Kisses on a Postcard (7 page)

She would grumble when she hadn’t slept well. ‘Oh
Duw
, I feel like a stewed owl,’ and she had a saying which she used on afternoons when she wanted a nap – no amount of mockery from us would make her abandon it – ‘I’m just going upstairs to throw myself down.’

But Auntie Rose was not just a cuddly mum-figure. We had to live by her standards, and it was not a good idea to forget or flout them. She once gave me a lesson that bypassed the mind, etched itself into me and is still there. It was a while later; I was, perhaps eight or nine. Her daughter-in-law, Ethel, wife of older son Len, was staying. The three of us went for a walk up the lane to St Cleer and the moor; each of us had a jam-jar to search for wild strawberries. There weren’t many but I persevered and after much effort had a miserable half-jarful while Auntie Rose and Ethel picked few. They preferred to natter. When we were back home I poured mine on my plate at teatime and planned which of the best ones to save till last.

Auntie Rose looked across the table at me. ‘You’ve got your strawberries there, then, have you, boy?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, not sure what was wrong.

‘Aren’t you going to offer them round, then? We got a guest.’

I flushed till the hair rose on my neck, aware of my gracelessness but also of the injustice. ‘But you two didn’t bother. I mean – I picked these while you were talk – and—’

‘Greed I’m bringing up yere, is it? What if I only gave you the food you got yourself?’

‘I – sorry – I – er. Would you like some?’ I offered my plate to Ethel.

‘No, thank you, Terry,’ she said.

‘Would you, Uncle Jack?’

Uncle Jack was equally unhelpful. ‘No, thanks, boy.’

I turned to my nemesis. ‘Auntie Rose, would you like some?’

She hadn’t finished. ‘No, you do have ’em, boy. You obviously need ’em most.’

The chickens ate the wild strawberries.

And there was Uncle Jack, with his ferocious, secret scowls, sudden broad grins and his brusque delivery. In spite of these characteristics – or perhaps because of them – he was far less intimidating than Auntie Rose could be when she thought it necessary. One day he caught Jack and Ken Plummer trying to smoke down the garden beyond the privies. I was allowed to watch but not join in and waste the precious single Player’s Weight (one genteel, feminine step above the inevitable working man’s Woodbine) that Ken had stolen from his mother’s packet. Uncle Jack didn’t ask us where the cigarette had come from; he knew that unless it was one of his the answer would only involve his having to report the theft to someone else and compound the matter. He regarded us seriously and spoke man to man. ‘You don’t want to smoke, boys. It’ll stunt your growth.’ This was what we were all told at that time but Uncle Jack carried the evidence about with him. ‘I smoked when I was your age and look what happened to me.’ As he drew himself up to his full five foot nothing his eyes twinkled in self-mockery and his rebuke floated away like exhaled smoke. To redeem the seriousness of the moment he urged Ken and Jack to take a full drag and inhale. Of course they both choked and he strode away knowing that he had done all he could to discourage the unstoppable habit.

Uncle Jack’s ‘If I was your father, I’d—’ was the start to many a threat that held few terrors for Jack or me. ‘Bloody Cornish,’ he would say without rancour. ‘God-bothering, Bible-punching Tories.’ And then the sentence that was applied to anyone who had a moan about something or who displeased him in some way, ‘Send ’em down the mines for a bit, then they’d know they were born.’

I wondered what Tories were and why they punched Bibles. Jack explained. ‘It’s just an expression. They don’t actually punch them. I think they just bang them down hard in church or chapel. I’ve seen them do it with hymn books. And cowboys do it in the pictures too. They talk about punching cattle but they never do; they just punch each other.’ I stared at a cow in a field and imagined punching its massive forehead, wringing my fist in agony as a result.

‘Bloody Churchill.’ This was another of Uncle Jack’s remarks that seized our shocked attention. ‘He sent the troops in against us at Tonypandy.’ ‘Us’ were his beloved South Wales miners, on strike for a living wage. His complaint, I later learned to my dismay, was in reference to the notorious government reaction to that strike in 1910 when Churchill was Home Secretary.

‘Nye Bevan, there’s your man. On the Opposition benches all by himself. Attlee, Morrison, Bevin, they’re all in the Government. Part of it. Sold out.’ The Labour Party, who he had voted for all his life, had united with the arch-Conservative Churchill to form a coalition government and win the war. They earned only Uncle Jack’s contempt. Nye Bevan, Uncle Jack’s Welsh, left-wing idol, was the man who stood out virtually alone against the war and coalition (though he rejoined his colleagues in the Labour government that swept to power in the aftermath to found the National Health Service).

Of course, even though we were children of a couple who were also Labour – neither had any time for the Establishment, Dad because of his trade-union background and Mum because of her suffragette, musical family – the politics was over my head at first, but I learned.

‘Ernie Bevin . . .’ Uncle Jack rumbled to a bitter, thoughtful silence.

We knew of Bevin, a major trade-union figure, now Minister of Labour, former official of the Dockers Union, powerful and popular in our eyes, subsequently Foreign Secretary in Attlee’s post-war government. Whatever was coming next? ‘Yes? What about him?’

‘He tried to call a general strike of all the British unions and the German ones to stop the first lot in 1914. They called him a traitor. Now he’s one of them. Urging us all to join up and fight. Huh. Bevin Boys.’ (Young men who couldn’t or wouldn’t be conscripted into the army were often directed down the mines to help the war effort under Bevin’s rule, known as Bevin Boys.)

There were the one-sided arguments that Uncle Jack had with the BBC Home Service newsreaders.

‘It’s no good, Jack, he can’t year you and the boys and me aren’t listening,’ Auntie Rose would interject.

But we were. It was from these outbursts that Jack and I learned the political and religious geography of our world. I found these attacks on people I had barely heard of, but had been conditioned to hold in esteem, thrilling and subversive. They gave us the references that influenced our lifelong political thinking. One day I asked Uncle Jack why he came to Cornwall if he didn’t like it. ‘Work, boy, work. No work there in the Valleys. Come with the Great Western, didn’t I? The Company.’ This word was spat out in a way that questioned my hitherto benevolent view of all things railway. ‘Got the house an’ all. Tied. Huh. Tied. Like our lives.’ Of course I didn’t then understand all that was behind that, but as comprehension grew so there was a growing awareness of how the world about me worked differently for different people.

In spite of these sentiments, Uncle Jack seemed to like living in Cornwall. I cannot believe that working on the glorious three and a half miles of track that wound westward down the Fowey Valley from Doublebois and was his gang’s stretch wasn’t infinitely preferable to any coal mine, no matter how strong the camaraderie down there. I think he must have been painfully split between his leftist, internationalist, socialist ideals and his patriotism, as were so many. He certainly supported the war effort, going into the underused front room to listen, rapt, to Churchill’s speeches on the wireless, which ran from great acid batteries that needed frequent changing and charging. And he went drinking on Saturday nights with his allegedly Tory, church-or-chapel Cornish workmates, singing his way home from a pub in Liskeard – for Dobwalls was dry, the Wesleyans had seen to that. ‘Bloody chapel. Bloody hypocrites,’ Uncle Jack used to growl, but, like Dad, he was no great drinker, he just liked to have something to beat the Methodists with.

When he went with his workmates to Liskeard for a drink on a Saturday they had to be on the last down-train or it was a four-mile walk home. They would pile out of it, go to the rear end (our end) of the down-platform, cross the line as the train left to continue its way west, greet the signalman in his box just below us, scramble up the narrow, steep footpath that climbed up the cutting between the nettles and bushes, slip through the wire behind the wash-house and there they were, at the end of the Court. I remember one warm, magical night when they stopped at the top of the footpath to relieve themselves. They must have been a bit tight or noisy, probably singing, because Jack and I were awake and quickly up.

They were hissed at by Auntie Rose at the back door. ‘Sssh, Jack. Everyone’ll year. All up the Court.’

‘I should hope so. Half of ’em are out yere with me,’ was Uncle Jack’s reply, half smothered in his own and others’ giggles. ‘Four miles to wet your whistle.’ He raised his voice to complain to the world. ‘It’s bloody antediluvian. Bloody Methodists. Bloody Cornwall.’

‘Oh-ho-ho. Plenty of time for all that in the morning. Bed now. Shall I wake you for morning service, is it?’ Auntie Rose demonstrated her control of the situation with a shaft that brought grins from the others.

Uncle Jack’s ‘I’ll bloody kill you if you do’ had no more threat for Auntie Rose than did his other, more sober, threats to Jack and me.

‘You couldn’t kill a dozy fly with a frying pan. Come on, up to bed. You’ll wake the boys.’

‘It’s all right, Auntie Rose. We’re awake.’ We were already down at the back door.

‘Oh
Duw
. Back inside, you two, before you catch your deaths.’

‘Want to splash your boots, boys?’ was the far more alluring suggestion from Uncle Jack.

‘Yes, yes, I’m bursting, I’m dying to.’ And we two whippets were past Auntie Rose and through the wires to join him and splash anything we could manage. We thought we were men indeed to stand in such a row, barefoot on an enchanted summer Saturday night, as the last train’s sounds echoed over the Fowey Valley and left the dozen or so houses of Doublebois to silence.

Chapter Five

We went to school in the village of Dobwalls, a good mile away, east along the A38 main road. Both schools, vackies’ and village kids’, were at the far end, to add to the yardage. We Doublebois children walked there and back every school day for the three years I was there, in all weathers, mostly wet it seems now. Nothing was thought of this; there were other children just as far-flung making their way to school from different directions. Though I recall that coming home sometimes seemed to be endless. To breast the last rise with the lone oak tree at the top, bent and stunted, growing only one way in the wind, and to see Railway Cottages, with ours on the end, was always welcome. I don’t think there was a single fat child in Doublebois – or Dobwalls for that matter – and few, if any, adults. Wartime rationing had little or nothing to do with it: the greedy could always find something to eat in the country. It was simply that whatever we put into our mouths was burned away in constant physical activity.

In Dobwalls village the vackies and the village children took one look at each other and it was instant war. It wasn’t, as far as I remember, that we hated each other, but simply that we regarded them with contempt, and they resented the pushy newcomers. Perhaps it started from the very first meetings. They only had to open their mouths to be objects of ridicule to us. Perhaps they were trying to be friendly. ‘Whirr be you fram, then?’ was greeted with suppressed giggles and ‘You talk funny’.

‘No, us don’t. You do.’