Kisses on a Postcard (11 page)

Uncle Jack was a master at rabbit-catching. Into the field straight after his day on the track, he would arrive as cutting was nearly finished. That tiny, round figure could cover a few yards in a flash. Jack and I were always racing him down the Court and never won. A rabbit would break, a dive, a quick twist with his hands, and he would wink at us as the little bundle went into the pocket inside his jacket. When he had got two or three he would whistle to us and off we went home for tea to discover he generally had another one he had caught when we weren’t looking. I find it almost unbelievable now that round little Uncle Jack could snatch at and catch a passing rabbit, quicker even than the dogs. But he could; I saw it. And he was not unique.

We were always on at him to let us kill one, and I can remember experimenting with tentative, inadequate rabbit punches as I held up some poor creature by its hind legs and chopped tentatively away at the back of its neck with the side of my hand until Uncle Jack took it from me and ended its pain and fear. At first I was the squeamish young townie, half afraid of anything living and wild, and not really wanting to hurt it. Quite soon that was buried under my wish to demonstrate my – what? Manliness? Competence? I don’t know, but thus are many sorts of killers made, out of wishing to belong. We caught rabbits all the time in the gins and snares that were in constant use all round us, and, as the rabbits were often still alive when we came to inspect the traps, we had plenty of opportunities to improve our techniques. I became adept, preferring to hold the neck in one hand and hind legs in the other. Then a stretch and sharp twist. Apart from the centuries-old farmer/rabbit war, they were a very welcome addition to our wartime meat ration, but that was just an excuse for my willingness to kill.

When threshing time came a tractor would tow the threshing machine round the local farms: a clanking, smelly thing that produced clouds of chaff to make you sneeze, driven by a belt fitted on to a tractor. We would gather at each farm to join in. Then it was the turn of rats and mice to be the quarry. There were always some who had made the newly built ricks their home and larder in just a few days. But as the sheaves were dismantled and forked into the thresher it was slaughter. The bigger boys loved to spear them with pitchforks as they appeared and the dogs made short work of those that were missed. There was always the thrill of daring to corner a rat when legend had it that they would fight to the death, leap for your throat or somehow bite you. But I never saw any person or dog remotely threatened by these terrified creatures.

And then, as the leaves started to fall, I can clearly remember standing at the crossroads in Doublebois looking out over the valley and watching flocks of birds heading relentlessly south; I don’t know what they were but they were big and small birds and big and small groups and in vast numbers. The biggest and most spectacular flocks, though, were the starlings just finding their roost for the night. They wheeled and dived and rose and spread, bunching up and thinning out from dense black clouds into long wisps before sinking down into the woods and disappearing. I have never liked starlings in the garden, always in numbers, coming noisily down in their glossy blue-black plumage, strutting about and bullying the other birds, the storm troopers of the back lawn; but their aerobatics en masse were unforgettable. I was never up early enough to see them rise the following morning.

The climax of autumn was the harvest festival when the church was full of donated fruit, vegetables – principally marrows which people were glad to get rid of – and sheaves of corn, and we all belted out ‘We Plough The Fields And Scatter’, and ‘Come Ye Thankful People, Come’. After this celebration the fields were bare, the grass stopped growing in the pastures, tractors criss-crossed the cornfields, ploughing-in the stubble, followed by squabbling crowds of seagulls, crows, lapwings and the inevitable starlings. And the world turned brown.

A few months later the furious winter of
1940
–
1
took hold. The village pumps were encased in ice and the wind whipped the snow down off Bodmin Moor making six-foot drifts in the middle of Dobwalls. Snow was a rarity in the south-westerly airstreams of Cornwall. For the Doublebois children the mile and a half walk to school became an ordeal involving red ears and noses, chilblains, chapped fingers, soaked woollen gloves with icicles on them, wet feet and necks from the melted snow that spilled into every gap in our clothing, especially over and into our hobnail boots. We had cold feet all day. Not one of us had wellies as I recall; there was no rubber to spare to make such things for children.

When we walked home was the time for games: slides in the village street which annoyed the grown-ups, snowballs thrown at each other as we walked, ran and trudged the mile and a half back. We waded into snowdrift after snowdrift until we were frozen, soaking and bored with it. Then, oh then, the warm range in the kitchen of the Phillips’ cottage, fingers and faces going red in the heat, hot drinks, cosiness and Auntie Rose presiding over it all.

Going to bed was the next ordeal. Undress downstairs into warmed pyjamas, no heat up there, but a lovely stone hot-water bottle in the bed to put your feet on as shivering you scrambled in to snuggle down into a billowy mattress, pillows, blankets and eiderdown. In the morning the windows were an etched miracle of frost patterns, often with the ice on the inside, condensation from our night-time breathing, which you could pick at or draw on with your fingernail before reluctantly getting out and diving into clothes that Auntie Rose had left warming by the range all night.

The children arranged a mass snowball fight one dinner break; vackies versus village kids. It included every child in the district between the ages of five and fifteen and got utterly out of hand – not that it was ever in it. Waves of schoolchildren surged up and down the road between the village school and the Methodist chapel hurling ice and snow or just shouting. When the bells sounded, while some law-abiding souls went in to school, the rest of us spilled over into fields and chased each other to Duloe Bridge. The climax was a snowball shoot-out as the wan winter daylight faded. We swaggered back into class in front of the admiring looks of the more timid kids to have the smirks wiped off our faces by Mrs Langdon, our Junior Vackies mistress, normally the kindest of women, and Miss Shepherd of the village school, a tiny, bird-like creature, who laid their rulers mercilessly across our chapped and tingling fingers.

And once, when Mr Evans, the elderly village-school headmaster, was absent, tiny Miss Shepherd was forced to bring out their school cane and wield it on several of the bigger boys – vackies and village kids – for a group transgression: chanting blasphemous versions of
Hymns Ancient and Modern
in public. Miss Shepherd was halfway down the row of proffered backsides when the cane, groaning under its excessive burden, gave up the ghost and snapped in two. Miss Shepherd burst into tears and the row of unyielding bottoms returned to their seats.

A weekly ordeal was the letter home. Auntie Rose was adamant. We were never allowed to miss. I regarded it as a chore to be endured; it must have been torture for Jack. One winter evening I sat at the table chewing a pencil while Auntie Rose mended socks with a letter from Gwyn on her lap. She was upset and not inclined to be indulgent to my whinges.

‘I can’t think of anything to write.’

‘You say that every week.’

I was as foolish as ever. Walking in where I should never go. ‘You’ve read that letter from Gwyn hundreds of times.’

‘And I shall probably read it hundreds more.’ I froze at the tone in her voice. ‘They said he was only going training back home in Wales. Now they’ve sent him abroad. Abroad. Where? Haven’t they ever heard of embarkation leave?’ Her voice had risen to a querulous high and she stared at me as though it were my fault and I had the answer.

Intimidated, I offered, ‘Uncle Jack said they didn’t give them leave because they didn’t want to warn the German submarines. Careless talk costs lives.’ This was a wartime slogan which I piously trotted out.

‘What does he know about it?’ she growled.

‘That means the army were protecting our soldiers,’ I tried.

‘The army? Protecting our soldiers?’ She raised her head from her mending. Her eyes were hollow black bottomless holes as she looked at me. Her voice slashed across the room. ‘When did that ever enter their heads?’ I stared at this apparition, a moment ago sober, comforting Auntie Rose, now someone looking out of hell. I think she must have seen my dismay because her eyes and voice returned to normal. To my relief she went on. ‘ “Address, care of the War Office”. Care of . Huh.’ She changed again, lost in her own world; I wasn’t there. ‘Like they took care of the boys from Jack’s pit in the last lot.’

I was too curious to keep silent. ‘What’s the last lot, Auntie Rose?’

She was still lost. ‘The last war. Jack was the only one who came back alive to our village in Wales. The only one. It’s why we left: every woman staring at me as if it was my fault.’ She shuddered and returned to the present, waving Gwyn’s letter accusingly at me again. ‘Ink on paper instead of a person here in your life. That’s all there is: letters. And every letter from Gwyn is one page long. That’s all he can manage. One page.’

‘Two sides,’ I tried helpfully.

‘It’s not enough. You write two pages home to your mam and dad this week. Two. D’you hear?’

This awful sentence took my breath away. ‘That’s
four
sides.’

‘I know how many it is.’

‘I’ve never written four sides.’

‘You can this week.’

The awful injustice of this made me reckless. ‘That’s not fair. We shouldn’t have to write at all. It was her sent us away.’ As soon as I had said it I wished I hadn’t. I tried not to catch her eye and muttered, ‘Well, she did.’

‘What?’ she said quietly.

‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘Don’t you ever say anything like that again about your mother. Or your father.’

‘I was only moaning about writing letters.’

‘Never. D’you hear?’

‘Yes, Auntie Rose. Sorry, Auntie Rose,’ I muttered miserably. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘I don’t care what you meant. Never.’ It was the first time I ever saw her really angry with me, even though she must have known it was only childishness on my part. ‘I have to stop myself writing
fifty
sides to Gwyn, and I can hardly spell my name. You’re supposed to be clever.’

I was trying not to cry. ‘Just because you’re upset about Gwyn I’ve got to write four sides, a whole blinking book. It’s not fair.’

‘I know it’s not fair, boy. Nothing is. Listen. Who did your shoelaces up for you before you could do your own?’

‘Mum, I suppose. And Dad sometimes.’

‘Your mam and dad. Exactly. And do you think they minded?’

‘Dunno.’

‘No, my Terry, they didn’t mind. You can be sure of that. Because they love you. And your brother. They love you both . . . and your shoelaces . . . and your first teeth when you lost ’em . . . and the locks they cut from your hair. I’ve still got some of Len’s and Rose’s and Gwyn’s. Even the clippings when they cut your toenails.’

‘Ergh.’

‘Yes. Everything about you. So. You write them four sides about your shoelaces, is it?’

‘Nobody can write four sides about shoelaces.’

‘I would jump for joy if I got four sides from Gwyn.’

‘If they were about shoelaces you’d think he’d gone barmy.’

So, Gwyn was abroad, in North Africa, the only place the war was really going on at that moment, except over London. Perhaps his embarkation leave had been when we met him and he had kept quiet about it. We looked at pictures in the papers and during our rare visits to the cinema at the newsreels, which showed Italian soldiers surrendering in their tens of thousands, long columns of them walking across the desert guarded by the occasional casual Tommy with a rifle slung over his shoulder. We searched to see if it was Gwyn, our hero. We seemed to be winning. It was all an illusion: the Germans led by Rommel hadn’t even arrived there yet.

C
hapter
E
ight

Jack and I used to go shopping with Auntie Rose once a week in Liskeard, four miles away, the next stop on the train. There, with pocket money supplemented by our parents, we bought our weekly treats: for Jack it was generally an Army cap badge, for me a Dinky Toy.