12. REVOLUTION

Whenever my father was home we had family excursions. One of our repeated visits was to various parts of Dartmoor, most of the time around Haytor. My favorite plant became the heather, my favorite folktales the ones about people trapped in bogs and about the moor little people, perhaps really the fount of modern hobbit lore. My two favorite moor activities were photographing the wild white face Dartmoor sheep, believed to be one of England’s most ancient breeds, with a splendid reflex camera which my father had bought me. Of course I had to develop the negatives and print the pictures. It was splendid all the way around. My second love was making model aircraft that flew with little miniature engines.

I made my aircraft and my father made his. And there began the problem of competition. It's true that I was smarter, better educated, better spoken and better mannered, better now at almost every subject except celestial navigation. I played chess and he did not. I was a good footballer, splendid in field hockey as  goalkeeper and a very good cricketer; he played nothing, but here, where I should have excelled, his planes always seemed to do better than mine.

Mine were as well made, but his were always in one way another more inventive. He even invented a swept back wing aircraft. It was not jealousy, but a mindless and yet almost undetectable envy that stirred inside of me.

I only had one great success with an aircraft which had a yard wingspan made of balsa and paper. In that alone we shared a triumph.

I went on excursions by charter bus with my grandmother (we were never accompanied by my grandfather). We normally went to the port villages of Looe and St Austell in Cornwall or to her favorite in Devon, where she loved to look at all the little shops and the colorful fishing boats. We had tea and scones and sometimes little fancies. Life was simple and delicious without complications.

Whenever possible, with my friends, we visited Wembury Beach by bike and our main pleasure was looking in the rock pools for anything live there, picking limpets off the rocks to take kome and jumping into deep rock pools for the splash, for we never actually swam.

It was to this calm background, in which somehow my brother never appears in my memory, that eruptions began. He liked staying home with my mother and was never adventuresome. His temperament was rather like hers, while I took after my father in almost everything. That was the problem. Years later as an adult I understood the problem. More than anything he wanted me and my brother to succeed, but his investment was in me. He was torn between watching my growth and advances in areas where he could never follow and making the way clear fo me to advance, yet wanting to be up there too.  It too was a form of envy, but much more natural and understandable than mine.

Eventually came the big crunch.

My father didn't like to go anywhere without doing something, a habit I captured. He didn't like lying on the sand and, like most fisherman at the time, did not swim, although he eventually mastered a backstroke. We went to the beaches, Polperro in Cornwall, Mothcombe and Challaborough Sands.

My problem became evident on one of the outings we often made at Bigbury, where we always went with his many friends, much younger than himself.

He had purchased for the use of the children at the playing fields complete cricket gear, including stumps balls, batting pads and wicketkeeper gloves and pads. We borrowed them always for Bigbury.

There on the sands, for there were few tourists in those days, we set up a pitch to play cricket partway towards Burgh Island.

To all his friends of course I was the cricket expert and on one outing my father and I ended up on different sides. We didn't play with two wickets, just one, so each person had to be bowled out. I was a bowler more than batsman and bowled the other side out. Then when our side went in and it was my turn to bat. My father was very strong and bowled against me.

Looking at it now I was absolutely clear that he was never going to get me out. I played a few good strokes but "stonewalled".  That is, I just blocked his balls.

He refused to give up until finally, hurling with all his might, even his stamina after more then a half hour gave out. It didn't matter afterwards that I had won and he had lost. I had played with true hostility. I am not sure about him, perhaps after all just simple pride drove him. No one else had the slightest idea what was going on.

All was forgotten afterwards, but the seeds in memory are sometimes evil little things.

Yet his generosity continued. He was silently my champion. In those early school years at Plympton we started a chess club, playing during breaks and after school. My father stepped in and presented a dozen boards and Staunton chess sets for the club. So naturally I played chess. I wasn't bad, but there were no more than a dozen members and no girls. For years I played and when playing any good player I NEVER won, not once. Yet with my father's determination, though he never asked how I was doing in the game, I continued day after day, losing and losing.

There were two great older players in the club, the Boreland brothers. One or both were Devon Champions. One day agaisnt the younger I drew a game. I don't know if you can imagine how it is to lose and lose for years and then finally DRAW one game.

I couldn't have felt more chuffed if I had beaten Alexander Alekhine.

From that moment on I was a firm adherent of chess, although it was many years before I began taking it really seriously.