COCKLES & Co.

The unprecedented fine weather we have enjoyed this April has meant that Poppy and I have been moved to spend more time floating up and down the Estuary than in any April before.

At midday on Maundy Thursday we slipped off down river with the tide and did not come back to our mooring until eight o'clock in the evening. I watched the turn of the racing tide from the safety of the sandhills of Dawlish Warren where the sun shone and the skylarks were pouring their full hearts from heaven,or near it!

On the way home I landed on the Cockle Sand which still lives up to its name although the cockles are`far fewer and much smaller than heretofore. It took me twenty minutes to find two handfuls of cockles for my Good Friday tea.

I observed once again the curious way in which the cockles, who had opened up a millimetre or two to observe the great and glorious world beyond their shells, snap tight the moment they are picked from the sand and how sometimes they spit as though disgusted with their fate, as though making their comment on the capture that dooms them to being boiled alive.

There is a notice where I tie up my dinghy on the Green at Lympstone telling the world that all shellfish taken from the Estuary must be boiled for at least three minutes. This seems a small precaution to take considering the history of poisoning attributed to the Exe shellfish. I boiled mine for six minutes just to make doubly sure. I did not want this to be my Last Supper! The boiling perhaps makes them taste a tad more wersh but pepper and salt and a drop of white wine and a little fresh thyme soon puts enough joy into them.

A MINOR INDUSTRY

“What are those ragged creature going out on the mud for?”

“After mussels and cockles,” says pretty Milly Batstone….

“What they call a minor industry , ” says Arthur, her wimpish, grocer boyfriend visiting from the city of Exeter who just doesn’t get it. “I suppose only the lowest of the low do such messy work; and only the lowest type of people eat them anyway.”

“Your quite wrong there,” answers his sweetheart, Milly. “There’s nothing messy about it. Our mud’s clean—very different from Exeter mud.”

This messy or not so messy, minor industry of the harvesting of shellfish is lovingly described in Eden Phillpotts’ 1922 novel, Redcliff. Later in his story Miss Jane Shears, feisty cockle gatherer extraordinary, puts the unloveable Arthur right:

“You speak out of your Exeter ignorance; but cockles is our bread and cheese here, just like tying up parcels of bread and cheese for other people to eat is your bread and cheese……All our women – even our sempstresses and such like- go down to the tide off and on, to earn a bit of the cash God puts in the mud. Cockles be the sugar in our tea and the butter on our bread, my dear man.”

Tide after tide the cockles and mussels were raked out of the mud by the women and children of Lympstone village and the mussels were taken by the basketful to be cleansed at the local cleansing tanks before being sent off by rail to the mussel-eating factory workers of the Midlands. The story I have heard is that the cleansing tanks at Sowden End were a consequence of the unregulated years which came to an end when shellfish from the Estuary poisoned a couple of streets of some Midland town or other. I would like to know if anyone else knows more of this story. In any case the cleansing project failed finally because it became too expensive for the local shellfish gatherers to use the tanks and in the 1930s the shellfish industry collapsed.

In the sixties and early seventies it was still possible to spend a happy day on the banks and to bring home many buckets full of cockles. My father and my mother regularly went a cockling, mostly not in the mud but on the Cockle Sand and their only bathtub was often full of cockles bubbling away cleansing themselves in brine. They supplemented their fried breakfasts with them, crisping them in butter. Delicious!

Tomorrow: an introduction to my Poppy entitled A Boat for the Estuary.



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