Kisses on a Postcard (6 page)

The hamlet of Doublebois had four local children; to these were added eight vackies, four from Welling – Jack and me, and Harold and Alan Packham, billeted rather grandly across the main road in the solid detached house of the district nurse, Miss Laity – and four from Plymouth: the three Plummer boys, Peter, Eric and Ken, and one girl, Elsie Plummer, a cousin of some sort, who didn’t live with the rest of the Plummers but was billeted on Miss Polmanor, the Doublebois Wesleyan zealot. More later of this unhappy pairing.

A few months later, when the summery Battle of Britain, fought in daylight over the Kent and Sussex skies of our former home, evolved into the nightly, autumnal Blitz on London, another vacky joined us: five-year-old Teddy came to 3 Railway Cottages with his mother and baby sister.

On our first morning the four Welling vackies met the four locals – Jimmy Peters and the three Bunney children – in a smallish triangle of land euphemistically known locally as the Park. The Park was at the crossroads in Doublebois. This was a five-road crossroads consisting of the main road running east to west, a lane going north to Bodmin Moor or Me, one week after arriving in Cornwall

south to Lostwithiel, and Station Approach sloping down to the up-platform and ticket office. When you add to that the two sentried entrances to Doublebois House and the main railway line running down the valley you have a veritable rural Piccadilly. But little stirred there until a train stopped or the army was on the move.

The Park had several magnificent beech trees, especially one right on the corner from which you could see everything in Doublebois: all of the dozen or so houses, the station, over to the Bunneys’ farm, the goods sidings with Blamey and Morgan’s mill, especially the trains panting up the long gradient from the west into the station. We were soon up it day in and day out.

That tree, our tree, also commanded an astonishing view: the Fowey Valley, almost as heart-stopping as the first sight of the sea on summer holiday. The main road plunged down on one side of the valley past a quarry into woods; the railway snaked parallel along the other side on a thrilling succession of bridges and viaducts; between them initially was a field, the Rabbit Field, we learned, beyond which the tops of trees waved and swayed into the hazy distance, beckoning magically and majestically. We all hung from the branches of this tree. Jack voiced the shared, aching longings of the four vackies.

‘Let’s go down the woods.’

There was a silence while the locals stared at us. Then in broad Cornish from David Bunney, ‘Wha’ frr?’

It was our turn to stare at them. ‘What for?’

‘Yeah. Wha’ frr?’

‘To play.’

‘Play wha’?’

‘Just play.’

‘Wha’s wrong wi’ yere?’

We stared at the crossroads beneath us and away out over the enchanted valley. ‘
Can’t you see?
’ ‘
Are you blind?
’ There lay adventures, endless woods, a rushing river, fish to catch, streams to dam, paths, tracks, the quarry to climb, creatures and things we hadn’t heard of. What for?

The locals drifted away as we vackies charged down the Rabbit Field kicking the tops off thistles and on into the dappled gloom of our vast new empty playground.

A day or so after I got to Doublebois I was playing with Alan Packham down on Station Approach by the entrance to the up-line. We were throwing the little stones that had worked loose from the tarmac at each other. There was no animosity in this. I threw a handful and one made a tiny hole in the top-left-hand pane of the frosted-glass window of the booking office. I tried to claim it was Alan’s fault because he had been in front of the window and ducked when I threw. My pleas fell on deaf ears. The matter was reported to Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack. I was ashamed to be in their bad books so quickly. They sent me to apologise to Mr Rawlings, the stationmaster, and to offer to pay for the damage (with what, God knows). He gave me a lecture about shortages of glass – the panes had wire mesh in them to strengthen them, not very effective against vackies with stones – and told me the pane couldn’t be replaced. It stayed unmended for the duration, rebuking me every time I went down Station Approach. The ticket clerk sat behind it when on duty and I always wondered if he got a stiff neck from the draught when it was cold. It finally had some paper stuffed into it. The incident also affected my relationship with the stationmaster, who was an imposing figure anyway. I decided that he had me marked out as a bad lot and I avoided him when I could. I found his gaze intimidating the whole time I was in Doublebois. I have no idea what he really thought of me, if anything.

Just a day or two after that incident I was with some others up our beech tree: vackies and Doublebois children. We had soon found we had enough interests in common to make friends in spite of what we saw as their lack of gumption. School was in shifts. There was nowhere to put all the children at once so some of us were off that afternoon watching army lorries going in and out of the camp. Everything to do with the army fascinated all of us. We asked the guards on the entrances if we could touch their rifles and generally made nuisances of ourselves. In the first nervous aftermath of Dunkirk we were told to buzz off in no uncertain terms, but as things calmed down we were tolerated and then even welcomed by some, perhaps missing their own kids, so that the army camp became another adventure playground made even more alluring by the element of danger involved in dodging guards and officers.

We watched a train from Plymouth pull into the station. A Hall-class engine was drawing it. Jimmy Peters, son of another platelayer, the sub-ganger in Uncle Jack’s gang, didn’t even need to watch. He could identify a few of the individual engines that regularly drew our trains just by their sound; something I quickly learned from him. One or two people strode up Station Approach. I stared in wonder. My mother – my mother, lugging a heavy suitcase – was actually trudging up from the station towards me. She had received our card all right but had turned up anyway. I did not rush to greet her; instead, I turned and raced up the road, past the stationmaster’s house, past Jimmy Peters’ house, into the Court, down it and breathlessly indoors.

‘Auntie Rose, Auntie Rose, Mum’s here. My mum’s here. She’s outside,’ I gulped, excited beyond belief. I didn’t see her reaction, though she must have been flustered, because having delivered the news I turned and ran straight back to Mum.

My mother has often since reminded me of that moment. Her blue-eyed boy recognised her, turned and ran away. Whatever was wrong with him? It clearly upset her. She said that all sorts of anxieties took over in those few minutes before I came back. Nothing was wrong at all, of course. I had simply run to tell Auntie Rose. Had Auntie Rose become, in under a week, the first person in my life to share such things with, leaving my mother in the road outside?

I have no real idea of how Auntie Rose and Mum got on in that first meeting but it must have been well. When amoral, raffish Brighton met a South Wales mining village there was plenty of room for misunderstanding, to say nothing of the generation and class divides. Mum, with her good looks and classic lines to her face, always looked classier than we actually were. I don’t know what Auntie Rose thought of Mum but Mum must have trusted Auntie Rose immediately because she told her about the kisses code and our judgement of her. I hope it gave Auntie Rose the pleasure she deserved.

As they settled down over tea, I was driven out. They wanted to talk about us. I went down the main road into the valley, to the bridge over the River Fowey. It was a place of infinite attraction for me all the time I was in Cornwall. There was a pool under the bridge where there were always trout and, seasonally, sea trout. There were rapids below the pool.

I scrambled down a path from the road to a little piece of bank that jutted into the river just above the rapids. There were magical things to be seen, including two sorts of dragonflies: the smaller, common green ones, really damsel flies My mother’s favourite photo of herself taken on holiday after the war I think, and the larger ones with yellow and black hoops. One of these flew out in front of me and I looked up from my study of the water and reached out to it, not to catch it, I think, just to touch it. Into the river I went and found myself clinging to the bank, up to my chest, shocked, freezing cold and shouting with all my might as the current pulled at me. When I had left the road I had noticed one of Uncle Jack’s mates from the platelayers’ gang going home. He was pushing his bike up the long hill to Doublebois. Within moments I saw him above me, jumping the wall by the road and slithering swiftly down the steep path to where I was. We all marvelled later at how he stopped himself without going in, because – as he said – that’s what he thought he would have to do. He lugged me out, sat me on his bike and pushed me up the hill. Mum’s and Auntie Rose’s tea was broken up with the arrival of Uncle Jack’s grinning workmate and one dripping, shivering vacky.

‘’Ee got a proper voice on ’im,’ said the platelayer. ‘I ’eard ’ee all right. Good job I was there. ’Ee’d ’a’ been gone. Swept away.’

The platelayer’s assessment of my situation may have been a trifle lurid but Mum said that she constantly worried that her two sons would never survive the war. My rescue from drowning within an hour of her arrival did nothing to reassure her. London was unthinkable and the country too unpredictable for her.

But for Jack and me the world was secure; the war was an exciting but unthreatening event; Cornwall was an adventure, with Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack simply there, our ‘other parents’, taken for granted. That was their achievement. We soon learned that it was Uncle Jack who was colourful, the one who entertained us or riveted us with his actions, stories and views of the world that we were just beginning to discover. But his life, their marriage – and now our lives – were based on the solid foundation of Auntie Rose. She was generally self-effacing, firm and – like him – utterly reliable. Going home to her was in no time as natural as going home to Mum. I believe in retrospect that a great part of the self-confidence of these two people and their partnership was that they each knew who they were. They were part of the working-class culture they came from and embodied. And ‘working class’ was exactly the right definition for them. They knew their jobs and did them, earning their rest as fully paid-up members of the hard-work union. They had their own natural courtesy to each other. Their lives were full of unmentioned demarcation lines and no-go areas that both understood and observed. The unselfconscious way they gave ground or claimed it between themselves was over my head, lost on me at that time, part of the scenery. Each knew their own domain, respected the other’s boundaries and didn’t stray over them. Well, anyway, Auntie Rose didn’t, and when Uncle Jack did he was put smartly in his place. Something he always meekly accepted without ever losing his masculinity. Uncle Jack had the sense to realise his good fortune in marrying such a woman, and Auntie Rose was equally blessed. She never wanted anything other than their welfare – and now ours. If that is not a description of a love match then I don’t know what is. But the word love seems too insubstantial to describe the deep roots, the thick foliage, the hard-wearing warp and weft of their union.

After Mum’s first visit they were given express permission – if they needed it – to treat us exactly like their own children and punish us when we deserved it. I can think of no better expression of the trust Mum had in them from the word go. And I can still see Auntie Rose’s slightly enquiring smile when we pleased her and still feel the warmth of her body when she held me; and her hands, so much more roughened than my mother’s, but just as gentle.