Carry On scriptwriter Talbot ‘Tolly’ Rothwell was creating fictional lives for others, while all the time his own was close to the ideal for this quietly observing fifteen year-old.
To hear the man speak was another treat. His warm and perfectly formed vowels came from a deep place. His low tone and baritone belly laughs filled any room. And then there was the smile. Always a smile. Whatever the décor, a room was always a rustic and welcoming haven when Tolly was in residence.
One of the passions Tolly tried to press upon me was that of painting. He loved collecting artworks by local painters who captured on canvass the Downs and Sussex
As we stood looking back at his home village of Fulking, Tolly gently infused my imagination with the idea of being able to capture that scene, that moment and that singular memory and hang it on the wall forevermore.
I wasn’t won over. As a teen, the past was gone. It was the future that awaited. Scenery was of the moment, not to be captured and remembered. We were generations apart. And looking back I feel I failed him.
The other side of Tolly was the man who loved being among friends at his local pub. The Shepherd and Dog, in Fulking, had began life as a cottage. It’s beams and inglenook fireplace contributes to much of its current charm, and to Tolly it was very much a home from home.
Long before Tolly’s time local farmers had stood in the ever flowing spring that sat on the pub’s land and used the cool water to wash the sheep during the shearing season.
Nathanial Blaker, a Brighton surgeon who lived in Perching Farm wrote in ‘Sussex in Bygone Days’ in 1906: “To stand for hours up to the waist in a stream of cold water was most trying work for the men who washed the sheep and I have seem them, when the works was over, walk to the Shepherd and Dog stiff and scarcely able to move with cold.”
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