Walking Into The Past At Cockington

You don't just arrive in Cocktington. You step into another time. From Summerdyne, where we were staying in Torquay's Greenway Road, it was about a ten-minute walk. It felt like you weren't just walking into a sub-village, but you were also walking away from 1989 and walking into... possibly 1489?

There was a tree-lined lane that grew darker, damper, quieter and shadier the further you want. In my childhood mind, I was imagining Narnia. I'd seen the pictures of Cockington so I knew what to expect. Candy-coloured houses, thatched roofs, lush gardens and horse drawn carriages. Nothing quite prepared me for it though. 

You turn a corner, and there it is. The past. You step out of that lane where the only noise is the rustling of trees and your own breathing and then in a few steps you're somewhere else entirely.

I have to admit that when I wrote Cherry Lips, I was imagining the village where Cerise lived as Cockington, because this is the kind of place you read about in fairy tales. It really did feel like a time slip.

And the best thing about Cockington is that everything feels somehow softer there. It's probably because everyone who visits is on holiday. There's a slower pace, an atmosphere of wonder and excitement and the smell of freshly baking scones in the air.

And horse poo. Let's be real. That's what they don't show you in the promo materials.

There were fairy gardens, tiny gift shops filled with things that felt too delicate for everyday life and of course the kind of genuine Devon cream teas that people travel just to enjoy. 

I went in to a tea room on the first floor of a stone house with impossibly steep metal stairs and sat down. Then I looked at the clotted cream and absolutely refused. To eight-year-old me, “clotted” sounded suspicious. The kind of word that belongs in a hospital, not on a plate, because surely it's only bloody that clots? So I had jam and butter instead.

No regrets at the time. Mild curiosity now, but still… I stand by my childhood instincts and have never eaten clotted cream to this day, except well hidden in fudge and toffee.

What I remember just as much as the place are the people. There was a waiter who stuck in my mind all these years. He was full of joie de vivre, a real character. The kind of person who doesn’t just serve you tea, but becomes part of your memory whether you like it or not.

He was obsessed with Gloria Estefan. Not a casual fan. So obsessed that he was showing a poster of her to all the customers in the tea room, even the eight-year-old girl. My Dad spied him doing this and told him, "Oh, my daughter's a big fan," pointing to me. It was pretty clear that we were different kinds of fans though, given that he was staring at the chest area of the poster, talking about her like she might walk in at any moment. And I remember thinking, even then, this is SO random. She was mum-aged. He was young. Attraction didn’t compute in my eight-year-old brain.

Then there was the carriage ride. You can’t walk into the past and not fully commit to the experience. We climbed in and were taken back up that same tree-lined lane we had walked down on the way in. Only now, it felt different with the clip-clopping of hooves and the scent of horse musk and the swaying of the carriage. For a moment, we could have been Victorian children. Or Georgian. Or from any time at all really. Just not kids from 1989.

But then, reality gently tapped us on the shoulder because the woman driving the carriage, glowing with the kind of tan only a Devon summer can give, was casually eating a Pot Noodle while driving the carriage. When we stopped, she topped it up with hot water from a flask and carried on eating as she took payment, completely unfazed.

And, it has to be said. Absolutely iconic. I loved her.

In the gift shop, I bought a tiny bottle of Devon Violets perfume in a fairy sized bottle, with a little cork in it. It was delicate and almost weightless. The glass was green, the liquid when poured was a toxic shade of purple and it smelled... absolutely putrid. I had no idea until then that I don’t actually like the smell of violets. Not at all. Give me roses every time. That's what I get for blind-buying a perfume.

But that didn’t matter because it wasn’t really about the scent. It was about the bottle and about owning something a fairy would own, like it held something secret. I could imagine that if you opened it at the right moment, in the right place, something magical might happen. I kept it for years, not as perfume but as a possibility...

Looking back, Cockington wasn’t just a village. It was a moment where everything felt slightly enchanted, where the past and present overlapped just enough to make a wee lassie from Ayrshire who was white as a sheet in a summer that turned everyone in Devon cinnamon brown could walk through a lane, turn a corner and see life through the eyes of fairy tale characters.

I don't think I realised until I started writing this post exactly what my trip to Cockington did for me in the long term and the role it played in my experience as an author. I always say that my time in Torquay probably influenced me to write mysteries like Agatha Christie did, since Torquay was her home town, but I truly believe now that it was less of an influence on me as a mystery writer and more of an influence on me as someone who once wrote a fairy tale that the world has now forgotten.