One of the first things we vackies did was to build a hut in the woods. Most of the forest in the Fowey Valley was naturally deciduous but there were plantations of firs, standing in military rows. We drove in some stakes between four of these trees, cut branches for mainstays, found ferns and wove the fronds into four walls and a roof. More ferns and pine needles made a dryish comfortable floor. It was dark and womb-like in there, exciting when with someone else, frightening when alone and the sounds of the forest outside became menacing. The smell of resin was everywhere; we would go home sticky with the stuff. Jack and I, Ken, Eric and Peter Plummer, and Harold and Alan Packham created this place. It was our secret, jealously guarded.
Ken and Eric from Plymouth lived in the cramped little whitewashed bungalow across the Court with their mother. Their older brother Peter soon left, I think to join the army, and there were four more brothers, grown-up, who showed up occasionally, and a father who was sometimes seen and I don’t remember.
When the father and seven brothers were all together they must have been a formidable family, brought up in Plymouth – in Mutley Plain I think – in the Depression. As for Ken and Eric, they were our friends from across the Court, not a bit intimidating.
Their urban attitudes resonated with us vackies from London more than the rural ones of the Doublebois children. We, like them, were the outsiders, although to us Londoners their accents were at first indistinguishable from the local children’s, something both parties hotly denied.
Elsie Plummer, their distant cousin, ripe with imminent puberty, was what people slyly called then ‘no better than she should be’. But we liked her. One of her regular games was executing high kicks whenever we were playing together, generally at the entrance to the army camp. She was very proud of the height she could kick, would demonstrate it whenever possible and afforded every child, and most of the soldiers on guard duty, frequent glimpses of her knickers. When the ground was dry she would also demonstrate the splits to anyone interested, lifting her skirt to show that her knees were straight and her knickers touching the ground, providing us with a more protracted view. There wasn’t room in the bungalow for a girl, she and her male cousins were approaching puberty, so Elsie was billeted out. On Miss Polmanor of all people.
Elsie was into the bungalow and our house whenever possible. Auntie Rose half disapproved of her and half sympathised. Miss Polmanor regarded Elsie as her cross to bear for the duration; she made it her mission to convert Elsie to godliness. ‘I’ll save that maid’s soul or die in the attempt.’ A hopeless cause. It must have been one of the most mismatched billetings of the whole war and I wonder if some malicious officer was settling a score with Miss Polmanor. The trouble was that besides foisting Elsie on Miss Polmanor he inflicted Miss Polmanor on Elsie, though I think Elsie was the more resilient of the two.
When Elsie first met us London vackies we thought she was a local. She vehemently denied this and faced us squarely with her direct stare and burgeoning body. ‘Well, you talk like they do,’ we said.
‘I don’t. I talk ever so different. I be from Plymouth.’ She pointed vaguely. ‘’Tis over to there. My dad’s in the army and my mum’s gone off with a sailor so they sent me yere. I don’t like it yere.’
‘We do,’ someone ventured.
Elsie ignored this and continued on her own tack. ‘I’ve held the hand of a dead person.’
We just stood and stared at this revelation, imaginations racing.
‘Have you really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whose?’ challenged a disbelieving voice.
‘My granny’s.’
‘Oh.’ The unlikely scenario gained credibility.
‘I was holding her hand and she died.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing.’
After a long reflective pause someone said, ‘Do you want to play with us?’
She nodded.
‘Come on, then.’
We learned later from the Plummer boys that this story was often trotted out, one of several methods Elsie used to make an impression, though it was probably true. ‘If she was holding my yand I’d’ve been glad to die,’ said Peter Plummer contemptuously. ‘That was our granny too,’ complained his brothers, feeling upstaged by Elsie.
But their comments were too late. Elsie was in my head, indelibly. Months later she and I were playing together and went off into the woods to explore. Anxious to impress her I took her to our secret hut and swore her to secrecy. We crawled in through the low doorway; she looked round. ‘Cor, ’tis lovely and dark. Smells of resin. No one would ever know we were yere.’ She settled herself. ‘D’you want to play doctors?’
I was mystified.
She looked at me speculatively. ‘How old be you?’
‘Nearly eight.’
‘I’m nearly thirteen. I’ll be doctor first.’
‘All right.’
‘You got to take all your clothes off.’
I was flabbergasted. ‘
All
of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘My pants too?’
‘Then you lie down and I examine you. I say, “What seems to be the trouble, Mr Smith?” ’
‘The school doctor just combed my hair for nits.’
‘Do you want to play or not?’
‘No.’ But I did, desperately.
‘You shy?’
‘Yes.’
‘So be I. Let’s undress together.’
Clever Elsie had calmed the fears of both of us. We solemnly started to remove our clothes. Before we had got far, ‘You know boys and girls ’re different?’
More new territory. ‘I think so.’ I knew so, thanks to our cousins.
‘D’you know why?’
‘No.’ This seemed like the safest answer. ‘Hazily’ would have been more truthful.
‘ ’Tis to make babies. You put your widdler in my twinkle then I have a baby.’
I giggled nervously. She was insane. ‘Don’t be daft.’
‘True.’
‘It wouldn’t go.’
‘No, I thought that. I don’t think it works till you’re married, I think. Or grown-up. Tiny little babies come out the end of your widdler. All swimming.’
I let out an ‘Eeargh’ of disgust.
But she was relentless. ‘The husband has to lie on top of the wife, then it works. All husbands and wives do it. Your mum and dad did it to get you.’
‘Shut up,’ I muttered sullenly, not wanting to imagine such an event.
‘The baby grows for nine months in yere, then comes out.’
‘Babies are too big.’ I had caught her on a practical level.
But even that was no good. She just agreed. ‘I know. I don’t get it. The woman screams, so it mustn’t half hurt. I don’t think I want babies.’
We were both out of our depth. ‘You made it all up.’
‘The animals do it, too. You watch. I have. Nobody saw me. Crago’s bull. Blige me. His widdler. You should see. They all laughed.’
I was shocked into protest. ‘We’re not animals,’ and searched for an argument to refute her. Sunday school came to mind. ‘We got souls. The vicar said we’ve got souls and animals haven’t.’
‘What does he know? Be you going to play doctor, then?’
‘No. I don’t like you.’
‘Yes, you do.’
And she was right. I did. I, sort of, loved her. She spoke with a calm authority that was thrilling and disturbing. Like every other child learning the facts of life unofficially as we did I thought of my parents doing it: no. It was all too grotesque. I went home, stared at Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack and tried to imagine them engaged in something so rude and unlikely. No, not possible. I cornered Uncle Jack in the garden where we wouldn’t be overheard. ‘Uncle Jack, have we got souls?’
He was always glad to hold forth on this subject. ‘Nobody knows, boy, though they say they do.’
‘Nobody in the whole world?’
‘No. But if you ask me, it’s all tripe. All of it. All religion. Rubbish.’
‘So we
are
just like the animals?’
‘I wouldn’t say that, boy. We got
minds
.’ And he grinned with satisfaction at this opportunity to make his prime, anti-religious, point. How could he know that we’d just been having our first conversation about sex?
Auntie Rose was feeding the hens.
‘Auntie Rose, have we got souls?’
‘Course we have, my love. What d’you think we are, animals?’
‘Uncle Jack says we haven’t.’
‘What does he know? Heathen.’
There appeared to be nothing but confusion on the subject in the adult world, so how could Elsie know? But the assurances of her still childish but swelling body against mine, the changes in herself she pointed out so proudly, the persistent rumours of the truth that I encountered among the older children and the overwhelming evidence in the countryside all round us soon undermined my disbelief. So, when the other boys were busy elsewhere, the promise of a breathless, dry session of doctors with Elsie – full of intimacy yet reserve – created a trembling inexplicable excitement that was quite fulfilled by the cool, clinical little scenes we acted out in our pine-scented surgery in the woods.
C
hapter
S
even
Autumn introduced me to different new pleasures in the countryside. Blackberrying with Auntie Rose on the Slates came first. The Slates was the embankment beside the stretch of railway just below Doublebois before it disappeared into the woods. This embankment sloped down into the Rabbit Field, a long narrow field which lay between the main road and the railway and eventually merged into the woodland. The Slates was made up of the local slate blasted from the side of the valley when the railway was cut into it and the ballast laid down. Nothing but brambles and thistles would grow there. On the far side of the line was the goods yard, Blamey and Morgan’s mill and the animal pens. Auntie Rose, with bowls and jugs in a basket, led us out of the Court, through the crossroads and very quietly through the gate into the Rabbit Field. This was the moment for Jack and me to take off, hullooing and yelling down the slope. It was only then, among the thistles and hummocks of this not very fertile field, that you realised how aptly it was named: it became alive with rabbits scattering in every direction before they disappeared.
Next, the Slates: steeply sloped, dark-grey Cornish slates sliding under your feet. Don’t fall over, they cut; and brambles scratch. Bushes in clumps all round you, big fat blackberries. Pick four or five, eat one, pick some more, eat some more, fingers and lips stained purple. Stop and stare while a train which has stopped at Doublebois gathers speed just above your head, huge and threatening from where you stand below its wheels. Sometimes an express would roar by just above you, thrilling in its power and noise, belching smoke if it was labouring up the gradient on its way to Plymouth, or rattling happily, only a thin plume of steam, as it virtually freewheeled going west, down the valley. And waving, always waving at the drivers, firemen, passengers, guard. Then back to the business in hand, literally, until Auntie Rose said, ‘All right. These yere’ll do. We’ll come back next week, there’ll be a new crop ripe by then.’ She always picked more than Jack’s and my scrambling, purple-stained efforts put together.
Auntie Rose turned those blackberries into jam for the winter, all the jam she could make on our meagre sugar ration, and blackberry-and-apple pies for Sunday dinner, with custard usually, or rarely, and if we were very lucky, with clotted cream: the best pudding in the world, hot or cold.
The other riveting activity of autumn was the harvest. As the binders went round and round the fields, leaving a diminshing stand of oats or barley in the middle – no wheat was planted in wet, windblown Cornwall – we would stand the cut sheaves into regularly spaced little stooks and keep an eye out for rabbits. Generally two children would work with a man, the children gathering the sheaves, the man expertly stooking them so that they wouldn’t fall over in any wind or rain that might come before we gathered them onto carts and built ricks ready for the threshing, the next excitement to come. Everyone turned out for the harvest, a country tradition. We children, promised payment for our time, set to with a will as we eagerly worked out how much we had earned at so much an hour. We would turn up at the farmer’s door a few days later for our money and find out it was always less than we thought we had been promised, probably another country tradition.
But the real fun for most of us was the rabbits. As the tractor cut more and more corn the rabbits would retreat into the centre of the field, still invisible, frightened inwards by the noise. In fact they stood a better chance if they broke early with only a few yards to the safety of their burrows in the hedges. I always thought of the early ones, who shot out and were gone before we could move, as the clever ones, whereas they were probably the most frightened. As the climax drew near the rabbits would break with increasing frequency, but now they had a long run, had to thread their way through many clutching hands, past stabbing pitchforks and – generally their doom – the dogs. The dogs weren’t allowed into the corn after them, no matter how excited by the scents. So, as each rabbit broke, there was a mad hallooing and barking, generally ending in a growl, a sudden death and a warm furry body swiftly disappearing into a capacious pocket, to be gutted, skinned and into the pot. Some got away, and the dogs would scrabble fruitlessly about in the hedges, barking frenziedly: if they didn’t get them in the open, they were unlikely to succeed in the rabbits’ natural havens.