The water taxi to Mountbatten. We’re in choppy water, but we sit out on the exposed part of the deck. Poseidon must be angry, says W. Homerically. W.’s learning Greek again. Is the fifth time he’s begun? the sixth? It’s always the aorist that defeats him, he notes. Every time!
It’s choppy! We should libate the sea, says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. I tell him I don’t. It’s because mountains are salty, and the sea is full of broken up rocks, he says. The sea makes him happy, W. says. It’s the ozone. A choppy sea releases ozone into the air, which makes everyone happy. What are your feelings about the sea?, asks W. Oh it makes me happy, I tell him. It’s majestic.
The round, stubby tower at Mountbatten Point. W. seemed rueful the last we were here, two years ago or so, reading the plaque as he does this time. He must have been hungry, W. says. Hunger makes him very depressed. First his nose aches, then his teeth ache then he gets depressed, he says. What do you feel when you’re hungry?, asks W. I never get hungry, I tell him. I’m careful about that. I think it was more than hunger, though, I tell W. That wasn’t why you were rueful. For his part, W. is sure that I was the one who was rueful. I have no memory of that, I tell him. Either way, it would have had nothing to do with my being hungry.
W. cherishes my special love for the town of Turnchapel, near Mountbatten. I become gentler when I’m there, he notes, kinder. He likes my tender side. In another life, I would have lived here, I tell W. We muse wistfully on what I might have been like. A better person, W. thinks. Taller, with some nobility of character. I think I would have been gracious and other-oriented. I’m not other-orientated at all, I tell W. It’s because I’m a troubled person. W. finds this very amusing. What are you troubled about? – Oh everything, life in general. – Well, you wouldn’t have been troubled if you’d lived in Turnchapel, W. says.
At Jennycliff, high on the promotory, we find concrete sockets sunk into the ground, besides an abandoned bunker. There were guns here once, pointing out to sea from Plymouth Sound. We remember similar unoccupied sockets at Tynemouth Priory. W., who has a keen interest in military history, is intrigued. He thinks they date from World War One. The tower at Mountbatten was itself a Tudor fortification, W. remembers from the plaque. Then there was the construction of the Royal Citadel after the Civil War, which we can see from the promotory, with its cannon pointing both out to sea and into town, to remind its citizens not to rebel against the crown, W. says, Plymouth being a Parliamentarian city. Then the forts built in the early nineteenth century to defend the country against Napoleon, W. says, and notes that Napoleon himself spent two weeks in the city in the HMS Bellerophon before being shipped to St Helena. Now of course the forts are being converted into flats and leisure complexes, says W.
On our way back to the city, W. finds a plaque near Jennycliff which explains that the Sound is a flooded estuary or rea. 10,000 years, after the last ice age, the water must have broken in. Drake’s Island was once a hillock, and the breakwater must have been built atop an existing ridge, to keep ships from running aground, we muse. Rea means estuary in Spanish, W. tells me.
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