A man asked the question all Americans got asked. ‘Where you been to these last three years? ’Tis nearly all over.’ But it was lost on these two and somehow seemed scarcely fair. All of our images of America were white – with blacks occasionally being goofy or loyal in the background.
The second GI asked, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but we see you have two churches in your city. Is one – maybe – all right for coloured folk to worship in?’
‘They be Church of England and Wesleyan Methodist. Which be you?’
‘We’re Baptist.’
‘I reckon that’s the same as Methodist, don’t you, Miss Polmanor?’ someone asked maliciously.
There was another camp concert given with the ubiquitous Looe Fishermen’s Choir performing and us kids singing traditional and patriotic songs for our guests. Then their own jazz band played for us. It was sensational; the whole room was soon rocking. I had never heard music like it. But when GIs started jitterbugging there and then in the aisles with each other and the few girls who were present – their dresses swirling up above their waists – it went too far for most. Opinion about our guests’ behaviour divided between those who couldn’t wait to join in – mostly girls – some who didn’t mind, and most – or possibly the most vocal – who were shocked rigid. The arguments to support the shocked-rigid view became wider and wilder. A dance at the army camp, always an attraction for the younger females in entertainment-free Doublebois, Dobwalls and wider, became a must for all who could or dared.
And these smiling, flamboyant-to-us, gentle men who came from God knows what hells in the Deep South of the segregated USA let us pat and pull their hair, rub their skin to see if it came off, examine their pink palms, marvel at their very existence – and then they were gone just as suddenly as they had appeared and were replaced by other Yanks, white ones, no less friendly, no less generous, but with not a tenth of the exotic appeal of their black comrades.
Chapter Fifteen
Fighting was a part of living for a boy, most boys I suppose, in those days. I know that I was always willing to defend myself or my position or my rights even if the other boy was a bit bigger. And not just to defend myself. I was willing to attack, too. If he was too big I would hit him and run. I don’t think I was brave; we just thought like that. It established pecking orders and settled disputes, even for boys as young as me. At first the vackies fought the village kids. When that calmed down and many vackies had returned home – quite a few simply became fourteen, left school and went home to work – so that we were outnumbered, we fought each other, God knows what about. I remember having a strolling casual fight with Alan Packham all the way home from school one day while his older brother Harold walked with us and looked on. We were evenly matched in age and size; we walked a bit, punched a bit, walked and skirmished, breathing heavily from emotion as much as exertion; it was inconclusive. When he reached his house, the district nurse’s house across the road, he went in and I walked the few yards to the Court. I crept into the wash-house, washed the blood off and bathed the scratches from where we had fallen into the hedge as we grappled, before going in for my tea. Such things can’t have been as casual as all that, feelings and passions were clearly involved, but that is how I remember them, the causes long forgotten.
There was one fight, though, that was serious and stays in my memory. I was just ten, we had been in Cornwall for nearly three years and had just been given our end-of-term reports for Easter term 1943. By this time in the war the bombing seemed to be over so most of the vackies had already gone home (though we still had the V1 and V2 raids to come). We few who were left had been incorporated into the village school. I was top of my class and, indeed, the whole school, which had pupils up to the age of fourteen. This was no great academic achievement, the bright kids over eleven were already creamed off to Liskeard County School, and the child who came second to me was an eight-year-old Jewish boy in my class called Goodman, a recently bombed-out vacky from another part of London. He was, unlike me, a genuinely clever boy, two years younger, breathing down my neck and looking as though he would soon pass me. Jack, having reached fourteen, was going to go back home to Woolwich Polytechnic to extend his education. I was soon to sit the entrance exam for grammar school, an event dreaded by most, but not by me. Coming top must have made me insufferable, certainly to my brother. I don’t remember precisely what happened but perhaps I crowed once too often, perhaps a teacher said something to Jack about me being an example to him – as though he hadn’t had enough of that all of his life. Perhaps a combination of the two. It could even be that I was less guilty for the fracas than I still feel about it and Jack was less generous than I am painting him.
Anyway, he who had shown a whole childhood’s forbearance to his uppity young brother, hit me on the way home from school. This was a huge shock. I was surprised and hurt, not necessarily physically, and I furiously ran at him to hit him back. He defended himself easily and we had a long trail back to Doublebois, walking apart, punctuated with futile rushes from me and flung insults – I was good at those – between bitter sobs and recriminations. The other children kept well ahead, walking briskly on and staying out of this family squabble.
At home Auntie Rose quickly got to the bottom of who we had been fighting: each other. She was shocked. ‘You hit your little brother?’ she demanded of Jack in a voice that frightened us both and had him in tears of guilt and shame. I was sent out to the wash-house to clean myself up and put cold water – as though there was any other sort to wash in – on the back of my neck to stop the nosebleed. She was closeted with Jack and the two reports. I listened outside the window.
To my surprise I heard Jack receive no telling off for hitting me – though he cried from time to time and I could hear the indrawn sobs as he tried to stop himself. Instead, Auntie Rose paid him strings of compliments about how he had taken on the responsibility of me when we were originally evacuated, how he had looked after me, what a good boy he was, how he was always helpful and hard-working, utterly trustworthy, how he looked after his allotment and produced food for us all, how much she admired him because he was so like Uncle Jack, who had looked after her and their children through the awful time of the Great Depression. And, biggest surprise of all, how clever he was. Not just book-and-sums clever like me, but really clever and Wise about Life. When he was back in London and at the Poly he would soon overtake me and then we would all see. She called me in and sent me on an errand.
When I returned Uncle Jack had arrived home from work. He and Auntie Rose were closeted together briefly. He went out to the wash-house. Still in neutral gear with me she handed me my report and told me to take it out to him. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Surprise him. See what he thinks about that.’ Auntie Rose, impressed by learning, was normally very pleased by my reports, so I was fooled.
No matter what my report and the teachers said I was clearly pretty slow in some departments because, as I took it to him, pride reasserted itself; I was expecting more praise. ‘I’ve got my report, Uncle Jack.’
‘Oh yes?’ he said non-committally.
‘From school.’
‘From school? That’s unusual. Fancy, your report comes from school. Get me a bowl of water from the tap, there’s a lad. I’ll wash some of this muck off.’
I couldn’t go fast enough. But Uncle Jack stripped off his jacket and hung it up, then his waistcoat, carefully rolled up his sleeves, sluiced his arms, hands, face and shining bald head. He dried off, took me into the house, removed his boots, put on his glasses and sat in the armchair to read the golden report.
I was bursting. ‘I got all nines and tens. I only lost five marks in the whole exam. Every subject.’
‘Five marks?’ He was sharp. ‘Five? What d’you lose them for?’
I gaped at the question, breathless. My world turned upside down. It’s not what you achieve, but how far you fall short that matters. ‘Er – well – um – well – I – er – two were silly mistakes, I really knew
the answers, and three were taken off for untidiness.’
‘Carelessness, is it? I’m bringing up carelessness yere, am I? That won’t do, will it, boy? Let’s see all tens next time.’
‘But I came top of the whole school. Some of them are nearly fifteen.’
Uncle Jack was contemptuous. ‘Bloody yokels. Clods. Cockneys and farm labourers. What do they know? Tens, boy, next time. Tens. And less of this untidiness. And remember: when you’re top dog no one likes a clever Dick. That often results in losing friends, the ones you might call thick. And if you think I’m being hard, well, life’s never bloody fair. Pass me the newspaper.’
We had our tea. The meal seemed to be finished and only Jack and I sat, still subdued, at the table. Auntie Rose put a bowl in front of each of us. ‘Yere you are, your favourite: blackberry-and-apple pie, over from Sunday. But I’m not sure you deserve it.’
She left us to get on with what we thought was the best pudding ever. I had an idea. ‘I’m not hungry, Jack. Would you like mine?’
He stared at me and at my plate, aware that there was more to this offer than pie, but not sure what. ‘D’you mean that?’
‘Yes. Honest.’
‘OK.’ Somewhere round about then the penny must have dropped. ‘No. I’ll tell you what: I’ll have half.’
‘OK.’
I carefully cut mine into halves and spooned one of them onto his plate, watched by him. He looked at my plate, then at his full one. ‘There’s too much there. I can’t eat all of that. Would you like half of mine?’
‘All right.’
Jack measured and cut his portion, picked up his plate and carefully spooned half of his pie onto my plate till both were equally charged. ‘That’s fair, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
We ate our blackberry-and-apple pie in the peace brokered by Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack.
Jack and I were doing our homework after school one evening. Auntie Rose was listening to something on the radio so we were banished to the front room instead of the cosiness of the kitchen table in the middle of the life of the house. This was unusual so we went grumpily. Uncle Jack came in from work. The radio was turned up but we easily heard why we had been sent out. She said, quite quietly, ‘Elsie’s pregnant.’
‘There’s a surprise,’ said Uncle Jack, showing none whatsoever.
‘Three months gone.’
‘Who knows?’
‘Miss Polmanor, for one.’
‘Everybody, then.’
There was a silence broken only by the radio as Jack and I breathlessly listened. Auntie Rose broke it. ‘I wonder if she knows who the father is.’
Uncle Jack’s footsteps were taking him to the back door and the wash-house. They stopped. ‘If you eat a tin of baked beans how do you know which one made you fart?’ And his steps receded before she could answer.
I found Elsie down the gardens beyond the outside privies, somewhere she didn’t usually go. She was crying. This upset me terribly, no childhood outbreak of tears but something grown-up and important. ‘Elsie, Elsie, don’t cry. I love you.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she sobbed.
‘I’ll stay here with you.’
‘Bugger off.’ I didn’t move. ‘Go on, bugger off. Leave me alone.’
I ran back to the house. ‘Auntie Rose, Auntie Rose.’
‘Calm down, boy. What’s up?’
‘Elsie’s crying,’ was all I could think of saying.
‘She’ll do a lot more of that.’
‘Have I got to marry her?’ I blurted out.
At last Auntie Rose reacted in a way that matched the situation. ‘What?’ She stared at me.
‘I’m the father.’
She laughed, an entirely unexpected event. ‘Don’t be silly, boy.’
‘But I am. I—’ I struggled to express what we had done. What had we done? I wasn’t at all sure. ‘I – I kissed her.’
I was dismissed. ‘If you’ve finished your homework you can go out and play. Go on.’
I started to cry, not at all sure why. ‘But I love her. She said she loves me.’
‘It’s not what she said to you that matters. It’s what she did with someone else. Go on. Out.’
Elsie and I met frequently in spite of her telling me to bugger off. I was someone she could share things with, after all. Life must have been a bleak business living with Miss Polmanor. I have no idea what Auntie Rose’s views were, moral or practical, on the subject of unmarried pregnancies – and I cannot believe she condoned them – but her natural compassion asserted itself. Elsie was a girl she was fond of who needed help. That was that. Uncle Jack, equally kind, would always go along with his wife in such matters, anyway. So Elsie was an even more frequent visitor to 7 Railway Cottages. The rest of Doublebois more or less accepted it: ‘There’s a war on.’ Pregnant girls were becoming more numerous everywhere – especially since the Yanks had arrived. Although on that score there were those who thought girls who went with Yanks were not only tarts but also traitors to ‘Our Boys’.
When everyone else was out, Elsie and I giggled over her rounded tummy. ‘That’s the baby. D’you remember when you didn’t believe me about babies?’
‘I was young then.’
‘Feel it. It moves.’
I did and was startled, repulsed, I think. ‘Erggh. ’Slike a frog squirming.’
‘I hope ’er’s a Yank. They was best,’ was a remark she often made to my shocked ears.
I hadn’t seen her for a while when I saw her walking down the road from Dobwalls. I ran to meet her and laughed with shocked surprise. ‘Cor, Elsie, your stomach’s enormous.’
She was in no mood for childish pleasantries. Her face was set. Her mood angry. ‘They’re going to send me away.’
I was stopped in my tracks. ‘Oh no.’
‘To a home, they said. Where I’ll be looked after, they said.’
I was desperate. ‘I’ll look after you, Elsie. I love you.’
She ignored me, looking into her own hell. ‘This home’ll be full of girls what have had babies from soldiers. They’ll all be adopted. We’m “fallen women”, somebody said in the village.’
‘We can go to our hut in the woods, Elsie. We can live there together.’
‘Don’t be simple,’ and she strode furiously away to Miss Polmanor’s, leaving me shattered in the road.
Chapter Sixteen
Singing became part of my life in Cornwall. It seems that I sang all the time. We sang at school in assembly and in music classes: a hymn in assembly and all the well-known folk songs and children’s songs in class, plus the occasional more serious piece. We played singing games in school breaks; as I have said, the vackies and village kids even sang our antagonism at each other, and when that was over we sang children’s chants, games and popular songs together. At home the Light Programme was always on the radio with Auntie Rose joining in through the day and encouraging us to do the same: ‘Come on, boys, I sound like a crow. You can do better than that.’ So we sang not only the current hits but songs from previous years back to Victorian ballads and the music hall. We sang in church on Sundays and carols at Christmas.
I said at the beginning of this story how our mother introduced us to the Russians, the Romantics, Ravel, Debussy, serious twentieth-century music starting with Stravinsky and lots of popular music and jazz, which she played to us and for her own pleasure. Well, Uncle Jack introduced us to a different range. There were the Welsh songs that he loved and the folk songs and children’s songs that we knew from school, but the surprise was that atheist Uncle Jack showed us the beauty and majesty of the harmonies in Hymns Ancient and Modern and other ecclesiastical choral music. He never objected to our attending church on a Sunday – not that he would have dared cross Auntie Rose on the subject – indeed, he often came himself, turning the old ‘Why should the Devil have all the best tunes?’ into ‘Why should God have all the best music? He’s not listening anyway, so we might as well.’
Jack li
ke me was a member of the choir at St Peter’s church. But when he reached fourteen, voice wavering between alto and croak, he preferred to have his turn on a Sunday, like all the older boys, pumping the organ for sixpence; I was never big enough. All sorts of (really rather mild) naughtinesses were indulged in by those on duty, out of sight behind the organ between hymns; their whispers and stifled giggles were given black looks by the vicar and others. Occasionally it would get out of hand when the boys did not pay attention to the service and forgot the few pumps necessary to get the organ primed. The organist would touch the keys and, instead of the opening chord, the instrument would let out a dying, groaning sigh that made you have to struggle not to let out a snort of laughter into the solemn Sunday silence. Some boy would be given the dreadful punishment of being forbidden to pump and having to sit in the congregation each week with no sixpence. Although I regretted not being a part of the bigger-boy fraternity that actually got paid for doing such a desirable job, I loved being in the choir above all else. A few years later back in Welling I remember how sad I was when my voice broke. I certainly never embraced puberty.
I have long since been an atheist myself but I remain grateful and glad that I have a Church of England background. It gave me so much, not only musically but also with regard to the English language, architecture and other cultural spin-offs. I doubt if I would feel the same if I had met it a century or more earlier, when it still held real sway over people’s minds and lives, but I seem to have met it at just the right moment in its decline. In spite of all the sexual inhibitions and guilt that it left me with I remain indebted to my Church of England background that has brought me so many unexpected riches. Our national religion was all around us in those days, at school, in our language, on the wireless, in our national consciousness, in a way that it is no longer. It gave us boundaries and shape to our view of the world and it was Auntie Rose who set us on the road by insisting that we went to church and Sunday school, and Uncle Jack who made us listen to the beauty, both musical and verbal. I still use for reference, or just to read the language, my King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer presented to me in September 1940 and September 1942 for Sunday-school attendance and inscribed by the shadowy Reverend Oatey. Unfortunately I have lost my Hymns Ancient and Modern, which probably has ‘September 1941’ written inside it. The best of religions, full of glory and utterly ineffectual.
Kisses on a Postcard Page 15
