A special place in the heart

BRONWYN SELL experiences conflicting emotions as she retraces the steps of her great-grandfather's boyhood in a quaint Devon village.

Arthur Hopkins could still smell the primroses, violets and wildflowers of the English village of his boyhood 35 years after he ran away to sea.

The teenager forged a good life in New Zealand. He had 10 sturdy sons, a fine orchard and a respectable job as a freezing works inspector. But in 1907, in the months between his 25th wedding anniversary and his 50th birthday, he admitted to one unfulfilled ambition.

"It is to go home once more, be again a boy of 13 and rob the great cherry tree at the Rectory."

Home was still the Devonshire village of Silverton, a peaceful place of thatched roofs and an old stone church, bordered by hedges full of flowers, and beyond them, sweeping green fields.

Arthur was struck by homesickness. His heart was full, and crowded by memories when - on a whim - he wrote to the vicar who had moved into the home he'd left at age 13.

"I must talk to a Silverton man tonight," he began. He wrote about childhood memories of twilight walks through lanes, fields and meadows, and about doing his duty to King and Empire by helping to build a strong outpost.

"I have a rather pretty place here, on the banks of the River Styx, which is not so gruesome a place as its name implies, but rather a place full of beautiful meadows, large clumps of fine trees and redolent of clover, apple and peach blossoms.

"I hope some day to take a run home and once more visit my birthplace, but have grown to like the free healthy life out here. The great plains, snowy mountains, forests and lakes and wide spaces have a fascination of their own and few colonists care to stay in England."

Arthur died in Takapuna aged 80, having never returned to England.

On a warm summer's day almost a century later, I'm reading for at least the 20th time a well-travelled copy of his letter, which was unearthed in a Silverton history project about two years ago.

If I look over the steering wheel of my rental car, and beyond the tarsealed road and the few other cars in the village's quiet lanes, I can imagine I'm seeing Silverton just as my great-grandfather left it 130 years ago.

The houses are whitewashed, their roofs thatched and there's still plenty a cold pint to be had at the inn where his uncle was innkeeper.

It's the kind of Olde English village where the houses are known by their names or by the people in them, not their street numbers.

Wisteria House, where some of Arthur's relatives lived, is still covered with wisteria, but there is no longer a trace of ivy on Ivy Cottage, another family home. I have trouble finding the Poplars, his grandparents' house.

The woman in the tiny Silverton gift shop rings around the village for me, and discovers it's now called the White House, a big old place set back from the road. (For her efforts, I feel obliged to buy one of the ugliest teatowels I've seen.)

Hopkins' home, Berry House, is now Nettleworth House, a grand, ivy-covered, place that probably doubled as the schoolhouse his parents taught in.

The house backs onto a small but imposing stone church. The church bell, which Arthur said had the most beautiful tone of any he'd heard, tolls hourly as I retrace the steps of his boyhood.

In the deserted churchyard, now littered with headstones, the graves of his father and grandparents are surprisingly easy to find. Their headstones are succumbing to moss but still mostly legible.

I retrace one of his twilight walks, down the Poundsland Rd to the farmhouse (then occupied by my uncle Robert Dewdney), across the fields to the mill, over the bridge and up the meadow to Hayes Barton, and so by the lane home.

I have to cheat a bit. The risk of spreading foot and mouth disease in Devon made it difficult to traipse across fields, family pilgrimage or not.

The rectory takes some finding, and I'm disappointed. There's not a cherry tree in sight.

The village is beautiful, a gem in a county rich with history and tranquillity. I can see why he missed it, but also understand why he left. It is probably the same urge that drives thousands of people like me to the other side of the world every year.

We know New Zealand is a beautiful country and a good place to live, but we need a yardstick to measure it against, and we need to know what else is out there.

So here I am, returning to my great-grandfather's home while feeling far from my own - a stranger with a colonial twang.

It's not the smell of primroses I miss, but the sound of cicadas. I yearn not for a twilight walk down lanes and across meadows, but to run along a wild, deserted west coast beach, the wind in my face like freedom.

"Home," sighs my great-grandfather, "sixteen thousand miles away."

TRACING FAMILY HISTORIES

Public Record Office at Kew

Ph: (44) 208 392 5307

E-mail: enquirypro.gov.uk

General Register Office for Scotland

3 West Register St, Edinburgh

Ph: (44) 131 334 0380

The National Archives of Scotland

General Register House, 2 Prince's St, Edinburgh

Ph: (44) 131 535 1334

The UK Society of Genealogists
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Family history unit of Auckland City Library