Where the living is easy
Hut on the south Devon coast
Helena Drysdale is the author of six books of travel/memoir, including Mother Tongues: Travels through Tribal Europe and Looking for George: Love and Death in Romania
I first saw the Hut when I was two. As we ran down through the pinewoods and out onto the cliff, I picked up on my parents’ joy, which never left me. ‘Tighter,’ my father urged, until I gripped the beach handrail so tightly I could hardly move. Waterfall, hot rocks for sunbathing, shingle patched with softer sand that biscuits in the sun: this is where I spent every blissful summer.
Holidays began with a five-hour drive from London, me and my two sisters and three cats in the back, my father smoking at the wheel. Window down, mouth filling with saliva, I agonised over when to announce I was going to be sick: too early meant keeping them waiting on the roadside; too late was—too late.
Then, the Hut worked its magic. You bump along an increasingly rutted track—don’t lose your nerve—and park by the gate. As you walk down the path, a vista unfurls of sea and craggy headlands. A green clapboard bungalow is tucked into the bowl-shaped cliff face, like a stage with an audience of sea.
Built from a kit in 1923, it was run as a campsite for socialists: no running water or electricity and nudity encouraged. Waving angrily at a yacht approaching to moor, the owner fell over the cliff and died and, in 1950, my grandmother bought it. Although now equipped with ‘facilities’, it retains its slightly spartan simplicity and there’s still some nudity. It is the essence of privacy.
Stone hot-water bottles called ‘pigs’ were shoved into damp beds. In the mornings, my father produced flamboyant holiday breakfasts involving toast catching fire and acres of grease. My mother disappeared into fuchsia banks to haul out bracken and nettles, as she still does in her eighties. My sisters and I bounced around on space hoppers and built camps, and there were picnics on the beach with homemade pasties and water from a spring. Toe holes chiselled into the cliff accessed
