Great Western

Today

The weather was perfect yesterday. So, of course, the best way to spend it involved a total of five hours' driving and another couple of hours in a hall filled with smelly people hoping for a bargain and equally hopeful stall holders.

Yup! we were at a toy and model fair which was held at Sandown Park Exhibition Centre in Esher. Paul, of course, loves these affairs, and often finds that other commitments prevent him from going. And he doesn't like going without me.

So there we were, looking at rows and rows of (to me) indistinguishable model cars, and every variety of model railway loco, rolling stock and other bits and pieces.

Every now and then, tucked away among the Hornby Dublo (very 2nd hand) items there would be little booklets - a lot of them were old catalogues, but there were others on the history of GWR or some such thing. They were all tatty little cheaply printed paperbacks, dating back about 60 years. I rummaged about, looking for some very special books, but no luck.

In My Day

The little booklets for which I was searching, were published by the Western Region (or was it GWR?) and contained stories from the west country. I think that there were four of them and that the covers were printed in the famous banana split colours of the Western Region. When I was a child, I devoured everything that could be read, including these.

These little books were full of legends, folk and fairy tales from the West country. They told of Cornish Piskies who'd steal your babies if you didn't leave milk out at night, of Sundays revellers being turned to stone in the middle of their blasphemously played hurling match (just what was hurling?). I read of mermaids tempting Cornish fishermen, about the Rollright stones whom no-one has ever been able to count, who go down to the river to drink at night time. St Neot was the miniature Cornish saint, or so it seemed to me, never heard of in London and I read of St Michael casting down the Devil from St Michael's Mount. Then there were lurid tales of smugglers and wreckers and hidden caves in cliffs.

The books, which I read repeatedly during those long nights when sleep eluded me, led me into a world populated by superstitious Celts and made me feel that the "West Country" was indeed a foreign place.

I've no idea what happened to those books and would dearly love to find a set. I wonder if I could find some on eBay?