“You know how to get to Stokeinteignhead Village Hall, don’t you Chris?” Robert asked in a soft voice.
In fact, I could barely hear my brother (and my hearing is way better than Chris’s), therefore I wondered if Chris had heard Robert properly; but Chris nodded, smiled and answered in the affirmative, not that that necessarily means he heard everything (or anything).
For those of you who don’t know our area, Stokeinteignhead is a small country village, inland from the coastal road leading from Shaldon to Torquay, and it is about twenty minutes drive from our home town of Dawlish, where my niece’s wedding took place. We were about to depart for “the wedding breakfast” (although it wasn’t a breakfast at all, it being about four o’clock in the afternoon!); my mum, “Granny Porch” (not to be confused with the granny in Giles cartoons), went along with Chris and me in our car. As we neared Shaldon Chris admitted that he wasn’t quite sure where the village hall was situated.
“We can always ask someone,” I suggested.
Chris surprised me with a nod of agreement, which was rather unusual as he normally refuses to stop and ask for directions, and I wondered if he had heard me.
At Shaldon he took a sharp right turn onto the Coombeinteignhead road and I asked:
“Oh, are you going this way?”
“Why not? This is the way to Stokeinteignhead, it’s right next to Coombeinteignhead. Which way would you go?”
“I would have taken the coast road and turned right at Labrador to avoid the country lanes,” I answered.
“That’s the long way,” he said quite rightly, (but it does avoid the narrow lanes).
We passed through Coombeinteignhead village and soon we saw a villager walking along the road, and Chris, of his own accord, wound down his window and called to the man:
“Excuse me, but I wonder if you could tell me where the village hall is?”
“Follow this road for another two hundred yards or so and you’ll see it on your right – there will be a lot of cars parked there. I’m on my way there myself,” the man answered cheerily.
I noted that the man was not wearing his finery and didn’t look anything like a wedding guest; in truth, he looked more like a farmer out for a walk, and it crossed my mind that if he was not a guest then he must be a warden or a lonely chap who enjoys to see a bit of life going on in the village hall.
The village hall was exactly where the man said it would be and there were many cars in the car park. I looked around to see if I could recognise my son’s car, which was rather a long shot as I’m not good at recognising people’s cars – modern cars all look so similar these days – but, not surprisingly, I couldn’t see it.
“Is Jim’s car here?” I enquired of Chris.
“No, he’s not here yet. Listen, you and your mum can get out here and go on in ahead of me while I park – there’s no need for her to walk over the grass.”
As Mum and I walked across the tarmac running along the side of the hall a pleasant-looking couple, in Barbour jackets and tweeds, came down some steps. They were on their way back to their car. They looked at us and smiled and nodded their hellos.
“It’s a lovely day for it!” said the husband.
“Oh yes, isn’t it just?” we answered, as you do.
They were as fascinated in us as we were with them; I turned around for a backwards glance and found they were doing the same.
“Perhaps they’re just using the village hall car park,” I suggested to Mum.
We approached the open front doors, from where we could see down the entrance passage and through the glass panels of the inner door leading into the hall. There inside, where we expected to see our beautiful bride and the party from the church, was a Father Christmas!
Mum slipped into the bathroom and some ladies came out of the hall.
“Are you coming in to our Christmas Fair?” asked one of the ladies.
“Sorry,” I replied, “but we have to join our wedding party at Stokeinteignhead Village Hall. We have come to the wrong hall!”
“It’s not far – why not come in to our fair first?” she asked laughing.
Whilst my mother and I chatted to the ladies, we were joined by the villager who had told us the way to the hall.
“I had a feeling you weren’t wanting our village hall, not in your wedding outfits…” he grinned and chuckled, as farmers do.
Other charming inhabitants of Coombeinteignhead came out of the hall to see what was going on and they made sure that we had the right directions for the right village hall, only a mile and a half away. We had a feeling that the whole of the small community would soon be laughing about the smartly dressed ladies who visited their Christmas fair whilst looking for their rather late wedding breakfast. Who needs Sat Nav?
