LOST PAST
By WARREN POSTBRIDGE
THIS is a perverse article. No one will agree with- it, and no one ought to. It is written from the heart, and in these days that is generally a mistake. But the emotions will break their bounds sometimes. Before I. finish I will let the head have its common-sense, prosaic say.
Hitler, of course, is at the bottom of it. I never hated him quite so much as I have this week, after seeing the plans of the recon- structed Plymouth. They are as bad as the blitz. I have seen the devastated Plymouth. I have picked my way through the piles of rubble that mark the course of the streets I have known since I can remember anything, streets where I could name still almost every shop up one side and down the other, and I imagined, absurdly enough no doubt, that somehow or other, some day or other, those streets would rise again: Mentally I wrote over them Resurgam. Having been assured till I got a little tired of it that there'll always be an England, I supposed in My thoughtlessness that there would always be an Old Town Street and a Bedford Street and a George Street, a little straightened out, perhaps, a little widened—George Street broad enough not to need to be a one-way thoroughfare any more—with vistas opened up here and there, but with most things, certainly things like the Guildhall and the Law Courts; where they used to be.
I imagined it would still be a Plymouth where I could find my way about, that "Plymouth, mother Plymouth, sitting by the sea," sitting like a queen there, would be Plymouth, mother Plymouth, still, not an executive, efficient young female, Marcel-waved and scarlet-lipped, the flowing robes of the fourteenth century and the fifteenth, and all the procession of them down to yesterday, ex- changed for the latest tailor-made. But humanity, as Lowell so in- controvertibly affirms, sweeps onward. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in Wis. But it isn't true. The times can do what they like ; we are under no compulsion to follow suit. Once I had an idea I was a Liberal ; now I know I am a Conservative and thank Heaven for it. I want no new Plymouth, with its shopping precincts and its Civic Centre and its parkWay and its boulevards. I want the Plymouth I was born in and brought up in and roamed about in, The happy highways where I went And shall not go again.
I want the Plymouth where the one-horse bus made its leisurely progress up the Lipson Road and the one-horse tram jingled round to West Hoe Pier. I want, to cleanse the Hoc of the clutter of memorials that turn its windswept simplicity into a kind of rococo
campo canto. There used to be just Francis Drake on his pedestal —who could deny him place?—Drake and Smeaton's lighthouse, brought fittingly ashore to continue an honoured existence on the Hoe after the Eddystone Rock had begun to crumble under it. Why couldn't the memorialisers leave the Hoe at that?
I want a Plymouth where Plymouth's needs are supplied by Plymouth men, as they used to be when Wills and Underwood sold the groceries, and Adams made the clothes, and Matthews and Risdon baked the bread, and Harris and Prowse and Widger painted the houses, and Foster (homoeopathic) and Balkwill (normal) made
up the medicines, and Pitts in Cornwall Street, sold the meat, and Chambers sold halfpenny buns and saffron cake and pasties, and Miss Dicker in Market Alley sold milk and clotted cream, and Spooner's mules created an adventitious interest in Spooner's wares in the van behind them. I want a Plymouth where the Mayor goes lobster-fishing on the Mewstone, as he did in The Water-Babies ; the present Lord Mayor has done inestimable service to Plymouth, but he has never chased lobsters on the Mewstone and never will (though it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Lady Mayoress did). I want a Plymouth with a Halfpenny Gate, where they exact that humble coin before you can get to Devonport (if it could be con- ceived that anyone should ever want to). And I want, though I know I cannot get it, a Union Street with the ted-coats strolling up and down it with nursemaids on their arms (or wishing they were), as I remember them when Plymouth was Plymouth and I was a Plymouth boy.
I want the old Rose and Crown in Old Town Street, that you can read about in L. A. G. Strong's grim novel Dewar Rides (and I fancy in Baring-Gould's Court Royal too), but that went into Lethe decades before Hitler. And I want, beyond all other things, iconoclastic hands kept off Derry's Clock. It has escaped Hitler, with the distinction of some honourable. scars, which ought to be left there for ever ; whether it has escaped Professor Patrick Aber- crombie I can't quite make out. In the sumptuous volume which pictures the new Plymouth, rich in four-guinea-a-week boarding- houses open-doored to train-loads of five-pound-a-week tourists, a Plymouth where the multiple providers of boots and suits and drugs and the rest will make its main street as like the main street of Leeds as the main street of Leeds is like the main street of Manchester, or even (ashes of Sir Walter) like Princes Street in Edinburgh—in this sumptuous volume Derry's Clock is men- tioned as a landmark. It serves that momentary purpose, at least, but some innovation no doubt will soon meet the need better. In the plans of the boulevarded Plymouth I have failed to discover it. If Derry' Clock goes, I have done with Plymouth. I shall take all my maps of Devon and make a black smudge where Ply- mouth was. If I want to go to Cornwall—and there is no question about that—I shall fetch a compass by Tavistock or Launceston. If I come back from America, and steam, as I have done before, into the most beautiful harbour in the kingdom in the brilliance of a June dawn, I shall stay on board and get carried on to Southampton Of the Thames. I shall ret no foot more in Plymouth—and Plymouth will neither know nor care.
* * * * No fool, you very properly remark in cliché, like an old fool. True. And yet there are foolishnesses one clings to. Every word I have written here, of course, is nonsense. Plymouth is doing exactly what it ought to do. With the help of one of the most gifted town-planners in the world it is making itself everything that an up-to-date city ought to be. It is launching a magnificent and majestic scheme of reconstruction. It is clearing its slums—all that the Luftwaffe has not cleared for it—it is surrounding its public buildings, old and new, with grass and open spaces, it is talking of a mono-rail to link up with its new air-port, it is planning agricultural land outside its borders as well as urban land within. It is arranging to reduce, instead of increasing, the population within its civic area, so as to give every citizen more room to live. It is preserving jealously, let me admit it, all the old there is left to preserve. And it is still going to be called Plymouth. I am glad about that. It will touch one familiar chord if I ever do go back.
Previous page
