church just a small black silhouette, almost floating above the snow in the sky, makes me think we are in heaven, where I hope to go soon, if they’ll let me in. If I had known, as a grubby smart-mouthed seven year old, that I would live to be one of the tutting old hens of the village, aged nearly 80, I’d have been horrified. Violet finds me dreadfully old fashioned. But I have been blessed to spend my years in Brentor, which really is an actual heaven on earth, snow or no, and at the end your dad, my husband, Mum, and my baby brothers and sisters will be waiting on the other side.

But it would be remiss to pass without returning to you your father’s letters to me. Particularly one, which tells the legend of Issis and Druga, and brought me much comfort when my sister died.

Yours sincerely

Lizzie Walters