05. INDELIBLE LESSON OF RESPONSIBILITY

Mending nets of My Delight in the loft 1946

My father was always a responsible person and took life and fishing seriously, serving on the Devon Sea Fisheries Committe in an attempt to regulate net sizes and protect the future of the industry. While he wished his children a better future than he felt he had, for he had little opportunity presented except to be fisherman, he wished them to know his life. Often then I went fishing and learned well to be seasick overboard with the wind.

I helped haul in the nets, pulled the cods end rope, then sorting the fish we began gutting, boxing and sending the boxes below to the ice chambers,  The smell of fuel was abominable but I withstood it all and the crew members enjoyed "tacking the Micky" with practical jokes.

Coming in with the catch was always great with the seagulls in hundreds trailing behind to get the guts thrown overboard, for we gutted fish on board on the way in. I loved always sighting and passing Eddystone light with its magnificent history. I often took the wheel to bringing the vessel into the sound past Drakes island into Sutton Pool.

Then once in the task was not over for I had to be responsible, not because I was told so, but everyone else worked and made me feel part of the crew. So boxes were taken over to the fish market for auction. That was a sight in itself.

Then the day after the trawls were lifted out and mended on the quayside or in the loft, ¿see picture?

It was a small part of my life in time, but very important in my development.

At the end of the war in 1945 all school children received this certificate

from King George dated June 8th , 1946, which declared,

TODAY, AS WE CELEBRATE VICTORY,

I send this personal message to you and

all other boys and girls at school. For

you have shared in the hardships and

dangers of a total war and you have

shared no less in the triumph of the

Allied Nations.

I know you will always feel proud to

belong to a country which was capable

of such supreme effort, proud, too of

parents and elder brothers and sisters

who by their courage, endurance and

enterprise brought victory.

May these qualities be yours as you grow

up and join in the common effort to establish

among the nations of the world unity and peace.

I did not, I suppose, like most other children of my age, understand anything about world unity and peace, but I saw the hardships and dangers and remembered the ration cards and the lack of many foods, and of course my father's constant refusal to take part in buying the most simple thing on the black market.

For nutrition we had no problems, for although one of my fathers boats (he now had several), the Seaplane, once a great royal yacht, was confiscated  in the war without compensation (who could ask?), torn apart and made into a minesweeper, the others continued fishing with older men and we always had fresh fish, crabs, lobster and queens.

In the previous years, while the war was still on, I committed what I suppose could be termed "crimes against society". We children, a small group on Colesdown Hill, including my brother, stole potatoes from Farmer Stevens, whose field backed onto our garden. If my mother knew, she said nothing.

From the Buddha Dharma point of view it was theft right enough, but the half a dozen potatoes we stole every now and again and took up to the woods close to the disused quarry and on a small fire cooked in the fire until the outer skin turned black, were part of an adventure. Badly burned or not, we ate skin and all.

The interesting question is whether it was theft or not. There was a knowledge of doing wrong because there was a certain planning and stealth involved, but the fun in part was in not getting caught. We also stole apples, calling them windfalls, which the local farmer permitted, but with child cunning, we caused a few windfalls ourselves.

Did I learn anything at all from that, which formed my character, leadership perhaps, a sense of responsibility for the group?

There was also one more thing, for on one of our collection trips for unexploded bombs, on throwing them down onto the rocks of the quarry, one bounced into the bushes and started a fire.

We scrambled down and tried to put the fire out with water that was in old discarded pots and cans. Incendiaries are, however, phosphor-based and as the fire and the spitting grew larger all the boys took off. I was alone then. Why did I stay? It was a sense of responsibility for having done the incorrect thing. Water didn't work so I fought the blaze, which was probably much smaller than my imagination now recalls, with earth and branches until it finally went out.

I remember that I felt relieved, not pleased, as I made my way out of the quarry by the main path, passing the slopes where we as kids slid down on bits of metal onto the main road. When I arrived at the top of the hill a host of worried parents with their children met me. I was covered with soot, black in the face but really not worried at all.

All were too relieved to be angry and when I got home there was no reproach nor condemnation.  I explained and my mother listened. Because of that understanding, I learned that it was not necessary to lie at all in my family. You see it is childish behavior for the avoidance of punishment that generates the habit of lying in defense.

What more had I learned that took its place in my character development? Certainly it was not to be more careful. It was to fight to the end. There was a certain reaction against the fire that was instinctive, not cognitive. I sensed that, together with the thrill in victory and now in retrospect I knew what that certificate was talking about when it said, through personal experience,  "courage, endurance and

enterprise that brought victory".

It is so strange how many lessons are learned as a child and then hidden, only to emerge with force much later on. It is the same with all human stained thoughts, attitudes and intentions; their roots are in the rather forgotten things of childhood.

Yet adults forget so easily the lessons that are available every day that can guide them in correct Dharma action.

By the time the war was over, I was five years into the development period of "discrimination" where outside influences begin to divert that natural trait into an "egocentric greed". In taking possession of things, discrimination is strangled for any children with that magnificent gift of nature and greed, or the negative attribute of clinging and craving, starts to develop.

I feel fortunate that I was not of that "discrminating" temperament, but Mara's greedy daughter was there in the background, tempting, always tempting.

During those times I had my lair cut into a bush inside a wall overlooking the quarry and shared it with my brother and other children. There in the walls, we built shelves for our trophies and supplies, pretending that some plants we had found were tea. We kept our horse chestnuts, used in competition, safely there too, along with treasured marbles and Bulb-ears, which were won in marble-throwing games played in ancient Rome and Egypt.

It bound our group together like a tribe. But there was a feeling of ownership which I had never sensed before with anything else. Always I had shared naturally, but now there was a clear "I " that was sharing.

From the Dharma point of view it is clear I had emerged unscathed from the growth period from birth to five, in which natural sensitivity is destroyed by family, religion and education in those children who natually have sensitive dominance. In its place arises a defensive confusion and dissonance. It was also important in the discriminative stage that the "acquisitiveness" that is clinging and craving be foiled.

Without meaning to, my parents did exactly the correct thing. They gave me and my brother everything that a child could yearn for. We could not crave, because before craving arose what we might crave was already there. It sounds monstrous and rather like spoiling the child, but somehow it did not work that way.

First, all the toys were handmade. My father, for example, worked late into the night to carve a wooden Spitfire for me and a Hurricane for my brother and, since he was a craftsman, it was in finest detail, which stirred within me the desire to build model aircraft from Balsa wood.

Every year at Xmas we gave most of the toys away to orphanages and such groups. Perhaps it was that flow that protected us  from the perils of greed that stalk every young child while they are growing up.