The various volumes and editions of that singularly attractive combination
of diary and commonplace-book and countryman's jottings bearing the title Small Talk at Wreyland are still, I sup- pose, known only to a comparatively small circle of readers, and will remain so till the Cambridge University Press brings them into currency again or transfers the copyright to some other publisher. Wreyland is the smallest of hamlets, close to, and virtually part of, the village of Lustleigh in mid-Devon, halfway between Moretonhampstead and Newton Abbot. Chance took me there a few days ago. Cecil Torr, the author of Small Talk, is dead, and the original manor-house, I believe, was burnt down. But Hall House, where the manor courts were held, is still there, with the date 1680 misleadingly carved on its granite Tudor porch—misleadingly, because the building is far older than that, the date, in fact, being only that of a reconstruction or the transfer of a lease; Wreyland goes back to Domesday Book, and Cecil Torr has traced its history in astonishing detail since then—a quite remarkable example of intensive study.
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