Chapter Three
The tiny front hall, where we were installed on a borrowed mattress on the floor, was a narrow passage that led to the front door, which was the ‘back’ door and never used. Everybody who entered Railway Cottages, except strangers, did so via the Court. They ignored the row of front gardens with their little gates, came down the Court and rapped on the back door which led straight into the back parlour or kitchen, the centre of the world in each cottage. If a stranger entered the gardens, walked the length of the terrace and banged on the front door, he was shouted at through the locks and bolts to come round the back, which was always open.
In the privacy of our mini-domain we stared at Mum’s postcard by candlelight – a first for us – and considered our code. Jack held the pencil. ‘How many kisses shall we put?’
I had no doubts. ‘I vote three.’
‘Hmm. I’m not sure.’
‘Come on yere, you two. What’s all this? Up-a-dando, into bed.’
Suddenly our new – surrogate – mother was with us. Jack slipped the postcard under his pillow – too late; she had seen but she said nothing. I think I remember her putting us to bed that first night, at once making us feel at home, secure. But perhaps my memory is playing me false and I am running many bedtimes into one because sometimes we are in the hall on the floor (where we were occasionally put when visitors stayed) and sometimes we are upstairs in what became our room. However, whichever place it was, there was always her warmth, her smiling good humour, her tact with two children who were not her own, just the presence of her. ‘Come on, then. Who’s going at which end?’
I grabbed the corner to snuggle into. But Jack was doubtful.
‘Will there be enough air for him in the corner? You see . . .’ He trailed off unhappily. ‘He won’t tell you, but—’
‘Oh no,’ I breathed. He was splitting on me.
‘I must.’
‘Must what, boy?’
‘He gets asthma.’
‘I don’t. Not much.’
‘All right, all right, young ’un. I won’t tell anyone.’ She turned to Jack and treated his concern with careful respect. ‘Now listen, you – Jack. We can’t open the front door, we’ll have God knows what animals and creepy-crawlies in yere, but we’ll leave the door to the front room open; there’ll be lots of air and he’ll be able to breathe there in the corner, you take my word. I know ’bout asthma. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Phillips.’
‘Did your mam tell you to see about the air?’
‘No, I thought of it myself.’
‘Did you now? You’re a fine boy. Now into bed, go on. No. Wait a minute. Do you say your prayers at night?’
We stared.
‘All right, I’ll say a prayer for both of you. In you get. My Jack’s a heathen, too. Look, boys, if you want to go outside during the night you got this yere. D’you see?’ She showed us a flowered jerry, hidden under a cloth.
We knew what a jerry was, of course, but her phraseology confused us. ‘Why should we go outside?’ asked two boys brought up in modern, plumbed Welling.
‘To go down the garden, of course. To the privy.’
‘Oh, yes. Outside. Sorry, Mrs Phillips.’ We had already used the odorous, unattractive privies, one feature of our life in Cornwall that I remember without affection. There were two cubicles, each a wooden two-seater, making four places in all. Though four people sitting there simultaneously doesn’t bear thinking about.
‘Auntie Rose, I said you call me. Right?’
‘But you’re not our auntie. Our auntie’s in Portslade.’
‘No, no, I’m not. You’re right. You call me Auntie Rose when you want to, is it?’
I wriggled down into the soft feather mattress we were to sleep on. ‘Cor, it’s ever so nice in here.’
‘There. Look at you. As snug as bugs in a rug.’
‘What?’
‘Tha’s what we say. As snug as a bug in a rug. Only there’s two bugs in my rug.’
‘I’m not a bug,’ said Jack, enjoying himself.
‘He’s a bugger sometimes.’
Her face momentarily showed that I had gone too far.
Jack was in at once. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs – um – he didn’t mean to say that. He’s just stupid sometimes.’
‘I’m not. You are.’
‘Well, he’s young, isn’t he? When he gets to your age he’ll know better. Now I’m going to put out the candle, if you’re ready?’
‘Could you leave it, please?’
‘Don’t you like the dark?’
‘No, it’s not that. We got to – um – do something.’
‘It’s bedtime now.’
‘We got to send a card to Mum and Dad.’
‘This one?’ She had moved round, sat on the floor and satisfied her curiosity about what we had been up to when she came in by producing the postcard from under the pillow.
We were dismayed. ‘Yes.’
‘Is that your writing? It’s very grown-up.’
‘No, it’s Mum’s.’
‘Well, she’s already written the card.’
‘We got to put your address on it.’
‘Well, you’ve done it, haven’t you? Yes, that’s more like your writing. That’s not how you spell Liskeard. I’ll do you another card in the morning. A nice new one with a picture. How’s that?’
‘No, no. We got to put something else on.’
‘What’s that?’
She was met with silence.
‘Well?’ she asked gently.
‘Er – kisses.’
‘All right, then. We can do that, too, in the morning.’
‘We want to do it.’
‘By ourselves.’
She stared at us, reading something special and prepared to give us our heads now that she knew that we were up to no mischief. When she spoke again her voice was even more gentle, more reassuring than she had sounded so far. ‘All right, then. You do it by yourselves, is it? That’s right. You got something to write with?’
‘Yes. Here. A pencil.’
‘All right, then. I’ll leave the candle lit and then come back again and watch you put it out the right way. We don’t want a fire, do we? Your mam wouldn’t like that.’ And she left us.
‘How many kisses?’
‘I vote three.’ I had no doubts.
‘Perhaps we should take one off cos we’re on the floor, not even a bed.’ Jack continued to take his older-brother responsibilities seriously.
‘I don’t care.’
‘There’s no taps in the house.’
‘It’s triffic here. Trains and everything.’
I am sure he felt the same as I did but wanted to be sure. ‘What about no electricity?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘And no lavatory.’ It was his last try.
I went on stubbornly, ‘I don’t care.’
He relaxed. ‘Me neither.’ At last he said what we were both feeling. ‘It’s like being on holiday only there’s no sea.’
‘We could put four,’ I said. ‘The more we put, the happier Mum and Dad will be.’
‘D’you think so?’
‘Yeah.’
We ringed the card with kisses and posted it next morning.
Chapter Four
When Jack and I ringed that card with kisses there was an unintended symbolism: Jack and I were ringed with love, though we didn’t know it and would have been embarrassed to have used such words.
Our foster-parents Rose and Jack Phillips were Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack to everybody in Doublebois. This was extraordinary: they were not Cornish; they had only lived in the tightly knit little hamlet for ten or fifteen years (a blink in rural timescales); he was neither church nor chapel, though she occasionally went to church and – even more occasionally – dragged him along. Yet even the ancient Mrs Moore next door and Granny Peters, two doors up the Court, a whole generation older than them, always called them in the broadest
Cornish Ahn’ee Rose and Uncle Jack. It was clearly some sort of tribute to their characters. He was a South Wales miner turned platelayer on the Great Western Railway. Their own two sons and one daughter were grown-up. Uncle Jack had been in the trenches in the First World War, in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, involved in some very heavy fighting. He had been invalided out with shrapnel wounds. Our father had been too young to be conscripted for the First World War and was just too old for this one, while Jack and I were – as yet – too young. We were a lucky family. But Uncle Jack and his sons fell precisely into the wrong age groups.
Two others who were in the wrong age group were a pair of soldiers, privates, who were the reason for Jack and me having to top ’n’ tail for a few nights on the mattress in the hall. They were up in the back, or I should say front, bedroom and were direct from Dunkirk, stationed in the grounds of Doublebois House, a large Victorian mansion which stood in its own substantial wooded grounds with two gated entrances just down and across the road from Railway Cottages. It had been turned into an Army camp, complete with Nissen huts up the twin drives to the big house, where the officers were. When we arrived, immediately after the Army’s retreat from France, the whole place was overflowing. Soldiers were billeted anywhere and everywhere. I don’t know how the local people had found room for us vackies.
One of our two soldiers was bright and nervous, the other had undergone some sort of shock and just sat staring into space the whole time he was there. The bright one smoked a lot and winked at Jack and me about his companion, making light of something that clearly concerned him. He tended his comrade’s every need, taking him out to the wash-house to shave him and leading him to the outside privy. I felt simultaneously grown-up to be taken into his confidence and embarrassed about an adult taking so much trouble to reassure us boys. We watched them with childhood’s detached curiosity.
I can see Auntie Rose’s concerned, unhappy face when she looked at the benumbed soldier and offered him food and drink. And, even more, Uncle Jack’s quiet, respectful movements when he entered his own house with this damaged man in it. He had been there and understood. Then, quite soon and suddenly, they were gone in a roar of army lorries, and Jack and I shared the front bedroom, which was the back bedroom and looked down the gardens, over the outdoor privies behind their discreet hedges, across a cornfield, the railway line in full view on the right as it rose out of the cutting and curved away towards Liskeard, Plymouth and England, where we had come from. Yes, with Welsh foster parents in Cornwall and sentries guarding Saltash Bridge, we soon learned that the River Tamar was a frontier.
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 i
nto 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.
Kisses on a Postcard Page 4
