The Chequer Board (8 page)

The ex-draughtsman had given his son as good an education as a coloured boy could get.

“Pa wanted me to be a draftsman too, and I did the course at school, and I liked it well enough. But then when I left school I couldn’t get a start nohow. No,
sir;
not in Nashville!”

“Why not?”

The Negro looked at him. “Things is mighty funny in some states,” he said quietly. “In Filtair, colored people don’t do drafting. I guess if I’d gone up to Hartford I’d have got a start all right, but Ma was poorly, and not much money, either. I got taken on as a garage hand at Filtair; it’s all colored in the garage. Then I got to drive a truck for them, and then they put the filters on the Type 83 Bulldozer for desert service, and I got to driving that around sometimes for experimental trials. Then when I got drafted they found I knew how to drive a bulldozer so they put me into a construction unit.” He thought for a minute. “I guess I’d have been in a construction unit anyway,” he said. “They don’t send us on combat service.”

In the winter of 1942 he had been moved across the Atlantic; he was stationed for a month or two in Northern Ireland with his unit. An airstrip had been needed in the region of Penzance. By March 1943, his construction company, with three others, was working on a hilltop just above the little village of Trenarth, four miles from Penzance, levelling the fields, breaking down walls, demolishing farmhouses, making roads and runways.

Trenarth is a little place on the railway, at the junction of the main line and the North Coast line. It is a place of about a thousand inhabitants, with a small market square, a church built in the year 1356, and a public house. The construction companies were all Negro except for a few white technicians; the impact of fifteen hundred coloured soldiers on this little place was considerable.

“I like Trenarth,” he said. “I guess we all do.”

There were some misunderstandings to be cleared up when they first arrived. A party of white American surveyors from the Eighth Air Force had come first to pick the site and mark it out, and they had told the village about the blacks who would arrive in a few days. They said that the Negro soldiers who were coming were rather primitive, and that the villagers would have to be both careful and tolerant. They said the Negroes could speak little English and did not understand the use of lavatories. When they were hungry, they would bark like a dog, and they had small, rudimentary tails concealed within their trousers, which made it difficult for them to sit down. Having drunk their beer and marked the site and had their fun with perfectly straight faces, the surveyors went away, and left the village in perplexity.

Old Mr Marston, the gardener at the vicarage, raised the matter in the White Hart one night. “I asked Mr Kendall if it’s true what they were saying about these black soldiers that are coming,” he said. “About them barking when they want their victuals. He says it’s all just a story they were telling us, to get a rise out of us.”

“Aye, that’s right,” said Mr Frobisher, the landlord of
the pub. “They was just pulling our legs. Negroes don’t have tails, not any that I heard of.”

A mournful little man who worked as a porter at the station said, “Well, I don’t think they was pulling our legs at all. Very nice and straight they spoke to me, they did. That corporal, he said this lot come straight from Africa. Africans, they are—that’s why they can’t speak English. There’s rum things happen in Africa, believe me.”

The consensus of opinion was that the stories were improbable, but that it would be prudent to maintain a strict reserve when the visitors arrived.

The story reached the Negro soldiers very quickly. In the March dusk, after their evening meal in the rough camp they were making on the bleak hilltop, a few coloured men walked down into the village. They came in a little party, smiling broadly. As they passed each villager they gave a realistic imitation of a pack of hungry dogs. They thought it was a great joke, and barked at everybody in tones varying from Pekinese to bloodhound. By the time they reached the White Hart, the village had come to its senses; in the bar they were accepted as interesting strangers to whom was owed some sort of apology.

“They were real friendly, right from that first evening,” said Lesurier. “They made us feel like we were regular fellows.”

It was not only that the villagers were conscious of their own stupidity. At that time there had been a great deal of prominence given in the English newspapers to the assistance America was sending in Lease-Lend, and this
assistance was obvious to everybody in Trenarth in the increasing numbers of American tractors, trucks, and jeeps to be seen in the streets. Like others, Bessie Frobisher, the buxom daughter of the landlord, had half believed the stories she had heard about the Negroes, and felt in a dim way that she owed recompense to these black, soft-spoken, well-behaved strangers in the bar. So she got out her electric iron, which had not functioned for a month, and brought it into the bar and put it on the counter, and said, “Can any of you mend an iron?”

Sergeant Sam Lorimer picked it up in his enormous pink-palmed hands. “Sure, lady,” he said, “I can fix that for you.” He turned it over, examining it. “It don’t get hot no more?” he asked.

She said, “It doesn’t get hot at all now. It used to be ever so good. It’s a job to get anything mended now, you know.”

He called across the bar, “Hey, Dave, lend me your screw driver?”

Lesurier lent his screw driver, and with that and a jack-knife they disembowelled the iron on the counter while the girl watched, picked up the broken thread of filament and made it fast, and re-assembled it. They tried it in a lamp socket and it got hot at once.

“It’s all okay now,” said Lorimer, “but the filament won’t last so long—it’s kind of rotten. It gets that way as it gets old.”

“You can get new parts for irons like that,” said one, “I see them that day we was in Belfast.”

“That’s so,” said Lorimer. “Maybe we could get one in Penzance.” He passed the iron back to Bessie. “Well,
there you are, lady. It’s fixed right now, until it goes again.”

She smiled at him. “It’s ever so kind of you to take the trouble,” she said. She turned to her father. “Dad, this gentleman’s mended my iron, and it works beautifully.”

She used her normal language without thinking anything about it, but each Negro within hearing caught the word “gentleman” and stiffened for a moment in wonder. They certainly were in a foreign country, a long ways from home.

Frobisher passed his hand over the iron to feel its warmth, and turned to Lorimer. “Aye, it works all right,” he said. “Will you take something on the house? A glass of beer?”

The big Negro hung his head, smiling and confused. “Well, that’s real kind of you, mister,” he said.

Within a few days the boys were fixing everything. They liked fixing things. They fixed the leg of the settee in the saloon bar, and they fixed the gate leading to old Mrs Pocock’s cottage garden. They fixed the Vicar’s Austin Seven, and they fixed the bit of wall by the war memorial, that a truck had knocked down. They fixed the counter flap of Robertson’s grocery shop, and they fixed the wheel of Mr Penlee’s dung cart. When Penlee gave them tea with all his family in the farm kitchen, as some recompense for what they had done to his cart, they were so overwhelmed that they turned up next Sunday in a body and limewashed his cow house.

They fixed everything that needed fixing in Trenarth in a very few weeks. In a country that had been at war for over four years, with every able-bodied man and woman
called up for industry or for the forces, their presence was a real help to the village; the people liked them for it, and for their unfailing courtesy and good humour. They were well paid by English standards and they brought prosperity to Trenarth, which was a factor in their favour, but more important was the willing work they did; England in wartime had plenty of money, if little to spend it on. Some of them were gardeners in civil life, and used to come up shyly and ask if they might work in the garden, asking for nothing but the pleasure of tending flowers. Some of them were farm hands, and wanted to do nothing better in their spare time than to help the land girls clean the muck out of the cow houses. Inevitably they were asked in to a meal as interesting and honoured guests, and equally inevitably they would take the farmer’s daughter or the land girl to the pictures in Penzance.

They had a grand time in those early days. They used to bring a couple of trucks down from the camp on Saturday afternoons to pick up the girls, and drive off to Penzance to the pictures in a great merry party, thirty or forty black young men and as many white girls, all laughing and jammed together in the great trucks, having a fine time.

The Vicar, Mr Kendall, held unconventional views on most of the controversial subjects in the world, which no doubt accounted for the fact that at the age of fifty-three he had progressed no further than the living of St Jude’s, Trenarth. He stood with Mr Frobisher one afternoon, watching one of these expeditions as it started off, and
said, “We’ll have a few black babies to look after, presently.”

Mr Frobisher rubbed his chin. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “It’s the girls’ own business if they do. Colour apart, I like these fellows well enough, I must say.”

The Vicar nodded. “I’d rather have them than some others of our gallant Allies,” he said darkly.

It was in that halcyon time that Private David Lesurier became acquainted with Miss Grace Trefusis.

Miss Trefusis worked behind the counter in Robertson’s grocery shop, where she spent all day making up little ounce and two-ounce parcels of rationed foods. She was nearly seventeen years old, a pretty, dark, reserved girl who had grown up late and never had much truck with boys. Lesurier, at the age of twenty-two, had played and danced with various mulatto and “high yaller” girls back home in Nashville, but had very seldom spoken to a pure white one. He was shy of Grace, and very much attracted to her at the same time.

He saw her first at Robertson’s, where he was buying cigarettes. He could buy better cigarettes in the canteen up at the camp, but it pleased him to go into English shops and buy; it gave him a feeling of competence in a foreign land. From that time on he bought all his cigarettes at Robertson’s, in single packets of ten, that necessitated many visits.

In spite of this assiduity, he did not get on very fast with Grace. With a sixth sense she knew he came to see her. She was shy of him and did not want much to be seen about with a black boy. As he was equally shy of her
and never asked for anything except, “Ten Players, please, ma’am,” she had little difficulty in keeping him in his place. But from his many visits, a queer, tenuous little friendship came into being. She grew accustomed to him and his shy “Ten Players, please, ma’am,” and sometimes she smiled at him. She was very young and pretty when she smiled.

Up on the hilltop the Negroes did their work efficiently and well, accelerating their own departure. In six weeks the strip was paved and usable by airplanes of the U. S. Army Air Corps. Half the Negroes were moved on to other work in other places; the remainder were set to putting up prefabricated huts and ammunition dumps, and making roadways. In their place came the first detachment of the Army Air Corps to take over the new strip.

For a week all went well. The white American soldiers mixed amicably with the Negroes, using the bar of the White Hart on friendly terms with them and chi-hiking with them in the street. By the end of the week, however, the detachments were of about equal strength, and a stir of uneasiness was agitating the whites.

Girls were the first and main trouble. Every eligible girl in Trenarth by that time was walking out with a black soldier, for the very good reason that there had been nobody else in the vicinity to walk out with. The white troops found to their concern that every girl was dated up by a Negro. Socially this was no great matter, for there were too few girls in Trenarth to go round in any case and there was a large camp of A.T.S. not far from Penzance willing and anxious to be taken out by the Americans. Amongst the new arrivals, however, there were a
small proportion of whites from the “Deep South,” to whom the feminine vagaries of Trenarth were genuinely distressing.

Corporal Jim Dakers, from Carthage on the Pearl River, in Leake County, Mississippi, gave expression to his feelings in the bar of the White Hart one evening.

“You’d think these English girls would have more sense of decency than to go walking with a nigger,” he proclaimed. “What kind of a dump is this, anyway? Their folks should give them a good whipping. If they don’t, well I guess there’s other folks that will.”

His companions said, “Aw, lay off, Jim. You’re not in the South now.”

He said, “It sure burns me up to see the niggers getting out of hand this way.”

Behind the bar the English landlord stood mute, faintly hostile.

There were other irritations, too. Ninety-five per cent of the white Americans of the Army Air Corps were quiet, well-behaved, and tactful, but unfortunately the remainder were more vocal. Corporal Stanislaus Oszwiecki, from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, considered that municipal affairs were run better at home. He returned to the bar from a visit to the urinal, and said:

“Say, what do you know? They ain’t got no sewer here. Just a kinder soak pit, ’n an earth bucket.” He turned to Mr Frobisher, the landlord. “Say, didn’t nobody ever tell you guys about modern sanitation?”

The landlord took his pipe out of his mouth, and said slowly, “You’ll find all you want in the towns and cities in this country. It’s not necessary in a place like this.” He
spoke quietly and with restraint, because he was sensitive about the lavatory accommodation of the White Hart. As soon as the village got a more adequate water supply, he meant to alter things.

“For cryin’ out loud!” said Corporal Oszwiecki. “He says proper sanitation ain’t necessary. Say, you guys want to brush up your ideas if you’re ever goin’ to stand up to the Germans. Look what they done to you before we came—” He drew his breath in sharply—“Boy, did you see Plymouth! You British want to get around some ’n get some modern notions. The U. S. Army pulled you through last time, ’n it’ll pull you through this time. But we ain’t comin’ over every twenty years whenever you get into trouble. No,
sir!
”