13. EMANCIPATION

Once Bluebell Woods

I suppose it was about 1946, when I was around thirteen going on fourteen, that my emancipation began. I had always had sweethearts before, and I remember one girl that I adored (for a while) called Angela Palmer.

She was slender and beautiful with long hair. Many a night I stood outside her house yearning to catch her shadow on the window blinds. There was absolutely no sexual stirring at all; something deeper was happening and my right brain was making some subtle selection.

But then two incidents occurred, both of which showed the innocence of the times.

One day two pretty girls, a cousin, Sylvia, and a friend, came to our house in Elburton for a visit and stayed the night. They were both a couple of years older than I. They slept together downstairs on a bed sofa and I wandered down shortly after everyone was in bed, for I slept upstairs and there had been a mild flirting all day. Why, I don't remember.

Their door was open so I peeked in. They were awake and talking. They saw me and told me to come in. I did and they invited me rather intimately to jump into bed with them. I refused. I wonder why now, because it was neither shyness nor propriety; perhaps it was because I really didn't know why they would invite me in.

Yet in that same year there was another incident. Through another family friend I met another girl. Her name was Audrey Francis Lang. She went to school in Plymouth and was a couple of years older than me. We exchanged kisses, as I was just awakening to the idea.

Then she told me that her friends were talking about kissing and such things and were having a competition. The idea was to see who could hold the longest kiss.

So we entered in competition with these unknown others. For weeks she came and we sat there on the sofa downstairs undisturbed and undetected (at least I believe so) just kissing. Yet it never went further than that, due I believe to our innocence.

Is it one major problem of the civilized world that children lose their innocence so early?

I was thirteen or fourteen, still wearing short pants to school with no seasonal change, even in the cold of winter. It would not be long before I could wear long pants. Hormones were beginning to flow.

I remember one part of another Shakespearean play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which there was a play within a play. I played Snug the Joiner and remember the following:

SNUG

Have you the lion's part written? pray you, if it

be, give it me, for I am slow of study.

QUINCE

 You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.

Yet indelible were the lines of Flute who, as the parts were dished out, was directed to play Thisbe, a woman.

He declares, "Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming".

Miss Horrell, bless her, taught me in that moment what it was to direct a play.

She changed the line's emphasis. She generated a pause after "beard", and made the actor act pensive for a fraction of a second before adding "coming".

I was impressed. Perhaps too because I had the faint wisps of hair on my upper lip ... "coming".

Then something very strange occurred. Across the way a new vicar had come to serve at Elburton Church. He was a small chubby little man with a disarming smile. Well, he came over and gave my father a huge six inch thick old bible with gold designs on the cover and binding, which closed with a metal catch, inside of which one put one's personal family tree.

He asked my father if I could join the choir. My father was not religious and had his own agnostic position, but he always wanted all doors open to us. Never was any idea, no matter how strange, excluded.

He was firm in believing in ethical standards and I believe his only immoral act at that time was stealing a Gideon Bible from a hotel. He felt guilty as no one had informed him that they were there to be taken.

I decided that a choir may not be so bad, as I was also in the St John's Ambulance Brigade and a Boy Scout, so I joined the Choir of St Mathew's Church on Sherford Road. At that time it was a delightful unassuming church with a great pastor and I remember marching in from the choir room to the organ music with my psalm book and white cassock. I clearly remember the friendliness of the people and the great harvest festivals we held. Every time before I went, my mother had to remember to slip some coins into my hand for the collection.

I admit that I was more intrigued by God than Jesus and I preferred the Old Testament God. We sang all the usual songs, one of which I retain, "All things great and beautiful" and of course the Apostle's Creed, which is installed firmly in memory. Although it made no inward impression, it is there in memory with the Lord's Prayer, along with the conviction that very few Christians know anything about true and natural compassion and do not even know how to enter correctly into recitations of their own churches.

I wrote recently to the Elburton Church without the kindness of a reply, so it seems any friendliness that is now proclaimed is less from the heart and more from the head. That comes as no great surprise.

And so life went gloriously on.

I still played football down at the fields, which the Duke of Edinburgh had finally blessed, and still went frequently with my grandmother to Bluebell Woods (the actual name was Dunstone Woods). One entered by an old wooden stile at each end.

It was a thick woods, a very large copse actually, bordered on all sides by just a few houses. It was a delight to walk there.

In some of the Dharma lessons I have given, I sometimes have mentioned in jest that one day children will  have to visit a museum to see a tree.

This week I saw pictures of my Bluebell Wood. My jest has come true; I am horrified. The wood is reduced and clamped on all sides by little square houses built by people with little square heads. Where have all the bluebells gone? "Gone to graveyards every one", with the memories of the beauty that has died there.

I played field hockey, cricket and football at school, yet I was no great fan of athletics. I felt that running was rather boring, my specialty being javelin throwing, tutored by Mr Hamilton, our sports director. I had only one school hero, a boy from the sixth called Ferris, who was a Devon Champion pole vaulter.

Outside of school at fourteen and  in the direction of fifteen, I began playing football and joined Plymstock United Football Club as an inside forward. Inclement weather stopped nothing and believe me, a leather football bound up with laces is heavy when it hits your forehead, and the leather boots with metal toe and nailed-in cleats were a pain to keep soft with Dubbin, but nothing stopped those games; rain and sleet were just normal hazards.

My friend Raymond played for the Oreston Rovers. He was a great footballer, as was David Strange. Both had trials for Arsenal much later.

The club had been formed a year or so earlier by Sam Kerswill, a local builder. We played at Forester's Field, adjoining Dean Cross. The club was just a village side, but gained election to the old Plymouth Combination League, playing village sides from around the area.

Football was still unimportant, but great to play. I remember in the second year, when I left PUFC, I competed with another player, a friend called Joe Yabsley, to be leading goal scorer. There was no racing around after a goal, fists in the air or such antics then as there is today when you watch the absurdity of the professionals. There were no great discussions with referees. We played ninety minutes with no substitutes and there were no yellow or red cards. You were just sent off for dirty play. Neither Joe nor I were ever sent off. There was no such idea as a professional foul.

We naturally played often in Plymouth;, but you had to get there by your own means and you were informed if you were playing in the next match by mail. My parents just gave me the fare and let me go. They never saw a game I played in, not even later. They supported me but never made anything special of it.

I started "stepping out" to the local dance halls and began to dance, tentatively asking young girls to dance who took my fancy. I made a new friend, Gordie Lane, who was also a footballer and we started going to dances together, taking the girls for long walks afterwards.

Eventually we started going to dances in Plymouth on Union Street run by a dance master called Jefferies. We went together but seldom came home together and normally in the small hours of the morning I had to walk from Union Street down past Sutton Pool and passed Prince Rock over Laira Bridge.

The way led along the old Billacombe Road before the monster cement roads had been put through, destroying orchards and the like. On that way back on the road to Colesdown Hill, there used to be an old lime kiln, like a deep cave. It was built into the bank with a large corbelled round arch. There were no lights at all and it was always pitch-black at that point because Plymstock and Elburton were not part of Plymouth; both were just villages. It was here many nights that I experienced my very first fear. It began just at the thought that someone could be lurking there.

I was very aware of that first fear as a mental creeping thing that mounted, and my pace quickened until I was past the spot and then relief came. Nothing ever happened, but the experience was in my whole body. I could have gone home those nights by a different route, but it became a challenge. No matter how many times I steeled myself, the fear came. It was something deep and really primitive and not mental at all. I always walked to the other side of the road

I never told anyone, and when I got home, the door was always unlocked and no one waiting up. Never were there questions on the following day. Even on the first day when I actually asked if I could go to a dance in Plymouth, my mother asked when I would get back. "Very late", I replied.  There was a simple "All right, take care now".

It was not an indifference but a clear confidence in my behavior that was essential for a growing child approaching adulthood.