Down Among the Weeds
Down Among
the Weeds
Harry Beaves
Copyright 2018 Harry Beaves
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For John and Philip and the generations to come.
The objects of life are to do adventurous things, to make (or at all events enjoy) beautiful things, to understand wonderful things.
Romney Green furniture-maker, writer, social reformer.
Contents
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to many people for this book, but it was Stephen Craske who first sowed the seeds. We were quietly chatting one evening about my problems with anxiety and my suspicion that the roots lay in my Northern Ireland service so I showed him the scrap book I kept of that period. As a psychiatrist he saw the connection and suggested I wrote about it. At the time I thought it might be a throwaway line, but it struck a chord as it was something I had secretly wanted to do. A few days later a package arrived containing a copy of his own autobiography. I read it with fascination. It showed me what was possible and lit the fuse for this project.
Neither this book nor Stephens book would have been possible without the assistance of his son Oliver Craske. Oliver has been a huge help in providing both moral support and practical advice and assistance without which this work would have remained a dream.
Hundreds of characters have influenced my life, but for more than thirty years I was in the Army so I owe it to the Great British soldier who makes this story and in particular it is the men of 28 Battery and of 148 Battery whose courage, determination and irrepressible good humour have made it a privilege to serve.
Much of my story concerns health and I am indebted to Graham Kidd for all his help in putting me back on my feet.
Self-publishing is a daunting process and the staff of Troubador have guided me through superbly.
Finally, none of this would have been possible without the help, support and encouragement of Barbara, my wife of forty years. To her an explanation: when in and others I refer to the Big Brown Bird I do, of course, mean tall.
Photographs and illustrations are by the author and family unless otherwise stated.
Introduction
I am now well into the last quarter of my life and have reached the stage when many people take stock of what they have done and what they might have achieved. I probably havent achieved very much, but I believe that I have been extremely lucky to have led a very full and happy life. There are a number of reasons why I have chosen to tell my story.
As a boy I was fortunate to grow up among a large extended family, my grandparents all coming from the usual Victorian-sized families. My mothers relatives lived around Devizes in Wiltshire and my fathers around Andover in Hampshire. They were country folk who over the years had rarely moved far from their native villages, so my sisters and I grew up knowing most of them and regularly heard tales about their characters and their deeds. Today, families are much smaller, the world seems a much bigger place and I have been struck by how little my own sons know about their immediate ancestors.
When I thought about this, I realised that there were important parts of my parents lives that I knew little about and although, as a boy, I had known my grandparents, I knew almost nothing at all about them. I particularly regretted not learning more about my fathers and grandfathers service in the World Wars. Neither achieved great distinction, but both were very much in the thick of it and were seriously affected afterwards, but, for whatever reason, I never asked them about it nor did they choose to tell.
In recent years I have developed a strong interest in genealogy and, using the internet, have been able to trace our family tree in some detail. But a family tree is often very sterile as most of the members are flat with no more than the bare details of birth, marriage and death. What were these ancestors really like and how did they live their lives? I can get some sort of a picture from other records that show that my great-great-great-grandfather (on my fathers side) and eight of his nine siblings separately fled rural poverty as silk weavers in Andover for the urban squalor of Spitalfields. Two of them died there of illnesses caused by poor living conditions. In 1842 four others took their young families on a three-month sea journey to New Zealand where they were among the countrys earliest settlers enduring amazing hardships and dangers. Their descendants include an important Missionary to the Maoris (Thomas Godfrey Hammond), an All Black, of course (Ian Hammond) and the inventor of the Elastrator device for castrating (!) sheep and cattle (Arthur Oswald Hammond). A fifth chose to settle in Australia.
Similarly, it was fascinating to discover that Edward Wilkes, my maternal grandmothers seventeen-year-old brother, on the instructions of his mother, kept a diary of his journey to Australia, telling in matter-of-fact terms of the rugged conditions for passengers on a sailing vessel when he emigrated in 1883. After 104 days at sea and with the journey complete, he thought the diary of little consequence, but he sent it home to his mother as she had instructed. She kept this treasured memory of her eldest child with her for fifty years until she died. It is now a valued document in the Wiltshire County Archives.
My first reason for writing this autobiography is to fill a gap for the generations of my family to come, not to suggest that I achieved any great things, but in the hope that my story and the way I tell it will paint a picture for them of the sort of person that I am.
In doing so I have become very aware of the vast changes that have taken place during my life time, memories of which roughly span the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, a period which has taken us from the austerity of the post-war years to the cyberspace age. From a time when children played in woods and trees until dusk to a time when they stay indoors and focus on electronic games, in fear of unknown dangers that might lurk outside. In some ways my early life is a reflection of the social history of that time.
Almost all of my working life was spent serving in the Army. The Artillery Regiment, of which I was part, was taken out of its comfortable role in Germany, where it was part of the NATO force opposing the Communist Bloc, re-trained and sent to Belfast perform a largely infantry task. For four months in 1972 I served on operational duties in one of the most difficult and hostile areas of Northern Ireland, at a time when IRA activity is generally reckoned to have been at its most intense. On a number of occasions our unit was involved in events that made the front page of the national press.
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