Gobbets and Doggerel

I love bumping into Tom when I’m waking my parents’ dog Nell. How it usually goes is that I interrupt him doing some odd job, and we have a quick chat. Today Tom is in the lane, sweeping up the trimmings from his well-manicured privet hedge with a dustpan and brush. Fair enough… except the lane gently slopes up to Andy’s milking bay and is a six-inch-deep river of cow slurry.

Tom is a a determined man. The dustpan is full of a mess that looks sort of like privet madras, and you can’t see the bristles on the brush for cow shit. Tom’s hands are somehow spotless though and we shake. We would have done so regardless, because I was brought up in cow slurry.

Tom was a lorry driver most of his working life. He started in the early 1960’s; not a particularly long distance driver, but distance is a psychological construct…and a 250-mile job in a 1965 Commer was probably the equivalent of taking an artic to Budapest nowadays

One thing about our chats is that Tom talks Northwest Devon. It’s a rare accent now; and it never was common.  I find myself slipping into the verbal patterns of my schooldays when I talk to him…not so much the accent, as I never had much more than a tang of it; but more the structure of the way we spoke as schoolkids. We all do it ..a kind of mirroring which probably has its own name.

The other thing is: Tom rambles a bit, about his travels and local gossip but, almost always, he’ll slip in something that you’ve never really thought about…an aside that makes you think, ‘hang on a bit…’  as you walk away with an impatient dog. Sometimes it’s a preposterous thing, sometimes it’s a thing to ponder.

Today it’s a questionable fragment, hidden in a very brutal bit of local history…wrapped up in a tale about a lorry load of eggs. Events I never heard about as a kid, although they’re well documented in the sort of history books kids don’t read. I grew up thinking, ‘nothing exciting ever happened here’. Except that, in The Summer of ‘49, far too much happened.

Transcribing this to give some sort of impression of a rare variant of the Devon accent has been difficult. I probably shouldn’t have even tried but I need to practice writing dialogue because people don’t talk like they do in books. In fact, I only utter one embarrassing line, so it’s not really a dialogue at all.

“For ee come out the depot at Harwich, an ee said to ees mate, ee said. ‘ I got one of the Wurzels out ere with a load’, Cos I ad them eggs … I ad atchen eggs”.

“Gedd-on! Action eggs?..Wots one of them then…like a Kinder egg?”  That’s me I’m afraid. I still can’t believe I actually said ‘Gedd-on! for the first time since I was 18.

“No,..atchin eggs! Eggs wots abaout to ‘atch..for broilers it was.”

“I says to im ‘Don’t you bloody called me wurzel!’, Cos The Wurzels was Somerset, wannit…Don’t talk nothin like Devon …Once you get over the Blackdowns they have a harder way of talkin.

“The Wurzels would be what I call my era. Well, I’m not sold as your Dad, but I shall be aydy-seven now in a fortnight. But I can’t change how I talk. Not for anybody …even thiccy Prince Charlie come down the road and give me undren pound to do it. You young un’s talk better ’n’ me cos you had the brains to leave your voices on the school bus, but you was from over Broadwoodkelly way…Alchey Down wasn it?”

“But I can’t change it. And anyway theym ‘We’ people…. Somerset people. What strung us up with the Cornishmen way back in olden times. Them Somerset ‘We’ people, well, mostly they got what you might say is untrussworthy ‘istry.”

My mind does a double take. As a kid I had absorbed those stereotytpes that Somerset people weren’t trustworthy,that Dorset and Wiltshire people were good, that the Cornish were a bit odd in the head. But they were long forgotten and I had never any thought to their origins.

“Us aint bloody Cornish neither. Us is no more Cornish ‘an that dog. You go down in Cornwall, them’s ‘We’ people too. The proper Cornish is everything is ‘We’ is’nit? Here us all said ‘Us’. Weem us people. You can say ‘weem’ though meanin ‘us is’…I suppose”

“Back in old times, they say, after the big rumpus, they could tell the Cornish by that, an if ’em said ‘We’… well then they was for hangin. Hung a load of us too they say…for bein led on by Cornishmen. Thousands…’specially over Samford Courtney way.”

Nothing ever happens here. We’re not in the history books, But once, in 1549, it did. Thousands were slaughtered and that horror was buried for centuries and never spoken of. Eventually the industrial revolution, Wesley and World Wars eclispsed it. But there are still fragments.

“Me and you from here is ‘us’ see. Not ‘we’.”

“Don’t get me wrong I ‘ad a Cornish mate one time…ee’s dead at the moment..but Tommy ee was alright. But for ee t’say it… it was ‘we’. Like them posh… wotsit… DFL lot say …’cept them’s not posh down there…down Bodmin way… to be fair…never was money to be made down there.”

“I drove eggs all over. Cornwall, Somerset. Een Newcastle one time. I’d geddon with all…dun matter where they’m from, whatever town or country’s all the same to me. But for ee to say I was a Wurzel was proper vexin…ad to put un in ees place”

“Them’s We people. Me and You an thiccy dog weem Us. Not We!”

How much of this is true? I know Cornish do say ‘we’ and that’s not a modern affectation; for they always have. I know Devon people say ‘us’ . I don’t know about Somerset (it may depend where you are in that county). I know that the brief 1549 Prayerbook Rebellion was put down with shocking brutality in this small part of Devon…largely because in Devon, as with Ketts rebellion in Norfolk (which happened the same year), it became increasingly revolutionary against big landowners and enclosures; rather than about resisting Cranmer’s Book Of Common Prayer. Also Somerset’s troops, from over the Blackdown Hills, were the most hated and brutal of all. All that stuff is well known…but could it be that uttering that simple pronoun ‘we’ was once a death sentence? Maybe. The only people who could answer that for sure …  theym dead at the moment so us’ll likely never know.

“Me And Thee Is Us Not We“

Jack Hayter edited Sept 2025, written 2020