Daughters of Cornwall

by Fern Britton

  Eventually we were all settled and our lunches in front of us.

  ‘For what we about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,’ intoned Grandfather.

  ‘Amen,’ we replied, and tucked in.

  The conversation around the table was jolly and fun. David was itching to get to the small pile of presents under the tree; there was a large box-shaped parcel labelled to him from Grandfather, but Mum had decreed we weren’t to touch them until teatime.

  ‘Please, can I open it now?’ he wheedled.

  ‘No darling, I have told you. You have your stocking gifts to play with.’

  It was true. David had woken us all too early and insisted we went downstairs to see if Father Christmas had been.

  ‘Come on then.’ Mum had got out of bed and wrapped herself in her warm dressing gown and slippers. ‘We may as well get the fire lit for the day.’

  Edward, who could sleep all day if allowed, got up and got the fire going, while I put the kettle on and made us all a morning brew.

  The stockings hung bulging and invitingly from the mantel.

  We sat in a tight group on the rag rug in front of the fire and rapidly pulled open our gifts.

  Mum had given me a small bottle of Devon Violets cologne. I swiftly unknotted the purple ribbon around the bottle’s neck and carefully pulled the cork stopper out. I put it to my nose and inhaled deeply. Soft and alluring, the light scent made me feel like a grown woman.

  ‘Don’t spill it,’ she said.

  ‘My first bottle of real scent.’ I hugged her, my knees digging into the knots of the rug. ‘I love it. Thanks Mum.’

  Drinking our tea, we got busy opening our small gifts. I had made shortbread biscuits for Mum, knitted fingerless gloves for Edward and, for David, I had found a tiny model of Mum’s car. He immediately began running its little wheels all over the floor, making the noise of Mum’s infamous clashes of gears as he went.

  Mum was not amused. ‘It’s the clutch, not me,’ she exclaimed as Edward and I laughed till we cried.

  Now, sitting around the table with my small family, Grandfather tinkled his water glass with his pudding spoon. ‘I’d like to make a toast. May 1939 be a year of peace for us all.’

  ‘Peace for us all,’ said Mum as we drank.

  ‘And,’ continued Grandfather, ‘for Ernest who cannot be here but to whom we send our loving thoughts.’

  ‘To Dad,’ Edward replied.

  ‘To Daddy,’ I echoed.

  Mum got up and went to the clock on the mantel. She pulled a letter from behind it. ‘I have a message from him.’

  ‘Has he sent me a present?’ David asked.

  My heart flipped. We hadn’t heard from Daddy for a long time. I had written him two letters since the summer, telling him about school, and Mum’s shop, and about how we all would like him to come to Cornwall and stay. Be a family. He hadn’t replied, yet. He had remembered David’s birthday, but not mine. Had I done something bad? Is that why he had left me in England when I was so little? I wanted to have him home so that I could talk about him in the same way my friends talked about their fathers. The fun they had. The closeness. A daughter and father relationship I could see was different to mother and daughter. A father can lift you on his shoulders and hold you on his knee. He is the first man a girl can love and the one her husband will forever be compared with. Mum’s father died in a fire with her mother. Did she compare Daddy to him? I don’t think my parents could have properly loved each other, but I think she needed him to look after her. Or maybe she was too independent and capable? Magazines are always saying that men want a nice wife who will look after them. Mum looked after us very well, but perhaps she didn’t look after Daddy? Perhaps I would be the same when I married; after all, I only had Mum as my role model and she could do anything without a husband. Was Mum the same as her mum? I was on the brink of being a woman and I was beginning to see the world through a woman’s eyes.

  Mum had opened Daddy’s letter and began reading aloud.

  Hello my dear old things and Happy Christmas to you all,

  I am so sorry not to be with you for another Christmas and to share your Christmas turkey. As I write, the monsoon rain is falling heavily and the heat and humidity is rising. I am imagining you in the cold. Is Jack Frost biting your toes? It’s a long time since I felt him.

  On Christmas Day I will be thinking of you and hoping that you are all together eating well and singing Christmas carols. I am thankful that you are all safe in Cornwall. I shall go to our local Protestant church and pray for you before our ‘English’ Christmas lunch at Government House.

  I am afraid I shall be staying out here for longer than any of us expected. I cannot tell you exactly why, due to confidentiality, but the government in London has asked all British territories to stand fast during what might be a spot of bother in Europe and elsewhere.

  I enclose some photographs of the little monkeys that come to share my breakfast each day, a snake charmer, some of the temples that Clara will remember, and Cottontail’s grand-puppies, which are all growing up quickly, just as you all are.

  God bless you all,

  Ernest/Daddy

  Mum stopped reading and exchanged an unreadable look with Grandfather, before saying, ‘Daddy also enclosed ten shillings for you all to spend on a present from him. Isn’t that kind?’

  This jolted a memory in David. ‘Can I open my presents now?’

  Mummy refolded the letter and put it back in its envelope. ‘When Edward and Hannah have washed up.’

  David looked at us solemnly. ‘Hurry up, please.’

  Edward and I dutifully stood and started to clear the table. We left Mum and Grandfather to sit by the fire while we went to the curtained-off kitchen.

  ‘Toots,’ said Edward quickly, checking that the adults couldn’t hear us.

  ‘Yes?’ I whispered.

  ‘If we were to go to war with Germany …’

  ‘Oh, not this again.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘We won’t go to war. Not after the last one. Who would want to?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My friends and I have been talking about it. If we have to, we would go.’

  ‘Mum wouldn’t let you.’

  ‘She couldn’t stop me.’

  ‘But you are going to medical school and will be a doctor.’

  ‘I can do it afterwards.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I was getting upset. ‘We need doctors.’

  ‘And we need pilots.’

  ‘But you are going to medical school,’ I hissed.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ He ran a plate under the cold tap, rinsing off the suds. ‘I’ve written asking for a postponement. A lot of students are doing the same.’

  I silently dried up the last of the dishes and folded the tea towel before hanging it on the oven’s rail. ‘When are you going to tell Mum and Grandfather?’

  He gave me a steady look.

  I shook my head. ‘Not tonight. No. You can’t spoil their Christmas.’

  ‘I thought later, before I took Grandfather home.’

  ‘Absolutely not. Promise me.’ I sounded pleading, even to myself.

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘Well when?’

  ‘After the New Year. When all this –’ I waved my hand towards the room beyond the curtain – ‘this happiness is over. Promise me.’

  ‘OK. I promise.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hannah, Trevay

  January 1939

  The weather had become increasingly wet and gloomy, and then a cold snap over the southwest brought with it deep snow over the moors. With no way of getting over Bodmin Moor, Cornwall was cut off.

  We didn’t expect that Mum’s shop would be overly busy during the first part of the year, people having spent their comfort money over Christmas, but we didn’t expect it to be dead. The whole of Cornwall, not just Trevay, was in a financial hole. Farmers couldn’t get t
heir beasts to market and the rest of England couldn’t get their goods to us.

  The Trevay fishing fleet was out every day. We depended on them and they on us. Whatever time of day they returned, we were waiting on the harbourside. But, before the weather got better, it got worse. The thermometers were below freezing and the inner harbour had frozen over. The fleet were stranded offshore for almost three days.

  It’s a funny thing that in times of near disaster one can only remember the warmth of community spirit. Mum opened up the café from 8.00 a.m. until 7.00 p.m., asking Trevayers (as we began to call ourselves) to bring with them whatever they had to share so that as a village we could sit as one, in warmth, and not feel hungry or lonely. She brought everyone together. Families buried feuds, friends forgave each other for past slights, children made new friends and even one or two love stories bloomed.

  When at last the harbour ice melted, we welcomed the crews home with warm fires and hot food.

  We even made a story in the local newspaper, the Trevay Times.

  ‘Mrs Clara Bolitho Welcomes the Hungry and the Lonely’ read the headline. I was terrifically proud of it and bought two copies. One to put in my scrapbook and the other to carry in my small purse in case I came across anyone who hadn’t already read it.

  During all this disruption, Edward hadn’t had a chance to break his news about postponing medical school. That was until breakfast one February morning, when the postman dropped two letters through the door.

  Mum was buttering toast in the kitchen. ‘I’ll get it,’ I called to her. Two letters were on the mat. One for Edward with the crest of the Bristol medical school on it, and one addressed to Mum. Out of curiosity I turned the envelope over to see if it yielded any clues. In black ink and in a clear hand it read, ‘Michael Hampton, Faversham, Kent’.

  Edward and David came chasing down the stairs having some sort of game, and I held up Edward’s letter. ‘For you,’ I said, raising my eyebrows.

  He snatched it from me and hurriedly put it in his trouser pocket. ‘None of your beeswax,’ he said and sat down at the table.

  ‘Hannah,’ Mum called to me. ‘Take the tea tray to the table for me, would you?’

  ‘Yes Mum.’ I put her letter in my cardigan pocket and did as I was asked.

  ‘Tappy eggs and soldiers,’ Mum said, putting a bowl of boiled eggs and a full toast rack in the middle of the table.

  David grabbed one and let it go quickly. ‘It’s hot.’

  Mum tutted and helped him put it into his egg cup and then take the top off.

  ‘Can I have butter in mine?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Mum firmly.

  I remembered the letter in my cardigan.

  ‘This came for you.’ I handed it to her.

  She reached for her glasses and read the front. She paled and bit her lip

  ‘Do you recognise the handwriting?’ I asked.

  She turned the envelope over, as I had, and read the back. A shadow crossed her features. One I couldn’t decipher. A sadness perhaps? Shock? She got up and threw it into the fire without opening it.

  We three all looked at her. ‘Why did you burn your letter?’ asked David.

  ‘It’s from someone I used to know,’ she said, sitting down and picking up her tea cup.

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a grown-ups’s thing.’

  ‘Oh. Was it somebody who was horrible to you?’ I persevered.

  ‘Quite the opposite.’ I opened my mouth to question her further but she got up briskly and said, ‘Look at the time. You’ll be late for school. Edward will walk you on his way to the butcher’s. Is that OK with you, Edward?’

  The three of us trudged up our street and turned left up the hill to school. ‘You don’t need to walk me to school any more,’ David complained.

  ‘I’m going to the butcher’s for Mum, aren’t I?’ Edward enjoyed his position as Mum’s second in command and used it to shut us up at moments when we wanted to know what was going on.

  ‘Mum wasn’t happy about that letter, was she?’ I said. My mind had been burning with all sorts of explanations and had landed on the most obvious one I could think of. ‘I think it was a love letter,’ I said. ‘From an old admirer.’

  ‘Pooh,’ said David.

  ‘What do you think, Edward?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s for Mum to know and us to respect.’ His self-importance inflating wildly. ‘Right. Off you go and have a good day.’

  As I ran into the playground with David beside me, he said, ‘I hate it when Edward gets all big for his boots.’

  He said it so seriously I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. ‘Me too!’ I said, and we laughed all the way to the assembly hall.

  When we got home, I could sense something had changed. ‘Mum?’ I looked in the kitchen and then the shop, but I saw that she had turned the sign to closed. Something was not right. Business had begun to pick up again and, even if she couldn’t tend to customers herself, she always had Edward to call on. He was surprisingly good at selling things to the women who shopped there. Mum always said it was because he was so tall, handsome and charming. ‘Your charm will either get you a long way or into terrible trouble,’ she would tease him.

  I backed out of the shop and went upstairs. ‘Mum? Edward?’

  I heard a movement in the bedroom that Mum and I shared. I opened the door slowly. The curtains were drawn shut and it was clear that Mum had been lying down because she was now sitting on the edge of her bed, with her back to me, looking for her shoes, whilst running a hand through her loosened hair.

  ‘Mum? What is it? Are you not feeling well?’

  ‘Is that you, darling? How was school?’ She still wouldn’t look at me and I sensed she had been crying.

  ‘Yes. I wrote an essay about Oliver Cromwell.’

  ‘Oh, good girl.’ She reached for the hanky she almost always had up her sleeve and wiped her nose.

  ‘Why are you in the dark? Do you have a headache? Can I get you an aspirin?’

  ‘No thank you.’ Over her shoulder, she glanced at me with a small smile. ‘I’m fine.’

  I went to sit next to her. ‘Did that letter upset you this morning? The one you burnt?’

  My hands were in my lap and she took one of them and patted it. ‘A little.’

  ‘Was it from a Gentleman? From the olden days before you met Daddy?’

  She smiled sadly. ‘Where do you get these ideas from?’

  ‘Was it?’ I persisted.

  She took her hand from mine and used it to take my chin while she looked deep into my eyes. ‘Darling, life is a long road full of potholes. Some you can walk around and others you fall straight into and get hurt.’

  ‘So the letter was from a pothole?’

  She laughed. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Will you tell me one day?’

  ‘That’s enough for now.’ She smoothed her blouse and stood up. ‘Were you looking for me?’

  I remembered. ‘Oh yes. Where’s Edward?’ I asked.

  She sniffed and wiped again. ‘I don’t know. Have you looked in his bedroom?’

  Suddenly I didn’t want to find Edward. If he had told Mum about not going to medical school, on top of the other letter that had upset her, I absolutely didn’t want to find him.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea if you like.’

  ‘Yes please. That would be lovely.’

  In the kitchen I found the breakfast things unwashed and no apparent sign of a luncheon snack having been made. That wasn’t like Mum. Or Edward, to be fair. He was a pretty good housekeeper. Being Mum’s ‘man of the house’.

  David wandered in. ‘Can I have a biscuit? Oh yuck, smelly old eggs.’

  I busied myself around him. ‘Mum has a headache.’ I pointed at the biscuit tin. ‘You may have two biscuits and a glass of milk while you do your homework. I’ll clear up a bit and then, if Mum still doesn’t feel right, I’ll make us cheese on toast for supper. How does that sound?’<
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  ‘Nice. Where is Edward?’

  ‘I’m not sure but he’ll be home soon.’

  ‘I need his help with my fractions.’

  ‘I can help if he can’t. Now off you go and do what you can.’

  I ran a bowl of water for the washing up, my brain spinning again. I was scared.

  I had never seen Mum like this before. I had seen her angry, frustrated and tired but not so obviously upset. If Edward’s letter had added to her sadness, I would kill him. Mum was both mother and father to us. What would we do if anything happened to her?

  Suddenly I understood something vast. Why had I not seen it before? Mum was the centre of our lives. She had no husband, no partner to take the helm in stormy times. No shoulder to rest her head on. She was alone.

  Daddy had to come home. I would write to him, without anyone knowing, and make him come back. Especially if an old admirer was sending her letters. Mum needed him. How could he not look after us? If I explained how things were here, I was sure he’d come back.

  I washed up and got the kitchen straight while the kettle boiled, and then took Mum’s tea up to her.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said, putting it on her dressing table.

  ‘Thank you, darling.’ She had moved from the bed to the small stool and was brushing her hair in the mirror.

  ‘The kitchen is all tidy and David is doing his homework.’

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said, looking at me through the mirror. ‘What would I do without you and Edward?’

  Her eyes looked so sad. ‘What would we do without you is the better question,’ I answered, and began to straighten her pillows and blanket. As I did so I felt the sharp corners of an envelope, caught in the bedding. I pulled it out. It was Edward’s letter from this morning.

  Mum’s eyes saw the anger in my face as she watched me in the mirror.

  ‘You might as well read it,’ she said.

  The gist of it was the medical school could no longer hold a place for him and, if and when he wished to, he would have to reapply, with no guarantee he would be accepted second time around. It ended by wishing him luck in the RAF.

  Anger, born from Edward’s utter selfishness, swelled in me. How bloody dare he show this to Mum before telling me?