Kisses on a Postcard (9 page)

‘He was a saint,’ said Miss Polmanor, as she saw me look at him. ‘He died abroad for me and Jesus and now I live for both of them. That’s my vocation, willed on me by God.’

The man just looked ordinary to me, someone from another age. I don’t even remember feeling curious. Realising that I was some sort of favourite, Auntie Rose usually saw that Jack was working on our vegetable patch in the garden with Uncle Jack, something Jack enjoyed and I didn’t, and sent me to buy the Corona on my own. I think she did it as a kindness – to Miss Polmanor, not to me. Objections from me were overridden: it became my job. Miss Polmanor gave me texts and talks and even the occasional glass of Corona along with oblique references to the ‘saint’ that were lost on me but which left me uncomfortable. I got the impression that he was a missionary who had died of something or other in darkest somewhere or other. She liked to open herself, no matter how slightly, to me and even patted my head once and gave me a half-hearted hug, which enveloped me in a two-level, sweet-and-sour sickly smell that nearly caused me to run for it. But we were used to being the recipients of unwanted embraces or cuffs and were skilled at dodging them. After that I generally managed to keep the plentiful furniture between her and me. Somehow I had slipped through the net of her disapproval of all things young – and especially vacky – and had her bottled-up affection.

I used to hope for Elsie to rescue me from all this if she was in, but when Miss Polmanor answered the door to me with my sixpence and empty bottle Elsie was gone in a flash and I am sure that Miss Polmanor was glad to see her go in spite of her constant denunciations of Elsie’s unwillingness ever to stay in – probably to avoid yet more futile, pious indoctrination.

Miss Polmanor rode her bicycle into Dobwalls to shop and do her good works, often, so Auntie Rose said, to the exasperation of Buckroyd. She was soon round the Wesleyan minister’s neck about us vackies playing in the Methodist graveyard at dinner break. ‘’Tis sacrilege, Mr Buckroyd. Disturbin’ the dead like that.’

‘I don’t think the dead mind too much, Miss Polmanor.’

‘They make up profane words to hymn tunes. I’ve heard they.’

‘So do our children, Miss Polmanor.’

‘But not so profane as they.’

‘Well, they’re more – er – inventive.’

‘More sinful.’

‘There’s a war on, Miss Polmanor.’

And, in the rumour and gossip that always rides in tandem with war – I mean our private war – stories abounded of vackies who behaved outrageously or were treated with cruelty.

‘Have you ever heard? Over to Tremabe they chopped off all the chickens’ heads. Every living one o’ ’em. Two little savages, only seven years old.’

‘No. Is that so, my dear?’

‘And down to Warleggan they slaughtered lambs in the fields, fired a rick. ’Tis bloody mayhem, I’m telling you – oh, sorry, Mrs. I didn’t mean to – but ’tis terrible.’

‘ ’Tis like a plague: the eleventh plague of Egypt, the plague of children.’

‘Oh, no, no, no. We got two. They’m nice. I like ’em. My missus dotes on ’em.’

And, after their gossip, villagers strode off down the main road along which Dobwalls was strung, tut-tutting or doubting, according to their views.

There was one story that was ubiquitous, told in every village in the county. ‘You know that farmer up the edge of the Moor, Penmalligan. He had two vackies billeted on he.’

‘Ar. Boy ’n’ a maid.’

‘Well, he locked they in the linney all night, then took his strap to ’em after breakfast. His breakfast. They din’ get none. They was nine and ten years old. Well, their father got to year. In the Guards, he is. Grenadiers. Back from Dunkirk.’

‘Yes, they was there, I read it.’

‘Well, he went AWOL, went to Penmalligan’s farm, punched he all round his own farmyard, then took his kids off with him back to Lunnon. ’Twas a proper job.’

‘Have you heard of anyone else giving they vackies what for?’

‘No. Everyone round yere be giving it up for Lent.’

And though such events always took place in the next village but one, the mythical guardsman was a famous and cautionary figure.

Uncle Jack took Jack and me in hand. ‘Who started it all?’

‘They called us slum kids.’

‘And what did you call them?’

‘Turnips.’

‘What else?’

‘Yokels.’

‘What else?’

‘Clodhoppers.’

‘Hmm. Who called who names first?’

This was lost in the mists of time.

He put his arms round us confidentially. ‘Listen, boys. You can’t call people names when you’re living in a village full of self-righteous, Godbothering hypocrites. So don’t do it.’

‘No, Uncle Jack. Sorry, Uncle Jack.’

‘I know they’re a lot of Bible-punching Tories, but try to make friends with ’em. We’re fighting the Germans, not each other.’

C
hapter
S
ix

Quiet but intense excitement in the Phillips household. Gwyn, their younger son, was coming home on leave. He was training somewhere. When he was called up he managed to get into the Royal Welch Fusiliers like his father. The Welch, with its archaic spelling, was a top regiment. Uncle Jack must have been pleased in that schizophrenic way he had of both hating the military and being proud of being Welsh. Tories, staff officers, authority in general, mine owners in particular, shareholders (‘vested interests’ was the phrase then) and religion were all his targets but he was patriotic. Auntie Rose’s political views were simple: she distrusted anything or anyone that put her loved ones in jeopardy. She had suffered the First World War with Uncle Jack being at the front and invalided out. She didn’t need any of that again, and Gwyn was her youngest and most vulnerable. Her daughter, Rose, was relatively safe in Barry, South Wales. Older son Len, Leonard Llewellyn, was ground crew in the RAF, which seemed as good as she could hope for. Both of them were married, something which gave a feeling of danger shared, of security, no matter how false. But Gwyn was single, all hers, and anything could happen to him. He was already a corporal, another source of unspoken pride for Uncle Jack but of no comfort to Auntie Rose.

She was on the platform to meet the train; Uncle Jack was working on the line in the valley; Jack and I swung on the wire fence behind the wash-house and looked down on the station. The train blocked our view at first but as it pulled away we saw Auntie Rose in the arms of a soldier, his back to us, her head buried in his shoulder, then raised to look into his eyes; we could see hers shining from fifty yards away. He was dark, not very tall, had a kitbag and rifle. Instead of taking the usual route, walking to our end of the platform, crossing the line (illegally) and climbing the little track that many feet had worn, then ducking through the wires, they walked away from us, the long way round, down the platform to greet the porter and Mr Rawlings the stationmaster, over the bridge, up the road and down the Court. I think she wanted to show him off to anyone who was about.

We soon discovered that Gwyn was extrovert, carefree and seemed to like the world as much as we quickly grew to worship him. When I say carefree, his humour had a black, graveyard edge to it, always visible, like Uncle Jack’s. He never stopped singing, a nice tenor or light baritone, I am not sure which. The reason for his musical leaning was not just the cliché of being Welsh. Uncle Jack had encouraged it, trained it since Gwyn’s treble days, as a possible escape from a life of drudgery down the mines, on the railway, or in some factory. He had seen a way to help his son to escape from what had been his life. He had the right pupil, with a ready unselfconscious voice and easy invention. Every popular hymn and Welsh song was sung to us in snatches with Gwyn’s (and other soldiers’) subversive or filthy lyrics.

‘How did you become a corporal, Gwyn?’

‘I kissed the sergeant major.’ He cleaned up the usual saying for us, although kissing the sergeant major face to face seemed more shocking than kissing his arse.

‘Are you going to fight the Germans, Gwyn?’ I asked him when his leave was drawing to a close.

‘No. More training in the mountains, boy. Bloody cold. The Brecon Beacons. It’s not much fun but it’s better than getting killed. They’re saving us Welsh. In reserve. After the Germans have wiped out all you English we’ll go in and sing ’em to death.’ And he let out a burst of a Welsh patriotic tune with very unofficial English lyrics.

The immensely popular song ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was constantly on the radio, generally delivered by Vera Lynn. Gwyn loved to parody her. He would emote extravagantly, arms thrown wide, and sing, ‘We’ll meet again, when they’ve blown up Big Ben,’ holding ‘Ben’ for ever with massive vibrato. Seven-year-old me found this the height of musical satire.

I wondered about those mountains, unknown things to me. Our train rides to our great-aunts in Brighton took us through the South Downs; but mountains? And the Brecon Beacons? What were they? And why were they cold in the summer? Uncle Jack soon had his atlas out from the one or two shelves of Serious Books that filled the bookcase in the rarely used front room. I was in it for hour after hour while I was in Cornwall when it was too wet or cold or hot or dark to go out. And often when it wasn’t. There were cities with exotic names that became battlegrounds in the war; mountains, seas, oceans, plains, deserts and rivers that were being fought over; the shapes of the continents fascinated me; the outlines of the countries, each with its own individual colour; the vast amount of pink where the thin red line had passed, nearly half of the world, it seemed, was the British Empire. I swelled with pride: our empire.

Some evenings in Gwyn’s week’s leave Uncle Jack went for a drink in Liskeard with him and on Sunday morning after Auntie Rose had put the roast in the oven we all walked down to Halfway House – our nearest pub down the main road into the valley, halfway to Bodmin Road station (now, prissily, Bodmin Parkway), the next stop on the line – for drinks before Sunday dinner: beer for the men, shandy for Auntie Rose, pop for Jack and me, crisps for all of us. Then back with bottles in the men’s jacket pockets. We learned to value our pleasures: it was three and a half miles there, three and a half miles back, mostly uphill, singing all the way, led by Gwyn.

‘Gwyn’s going to be a singer after the war,’ Uncle Jack had told us and anyone who would listen.

‘Going to be. He never stops,’ Auntie Rose complained insincerely.

She was a different person with Gwyn there, like an opened flower. Uncle Jack quietly glowed instead of his usual half-scowl. The place was lit up, full of Gwyn’s song and laughter. And then he was gone.

The woods, in summer, became our playground. They were as good as they promised when we first saw them: endless trees to climb; little streams everywhere, some of which dried up in hot weather and others that only appeared when there had been a lot of rain. Even these were often, to our surprise, full of tiny fish, minnows or sticklebacks, which you could catch in a jam-jar and take home. But they soon died so we gave that up. These streams we dammed or re-routed; we collected watercress from them and took it home for the table. I saw a kingfisher that had built its nest far from the river and was earning a living and raising a family on one of these tiny, gurgling flows.

But it was the River Fowey that was the magnet to us. It hurried along in its dappled cavern, with deep pools that swirled mysteriously, could suck you fatally down and held fish of giant size in our imaginations. It splashed over rapids that it seemed no fish could possibly negotiate. There were little sandy beaches in places with backwaters where you could examine the insects and trout fry in close proximity, making a pool which they could not escape from until you dug a channel with your hand and watched them swim away. Tree trunks lay across it, deliberately felled or just left to make bridges for the more agile. Further upstream, beyond the limits of the Doublebois House estate, the woods thinned out and the river flowed through meadows until you traced it back to open moorland where the buzzards soared and the wind always seemed to be blowing too much. But that was quite a walk, rarely undertaken.

Of course, when they visited, our parents were taken to our magic playground. Mum, hobbling along the riverside path in unsuitable shoes – actually high heels if my memory is correct – was soon stuck over the middle of the river on one of the tree trunks, sitting down, legs astride in a very undignified manner, while we ran back and forth, climbing over her to show off our skill, offering advice that she couldn’t take and laughing and yelling with glee. She would appeal to Dad, ‘Billie, help me, I can’t . . . I’m slipping . . .’ but Dad played to the gallery of his agile sons and joined in the masculine taunts. Mum laughed too in that hopeless way she used when she couldn’t do anything about a situation, though I suspect she was really hating it, just making acquiescent noises and glad to be with us.