Delderfield Days

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Delderfield Days - Fairlynch Museum

By: Michael Downes
Added: 22 January 2012

Among the centenaries and special occasions this year, devotees of the East Devon-linked playwright and novelist R.F. Delderfield will have remembered that he was born 100 years ago.

Brought up in the London area, Delderfield did not move to Devon until 1925 when his parents took over the running of the Exmouth Chronicle. Later he succeeded his father as editor. A blue plaque erected by the Exmouth Society marks the house where the family lived on Chapel Hill, near The Beacon. Delderfield lived for a time in Budleigh Salterton and Knowle, running an antiques shop in Newton Poppleford. He eventually settled in Sidmouth, building a house called The Gazebo on Peak Hill.

His biographer Marion Lindsey-Noble is one of the prime movers behind a special day of events on Sunday 24 June to honour the writer, described as "Sidmouth’s most famous son."

A few months before that occasion Marion Lindsey-Noble will be visiting Budleigh to give a talk about Delderfield at the Peter Hall on Monday 12 March as the last of the Friends of Fairlynch Winter Talks. Her book is on sale at the Museum and a Delderfield exhibition has been planned for Fairlynch to mark the centenary of his birth.

Always a keen writer herself, Marion Lindsey-Noble has followed in the footsteps of Delderfield with her first novel, The Green Sari, published last October and she is now working on a sequel. Set in Bangladesh where the former language teacher lived in her twenties, the book is described by its author as a heart-warming read and a bitter-sweet love story.

Karin, a young German student meets and falls in love with the handsome and charming Raj. Soon afterwards, he has to leave her country. The novel describes the lovers' struggle to be reunited against her parents' protests, society's prejudice and an impending war, and a young Western woman's desperate attempts at adjusting to life in a Muslim country - far from everything she has ever known.

The Green Sari is described as weaving itself through the trials and tribulations of Karin's life, portraying the cultural divide between East and West whilst drawing a loving, but haunting comparison between the Bangladesh of the 1970s and the present day.

Marion Lindsey-Noble feels that it should be read by every young woman who embarks on a relationship with someone from a very different background. "Marriage is never easy but there is a staggering difference between being a wife in the West and a wife in a Muslim country - however much one is in love and however westernised the man professes to be."

In spite of such an ominous warning, the author calls her book "a declaration of love to one of the poorest countries on earth - Bangladesh."