The Sailor's Return, Chaldon Herring (East Chaldon)

The pub called "The Sailor's Return"- and the village of Chaldon Herring (East Chaldon) are interesting places for a literary pilgrimage. It's strange that there is no mention (on the information board outside the pub) of David Garnett's novel "The Sailor's Return" (1925), or of the film (same title, 1978) directed by Jack Gold. Perhaps the topic is still too controversial? It seems to have been a very open-minded and artistic village community in reality. David Garnett used to stay here, but the village itself is better known for its association with T. F. Powys and with Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland.

Some extracts from "The Sailor's Return":

"They turned a corner and saw 'The Sailor's Return' before them, standing alone a hundred yards or so from the village. It was a long low house, heavily thatched, but the sign had decayed and the frame stood empty."

" 'The Sailor's Return' soon became the very picture of what a country inn should be."

" 'The Sailor's Return'...had indeed something of a name, both on account of a black woman being there, and because the new landlord had made the place so handsome, and entirely different from the miserable little pot-house which it had been for twenty years before his coming."

"All the sailors who came...were slow to take their departure, and would look round once or twice at the sign before they went away down the road, as if they were saying to themselves:
" 'The Sailor's Return', please God that I also may return and find such a house as this waiting for me."

The novel is about racism in a fictional Dorset village (Maiden Newbarrow), but this tragic tale of  the fate of the mariner-turned-publican William Targett, Tulip (his African wife) and Sambo, their son, is itself often couched in extremely racist language.

 

Llewelyn Powys on William Barnes:

"How unmistakably, how essentially English the old man's poems are!- like clods dug up from an East Chaldon mead, smelling of primroses and diaisies and damp island-mould" (from Thirteen Worthies)

From "The Green Valley" by Sylvia Townsend Warner:

"Here in the green scooped valley I walk to and fro.

In all my journeyings I have not seen

A place so tranquil, so green;

And yet I think I have seen it long ago,

The grassy slopes, and the cart-track winding, so."

(Quoted in the introduction to the excellent book "Chaldon Herring, The Powys Circle in a Dorset Village" by Judith Stinton).

New edition, with additional material, Writers in a Dorset Landscape, Black Dog Press, 2004

Chaldon Herring: Writers in a Dorset Landscape

Chaldon Herring: Powys Circle in a Dorset Village

Map of the area from the first edition of this essential book:

Rat's Barn: Ruin in a Landscape.

Derelict building with Powys Family associations

Dorset Echo report, 11 March 2012