My mother, Molly Goodland, who has died aged 96, wrote vivid descriptions of life on Exmoor in the rural south-west of England.
For many decades, her time was devoted first to looking after children and then to caring. Only later in life was she able to find time for writing, and she described her 1930s childhood movingly and perceptively in Growing Wild on Exmoor, published under her maiden name, Molly Richards, in 2007.
Molly was born on Broomstreet Farm, between Porlock and Oare on Exmoor (the area fictionalised by RD Blackmore in Lorna Doone). She grew up with five siblings, an alcoholic father, Ernest Richards, and a mother, Mary (nee Ridd), who could only just cope with the pressures of motherhood and sheep rearing. Molly left school at 13 and found work on local farms and then as a farm-help all around Britain and in France, but she always came back home.
In the late 1950s, a Cambridge-educated businessman from Taunton, John Goodland, bought Twitchen, the cottage below her family’s farm. Both at a stage when they wanted to settle down, Molly and John became engaged. Photos of their wedding at Oare church in 1959 show the Exmoor farming community and the Taunton business class mingling uneasily. The couple moved to Taunton and raised three sons, my brothers, Tom and Phil, and me.
When John was diagnosed with cancer, Molly nursed him until his death in 1978. After this, she moved house restlessly, each time a little closer to Exmoor. Her sister, Margaret, and her mother fell ill, followed by her two brothers, who had never married or moved from the farm. I remember her driving off almost every day to look after first one, and then the other. After their deaths, the farm was taken over by a cousin.
Only from her 70s onwards did Molly have the time to spend on what she really wanted: writing. Apart from her autobiography, which carefully preserves West Country dialect in its vividly descriptive prose, she published two books of poetry, Evening on Exmoor (2007) and Feeding Lady Winifred’s Cats (2009).
In a review of her work, Michael Laskey described her as “a true poet. Entirely without self-dramatisation or self-pity, she confronts her inner and outer demons.”
She is survived by Tom, Phil and me, and by five grandchildren.
