Kisses on a Postcard (8 page)

We all stared at each other.

‘Wha’ be you staring at, then?’

And the usual knowing answer. ‘Don’t know, it ain’t got a label.’

‘What be you looking so glum for?’

‘There’s nothing to do here,’ answered the vackies. (A view not shared by us at Doublebois. We had the station and goods yard, flour mill and stock pens, big house, Army camp, the valley, the woods and the river. But when in Dobwalls we showed solidarity without even thinking about it.) ‘No Woolworth’s, no pictures, nothing.’

‘Well, go home, then. Nobody asked you to come.’

‘We can’t. Bombing.’

‘There bain’t no bombing’ (and there wasn’t yet). ‘I reckon ’tis cos your mothers don’t want you.’

‘You haven’t even got pavements. It’s a dump.’

‘No, ’tisn’t, ’tis our village.’

One vacky thought of a great joke. ‘Oh, ’tis it?’ All the vackies laughed. ‘Well, you can keep it.’

Stung, the village kids’ answer was, ‘Townies. Slum kids’.

‘Turnips. Yokels. Clodhoppers.’

We twelve Doublebois children would walk to school together quite happily but, when we got to the village, we separated, without conscious effort, into vackies and village kids.

Dobwalls straggled in an undistinguished way for more than half a mile along the main A38. There were a few houses down side lanes and that was more or less it; some few hundred inhabitants. The first building we came to at our end was the post-and-telegraph office, on the left, set back from the road, strangely in a bungalow with a long garden path. Then the Lostwithiel road forked into ours and we were in the village, with Ede’s shop on the right and Rowe’s garage facing it on the left. Three lanes joined the main road as it forked, one prong leading back to Doublebois and Bodmin and the other diving under the railway line to East Taphouse and Lostwithiel. This six-pronged junction, as complex as ours in Doublebois, had no more traffic than we did. We split up as we passed the shop, walked on past the main drinking-water tap at the bottom of a little hill and up the other side past St Peter’s, the tiny Anglican church. At the far end, the village kids turned right and had the pleasure of going past the forge of Mr Uglow, the blacksmith, where horses sometimes stamped uneasily, aware of the burning smells from within, and all sorts of exciting things could be happening, before continuing a little way down the Duloe road to their school. The vackies turned left into the Methodist graveyard, where – not surprisingly – nothing ever happened unless we made it. Our main classroom was in the chapel; our infants’ class, my class, was behind the graveyard in a wooden building with a corrugated-iron roof misnamed the Hall; our playground was the consecrated churchyard, hide-and-seek between the slabs of slate. We were forbidden to leave the churchyard during the day and they were not allowed out of their school playground. This, of course, led to the more adventurous escaping to taunt the other lot over their wall and then run away. After school there would be more taunts and scuffles. Once we Doublebois lot had got clear of the village we joined up and continued on our amicable way home.

The vackies had one song, favourite among the many that were used, sung to the tune of ‘A Gordon For Me’:

The turnips are thick, the turnips are dumb;

They use stinging nettles for wiping their bum.

They eat mangel-wurzels and live in a shed;

They’re dotty and spotty and soft in the head.

The village kids’ song, to the tune of ‘Blow Away The Morning Dew’, had, in my view even then, more style. I think I liked the tune better:

They come down yere from London so swanky and stuck up;

They challenge us to take them on and say they’ll duff us up.

So we’ll blow away them vacky kids to kingdom come;

We’ll blow away them smarty-pants and kick them up the bum.

Perhaps the last five words let it down. The tunes, of course, we all knew well from school.

Efforts were made to improve relations. They were futile.

Some well-meaning person suggested a cricket match: we walloped them. A football match followed: the score was, believe it or not, vackies
thirty-odd, village kids nil. Our contempt for them was confirmed. Westwood Secondary School – no great shakes academically, consisting almost entirely of grammar- and technical-school rejects – was streets ahead of Dobwalls village school. We younger brothers and sisters soon saw that we were equally superior to their infants. As we came from the suburbs with woods and greenery, even their strengths, the mysteries of the countryside, were partly known by us, though we had much to learn. When it came to street wisdom the gap was unbridgeable. They didn’t seem to have heard of knock-down-ginger or scrumping. If they wanted an apple they either asked or took one. Or of stealing from Woolworth’s – for obvious reasons that we vackies made no allowances for, although it soon became apparent to even the most hardened of us that you couldn’t possibly steal from Ede’s, the village shop, not because it was too dangerous but because it was too personal. Unthinkable to take things from Mr Ede and his brother. The anonymity needed for petty crime was gone.

We arranged our own private group fights – more confrontation and insults than violence – in the dinner break and returned to our separate classes late and dishevelled, to get our knuckles rapped with a ruler – more painful than the fights. And our leader, Frank Emmett, and their leader, Sam Finch, fought each other in single combat to wild cheers and a disputed result.

The whole village divided. Those with their own children and many others regarded the vackies as a pestilence to be endured or resisted. But there were those who suddenly found themselves with new families: energetic, bright children who won their hearts and brought a new vitality to their village, trebling the under-fourteen population. And, of course, there must have been the unfortunate misfits, vackies who were too difficult to manage for one reason or another and villagers who just couldn’t handle the children dumped on them. But, although the stories of cruelty and abuse abound and resound even now, I remember none among my fellows who was mistreated. Though there was one little boy in Junior Vackies who often wet himself, so at least one of us was unhappy. When he did it, someone would hold up their hand and say, ‘Please, Miss. Dozmary Pool.’ (A famous stretch of water on Bodmin Moor.) And he became the humiliated centre of stifled mirth as Mrs Langdon patiently cleaned him and the floor up. I remember no sign of sympathy from us young savages and he was one of those who soon went home.

Prominent among the pro-vackies faction was the Reverend Clifford Buckroyd, the Wesleyan Methodist Minister, a pleasant, good-looking, fortyish man (my mother told me years later that every time she visited us she always fancied him, which surprised me as much as an adult as it would have done had she told me at the time – he was a
minister
for goodness sake) who worked hard to make us vackies feel at home and the village accept us. He was a popular man and lives clearly in my memory. If personality had dictated where people worshipped, his chapel would have been overflowing and the Anglican church empty. I can barely remember its vicar, the Reverend R. O. Oatey, though I attended it for three years, taken there by Auntie Rose. But denominations and places of worship were ingrained, only marginally decided by such ephemeral factors.

There was one Wesleyan Methodist woman, the anti-vacky Miss Polmanor, the one on whom Elsie Plummer had the misfortune to be billeted, who seemed to personify all the traits of uptight bigoted Christianity that made Uncle Jack so angry. It abounded in the country in those days. When I say country I don’t just mean countryside, I mean the whole country. No one had a monopoly on it. Miss Polmanor lived in one of a pair of houses some yards from the Court, up the road towards Dobwalls. But her religious convictions meant that there was more to her than mere narrow-mindedness, as I learned in due course. She was harder on herself than on anyone. She seemed to make her own life something to be endured rather than enjoyed. There was, no matter what Uncle Jack might have thought or said, not the faintest whiff of hypocrisy in her. Whatever she demanded of people she first drew from herself. I became, soon after my arrival in Cornwall, her unwilling confidant, though I did not understand much of what I was privy to till much later. I certainly did not like her or wish to be near her but was obliged to see her and talk to her alone regularly.

It all happened by chance. To eke out what must have been a frugal existence – I don’t know what she lived on – she had acquired the Doublebois concession on Corona. Corona was a firm that made fizzy drinks that were far and away the favourite of all of us children. If you wanted a bottle you had to go and knock on her back door. She had crates of full bottles in her cool little cellar and crates of empties ready for collection outside the back door. Corona bottles came pint-sized and were secured with an intricate wire arrangement attached to a ceramic cork which had a red rubber washer round it. You opened the bottle by holding it in your two hands and pressing on the wire on either side of the neck with your thumbs until the whole arrangement moved past some sort of fulcrum. Then the cork was released and the pressure from within blew the bottle open with a satisfying pop. If you had been shaking it, or if it was too warm, the opening pop was an explosion, followed by a foaming tide and you lost half of the contents. Our favourites were cherryade (sweetly disgusting) and ginger beer (probably would still taste good to me today).

Every Sunday dinner in summer Jack and I were allowed to have a glass each with our meal. But there was a difficulty. Miss Polmanor would not trade on a Sunday. That was against her strict Methodist religious convictions. The same widespread convictions that had ensured, to Uncle Jack’s frustration, that there was no pub in Dobwalls and that most of Wales was shut on a Sunday. So we had to buy our bottle the day before during normal shopping hours. On a Saturday morning, with Jack and with last week’s empty, worth a penny or ha’penny back, it was an enjoyable errand. We could choose the flavour – if there was a choice – and carry the new full treasure carefully home to be stored somewhere cool for Sunday. But the errand was sometimes forgotten on a busy Saturday and disappointment stared us in the face on Sunday morning. On one such morning Auntie Rose cannily sent me alone on what looked like a pointless mission.

Acting on instructions I said, ‘Sorry, Miss Polmanor, but Uncle Jack was working on the line yesterday, war work. Auntie Rose was ill in bed and Jack and I were at choir practice. Could you let us have a bottle of pop, please?’

‘I can’t sell you anything on a Sunday,’ she said in the shocked tones of one who was appalled at even being asked. ‘Mr and Mrs Phillips know that.’ She was one of the few who did not call them Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack. ‘’Tis against the Scriptures. I’m surprised at them sending you.’

Somehow I had the wit to say, ‘Oh, but they didn’t, Miss Polmanor. I thought it by myself. I thought you might make an exception.’

She must have liked that because I saw a rare faint smile on her face and she sounded more gentle. ‘ ’Tisn’t for me to make exceptions, young man. ‘’Tis for God. Be you worth an exception?’

I couldn’t handle the problem of thinking how God might make an exception for me, so gave up. ‘Sorry to bother you, Miss Polmanor.’ I turned away, looking into a Corona-less Sunday lunch.

‘Just a minute, young man. Did you say that you were at choir practice?’

I was too honest by far, bearing in mind her Wesleyan faith. ‘Yes, Miss Polmanor. But it was Church of England choir practice, at St Peter’s, not at Mr Buckroyd’s.’

‘That don’t matter, boy. You was doing God’s will as you saw it.’

Is that what I was doing, I thought to myself.

‘I can’t sell you anything on a Sunday. That’s for sure. But, if you’re very good, I could
give
you a bottle to take with you and you could pay me tomorrow.’

I can’t remember what I said, if anything.

‘Not a word to anyone, mind, or my life will be a misery.’

I wasn’t foolish enough to respond to that with a clever remark or old enough to have even thought of one. I stood, respectfully hopeful.

‘And only because you was singing to the glory of God. This is just between you, me and Him.’ She gestured upwards. ‘Promise?’

I did so fervently.

‘And will you be good if I do?’

Another ardent assurance. She certainly demanded her pound of flesh on His behalf.

‘There you are, then. And give thanks to God when you drink it.’

I took it, thanked her and God and ran for it.

Of course, the minute I was home Auntie Rose had to know how I had drawn ginger beer from that particular stone. When I told her she quietly smiled and I was made to promise to take the money straight after school. Uncle Jack’s eyes lit up when he heard the story. ‘A chink in God’s armour,’ he laughed. ‘Who would’ve thought it.’

Unfortunately this led to a further intimacy: when I took the money she asked me in. Her house was more old-fashioned than anything I had seen, packed with bric-à-brac, mementoes, religious texts and biblical pictures. There was one item that stood centre on the sideboard that was unmissable: a silver-framed photo of a man. It was turned into a modest shrine, standing on a little tapestry with candlesticks on either side.