Daisy’s Vintage Cornish Camper Van

by Ali McNamara

  ‘I know – I looked at the dates,’ Malachi says practically.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say, feeling a bit silly, ‘there are dates. I see them now, just above the writing – 1976, 1988 and wow, 1945! That is an old one.’ I look across at the other side of the cards where there would usually be an address, a stamp and a postmark, but they’re all blank. ‘That’s odd – there are no stamps or addresses on any of these.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Malachi says, taking the cards from me again. ‘Why would you write a card to someone and then not post it?’

  ‘Not only that, but three times?’

  ‘Perhaps Lou didn’t want this Frankie to read them?’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Well, it’s quite obvious she’s in love with the guy. Perhaps she didn’t want him to know.’

  ‘But why write postcards to him then?’

  Malachi shrugs. ‘Humans are a strange species. They never stop amazing me.’

  ‘Where did you find these?’ I ask, looking inside the van.

  ‘I was pulling one of the seats out so it can go to be re-upholstered. There’s a huge rip in this particular one, and they were poking out of the back.’

  ‘How strange. Do you think there might be more in there? These cards were written so far apart – there could be even more hidden away.’

  ‘Why don’t we take a look?’ Malachi says. ‘I’ve only pulled out one seat so far.’

  ‘Where’s that one?’

  ‘It’s just round the back of the van, propped up against it.’

  ‘I’ll check that one again, and you look inside the van.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Malachi salutes. ‘Right away, sir!’

  ‘Jump to it, then,’ I instruct, playing along.

  I head around to the other side of the van, and find a shabby red leather seat sitting forlornly on the ground. I turn it over and find the huge rip Malachi mentioned. I can’t see anything so I gently slide my hand inside. All I can feel to begin with is coarse stuffing and metal springs, but then as I slide my hand a little further in between the springs I touch something that feels very much like card.

  As gently as I can I pull it free from the seat. It’s a little battered but I recognise immediately the florid black ink handwriting. I put my hand in again, a little further this time, and feel around a bit more. This time I retrieve two postcards at the same time – same handwriting, same sender.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ Malachi calls from the van.

  I look up and see his face peering at me through the dirty window.

  ‘I’ve found three more!’ I tell him excitedly.

  ‘Four here!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve only opened up the back of one seat so far.’

  Over the next hour we manage to retrieve an incredible ninety-two further postcards from the van. They are mostly stuffed into the back of the remaining seats, but we find a few tucked behind cupboards and in the lining of the ceiling.

  ‘Wow!’ I say, looking down at the pile we’ve amassed outside the van. ‘These cards span more than fifty years. The earliest I’ve seen is dated 1945, and the latest 1999. It’s madness.’

  ‘Madness that we’ve found so many postcards or madness that they’re all written by the same person to the same person?’

  ‘Both!’ I say breathlessly.

  Malachi smiles at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you look so alive since you arrived here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You look flushed and excited by our little find, and if I may say, very attractive as a result.’

  I feel my cheeks flush all the more. ‘Stop it with all your blarney,’ I tell him, looking away, pretending to examine the cards again. ‘Full of it, you.’

  I expect him to come back with a quip about me stereotyping the Irish, but Malachi is unusually silent.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ I ask, hoping he’ll bite.

  To my relief he does. He pokes his tongue out at me. ‘Ah, you wish. Prefer the strong silent type, do you?’

  ‘Er… no, I don’t have a type.’

  ‘Not even a rakishly handsome Irishman?’ Malachi grins.

  ‘Sadly, I don’t know any of them.’

  ‘Ah, the mortal wounds me.’ Malachi pretends to retrieve a dagger from his heart.

  I shake my head dismissively. ‘All right, Romeo, let’s get back to these postcards. Do you think the previous owner of the van was the same person who wrote these? What was her name again?’ I look down at the cards at my feet. ‘Lou.’

  Malachi shrugs. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘She might like them back.’

  ‘Would you stuff something you wanted to keep inside a seat or at the back of a cupboard?’

  ‘I would if I wanted to hide it. If this camper van belonged to Lou, the postcards were likely precious to her but she didn’t want anyone to see them.’

  ‘So why leave them in a rusty old – Oops, my bad,’ Malachi corrects himself, ‘a classic VW camper van?’

  I smile at his faux pas while I think.

  ‘Perhaps the van was stolen from her and she didn’t have time to retrieve the cards? Or perhaps she was involved in an accident and the van was written off, only to be discovered years later hidden in a forest, covered in leaves.’

  It’s Malachi’s turn to smile now.

  ‘Hidden in a forest, covered in leaves?’ he repeats. ‘Wow, you actually do have an imagination, and a good one too.’

  ‘Of course I have an imagination – I’m a designer, aren’t I?’

  Malachi pulls a sort of meh expression.

  ‘What’s that face for? I am.’

  ‘Graphics are hardly art, are they?’

  ‘Of course they are. I went to art college for three years to qualify.’

  ‘I’m sure you did, but I bet everything you do now is computerised. When was the last time you picked up a paintbrush and let your imagination run free? At your college, I’d bet.’

  He was right, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it.

  ‘I have a very creative mind,’ I tell him instead. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be as good at my job as I am.’

  ‘Ooh, get you.’ Malachi puts his hands on his hips. ‘That told me, didn’t it?’ He pretends to slap his hand.

  ‘All right, clever, what do you think happened to the owner?’ I ask, changing the subject back to what we were originally discussing, instead of allowing myself to be carried along on one of Malachi’s tangents.

  ‘I think the owner simply sold the van and forgot that the postcards were hidden in there.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, Lou wouldn’t have forgotten. It’s clear this Frankie meant a lot to her.’

  ‘You’re assuming that Lou was the owner of the camper van. She might not have been.’

  ‘Do you have some sort of record here of who sold Daisy this van?’

  ‘Do you mean the vehicle’s log-book – that would have the original owner’s name in it?’

  ‘Yes, that would be perfect!’ I say excitedly. ‘Do you have that?’

  ‘No, sorry, it didn’t come with one. I think Bob must have just bought it from a junk-yard or found it derelict on someone’s land before he sold it to your Daisy, as she has no paperwork whatsoever.’

  ‘Oh.’ My excitement diminishes somewhat.

  ‘It’s a shame she doesn’t have a number plate either,’ Malachi says, looking at the van, ‘as we might have been able to trace her previous owner from that. You’re a bit of an orphan, aren’t you, girl,’ he adds, patting her fondly. ‘Let’s think.’ Malachi looks at me again. ‘Perhaps someone else might have found those cards – a collector maybe – and simply transported them around.’

  ‘So why hide them away?’ I shake my head. ‘No, I’m absolutely certain Lou was a previous owner of this van.’

  ‘How in Lucifer’s name can you know that?’
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  ‘Come with me,’ I say, beckoning Malachi as I walk back around to the other side of Daisy II. ‘Look at this…’ I pull the leather seat away from where it rests against the dirty red paintwork.

  Malachi leans down to peer at what I’m looking at, then he stands up again and smiles.

  ‘You see?’ I say with satisfaction.

  ‘I see.’ Malachi grins.

  This side of the camper van is particularly grimy, even more so than the other. It’s as if it has been left someplace where dirt could accumulate more easily on just one of its sides – like a road where it had been constantly splashed with dirty water from passing cars – but where Malachi had originally rested the seat when he’d pulled it out, some of the dirt has been worn away, and while I’d been looking for more postcards I’d noticed that painted in ornate white letters was the name ROSE.

  Ten

  As the late evening sun pours through the French windows of Snowdrop Cottage warming the room and me, I pick up another postcard and begin to read:

  2nd January 1948

  My Darling Frankie,

  Oh, how I miss you.

  I know I’ve written before and told you this, but particularly today I miss you all the more. You see I have to make decisions about my future education.

  Mother and Father want me to go to Oxford University. (Apparently I’m clever enough, who knew?!) But I really want to go to an art school to study painting, which as you know, other than you is my one true love.

  Oh Frankie, how I wish you were here to talk to.

  Forever yours,

  Lou x

  I scribble a note in my book – Oxford.

  Now we were pretty certain that Rose (or “Daisy-Rose” as Malachi was insisting we now call the camper van) had been owned by the mysterious Lou, I had decided to try to return the postcards to her, or if for some reason Lou wasn’t around any more, to her family at least.

  Malachi thought I was mad, and told me in no uncertain terms that I’d never be able to trace her, but I disagreed. There had to be something in the cards that would help me, and so far this morning I’d already found out that Lou was fairly local to St Felix – some of her early cards to Frankie were sent from places not that far from here. She’d bought the camper van she’d called Rose in 1964 with some money she’d made from painting. Now this last card told me she might have gone to Oxford University. I felt I was already starting to piece Lou’s story together very nicely indeed, and I still had many more to read yet.

  I didn’t know what it was about the cards that made me so interested in them. Perhaps it was their age – some of them were over seventy years old. Or perhaps it was the exquisite notes of love that one person had sent to another. It was heart-breaking to think that someone so young was already experiencing the agonising pain of love and loss at such an early age, and not only that, that they had carried that pain for so long.

  I read some more of the cards, trying desperately to read between the lines to find any clue that I can.

  However, although I deduce Lou did eventually go to Oxford to study, other than that there doesn’t seem to be anything else out of the ordinary. They all begin My Darling Frankie and end Forever yours, Lou, and nearly all of them mention at some stage how much Lou misses Frankie and how she wishes she could be with him, but what I do find as I organise them into chronological order is that there appears to be a huge gap. The cards start in the forties and continue with an average of three a year through to the sixties, and then there’s a gap before they start up again in the late eighties and continue through until the end of the century.

  Why did they stop for so long? I wonder, as I look at the pile of cards on the table next to me. It makes no sense for them to stop and then start again?

  What happened to Lou for twenty years that meant she stopped wanting to write to Frankie?

  I re-read the cards from the eighties onwards. Lou doesn’t mention a husband or a family in any of them, so that was unlikely to have been what stopped her writing. She mainly talks about her career as a painter, and all the places she visits and people she meets. She doesn’t mention any significant events that might have affected her life and either prevented her from writing to Frankie or made her not want to. It was very odd.

  I get up and go downstairs to make a cup of tea. As I’m waiting for the kettle to boil, I’m still churning this mystery over in my head. Suddenly, it hits me. Without making my tea, I run back upstairs, grab my phone and dial.

  ‘It’s me,’ I say breathlessly into the receiver.

  ‘Hullo, me,’ Malachi replies calmly at the other end. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘There are more postcards,’ I say, not wasting any time.

  ‘More postcards? Where?’

  ‘If they’re not in Daisy-Rose, then they have to be somewhere else.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  I tell Malachi about the huge gap in the dates on the cards.

  ‘It’s possible, I guess.’

  ‘It has to be – otherwise why would Lou stop writing?’

  ‘There could be many reasons.’

  ‘No, I’ve been through all of them. I’m certain there are more.’

  ‘Look, do you want to come over and discuss it?’ Malachi asks. He sounds very relaxed, and I’m sure I can hear the sea in the background and the cries of gulls. ‘I’m not up to anything this evening, are you?’

  ‘Er… no.’

  ‘Great. Ralph and I are parked up on the cliff overlooking the bay. It’s a gorgeous sunset this evening.’

  ‘I know. I can see it from my window. What do you mean you’re parked up? Are you in a car?’

  ‘Noo, as if. We’re in Pegasus.’

  ‘What’s Pegasus?’

  ‘My van, of course!’

  ‘Oh, your camper van. I forgot you had one too – sorry.’

  ‘You’ll find us easily enough. It’s a green and cream bay.’

  ‘Where you’re parked is?’

  ‘No, my van is green and cream – it has a bay window. Remember I told you about split screen and bay windows?’

  ‘Oh yes, so you did.’

  ‘So we’ll be seeing you soon then?’

  ‘Sure, okay, I’ll walk up. It’ll take me a few minutes, though, if you’re where I think you are – it’s a fair way from here.’

  ‘No worries, we’re not going anywhere. We’ll see you in a bit.’

  Assuming it will be cold up on the cliff, I pull on a sweater before locking up the house, then I make my way through the town and up along the cliff path until I see a green and cream camper van parked up. It’s pulled off the road on to some rough grass, and as I get closer I see Malachi and Ralph sitting amiably next to each other on a rug to the side of it. They’re facing the sea, and they both look so peaceful as they sit gazing out into the sunset that I almost don’t want to go over and disturb them.

  But my movement disturbs Ralph; he turns his head and barks at me. Malachi puts his hand on his back to quieten him, then he sees me coming across the grass towards them and waves.

  ‘I almost didn’t want to interrupt you,’ I tell him, as I arrive next to them. I pat Ralph’s head and he licks me. ‘You both looked so calm there looking out over the ocean.’

  ‘Nature at its finest,’ Malachi says quietly, looking back towards the sunset. ‘God is definitely showing off his skills tonight.’

  ‘It’s very pretty,’ I agree. ‘So how come you’re parked up here?’ I ask, looking at the van. ‘Is it allowed?’

  Malachi shrugs. ‘Sort of. I can park here temporarily, but I can’t park overnight.’

  ‘Why would you want to park here overnight?’

  Malachi turns to me, grinning. ‘To camp, of course! If the sun is like this this evening, imagine what it will be like in the morning – glorious!’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Bob’s yard doesn’t quite have the same views, plus I’ve seen that vista a few too many mornings already.’

 
‘You’re sleeping in your van?’ I ask in surprise. ‘What – all the time while you’re here?’

  ‘Nope, not all the time while I’m here, all the time full stop.’

  I look at him, puzzled. ‘You live… in this?’ I turn to the camper van now. It’s in a lot better state than Daisy-Rose. Malachi obviously dotes on it. Even though the sun is fading fast in the sky, I can see clearly how the paintwork and chrome have been polished to perfection.