We were waiting one evening in Plymouth North Road station buffet for a train that was very late. ‘Bombing up the line’ was the dark rumour. Jack had bought a miniature sheath knife in its leather sheath, something he had been coveting and saving for for ages. He kept taking it from the shopping bag, unclipping the press-stud fastening round the handle and half withdrawing the glistening blade. Our heads bent over it as we experimented: should he hang it from his belt at the side or secretly at the back like a hunter’s knife? It was a formidable purchase. The date was 20 March 1941. It was a Thursday, the first of the two nights on which the Luftwaffe wiped the centre of Plymouth from the face of the earth.
‘Come on, boys,’ said Auntie Rose. ‘Put that knife away till the proper time. When you get home you play with that, not in yere. You’ll lose it.’
She was interrupted by the sound of a distant siren. The whole buffet went silent. ‘Oh Duw, what was that?’ she breathed.
‘An air-raid siren,’ said Jack superfluously.
‘They’re a long way—’
She drew in her breath as the heart-stopping, low-pitched whirr and whine that develops into the shattering wail of a siren started up close by. The voices broke out again into a hubbub and a Devon accent rose above them all to say, ‘All passengers in the subway, please. At once. Come along now, my lovelies. Let’s be ’avin’ you.’
We all hurried out on to the platform and headed down the ramps into the subways under the tracks. The sound of gunfire was clearly audible some way off. Auntie Rose gathered us on either side of her on a bench, shopping bags on the floor before us.
‘Are they bombs?’ I asked Jack.
‘No, they’re our guns, shooting the Jerries down. Bombs whistle.’ He was rooting about in the shopping bags. Suddenly there was panic in his voice. ‘My knife. Where’s my knife? My new sheath knife is gone.’
Auntie Rose grabbed a bag. ‘Perhaps it’s in this one. Yere, let’s see.’
But Jack was gone, racing down the subway out of sight. ‘I left it in the buffet. I left it in the buffet.’
Auntie Rose was distraught. ‘Come back, come back, boy, you can’t . . .’ Her voice faded into disbelief. ‘He’s gone.’
I had been searching in the first bag. ‘Here’s the knife, Auntie Rose. It’s in this bag. I’ve got it here. Jack, I got it. Come back. Come back.’ And I set off after Jack, ignoring Auntie Rose’s agonised voice as the tumult outside grew louder. I flew between the huddled groups of people, turned a corner and stared up the slope towards platform-level. No Jack; he had already gone. As I started to run up the slope there was an even louder bang than before and bits of glass and debris flew about at platform-level. I stopped, terrified, and stood bawling near the bottom of the slope, afraid to move, when hands grabbed me and pulled me back round the corner.
‘’Ere, boy, come yere. I got you. You can’t stand out there.’
I sobbed, ‘Let me go. My brother. My brother’s up there.’
‘What? Your brother?’
‘He lost his knife. We’ve got it.’
‘What you talking about?’
Before I could say more I heard Auntie Rose’s voice. ‘Here, Terry. Here he is. With me. He came back.’
And there stood Jack. His courage, like mine, had failed at the sight and sound of the real war. Auntie Rose led us back to our bench, sat down and enfolded us both. ‘Oh boys, come yere. You give me heart failure, you did. Both of you.’
God knows what hell we had put her through in those few moments. How do you explain to their parents that your two charges ran up into the bombing and were blown to bits looking for a sheath knife that was in your shopping bag all the time?
‘I was going to go,’ Jack assured me. ‘It was only that you stopped me.’
‘So was I,’ I affirmed, equally inaccurately.
We spent the night sitting on the bench while the inferno raged above us. My principal memory, after the initial knife panic, was that, no matter how I shook with fright, the bench, which sat about ten people, always quaked at a different rhythm, and I couldn’t get my bottom synchronised to the common tempo of terror.
The next morning was the first day of spring. We stood among glass and bits on the platform till a train took us across the miraculously unscathed Saltash Bridge. Plymouth was ablaze, smoke hung everywhere; a high proportion of the bombs had been incendiary. The warships still lurked, apparently intact, in Devonport Docks and the Tamar Estuary, out of the way. Or perhaps their fire had been so intense that it was easier for the bombers to unload onto the undefended civilian centre of the city. Apparently the RAF had ready four antiquated Gloster Gladiator biplanes as air defence. I am not sure whether they ever actually took off.
At each station groups of people met the train to ask for news or just to stare at us. And there at the end of the platform at Doublebois stood Uncle Jack looking ridiculously small and vulnerable till he saw the three of us waving wildly from a window. Then his shut face burst open into a grin that threatened to tear it in two. He hurried down the platform, took her shopping bags from her, put them on the ground and hugged Auntie Rose. It was a rare enough event to see them touching, let alone this display. He just said, ‘Oh Duw, girl. There you are. There you are.’
‘Of course I am. What d’you think? Let me go, you fool. People are watching.’ She was flushed and pleased.
‘You looked after her, boys, did you, for me?’
We couldn’t wait to tell him about it. ‘It was triffic, Uncle Jack.’
‘I was ever so scared.’
‘I’ll bet you were, boy. I thought I’d got rid of you all at last. But there’s no peace for the wicked, is there?’
All of that day in the sky to the east hung a pall of smoke which turned to a red glow at dusk. Then the bombers returned.
A small crowd of us gathered in the gardens of the cottages to watch, a safer place than the subway under North Road station. In the distance there were flashes and distant crumps while the searchlights reflected off the smoke pall. The glow under it which was Plymouth grew brighter.
‘Oh, God, ’tis not possible.’
‘Will anyone be left?’
Miss Polmanor had the explanation for it all. ‘ ’Tis hell here on earth. ’Tis the inferno come to punish us.’
‘Not us.’ Someone pointed at the pyre in the distance. ‘Them.’
‘Let us pray to God to strike Hitler dead.’
‘If God wanted Hitler dead he wouldn’t wait for her to ask,’ muttered another.
The Plummers, joined by Elsie, stood silently and watched their city being destroyed. Elsie didn’t know if her mother, who had run off with the sailor while her father was away in the Army, was there or not.
‘Are you sure my mum’s not there, Auntie Rose?’
‘Course not, my lovely. Don’t you worry.’ Auntie Rose sounded convincing.
A neighbour added quietly, ‘’Er’s crying for her mother; ’er mother never gave ’er a moment’s thought.’
‘Is that what’s happening in London to our mum and dad?’ asked Jack.
Uncle Jack was stumped for a moment. ‘No, it’s not nearly so – London’s enormous, Plymouth’s small – it just looks – worse . . .’ he trailed off feebly.
‘It’s why we’m all vackies,’ said a Plummer boy.
And Auntie Rose held me tighter than before.
The fires could not be put out; they were beyond the scope of the fire services of several cities to deal with. Most of East Cornwall and South Devon watched Plymouth burn for nearly a week, under that pall of smoke all day and that red glow at night, like a false dawn.
The Germans returned for three successive nights a month later and the whole business was repeated. This time, with shopping trips cancelled, we watched the destruction from the safety of our bedroom window, magnifying our own former heroic parts in it. Auntie Rose told us that she had spent that entire night when we were under the bombers worrying about how, if we were killed, Unc
le Jack could possibly explain to our parents why she had taken us into danger in Plymouth.
Chapter Nine
Uncle Jack didn’t take long to get Jack and me singing. His success with Gwyn, and his natural inclinations, led him. I am not so sure about Jack’s enthusiasm for it but he went with it, anyway. On the other hand I was a very willing pupil and soon heard his views on many subjects as a result. One day he was taking me through a hymn, trying to get me to make sense of it. I sang without thought, breathing automatically at the end of each line:
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away.
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
Having listened he said casually, ‘That’s right, boy. Not bad. If we got to bother God this Sunday let’s bother him with a decent bit of sense, eh? Not all that slop about living eternally in heaven with Him, eh? There’s nothing cosy about time bearing its sons away. Pretty agnostic, really, innit, for a hymn?’
‘What’s agnostic, Uncle Jack?’
‘It’s halfway to good sense, boy. Atheism says there’s no God; agnostic says I’m not sure. I don’t suppose the chap that wrote any hymn’s a real atheist, so we’ll have to do with halfway house. Now, let’s have it again but we’ll hit ’em with a bit o’ clever phrasing this time, so they listen. Look yere, take your breaths where I marked the page. See? Then they’ll have to think a minute. Not that any of ’em do in church, but you never know.’
‘There is only one God, isn’t there, Uncle Jack?’
‘At most.’
‘Then why are church and chapel different?’
I had got him on to one of his favourite rants. He leaned in confidentially. ‘Well, you see, boy, church is a lot of lying, hypocritical, God-bothering, sinful Tories.’ He paused, hoping I would ask the question. I did.
‘And what’s chapel?’
‘Chapel is church without the poetry.’ Having got that one off his chest he returned with vigour to the matter in hand. ‘Come on now, with sense this time. Breathe where I marked it and start off with a big ’un.’
I gave it to him as instructed, one breath for the first two lines. I could just make it. ‘“Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away.” ’ Big breath. ‘ “They fly forgotten,” ’ a quick breath, the remainder smoothly rolled out in one, ‘as a dream Dies at the opening day.” ’ I let the last word hang and fade as my breath ran out.
There was a moment before he spoke. ‘There is lovely, my Terry. There is a beautiful voice you do have there. Makes me cry to year you. A scruffy little cockney with a voice like an angel.’
But I was learning his language. ‘You don’t believe in angels.’
He grinned and made to cuff me. ‘Only when I hear them sing.’
I dared to be too intrusive in this cosy atmosphere. ‘Why don’t you believe in God, Uncle Jack?’
He leaned back and looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Perhaps I should turn that question round and ask you why you do believe.’
Like so many of his remarks this was too fundamental for an eight-year-old. I thought and stared at him, my head in a whirl. ‘Everybody does.’
‘Do they? I’m not so sure about your dad and mam.’
More things to grapple with that I hadn’t thought about.
‘You know, boy, I was a Christian once. Brought up into it like all of us. Then, when I was in the trenches in the last war – the one before this one, two before the next – we went forward through no-man’s-land one night and captured some German dugouts. They’d made them quite homely. Very tidy, except for the dead body on one of the bunks. D’you know what was written on the wall?’
Of course I didn’t as I tried to visualise this macabre domestic scene.
‘Three words. In German. Gott mit uns. D’you know what that means?’
I was no more prescient than a moment ago.
‘It means “God’s on our side.” ’ He smiled at me. ‘Well. And all the time I had thought he was on ours. There was silly of me. He was backing both sides. Or neither.’
Suddenly I was on firmer ground. I came in hotly, ‘Those Germans were wrong. He was on our side. We won that war.’
Uncle Jack was unperturbed, continuing to smile sadly at me. ‘You’re right. So we did. I forgot for a moment.’
‘And we’ll win this one too.’ I restrained myself from pointing an imaginary Bren gun at him and making the appropriate firing noises.
‘I’m sure you’re right, boy. Let’s hope so.’
‘Can I go out to play now? The soldiers are coming back from manoeuvres.’
‘Have you written to your mam and dad this week?’
‘I was going to.’
‘Mam and dad first.’ He winked at being able to get both the last word and the last joke in. ‘You don’t want them thinking we’re all heathens down yere in Cornwall, do you?’
On the mantelpiece over the range in the living room of 7 Railway Cottages sat the two little brass shells in their cases with their soldered-on badges of the Prince of Wales: the three feathers and Ich dien on a scroll beneath, part of the cap badge of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. These shells, standing some seven or eight inches high, were treasures to us. We were fascinated by them. I think they were live. I can remember handling them again and again, feeling their weight, their shape, their menace. They were from the First World War, we knew, something to do with Uncle Jack’s past. He would not tell us. At some point we had made some sort of deal with him about practising and the shells. One evening we sang ‘The Ash Grove’ in harmony for him and Auntie Rose. She was, as always, full of praise.
‘That’s lovely, boys,’ she said, glowing.
Uncle Jack was more cautious. ‘That’s right, both of you. Not bad. You sound as though you’re thinking what you’re singing as well as making a beautiful sound.’
Jack was in at once. ‘You going to tell us now, then, Uncle Jack?’
He looked shifty. ‘Oh, well, I’m not sure.’
‘You promised when we got “The Ash Grove” right,’ I chimed.
Auntie Rose was instantly alert. ‘Promised what?’
Uncle Jack squirmed more. ‘I didn’t say it was right. I said it’s not bad.’
‘He said he’d tell us the story of the Army badges on the two shells on the mantelpiece. And Ich dien,’ we clamoured.
She looked upset. ‘Oh Jack, what do they want to year all that old history for? Horrible war stories. Isn’t this one enough? Our Gwyn’s out there, you know.’
Uncle Jack was surprisingly mild. ‘They’re boys, Rose, not wurzels.’
Jack and I were already dancing round the room, firing guns and making boyish noises. ‘Rat-at-tat-tat. Boom. Crash. Gwyn’s a Desert Rat.’
Auntie Rose got to her feet. ‘To the chickens, me. Get the eggs. The hens do talk more sense than you.’
And we were left to hear the stories of the First World War, Uncle Jack’s war. ‘I was in the bantams’ battalion, see. If you was under five foot you weren’t accepted at first. Good enough to dig coal, too small to fight, they said. Then after our High Command had let the Germans slaughter most of the good men they needed more cannon fodder so they took us titches. We made a whole battalion: the Welsh Bantams. We was in the line up against the Prussian Guards, big fine fellers, all of ’em over six foot tall. How ’bout that?’
We were horrified: he knew how to tell a story.
‘Cor, that’s not fair.’
‘That’s terrible.’
He smiled, having caught us, an easy thing to do. ‘Oh, no. Not so silly. Every man’s the same height when a bullet hits him. He’s horizontal.’
‘That’s brilliant.’ His views of generals and others in charge were already well known to us. ‘Our High Command weren’t so stupid, Uncle Jack. They thought of that.’
He changed at once, growling angrily. ‘Don’t let me catch you saying any good of our leaders, boy. Especially that particular lot
. They were just men like you will be sooner than you think. What were we doing fighting at all? Ernie Bevin tried to stop it with a general strike but they called him a traitor. Now, in this lot, he’s in the Govern—’
Politics had got him again and he needed to be rechannelled. ‘But the shells and the badges. What happened in the Great War?’
His response was sharp. ‘Great War, eh? Who taught you that?’
‘It’s on the war memorial in the village.’
‘Huh. Great.’ He went into himself for a moment. ‘Great, indeed.’ He remembered us and gathered himself again for the story. ‘First we was up against the Saxons. They was all right. They didn’t like the war no more ’n we did. We used to put up a tin helmet on the end of a rifle for their snipers to take potshots at. Then they did the same for us and we scored points. The officers stopped that. Said it was giving them practice. Practice? Huh. Nobody needed it.’
‘But what does “Ich dien’’ mean?’
‘It’s Welsh for “I serve”. The Prince of Wales’s feather and his motto. It’s funny, “ich’’ is like German. It’s more German than English. But we’re Celts, dark and small, different from you Anglo-Saxons, fair-haired like them buggers.’
‘Are Jack and me Saxons?’
‘Were the Prussian Guards fair, too?’
‘Some of ’em, yes. A thousand of them were in this wood near the Somme. There was a thousand of us, too. Our artillery started shelling them. Their artillery started shelling us. Everyone got blown to bits. Who killed who? I don’t know. Bloody fools. Trees like used matchsticks stuck in the mud. Then it got cold. German and Welsh dead frozen together, bayonets in each other. Next morning the frost had made them all white; it didn’t look real, like some hellish wedding cake. “Those whom death hath joined together let no man put asunder.” Seventeen of us came out alive. We got one of those insignia each.’
Kisses on a Postcard Page 9
