Cofton Farm Camp Site

A Memory of Starcross.

'Eee, when I were a lad'....... in the 1950's my dad and I would get the bus from Exeter to Dawlish and camp for a week at Cofton Farm, using a little WWII army-surplus 2-man ridge tent. My elder brother was in The Scouts, and so we were able to borrow his A-frame rucksack with his Primus stove, and miscellaneous camping equipment which included nesting cooking pots and pans with folding handles, a paraffin hurricane lamp and a sleeping bag which seemed to weigh about a ton. Everything reeked of damp proof preservative - a smell which still stirs me to this day! My dad, who was only about 4'6" was a wannabe copper and would trade his pitch fee for his services as 'Camp Cop' - complete with arm-band denoting his status. Guess he'd seen too many films of Nazis with swastika armbands. He'd control the traffic in and out of what was then a hazardous site entrance into a simple grass field. The owner of the site was a typical Devon farmer, flat cap, red face and wheezing asthmatically, as he drove around in his pick-up truck with overflowing bins of pig-swill in the back. These were occasionally exchanged for the contents of the chemical toilets which were deployed in a row of little wooden huts - the use of which demanded a certain spiritual fortitude.....
The highlight of the holidays for me would always be walking down the lane from the site to Cockwood and out under the railway bridges into the estuary and collecting winkles by the pail full.
Tired, exhausted and sunburnt, we would bring these back to the camp site, sprinkle flour onto the top of the water and watch the winkles surface and 'feed' on the flour - apparently this cleaned out their gut of sand and toxins. A few changes of water later and they would be boiling away in a big black cauldron on the top of the Primus stove. After cooling, it was then necessary to 'pick 'the winkles, which was done by by using a needle to remove the 'cap' which formed in the entrance of the spiral shell, and then stab the cooked winkle and extract it from its shell, flopping the wiggly object into a bowl. Once the whole batch had been shelled in this manner - they would be drenched in vinegar, have pepper shaken over them, and then eaten honey-sweet with with lashing of bread and butter and washed down with enamel mugs of scalding tea!

© Chris Howard 2013

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