‘Isn’t Jimmy Peters’ dad your son?’ asked Jack.
‘Oh yes. Yes. I forgot ’ee. Huh. I don’t count ’ee. He’s still here.’
I tried a new tack. ‘If you let me go, I’ll take your jug and get some water from the pump.’
‘Wha’ for? ’Tis half full.’
‘Auntie Rose said we got to.’
‘Oh, Auntie Rose. Yes. Her rock cakes: they’m well named.’
Jack got to the point. ‘And we’re sorry we tried to steal your gooseberries.’
‘You want some gooseberries? Go on, then. They be yansome now. Take that bowl and bring me some. I’ll make you some jam. Yere, come yere, little one. Let me touch your hair.’
‘I got to go. Auntie Rose is calling.’
‘Give me a kiss, Billy. Henry, give your mam a kiss ’fore you go to work.’
But we were out of the door with jug and bowl.
‘We’ll bring you some gooseberries in this bowl, Granny Peters.’
‘Come on, quick.’
And we were gone, her ethereal, quavering voice floating behind us, still echoing in my head to this day.
Elsie Plummer was a very good girl.
She went to church on Sunday
To pray to God to give her strength
To kiss the boys on Monday.
In our tiny community we all knew each other’s characters very well. There was no escape. Elsie had her reputation, she had worked hard enough for it, but I don’t know whether our liaison was known about or not. I never got teased about it so perhaps it wasn’t; one secret she managed to keep. Perhaps it was just too unlikely. With my first winter in Cornwall over we met again and again in the house in the woods as I grew more and more jealous of her and confused about my own feelings. I was nowhere near puberty.
‘Terry, let’s play families.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, go on. You be Dad and I’ll be Mam.’ By now she had learned from the cinema what to say and how to say it. She threw herself into the scenarios she had invented for us. ‘I love you, Dad. You can tell. Listen to my heart.’ She paused at my lack of response, entirely due to inhibition. ‘Feel it.’ I could do it only half-heartedly. ‘No, inside. Undo them, can’t you?’
‘Don’t want to.’
‘You do.’
‘You’re older’n me.’
‘I’m fourteen.’
‘I’m eight. Boys should be older’n girls.’
‘Who said?’
‘They always are.’
‘Not. Mrs Kitto’s older’n Mr Kitto. By miles.’
‘How d’you know?’
‘The whole village knows. So’s all right. I like you best. You’re the youngest.’ She tried her new-found seductive tone again. ‘Have you seen my new knickers?’
‘Everybody has.’
She was indignant. ‘When?’
‘When you do high kicks.’
‘Like this?’ She lay back and demonstrated, foot high in the air.
I was non-committal as I covertly looked.
‘Want to see ’em now?’
‘I just did.’
She leant close to me. ‘Want to touch?’
I was routed. ‘Don’t know.’
‘You knew the other day.’
‘Shut up.’
‘You want to, really.’
‘I’m going.’
‘You’re scared.’
At last it burst out of me. ‘Just stop talking about it all the time.’
She understood at once. ‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘Sorry, sorry. Yere. Lie down. By me. I won’t speak again. Promise.’
I did as she asked.
‘That’s right,’ she breathed in relief. ‘Give me your hand.’
C
hapter
T
welve
The soldiers stationed in Doublebois House were always being replaced. When we first arrived in Cornwall it was occupied by the men I have described, shocked after the Dunkirk debacle. They soon moved on and the place was taken over by a succession of different regiments, generally under training for some event or other. At one point Canadians were briefly there and suddenly left. We read in the papers a few days later of the ill-fated raid on Dieppe in which so many Canadians died. Doublebois seemed to go into unofficial mourning for a while.
Every time we got wind of a change of personnel, if we weren’t at school we children would all run into the Park and hang from the beech tree, cheering and waving, excited by all the activity. The soldiers always waved back and were often singing – dirty songs if we were lucky. Sometimes they were marched out to the station and boarded a waiting train. Then we would all run back down the Court and hang over the wire fence behind the wash-house, waving them out of sight up the line. Generally the movement was by road. Soldiers we knew, guards who had let us see their rifles and examine their equipment, went riding away in lorries, waving and smiling, always those two actions. Sometimes the replacements came riding in at the same time as the previous incumbents were leaving, so there seemed to be a frenzy of activity with a military policeman directing traffic at the crossroads. As convoys of lorries roared past the end of the Court, it became hazardous even to venture onto the normally empty A
38
. Nevertheless, we always dashed across it to the Park to watch the newcomers drive in through the left-hand gate and up that drive as the others departed by the right.
But most often and gloriously, one contingent would leave and there would be nobody there for a few days or weeks. The whole estate became an empty adventure playground for us children, vackies and locals. The two drives up to the big house were lined with rhododendrons and other shrubs. Between the drives was a monkey puzzle tree, beloved of the Victorians who had built this place. We couldn’t climb it and soon gave up trying. There were woods and empty Nissen huts to explore; there was an abandoned swimming pool, full of accumulated water, beside which I spent hours watching tadpoles and newts in spring, and water boatmen making lazy circles on the still surface during lazy summer afternoons. We pushed out little boats made of leaves and twigs with ants as the crews, we trailed our hands, we saw a snake trapped in there one day, swimming anxiously round and round looking for a way out, keeping us at bay, but it was only a grass snake, I think, gone the next day.
Our glittering prize in the middle of all this was the big house, now empty and at our mercy. Easy entry through a broken window and there was an unoccupied, echoing manor for our playground. We made full use of it, crashing and banging about until the owner of the estate, old Mr Steer, known to us as Old Man Steer, would appear to drive us briefly out. But his heart wasn’t in it after the soldiers’ destructive occupation. We soon returned. He lived in Home Farm, behind the big house, looking out over the valley, alone, I think, or with a housekeeper, because he still worked the farm.
In the lodge by the right-hand entrance of the twin drives up to Doublebois House lived Mr and Mrs Holman. Mrs Holman was the daughter or granddaughter, I’m not sure which, of Old Man Steer. Mr Holman was a solicitor who commuted daily to Plymouth to practise. They were a gentle, childless couple in their late thirties or early forties who made a point of befriending us vackies. They formed a mixed scout or cub group for all the children of Doublebois and we met in their house and played Kim’s Game, which I loved and still do, did first aid, read books on tree, bird and insect recognition and went on patrols round the estate.
Best of all, Mr Holman, a keen fisherman, took Jack and me on some all-night trout-fishing trips on the river during the school holidays. The thrill of being allowed to do such a thing, of having the responsibility of staying awake all night, was considerable. The actual event involved a walk in the late-evening light; we were full of anticipation, following a footpath down the hill from the back of the estate to the river, loaded with a borrowed rod each, bait, sandwiches, wet gear, a blanket, drinks and a torch. This was followed by long hours of just sitting on the bank in the dark with rod and line, often bored, often frightened of the noises in the pitch-black woods that surrounded us. Sometimes these noises came, mysteriously, from the river itself, sudden splashes that could not have been caused by the flow: perhaps fish, perhaps an otter, perhaps something else in our overheated imaginations.
We broke the night up with sandwiches and hot drinks from a Thermos. Occasionally your line jumped from a bite and all was excitement. It was generally an eel to throw back or kill if the hook was too far down. By torchlight we pushed squirming worms longways onto the hooks for bait and caught the odd trout or three which went into our keep net. I never worked out how the fish saw the worms in the dark; perhaps they smelled them. Up we would trudge in the early-morning light, leave Mr Holman, go home to gut our catch, watch Auntie Rose fry them for breakfast, eat them and fall into bed as Mr Holman got the morning train to his office in Plymouth. In spite of all the fright, cold and boredom I was always eager to be asked again.
Another all-night thrill, which happened to me only twice I think, was to be allowed – again in the holidays – to do the night shift in the signal box of the next section down the line, Largan box. The signalmen in the box on Doublebois station were local and permanent. Jimmy Peters’ dad was one at some point. Three miles down the line, controlling the next section, was a box right in the heart of the Fowey Valley, deep in the woods, a few yards from the river. These signalmen were not local, only temporary, often taking lodgings in one or other of Railway Cottages. The shifts were
10
p.m. to
6
a.m.,
6
a.m. to
2
p.m.,
2
p.m. to
10
p.m. We were often allowed in the box on the station but it was an event to be allowed to go down to the other box. It was far enough to demand that we had to be accompanied there and back on the line. So it meant an entire shift with the signalman. One summer’s evening I went down and spent from
10
p.m. to
6
a.m. in the box.
It was quite different from the fishing experience. The noise of the nearby river was a soothing background outside the safety of the dimly lit box. On that warm summer’s night it became a focus for every moth in the woods. They fluttered in and flopped down round the oil lamp and hovered and mated and died by the hundred. The few trains, nearly all goods, were in mid-rush down the valley or trying to gain speed for the climb, so clattered swiftly past the box with a wave from the driver and fireman, who you could see in the light from the locomotive’s furnace. Another wave from the guard, who could see us but who was just a shadow. I was allowed to heave on the great heavy signal levers, nearly as tall as me, and to ring the warning bells to the next section. In the long silences between the trains we saw owls float soundlessly down the line. Sometimes, their eyes turned towards us, just caught gleaming yellow in the far limits of our light, we saw foxes and badgers – lions and tigers in my imagination – crossing, vulnerable for a few yards on the rails before the undergrowth swallowed them. After the sun rose and came shining down the line there was the three-mile walk in the early-morning light, straight into its beams, back up the track to Doublebois, breakfast and bed.
After one of the empty intervals, soldiers once more descended on Doublebois. The Big House was requisitioned and overflowed. The Nissen huts were reoccupied. Girls took to walking the lanes near by with increasing frequency; Elsie, now abundantly fifteen, lost interest in me. If the vackies had shocked nearby Dobwalls, the soldiers stunned it. As lorries trundled along the main road their bawdy songs rang out:
Hitler has only got one ball.
Goering has two but very small.
Himmler has something similar
And poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.
The Miss Polmanors of the village rushed to the Methodist minister. ‘Mr Buckroyd, Mr Buckroyd, have you heard—’
‘Yes, yes,’ and then wearily, ‘There’s a war on.’
Camp concerts were huge events. Entertainment was at a premium in our backwater. The locals – and especially the children – did their best to get places. Professional entertainers and the Looe Fishermen’s Choir performed in the long Nissen hut that was the camp canteen. I remember one concert in particular. The compere, dressed as a vicar, made an announcement that brought a shout of laughter and left me puzzled: ‘I should like to apologise to Mr Shorthouse for misspelling his name in the parish magazine.’ What’s funny about that? When I had made the connection I thought for days about how rude and clever it was: not just one possible subversive answer, but two.
After the choir a sing-song, ‘You Are My Sunshine’. Rows of soldiers and not enough girls sang with a sudden, rolling, bellowing roar and swayed as they sang. The force and enthusiasm of all those open male throats gave that song an emotional power the composer could only have dreamed of. Oh, my wartime childhood: the stinging smoke and sickly beer smell; the distant light on the stage; and here in the comforting dark, rows of soldiers and the meagre ration of girls.
It was my childhood but it was their youth: hands tight round willing waists; male fingers pressing into thin summer frocks; female cheeks against harsh Army tunics; bawling out their fervour for the moment with a passion I could sense but not comprehend. Their passion was not to get at the Germans, of course, but to stay – for ever if possible – in the warm half-dark, in the promise of a smile and against the pressure of another body that might be snatched away. They had the threat of extinction to sharpen their senses.