When I sat down with John, I found myself stepping into a world that feels both familiar and impossibly far away. His memories paint a vivid picture of 1960s village life on the edge of Dartmoor, growing up in a large country vicarage in Ilsington. For John, the landscape isn’t just scenery — it’s the main character. A huge lawn, a paddock, an orchard, woodland… all of it forming a child’s entire universe. With hardly any traffic and long stretches between houses, freedom wasn’t a treat — it was the daily routine. Bikes and ponies stood in for lifts, and if you were thirsty, you simply knocked on a stranger’s door for water. That casual trust, and the sense that the village quietly knew who you were, says so much about how community once worked at walking pace.
Being the vicar’s son added another layer to that world. Weekdays were ordinary childhood, but Sundays brought expectations: smart clothes, church, and the slightly surreal experience of sitting among mostly older parishioners. The church wasn’t just a place of belief — it was the village’s social network, and John’s dad sat at the centre of it, speaking to everyone without pretence. At home, though, he was simply “dad”, and that created a lifelong tension for John between human messiness and the spiritual standards people imagine clergy must embody. It also planted something deeper: a sense of service, belonging, and what it means to look after others.
John’s stories are full of the textures of analogue domestic life. A big old house with no central heating meant smoky open fires, damp logs spitting sparks, and ice on the inside of the windows. Hot water bottles, an Aga in the kitchen, the smell of burning paper — these become sensory anchors. Village institutions doubled up: the post office was also the sweet shop, and returnable bottles could be swapped for treats. Even the pub had a hatch for buying sweets. Shoes weren’t disposable; they went to the cobbler to be resoled, names and prices chalked up behind the counter — a tiny economy built on repair rather than replacement.
As John grew older, independence turned into adventure and the occasional rebellion. A father who dropped children in a field with a tent for days feels unthinkable now, yet it made perfect sense then — a time of what John calls “benign neglect”, when competence was learned by doing. Music arrived through a glamorous uncle with a record player and 78s, then shifted to Hawkwind and Black Sabbath. There’s a brilliant moment where teenage John plays Paranoid to his vicar father, who listens politely, trying to make sense of it. And then there’s the long, aimless trek to find a rare osprey — hours outside, no phone, no updates, just curiosity and the certainty that you’d eventually make your way home.
