Kisses on a Postcard (5 page)

The taxi pulled up and we went through a little wrought-iron gate between a warehouse on the right and the row of seven cottages on our left. This area, we learned, was called the Court and all the back doors opened on to it. The Court was the common ground, the thoroughfare. We walked past a pump on the wall of the first cottage, down a narrow courtyard, past a large concrete rainwater tank halfway down on the right, joined to the back of the warehouse. A tap, set over a drain, jutted from this tank. All our washing water came from that, our drinking water from the pump. After this the Court widened a little with a small whitewashed bungalow on the right. We went to the end house of the terrace, which had a wooden wash-house beyond it and some hens in a wire-enclosed run on the right.

Neighbours looked out of doors at us. A woman said, ‘Thought you was only getting one.’

‘They was on special offer,’ said our man.

‘They looked too good to leave behind,’ said his wife.

He grabbed my hair. ‘This yere’s Terry, the uppity one, and’ – he patted Jack on the back – ‘Jack, my namesake, is the nice one.’

She was in quickly again. ‘Leave them alone, Jack. They must be tired and hungry.’ And she ushered us in.

We entered and stared in wonder at a shining black range with a cat curled beside it; at a canary in a cage; at a green velvet tablecloth; at a sideboard on which sat a little brass dustpan-and-crumbs brush; at a shapeless sofa; at oil lamps – no electricity here; at two First World War shells in their cases, over six inches tall, standing on either side of the clock on the mantelpiece. They took our excited attention, beating even the cat and the canary, with their soldered-on Army badges that had three feathers and ‘
Ich dien
’ on a scroll. The evening sun lit the room in nearly horizontal shafts full of dust; the room seemed packed with things and smelled of coal smoke and cooking.

But the glory came last: outside, past the hens in their run, right behind the wash-house, tucked down in a cutting and breathtakingly revealed, was the main London to Penzance railway line with Doublebois station practically below us, its goods yard and sidings a couple of hundred yards down-line beyond a road bridge at the far end of the station. In the short time before we went to bed – and even after – the rural silence of Doublebois was occasionally shattered as an express train roared by a few yards below us, steam and smoke belching over the cottages. Local trains chuffed. In the mornings goods engines shunted and banged and clattered, shouts echoed, the arms of signals clanked from danger, to caution, to go, and bells in the signal box announced the up-train to Plymouth and the down to Truro and Falmouth. We two railway children couldn’t have invented, couldn’t have dreamed of arriving in such a place. Even our address, cumbersome but utterly satisfying, was: ‘
7
Railway Cottages, Doublebois, Dobwalls, near Liskeard, Cornwall.’

C
hapter
T
hree

The tiny front hall, where we were installed on a borrowed mattress on the floor, was a narrow passage that led to the front door, which was the ‘back’ door and never used. Everybody who entered Railway Cottages, except strangers, did so via the Court. They ignored the row of front gardens with their little gates, came down the Court and rapped on the back door which led straight into the back parlour or kitchen, the centre of the world in each cottage. If a stranger entered the gardens, walked the length of the terrace and banged on the front door, he was shouted at through the locks and bolts to come round the back, which was always open.

In the privacy of our mini-domain we stared at Mum’s postcard by candlelight – a first for us – and considered our code. Jack held the pencil. ‘How many kisses shall we put?’

I had no doubts. ‘I vote three.’

‘Hmm. I’m not sure.’

‘Come on yere, you two. What’s all this? Up-a-dando, into bed.’

Suddenly our new – surrogate – mother was with us. Jack slipped the postcard under his pillow – too late; she had seen but she said nothing. I think I remember her putting us to bed that first night, at once making us feel at home, secure. But perhaps my memory is playing me false and I am running many bedtimes into one because sometimes we are in the hall on the floor (where we were occasionally put when visitors stayed) and sometimes we are upstairs in what became our room. However, whichever place it was, there was always her warmth, her smiling good humour, her tact with two children who were not her own, just the presence of her. ‘Come on, then. Who’s going at which end?’

I grabbed the corner to snuggle into. But Jack was doubtful.

‘Will there be enough air for him in the corner? You see . . .’ He trailed off unhappily. ‘He won’t tell you, but—’

‘Oh no,’ I breathed. He was splitting on me.

‘I must.’

‘Must what, boy?’

‘He gets asthma.’

‘I don’t. Not much.’

‘All right, all right, young ’un. I won’t tell anyone.’ She turned to Jack and treated his concern with careful respect. ‘Now listen, you – Jack. We can’t open the front door, we’ll have God knows what animals and creepy-crawlies in yere, but we’ll leave the door to the front room open; there’ll be lots of air and he’ll be able to breathe there in the corner, you take my word. I know ’bout asthma. Is that all right?’

‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Phillips.’

‘Did your mam tell you to see about the air?’

‘No, I thought of it myself.’

‘Did you now? You’re a fine boy. Now into bed, go on. No. Wait a minute. Do you say your prayers at night?’

We stared.

‘All right, I’ll say a prayer for both of you. In you get. My Jack’s a heathen, too. Look, boys, if you want to go outside during the night you got this yere. D’you see?’ She showed us a flowered jerry, hidden under a cloth.

We knew what a jerry was, of course, but her phraseology confused us. ‘Why should we go outside?’ asked two boys brought up in modern, plumbed Welling.

‘To go down the garden, of course. To the privy.’

‘Oh, yes. Outside. Sorry, Mrs Phillips.’ We had already used the odorous, unattractive privies, one feature of our life in Cornwall that I remember without affection. There were two cubicles, each a wooden two-seater, making four places in all. Though four people sitting there simultaneously doesn’t bear thinking about.

‘Auntie Rose, I said you call me. Right?’

‘But you’re not our auntie. Our auntie’s in Portslade.’

‘No, no, I’m not. You’re right. You call me Auntie Rose when you want to, is it?’

I wriggled down into the soft feather mattress we were to sleep on. ‘Cor, it’s ever so nice in here.’

‘There. Look at you. As snug as bugs in a rug.’

‘What?’

‘Tha’s what we say. As snug as a bug in a rug. Only there’s two bugs in my rug.’

‘I’m not a bug,’ said Jack, enjoying himself.

‘He’s a bugger sometimes.’

Her face momentarily showed that I had gone too far.

Jack was in at once. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs – um – he didn’t mean to say that. He’s just stupid sometimes.’

‘I’m not. You are.’

‘Well, he’s young, isn’t he? When he gets to your age he’ll know better. Now I’m going to put out the candle, if you’re ready?’

‘Could you leave it, please?’

‘Don’t you like the dark?’

‘No, it’s not that. We got to – um – do something.’

‘It’s bedtime now.’

‘We got to send a card to Mum and Dad.’

‘This one?’ She had moved round, sat on the floor and satisfied her curiosity about what we had been up to when she came in by producing the postcard from under the pillow.

We were dismayed. ‘Yes.’

‘Is that your writing? It’s very grown-up.’

‘No, it’s Mum’s.’

‘Well, she’s already written the card.’

‘We got to put your address on it.’

‘Well, you’ve done it, haven’t you? Yes, that’s more like your writing. That’s not how you spell Liskeard. I’ll do you another card in the morning. A nice new one with a picture. How’s that?’

‘No, no. We got to put something else on.’

‘What’s that?’

She was met with silence.

‘Well?’ she asked gently.

‘Er – kisses.’

‘All right, then. We can do that, too, in the morning.’

‘
We
want to do it.’

‘By ourselves.’

She stared at us, reading something special and prepared to give us our heads now that she knew that we were up to no mischief. When she spoke again her voice was even more gentle, more reassuring than she had sounded so far. ‘All right, then. You do it by yourselves, is it? That’s right. You got something to write with?’

‘Yes. Here. A pencil.’

‘All right, then. I’ll leave the candle lit and then come back again and watch you put it out the right way. We don’t want a fire, do we? Your mam wouldn’t like that.’ And she left us.

‘How many kisses?’

‘I vote three.’ I had no doubts.

‘Perhaps we should take one off cos we’re on the floor, not even a bed.’ Jack continued to take his older-brother responsibilities seriously.

‘I don’t care.’

‘There’s no taps in the house.’

‘It’s triffic here. Trains and everything.’

I am sure he felt the same as I did but wanted to be sure. ‘What about no electricity?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘And no lavatory.’ It was his last try.

I went on stubbornly, ‘I don’t care.’

He relaxed. ‘Me neither.’ At last he said what we were both feeling. ‘It’s like being on holiday only there’s no sea.’

‘We could put four,’ I said. ‘The more we put, the happier Mum and Dad will be.’

‘D’you think so?’

‘Yeah.’

We ringed the card with kisses and posted it next morning.

Chapter Four

When Jack and I ringed that card with kisses there was an unintended symbolism: Jack and I were ringed with love, though we didn’t know it and would have been embarrassed to have used such words.

Our foster-parents Rose and Jack Phillips were Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack to everybody in Doublebois. This was extraordinary: they were not Cornish; they had only lived in the tightly knit little hamlet for ten or fifteen years (a blink in rural timescales); he was neither church nor chapel, though she occasionally went to church and – even more occasionally – dragged him along. Yet even the ancient Mrs Moore next door and Granny Peters, two doors up the Court, a whole generation older than them, always called them in the broadest Cornish Ahn’ee Rose and Uncle Jack. It was clearly some sort of tribute to their characters. He was a South Wales miner turned platelayer on the Great Western Railway. Their own two sons and one daughter were grown-up. Uncle Jack had been in the trenches in the First World War, in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, involved in some very heavy fighting. He had been invalided out with shrapnel wounds. Our father had been too young to be conscripted for the First World War and was just too old for this one, while Jack and I were – as yet – too young. We were a lucky family. But Uncle Jack and his sons fell precisely into the wrong age groups.

Two others who were in the wrong age group were a pair of soldiers, privates, who were the reason for Jack and me having to top ’n’ tail for a few nights on the mattress in the hall. They were up in the back, or I should say front, bedroom and were direct from Dunkirk, stationed in the grounds of Doublebois House, a large Victorian mansion which stood in its own substantial wooded grounds with two gated entrances just down and across the road from Railway Cottages. It had been turned into an Army camp, complete with Nissen huts up the twin drives to the big house, where the officers were. When we arrived, immediately after the Army’s retreat from France, the whole place was overflowing. Soldiers were billeted anywhere and everywhere. I don’t know how the local people had found room for us vackies.

One of our two soldiers was bright and nervous, the other had undergone some sort of shock and just sat staring into space the whole time he was there. The bright one smoked a lot and winked at Jack and me about his companion, making light of something that clearly concerned him. He tended his comrade’s every need, taking him out to the wash-house to shave him and leading him to the outside privy. I felt simultaneously grown-up to be taken into his confidence and embarrassed about an adult taking so much trouble to reassure us boys. We watched them with childhood’s detached curiosity.

I can see Auntie Rose’s concerned, unhappy face when she looked at the benumbed soldier and offered him food and drink. And, even more, Uncle Jack’s quiet, respectful movements when he entered his own house with this damaged man in it. He had been there and understood. Then, quite soon and suddenly, they were gone in a roar of army lorries, and Jack and I shared the front bedroom, which was the back bedroom and looked down the gardens, over the outdoor privies behind their discreet hedges, across a cornfield, the railway line in full view on the right as it rose out of the cutting and curved away towards Liskeard, Plymouth and England, where we had come from. Yes, with Welsh foster parents in Cornwall and sentries guarding Saltash Bridge, we soon learned that the River Tamar was a frontier.