03. PLYMOUTH HOE

The Band Stand at Plymouth Hoe

Many Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays I walked on the pier and sometimes cycled on Plymouth Hoe with my grandmother, Lillian Quick (Clarke), a woman in the true sense for me, even now. She was a suffragette and called the famous Winston Churchill a warmonger continually. She was, I assume, a Liberal. With her husband Bill, who was trained as wheelwright and worked in his carpenter's shop in the Tar Works, they earned an extra penny or two playing music in the pubs. Her father, also tied to the sea, was Captain on a ferry that went between Devon and Ireland.

This gave my mother time to do her chores and certainly she too was a free spirit. When I walked on high walls or slid down many banisters on the many steps next to the fort, there was never a frown of concern or a word of caution.

I remember the Royal Marine Band in their splendid colored uniforms and sitting fascinated in my seat. The Band Stand didn't live long after that, for in the war it was removed as scrap metal and turned into material for warplanes, bullets and bombs. How many lives did that magnificent Band Stand claim? Who can tell?

It was never replaced and music was later played beneath a marquee.

It was important for my development that my gramdmother was strong. With my father she was a model and I admired them both. My mother, like my grandfather, was gentle and meek and later upon the path I would recognize both their temperaments as confused/sensitive and my father and grandmother as aversive/intelligent.

Make no mistake about it. parents and grandparents are the models for any child. No matter what society does to form the child later, it is these prime caretakers that set the basic framework for the future... If you, as a parent or grandparent, are no different than anyone else then the child will be like everyone else.

Occasionally a glorious rebel will break out of a bad mold, but that is not the norm. Parents are generally well meaning but also a victim of their own faulty formation. Many wish their child to succeed and rise above their own state, but still present themselves by their stained actions as models.

Favorable circumstances at birth then include adequate models as well as an adequate growing environment.

In earlier times, perhaps up to the fifties, people were made of sterner stuff and not brainwashed robots. Then most lived in the moment with more of a zest for life even though things were difficult and were not chained to future performance or dominated by little plastic cards or little chips.

In a couple of years this body with its mind will be eighty and I feel privileged not only to still be able to hang on to life without falling into the old age trap and very fortunate to be old enough to have lived in times which were more sane and natural than we see today.

The potentially sensitive child needs those traits polished and developed. It is not correct or natural that he or she is forced into the distorted mold of a greedy civilization.

The potentially "discriminating" child needs natural discrimination developed by model parents and here is where society stands or falls. It is here that modern civilization fails, for it builds from the precious seeds of discrimination an acquisitiveness that is a disease that is incurable.

I, as a potentially naturally intelligent child, required models that allowed development of leadership and effective rapid decision-making. Identity is always there lurking in the human creature and has been from the moment the first words came from the apelike creature called man.

My mother was a model for sensitivity and my father the prime model for natural intelligence and rapid decision- making.

One moment of inventiveness and rapid decision-making I remember well. He had the day free and considered going to the beach so I could enjoy making the traditional sand castles with my metal bucket and spade with Mickey Mouse and Minnie on it.

But the beach was crowded at the Hoe. In a fraction of a second a decision was made... He commanded always and there was never opposition. He marched us down to My Delight, motored out to Plymouth sound between the Hoe and Drakes Island, that can be seen in the photo, without telling anyone what he was up to.

There he dredged the bottom with buckets and loaded the deck with sand from the bottom. I had my private beach with a view of the Hoe and the precious Pier that was destroyed by German bombers in 1941 and never rebuilt.

My mother's sensitive temperament, also with a hostile sensitive model pair as parents, never fought my father's decisions, there were only sensitive and often subtle modifications that he never noticed. Until much later in life I never knew how much her support and admiration for him was essential.

It was always that way. There was never a long time planning. So life for me as a child was always an adventure in which I was a prime piece of the puzzle, not just an extra appendage, as most children are.

I believe that is what his own father hated in him and what most of his brothers and sisters admired. He didn't want to work for others, he bought a boat. It must have cost him the pleasures others had, but it was his world he was building.

I remember too the Hoe and my grandmother for another incident much later. While out walking one day, a war plane came from nowhere out of the clouds and strafed us, an old grandmother and a child. I was too young to feel afraid. I just remember the noise, and the image of my grandmother standing there holding my hand shaking her fist at the retreating aircraft.

I didn't even realize there was a war on, nor the consequences.

After that we moved into the country, to Colesdown Hill near Plymstock. We lived at the top in a semi-detached cottage and I remember walking up the hill with my mother for the first time. It was a steep hill with three cul-de-sacs on the left and a quarry on the right. On the way up I found three brass badges from soldiers' caps and I was surprised at that moment to learn from my mother that there was a war on and that my father was in the war as a naval CPO in the Merchant Navy.

I didn't know what war was. My only idea came from a very large framed print on one wall of my grandmother's living room. It was Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. I looked at it often with unbelievable delight. Later I could never reconcile that picture with her pacifism, but recalled that once in the war she was a rabid anti-national socialist against old Schiklgruber.

Anyway, my idea of war was that all the soldiers and sailors died. So I immediately counted on my father as being soon dead. I felt bad, as one can imagine, and without taking in to account my mother's smile and assurance, simply waited for the inevitable.

My great delight, and it was frequent, was watchimg the convoys of American troops as they passed, throwing out comics, chewing gum and army rations to any child thay encountered. The comics were in themselves great, but what impressed me were the ads which featured amazing bicycles that seemed out of this world.

My father appeared from time to time, home from his work in the Navy on minesweepers, destroying mines laid by the Germans to block aid to the Russians. He was on a run called the Murmansk between Scotland and Russia, one of the most dangerous in the war.

One of his first tasks at home was to build an air-raid shelter in our garden, which he shared with our neighbors. There was for me in this war a complete calm. Some nights on the way to the shelters as the air-raid siren sounded, I insisted on stopping to watch the moving stars, which my mother told me were just reflections of the German bombers passing to Plymouth.

In the distance, twenty or so miles away, we could see Plymouth burning, night after night.

There were fires lit out in the country to mislead the raiders, so we took our share of the bombing, mostly incendiaries, and every day I and several other children, with so much innocence it is hard to believe, went out searching for unexploded bombs, and there were many, which we took to a discarded quarry and lauched onto the stones below, where they exploded.

Afterwards we collected the fins as trophies.