Kisses on a Postcard (12 page)

Jack’s cap badges, mounted on a green baize cloth, were quite something. He must have got most of the regiments of the British Army, a magnificent collection, which, as it grew, he would unfurl and we would gloat over: the Sphinx of the Gloucesters, for their service in Egypt, the little badge worn on the back of their caps because they fought a heroic rearguard action; the many variations of the cross of St Andrew of Scottish regiments, some with exotic names: the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the Black Watch (whatever was that?). We loved the rearing white horse of our own Royal West Kents; romantic names like the Green Howards from Yorkshire; the hunting horn of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, now our local regiment. The skull and crossbones of the
17
th/
21
st Lancers with ‘Death or Glory’ scrolled under them easily imprinted themselves into the imaginations of romantically bloodthirsty boys; Uncle Jack’s Royal Welch Fusiliers with its curious misspelling and motto of ‘
Ich dien
’ (‘I serve’ in German, though we didn’t know that); I could go on. I think he had over a hundred and I learned the geography of the country from those badges and much of our military history, all seen in a heroic glow. We were in the middle of a war for our survival and these were our saviours.

My Dinky Toys were just as important: we had sea battles with
HMS Hood
,
Valiant
,
The Prince Of Wales
– all sent to the bottom in the real war with terrible loss of life even as we played our games. I went doggedly on playing with
Hood
long after the real one was gone in such a dramatic sudden fashion, hoping that somehow she would rise from the bottom. We had aerial dogfights, Spitfires and Hurricanes shot Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Dorniers out of the sky. We raided Germany with Wellingtons, Blenheims and Halifaxes. With Sunderland flying boats we saved our convoys from U-boats. Panzer tanks were blown apart by Churchills. Foot soldiers, lying down firing, running, were placed behind table legs, some in historic costume, but all involved in this war. There were Bren Carriers, machine guns and some artillery which actually fired. Even German soldiers were there, to be knocked over and killed again and again as they lost battle after battle in the front room out of Auntie Rose’s way, or in the hall, where they were laid out for us to admire without anyone ever likely to tread on them. Jack sold his wonderful collection years later, after he was married, to help pay for the conversion of the very nice coach house he and his wife had bought. But even then, when I was well into my twenties, it seemed like an act of vandalism to me. My Dinky Toys disappeared over the years in a much less useful fashion: I lost them or grew out of them and swapped them for other things now long forgotten.

The trips to Liskeard were regular weekly outings. But the great events that filled us with excitement were the much rarer twenty-two-mile train rides to Plymouth. On to the
9
.
40
a.m. stopping train, over Moorswater Viaduct and some spectacular views, especially down on to the Looe branch line that went right beneath us like a model; out of Liskeard station on another viaduct over another part of the same branch line. We, on the main line, would rattle on to Menheniot and St Germans. At last, Saltash, looking over the Torpoint ferry, and the Royal Albert Bridge, known to us all as Saltash Bridge. ‘Built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’, it announced at either end. What a name. It was the crossing point back into England.

There followed the slow rumble over the bridge, with its armed by a sentry at either end. Local legend said that it moved a foot every time a train crossed. I multiplied the number of trains each week by the number of weeks since the bridge was built in
1859,
then wondered why it hadn’t either edged itself up the Tamar or sidled miles out to sea.

The sight of the warships, low, grey and stark, indescribably menacing, lying in the Tamar Estuary, and Devonport Docks; then Plymouth and the Hoe; the statue of Drake with his bowls, a stylish reminder of how to reduce the enemy to size; pasties that tasted of potato and pepper but had never seen meat. Jack and I saved pocket money for these trips for yet more Dinky Toys and Army cap badges, ones too rare to be found in rural Liskeard.

Over these expeditions presided Auntie Rose with two shopping bags that became loaded and we all struggled with as she led us first from queue to queue then, when the serious business was done, from shop window to shop window. A cameo brooch was pinned to her best blouse and a silver-and-blue enamel butterfly brooch to her lapel. She wore a shapeless hat that required hatpins to hold it crammed onto her long, thick brown hair, done up in a bun.

We were waiting one evening in Plymouth North Road station buffet for a train that was very late. ‘Bombing up the line’ was the dark rumour. Jack had bought a miniature sheath knife in its leather sheath, something he had been coveting and saving for for ages. He kept taking it from the shopping bag, unclipping the press-stud fastening round the handle and half withdrawing the glistening blade. Our heads bent over it as we experimented: should he hang it from his belt at the side or secretly at the back like a hunter’s knife? It was a formidable purchase. The date was
20
March
1941
. It was a Thursday, the first of the two nights on which the Luftwaffe wiped the centre of Plymouth from the face of the earth.

‘Come on, boys,’ said Auntie Rose. ‘Put that knife away till the proper time. When you get home you play with that, not in yere. You’ll lose it.’

She was interrupted by the sound of a distant siren. The whole buffet went silent. ‘Oh
Duw
, what was that?’ she breathed.

‘An air-raid siren,’ said Jack superfluously.

‘They’re a long way—’

She drew in her breath as the heart-stopping, low-pitched whirr and whine that develops into the shattering wail of a siren started up close by. The voices broke out again into a hubbub and a Devon accent rose above them all to say, ‘All passengers in the subway, please. At once. Come along now, my lovelies. Let’s be ’avin’ you.’

We all hurried out on to the platform and headed down the ramps into the subways under the tracks. The sound of gunfire was clearly audible some way off. Auntie Rose gathered us on either side of her on a bench, shopping bags on the floor before us.

‘Are they bombs?’ I asked Jack.

‘No, they’re our guns, shooting the Jerries down. Bombs whistle.’ He was rooting about in the shopping bags. Suddenly there was panic in his voice. ‘My knife. Where’s my knife? My new sheath knife is gone.’

Auntie Rose grabbed a bag. ‘Perhaps it’s in this one. Yere, let’s see.’

But Jack was gone, racing down the subway out of sight. ‘I left it in the buffet. I left it in the buffet.’

Auntie Rose was distraught. ‘Come back, come back, boy, you can’t . . .’ Her voice faded into disbelief. ‘He’s gone.’

I had been searching in the first bag. ‘Here’s the knife, Auntie Rose. It’s in this bag. I’ve got it here. Jack, I got it. Come back. Come back.’ And I set off after Jack, ignoring Auntie Rose’s agonised voice as the tumult outside grew louder. I flew between the huddled groups of people, turned a corner and stared up the slope towards platform-level. No Jack; he had already gone. As I started to run up the slope there was an even louder bang than before and bits of glass and debris flew about at platform-level. I stopped, terrified, and stood bawling near the bottom of the slope, afraid to move, when hands grabbed me and pulled me back round the corner.

‘’Ere, boy, come yere. I got you. You can’t stand out there.’

I sobbed, ‘Let me go. My brother. My brother’s up there.’

‘What? Your brother?’

‘He lost his knife. We’ve got it.’

‘What you talking about?’

Before I could say more I heard Auntie Rose’s voice. ‘Here, Terry. Here he is. With me. He came back.’

And there stood Jack. His courage, like mine, had failed at the sight and sound of the real war. Auntie Rose led us back to our bench, sat down and enfolded us both. ‘Oh boys, come yere. You give me heart failure, you did. Both of you.’

God knows what hell we had put her through in those few moments. How do you explain to their parents that your two charges ran up into the bombing and were blown to bits looking for a sheath knife that was in your shopping bag all the time?

‘I was going to go,’ Jack assured me. ‘It was only that you stopped me.’

‘So was I,’ I affirmed, equally inaccurately.

We spent the night sitting on the bench while the inferno raged above us. My principal memory, after the initial knife panic, was that, no matter how I shook with fright, the bench, which sat about ten people, always quaked at a different rhythm, and I couldn’t get my bottom synchronised to the common tempo of terror.

The next morning was the first day of spring. We stood among glass and bits on the platform till a train took us across the miraculously unscathed Saltash Bridge. Plymouth was ablaze, smoke hung everywhere; a high proportion of the bombs had been incendiary. The warships still lurked, apparently intact, in Devonport Docks and the Tamar Estuary, out of the way. Or perhaps their fire had been so intense that it was easier for the bombers to unload onto the undefended civilian centre of the city. Apparently the RAF had ready four antiquated Gloster Gladiator biplanes as air defence. I am not sure whether they ever actually took off.

At each station groups of people met the train to ask for news or just to stare at us. And there at the end of the platform at Doublebois stood Uncle Jack looking ridiculously small and vulnerable till he saw the three of us waving wildly from a window. Then his shut face burst open into a grin that threatened to tear it in two. He hurried down the platform, took her shopping bags from her, put them on the ground and hugged Auntie Rose. It was a rare enough event to see them touching, let alone this display. He just said, ‘Oh
Duw
, girl. There you are. There you are.’

‘Of course I am. What d’you think? Let me go, you fool. People are watching.’ She was flushed and pleased.

‘You looked after her, boys, did you, for me?’

We couldn’t wait to tell him about it. ‘It was triffic, Uncle Jack.’

‘I was ever so scared.’

‘I’ll bet you were, boy. I thought I’d got rid of you all at last. But there’s no peace for the wicked, is there?’

All of that day in the sky to the east hung a pall of smoke which turned to a red glow at dusk. Then the bombers returned.

A small crowd of us gathered in the gardens of the cottages to watch, a safer place than the subway under North Road station. In the distance there were flashes and distant crumps while the searchlights reflected off the smoke pall. The glow under it which was Plymouth grew brighter.

‘Oh, God, ’tis not possible.’

‘Will anyone be left?’

Miss Polmanor had the explanation for it all. ‘ ’Tis hell here on earth. ’Tis the inferno come to punish us.’

‘Not us.’ Someone pointed at the pyre in the distance. ‘Them.’

‘Let us pray to God to strike Hitler dead.’

‘If God wanted Hitler dead he wouldn’t wait for
her
to ask,’ muttered another.

The Plummers, joined by Elsie, stood silently and watched their city being destroyed. Elsie didn’t know if her mother, who had run off with the sailor while her father was away in the Army, was there or not.

‘Are you sure my mum’s not there, Auntie Rose?’

‘Course not, my lovely. Don’t you worry.’ Auntie Rose sounded convincing.

A neighbour added quietly, ‘’Er’s crying for her mother; ’er mother never gave ’er a moment’s thought.’

‘Is that what’s happening in London to our mum and dad?’ asked Jack.

Uncle Jack was stumped for a moment. ‘No, it’s not nearly so – London’s enormous, Plymouth’s small – it just looks – worse . . .’ he trailed off feebly.

‘It’s why we’m all vackies,’ said a Plummer boy.

And Auntie Rose held me tighter than before.

The fires could not be put out; they were beyond the scope of the fire services of several cities to deal with. Most of East Cornwall and South Devon watched Plymouth burn for nearly a week, under that pall of smoke all day and that red glow at night, like a false dawn.

The Germans returned for three successive nights a month later and the whole business was repeated. This time, with shopping trips cancelled, we watched the destruction from the safety of our bedroom window, magnifying our own former heroic parts in it. Auntie Rose told us that she had spent that entire night when we were under the bombers worrying about how, if we were killed, Uncle Jack could possibly explain to our parents why she had taken us into danger in Plymouth.

C
hapter
N
ine

Uncle Jack didn’t take long to get Jack and me singing. His success with Gwyn, and his natural inclinations, led him. I am not so sure about Jack’s enthusiasm for it but he went with it, anyway. On the other hand I was a very willing pupil and soon heard his views on many subjects as a result. One day he was taking me through a hymn, trying to get me to make sense of it. I sang without thought, breathing automatically at the end of each line: