Gordon Williams wrote the two books that made his reputation in the remote mid-Devon village of Hittisleigh, which had a population of 120. He went there from London with his wife Claerwen and young family in 1966, on a £20 a week contract with the publishers Methuen to write novels.
With his insistence on a spare, unsentimental realism based on the model of Chicago writer Nelson Algren, and a larger-than-life need for convivial company with whom to talk through the night, Gordon was an unlikely inhabitant of a sleepy village where the farming practices of the time bore a closer resemblance to Victorian times than to farming as it is done today. However, it was living in this village, described as “lying in the foothills of Dartmoor” by the local historian WG Hoskins, that gave Gordon the mischievous idea for The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, the story of someone coming down off the moor in mid-winter to terrorise the locals. This was then transmuted by Sam Peckinpah into Straw Dogs.
And it was while living in Hittisleigh that Gordon wrote From Scenes Like These, his bitter story of life for an apprentice farm labourer on a farm outside Glasgow which reached the Booker Prize shortlist in 1969. The two or more years he spent in rural Devon turned out to be lifechanging.