Memories of Devon 1

Those of  of us who serve at the chalkboard have now been back at school for three weeks or so and thoughts have turned back to the joy that was the summer holidays. I spent a few days with my mother in Okehampton in Devon chasing up the family tree and this brought back many happy memories.
When I was between the ages of nothing and about 15 we holidayed every summer in a cottage adjacent to a working farm situated in rural central Devon. In my memory the sun always shone and the two weeks of bliss was an eternity of fun. How many eight year old boys today get to drive a tractor during harvest? I know my late father considered those two weeks to be the reason he worked so hard.
My father was an appalling cook. He was blessed with my mother who was a superb family cook so all was well when it came to domestic issues.
The one occasion, during the fortnight we would all, including members of the farm family and my Godfather's family (who often shared the cottage with us), head off the area around Brat Tor on Dartmoor. This tor is special as it has Widgery Cross on top of it. We used to call the area "Black Rock" in a Swallows and Amazons sort of name change.
There was a small river which had been dammed to provide swimming pools and always a climb to the top to touch the cross and wave to our parents far below. I still have no idea how we swam in  the cold of fresh Dartmoor stream water and did not catch our death of cold.
Before we had been there long we would be called for lunch and, of course, we would ambush the adults from a direction they were not expecting.
This was my father's moment. On a twin primus stove he would be doing a "cook out" (his name for it). This was very simple: In two frying pans there would be plenty of proper butcher's sausages, sizzling, spitting, occasionally banging and being generally harassed by Dad. Once cooked, these would be thrust into a folded piece of sliced white bread (probably "Wonderloaf or "Mother's Pride"), smeared with ketchup or brown sauce and wolfed down so fast that they made us pant at the heat. Never in my life since, have I been able to recreate the sheer joy at the taste of those sausages and their pulpy, bread blankets.
My parents retired to Devon some 27 years ago. A few years before he died, my father was able to take my niece and nephew up on to the Moor for a Cook Out, on the same old primus stove, with sausages from the same butcher. I think of those days in the sun often, and they make me smile with happy memories tinged with the fact that I miss my Dad, but I still can't work out how I ever swam in a Dartmoor river and survived.