The chair, the tray, the plate and the fork that I made for her were all a little unusual. Thus the plate was made from an aluminium saucepan sawn off to leave a rim that was one inch high over three quarters of its circumference and two inches high over the remaining quarter. It fitted into a well in the tray that was one inch deep. Thus there was no fear that the approaching fork might get entangled with the near edge of the plate before it reached the food and pressed it against the far edge. The fork had a wooden head set at an angle into a wooden handle; and fortunately the angle that was best for collecting the food was also the best for delivering it.
It was all a little unusual, but it worked. For the first time in her life Clare was able to feed herself, and this was a very great triumph for her and a very great excitement for us all.
On another occasion, some years later, her school allowed me to take home an old and battered tricycle that no one specially wanted. Could I do something with it? It would need a different seat, one that gave much greater support; it would need different handlebars to give a much simpler method of steering; and it would need different pedals since the only movement Clare could manage was a straightening of both legs at once.
It was enough. And in triumph, when the new term started, she propelled herself down the long corridor and into the school hall to prove it.
But designing something that worked was only half the problem. The other half was to make it look presentable.
It is a sad fact that much of the equipment designed for the disabled is inefficient and nearly all of it is ugly. To some extent the one follows from the other. An efficient design has a natural elegance which needs little embellishment to make it attractive. Whereas the wheel chair issued to Clare was such a mechanical disaster that nothing could have redeemed it. How unfair it is that a person who most needs a chair should so often have just the one – and one so very far from beautiful – while the rest of us, who need chairs only now and again, possess so many.
Why should Clare not have as many chairs as we have? Why should she not take the pride and pleasure in them that we take in ours? Why should they not be every bit as decorative and pleasing to look at? No reason at all. They couldn’t be bought, of course; but they could be made. And so I set to work to make them.
When I first started carpentry lessons at school, the pleasure I got was the pleasure of cutting and shaping the wood. The lines were ruled for me and I sawed along them and chiselled between them. At John Lewis I began to look at furniture rather more critically. Some I liked; some I disliked. But it was not until I was puzzling over Clare’s needs that I discovered another pleasure as great as the pleasure of making: the pleasure of designing.
It is in fact two pleasures and they are quite distinct. The first lies in solving the mechanical problem. This is what gives to the things I make for Clare their special fascination: they are all unique. There is no standard pattern to follow as there is if you are making, say, a kitchen table. For example, Lesley might want a device that will hold a mixing bowl and an egg whisk so that Clare can turn the handle and make a cake. Working out the best way to do this is very like working out those mathematical problems that so intrigued me at school. Merely to solve them is not enough: the satisfaction lies in finding the simplest, neatest, most elegant solution. The second pleasure lies in taking this, the theoretical design, and giving it a bit of style, giving it shape and proportions that are pleasing to look at.
But of course the greatest pleasure of all was to see Clare sitting comfortably where before she had been uncomfortable, doing something she had not previously been able to do. And it was a pleasant thought that this was, in a sense, a legacy from her grandparents whom she had never known – a product of the fusion of my father’s fondness for mathematics with my mother’s competent hands. If she had inherited neither, she could at least benefit from the fact that I had inherited both.
The wise man lives in the present. Where the future is certain he may make preparations; where it is uncertain he may take precautions. But beyond that he had best forget it. While Clare was at school our lives settled into their pattern. She was at school for twelve years, and for those twelve years there was no virtue in bothering ourselves with the question of what we were all going to do when she left. The question could wait. And its answer must wait now.
Lesley and I were booksellers, but though bookselling dominated it never monopolized our lives – nor should it monopolize these pages. When people come to see me – people who have not been here before – we usually arrange to meet at the shop. It is an easy place to find and I am usually there and so it seems the logical starting point for whatever is to follow. They come in and look around and then after a moment or two we go upstairs and find a room where we can sit and talk without being disturbed. Then, if they are not in a hurry to be on their way, I like it if we can spend a few minutes looking at Dartmouth. Lesley and I are proud of the bookshop because we made it ourselves. In a rather different way we are also proud of Dartmouth, proud to feel that we belong here, and so we like showing it off to those who do not know it.
So enough for the moment about Clare, and enough for the moment about bookselling. It is time for the conducted tour.
PART THREE
The Road less Travelled by
1. Town Life
There are four ways into Dartmouth. On my first visit, in 1951, I had come from the east. This is the usual direction for visitors from up-country, and whether they travel by car or bus or train their first view of the town will be from the other side of the Dart, the final lap of their journey will be made on the ferry. Lesley, on her first visit, before the war, had come in her father’s boat, and her approach had been from the south, by sea, through the narrow river mouth guarded by its two castles and then up the river to look for an anchorage. Or you can approach from the north, coming down the river from Totnes. Your first view of the town may be less dramatic but this you can forgive after so magical a voyage. Lastly – in one sense the least and in another the most important of the four – you can come by road from the west.
Here you will have a choice. You will have been travelling along a ridge five hundred feet above sea level. Half a mile from the river the ridge comes to an end, the town lies beneath you and six roads lead down to it. And in these six roads much of our history can be read.
The approach to Dartmouth from overland with its final precipitous dive has always been a problem. For what was good enough for foot and hoof was not good enough – for pneumatic tyre and what was good enough for our grandfathers was not good enough for us. And so, as our means of locomotion demanded it and as our engineering techniques allowed it, new routes were found, new roads built. Thus you can date the six roads into Dartmouth by their steepness and their width.
Having made your choice, what will you find when you reach the bottom? First and most important, you will find that you have arrived. This is not by any means true of towns generally. Most towns are not for arriving at but for passing through on the way to somewhere else; but Dartmouth is not on anybody’s way to anywhere. So, having arrived, you will be ready with your first question. ‘Which is the main street?’ The answer is: ‘The river.’
One may hesitate to call it a street but it is certainly the town’s main thoroughfare, the means of communication with the rest of the world which decided the earliest settlers that here was the place to build. Take away the river and no town would ever have sprung up for so little a reason on so inaccessible a site. So the town was built on the river and the roads were added afterwards. The river remains what it has always been, Dartmouth’s High Street, the only way into the town from the north and from the south, wide enough and deep enough for its purpose in medieval times, still wide enough and deep enough today. Its purposes may have changed over the years; today it carries holiday-makers rather than trade, and in some ways it is more of a barrier than a thoroughfare, discouraging communication with Torbay. But for all that it is still both our
High Street and the centre of our activity, the stage where the drama of the town is performed. And what more perfect stage could there be than this deep and wide anchorage right in front of the town, its narrow entrance, guarded by Dartmouth Castle, less than a mile away. And what more perfect seating arrangements for the spectators than a steep hillside allowing each row of houses to peer over the roof tops of those below so that all can see and each has its own most prized and cherished view. What do you do when you arrive in Dartmouth? You go down to the river to see what’s happening. Then, having spent an hour or so in contemplation, you are ready with your next question. ‘Where is the shopping centre?’
There isn’t one.
Most towns have two things; first, a historic centre, the place that decided that the town was to be here rather than there, and secondly a way of reaching it, the High Street. I have already explained why Dartmouth has always had trouble with its overland High Streets, periodically finding them too steep and too narrow and so having to try again. It has also had trouble with its centre. To build a town centre you need an adequate area that is both firm and level. Here, on the steep banks of the Dart, what was firm had a slope of one in two and what was level was mud, and only the narrow strip of land between was suitable for houses. So Dartmouth started life strung out in a line, its back to the hills, its toes in the water. Indeed it was so extended as to be two separate settlements divided by a tidal creek: Hardness to the north of the creek, Clifton Dartmouth to the south. And it was not until the nineteenth century that this creek was filled in, the river bank was pushed forward and a sufficient area of land, level and tolerably firm, was reclaimed to provide the town with the centre it lacked. And if it never quite succeeded, having left it too late, it did at least unite the two halves.
Today there can be no doubt that we are a single town. But we still like to recall the past; and so each year at the Mayor’s Banquet we pass round the Loving Cup and, taking it in turns to sip the cider, we drink a toast to ‘The Unity and Prosperity of the Borough of Clifton Dartmouth Hardness.’
For five years Lesley and I lived over the shop and stared at the river. Now and again destroyers would come in and moor just opposite us, wedging themselves in the gap at the end of our road. Once a school of porpoises came surging up the river. Once, very late at night, we saw a family of otters. Then when Clare came to join us we moved to a house on the edge of the town.
On the edge of the town? Here again Dartmouth is not quite like other towns. It hasn’t really got an edge – at least not the usual sort. Most towns grow outwards from the centre, adding a succession of annual rings rather as a tree does. But though Dartmouth eventually got the better of its mud, it has never got the better of its hills, and so when it had taken possession of all it could at the bottom, it jumped to the top where the ground was once again level enough, and built there. And in between, still grazed by cows, the grassy hillside remained. So when I say that our house was on the edge of the town what I mean is that below us were houses and above us the cows leaned over our wall and nibbled the tops of our pear trees. But if you climbed the wall and threaded your way past the cows you came to Townstal – and then you were back in the town again.
We lived here for ten years and though we eventually bought a van we always walked to work – down and up twice a day, for we liked having lunch at home. It was not a long walk. Measured horizontally it was only half a mile. Measured vertically it was 250 feet. And the route we took, from edge to centre, must surely have been one of the most beautiful walks from edge to centre of any town. I knew this at once, but it took me four years to discover exactly why.
You look at a town and you say ‘Isn’t it pretty!’ You say this as soon as you see it. Lesley and I said it when first we came to Dartmouth. Almost every first-time visitor says it. But if you come to stay, then, after a while, when the first fierce flames of passion have died, you find that you marvel each day a little less – until suddenly something happens to jerk you awake. . . .
With us it was the wall at Warfleet. We had not been that way for some time and so it came as a complete surprise, the widened road, the new retaining wall, twenty feet high, with its smooth, grey, cement-rendered finish, topped with huge rectangular castellations. It could have been a prison wall it looked so stern and forbidding. Dartmouth is a town of walls, it is true, but they are warm and friendly, built – and most beautifully built – of natural stone. And there had been a natural stone wall here at Warfleet before they pulled it down and replaced it with this. We felt a surge of anger. What could we do? What powers have ordinary citizens to prevent their local council from mutilating their town? There must be an answer. Who would know it? At that time Ian Nairn was editing a column in The Observer called ‘Outrage’. Well, here was an outrage, and I wrote to tell him so.
Our reply came not from him but from an organization then unknown to us called the Civic Trust and it urged us to form an Amenity Society – an obvious enough answer today of course, but less obvious in 1961. This we did and we called it the Dartmouth and Kingswear Society, and at various times I have been its Chairman and Lesley its Secretary. For convenience the Harbour Bookshop has always been its address and this perhaps helps to explain why over the years the bookshop has provided a quite disproportionate number of officers and committee members. I like to think that in our first sixteen years we have done a lot for the town. I like to think that in the first six years (when Lesley and I were most active) we did particularly well, though perhaps there may be Town Councillors who would have reservations about this. One thing, however, is certain: the Society did an enormous lot for me. It gave me a whole new field to explore.
You look at a town and you say ‘Isn’t it pretty!’ This is your first and, if you are just driving through, maybe your only impression. What a pretty little town that was! But if you live here you will discover that prettiness may be in conflict with other things: with good housing, efficient services, smooth traffic flow and prosperity generally. What most impresses the newcomer comes low on the Council’s agenda. Thus you have two opposing points of view, and how easy and tempting it is to ally yourself wholeheartedly and unquestioningly with one side or the other. The banners of each are to hand, ready to be seized and waved aloft. ‘Progress and Prosperity’ on this side, ‘Our National Heritage’ on that. Take your choice! No need for further argument! Into battle!
So the Dartmouth and Kingswear Society, born in a passion of anger, drawing the bulk of its membership from those people – elderly, middle-class, non-Devonian – who had come here to retire, could so easily have assembled its armoury of slogans and hurled them at the enemy, could so easily have leapt to the defence of every ancient building and fought every new development. So easily – but, it seemed to me, so fatally.
What was Dartmouth’s future? What were we trying to become? That was the question; and as it turned out it was one we had to answer almost at once. The County was on the point of preparing its Development Plan. If we who lived here were to have any say in the future of our town, it would be as well to get our say in first. I wondered if it ought to be a composite opinion that took into account and tried to reconcile all points of view, but decided that this would be too difficult: it was going to be quite hard enough to build a plan around the views of our two hundred members. And in the end six of us got together and three of us did the actual writing. A Plan for Dartmouth it was called; and Chapter One, ‘General Considerations’, was my own, almost unaided, work.
Walking each day to and from the shop gave plenty of time for considering things. And as I walked, so I wondered why I loved that walk so much. I had to analyse the experience. What was it that gave Dartmouth its peculiar charm? And then I had to ask myself: to what extent was this threatened? To what extent should it be protected? I had to decide just what it was possible to do and then produce convincing arguments to show that this was also desirable.
One thing was easy to see. It was the holiday-maker and the ret
ired who were providing and who would continue to provide the bulk of Dartmouth’s income; and so it was these two who would determine our future. So the first question the town had to decide was this. Should we follow the lead of Paignton and attempt to accommodate as many holiday-makers in camps and caravans and as many retired in bungalows as we could persuade to come here? Or should we admit that Dartmouth could never compete with Torbay, having no sandy beaches to offer and poor communications with the outside world, and should we instead make the most of our other assets. In other words, were there enough people who came to Dartmouth because it was not Torbay to keep us all happy?
My answer was that we should specialize, even though this meant saying ‘No’ to more caravan sites and bungalows, ‘No’ to what so many saw as progress and prosperity.
These may not seem particularly revolutionary words today, but I wrote them at the time with considerable nervousness. In those days we talked a lot about progress, and progress in Dartmouth meant supermarkets, not old buildings; it meant expansion, opening our doors to all who knocked, welcoming their money no matter how they wished to spend it and their cars no matter where they wished to drive them.
To some extent this belief still survives. A town, they say, must grow or die. Everything in man’s world must grow. Yet nowhere outside his world does this happen. All living creatures, plants and animals alike, reach eventually the particular size that suits them best and there they stop. Of course it is our burning ambition for better and still better, our insatiable appetite for more and yet more that has taken us to the top of the ladder. But now and again it does no harm to look down at the others and see how they manage their affairs. We may be different from them. But are we so very different?
The Path Through the Trees Page 24
