A FORGOTTEN ROMANCE

When in, probably, 1933 that remarkable young man Raymond B Cattell came paddling down the Exe in his two seater, German, sailing canoe, Sandpiper, he and his bold companion, Hugh Crowther, spent the night at Lympstone.

"Lympstone, like many fishing villages, is in its material possessions a slum, but in this picturesque setting and with the sturdy independence of its inhabitants, to say nothing of their fine and handsome appearance, it might be a dwelling of kings."

The two young men walked by 'the ruined sea wall' where they met 'a tall dark girl, whose handsome face was as attractive as the lithe freedom of her carriage.' The boys passed themselves off as 'yachtsmen' and the tall dark girl and and Hugh took an instant fancy the one to the other. Raymond left them to flirt with each other while he 'sat on a tiny red cliff, watching the water ebbing from the estuary and dreaming of the magical nights he had spent with his lost girlfriend Monica on Dawlish Warren the previous summer.'

The next morning the two young men knocked on the door of the 'very tall, handsome and dignified fisherman' who had undertaken to look after their canoe.

"Lo, there appeared at the door the tall dark girl of the night before! She had a duster in her hand and a scarlet handkerchief about her dark hair, which accentuated her gypsy appearance...Her face wreathed itself in delicious smiles. "So you've come for the 'yacht' that father's keeping for you?" she laughed. We assented, blushing as red as her handkerchief. "You'd better get it before he comes," she said to Hugh. "He may be keeping something else for you because of my getting in late last night."

It would seem that the father was subsequently pacified and was paid a shilling for the mooring he had provided. The fisherman's daughter sent the boys off with one kiss for Raymond and two for Hugh and with a warning for both of them:

""The swell's grumbling on the bar a lot this morning, you oughtn't to go out" she added, her face suddenly grave and judicial. We listened with all our ears, but to us the still morning air told nothing of what was happening three miles away at the sea's edge. We had no senses to detect the ominous drone which meant so much to the professional sixth sense of the fisherman's daughter."

Long, long ago these innocents parted.

YOUNG RAYMOND B CATTELL

In the spring of perhaps the year 1932 a lusty Devon lad, he might have been all of twenty seven, with his Kraft durch Freude girlfriend, Monica, was staying in one of the little bungalows that in those days stood at the Exmouth tip of Dawlish Warren. His name was Raymond Bernard Cattell. One day the local fisherman, one Bill Luscombe, who had made it his business to deliver food, letters, newspapers and drinking water to the several bungalow dwellers on the Warren, brought to Cattell unknowingly (“If I had told him it was a boat” writes young Raymond “he would have laughed his head off.”) packages containing a build it yourself, collapsible, German, two man, sailing canoe. Cattell and his friend Monica assembled this boat on the sands of the Warren and for her first voyage they paddled off up the Exe and into the Clyst. They skimmed over the weir at the Bridge Inn, had a jolly day up the Clyst and then paddled back by moonlight not without some curiously related adventures which can be read in Cattell’s 1937 book Under Sail in Red Devon.

No doubt many have made that trip up the Clyst before and since but what I think makes this story of interest is the fact that Cattell went on to be one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most celebrated psychologists. His life was truly illustrious and when he died in Honolulu in 1998 he had spent sixty years teaching and experimenting on the far side of the Atlantic. Countless psychology students, myself included, knew his name from his many heuristic experiments. For a long time I owned and enjoyed his Under Sail in Red Devon but never suspected the intrepid young canoeist and author was the self same man as the great American psychologist.

Tomorrow: a pretty poem entitled Cormorant.