We encounter Granny Smale, who ran one of Clovelly’s tea rooms, in chapter seven of Barefoot on the Cobbles. Stories of Granny Smale, or Granny Pengilly as she was also known, have come down to the present day. The incident with the cream, that is recounted in the novel, is just one of them.

Mary Ann Pickard was born in 1848, the daughter of William and Susan Pickard née Heard. Both the Pickards and the Heards were well known Clovelly families. In 1871, Mary Ann married mariner, William Pengilly, in Clovelly and they set up home in North Hill. In the 1891 census, Mary Ann can be found living in a three roomed cottage in the High Street, with six of their eight children. Just a week after the census was taken, her husband met with an untimely death. In order to support her family, Mary Ann ran Pengilly’s Tea Rooms in the High Street. She remarried, to Harry Smale, in the Zion Chapel in Silver Street, Bideford in 1897. Harry died in 1915 and Granny Smale’s granddaughter, Annie, came to help her run the tea shop. Mary Ann Smale died in 1920.

‘Leonard lingered outside Granny Smale’s, inhaling deeply as the aroma of baking brought a halt to his purposeful gait. Short, sturdy and energetic but elderly now, Granny Smale hadn’t been Granny Pengilly for twenty years or more but the sign outside the shop, that swayed and creaked in the salt-laden gusts, still read “Pengilly’s Tea-Rooms”. Harry Smale had succumbed to a sudden attack of influenza just last week and there had been speculation as to how Granny Smale would manage the business alone.’

Barefoot on the Cobbles will be published on 17 November 2018. More information about the novel can be found here. Copies will be available at various events in the weeks following the launch or can be pre-ordered from Blue Poppy Publishing or the author.