Kisses on a Postcard (19 page)

Newquay was a much more adventurous journey.
Three stops down the line to Par.  Par Sands was an intriguing name that often came up. It always sounded to me like a romantic and desirable place to visit and play on, especially as we were told it was part of the Cornish Riviera, that rich people stayed there before the war, so warm that palm trees grew along the front.  But we never got to see it. It was mined and covered in barbed wire and tank traps because of its attractiveness as a possible invasion beach. From Par there was a branch line which had exotic halts called Luxulyan, Bugle, Roche, St Columb Road (alight for St Columb Major and St Columb Minor.  Whatever was this, two villages related?) and Quintrell Downs.
Unfortunately the landscape we rode through did not match the place names. A large area of undistinguished, low, flattish moorland dotted with vast, melancholy china-clay tips, alternated with the great gashes in the ground from which they had been dug. It always seemed a very dreary place in my mind, though with a bit of sun on it it was probably better.

The little tank engine finally pulled us into Newquay on the north coast. The railway had made Newquay. Once the line had been opened it had grown from Victorian times into the famous seaside resort that we all knew of, packed all season. It was now deserted in high summer. There was an apocryphal story that circulated the railway community of Doublebois – and no doubt much wider – of the porter on Newquay station who saved all his tips from the pre-war holiday seasons and bought a row of cottages, which he let out during the summer, enjoying a well-heeled retirement on the rents. The story was probably not that apocryphal.

We always made straight for the glorious beaches, unscarred by barbed wire as I remember, perhaps because nobody imagined the Germans would sail round Land’s End and attempt a landing there. If the tide was out there was mile upon mile of empty, clean sand with streams to dam. Shrimps and lots of little creatures came out of the sand to greet the wavelets as the tide flowed swiftly in, all preyed on by seabirds and waders and examined by me. Above all there was the surf. We never dared into the big stuff but it was the first time I experienced the fun of standing up to my thighs in freezing water with a foaming wall bearing down on me, to knock me over and carry me back onto the beach spluttering, choking and exhilarated. Shivering to pieces, you towelled yourself down or, better still, had Mum or Auntie Rose do it for you. All in all, Newquay was always the most exciting trip.

Another journey that Auntie Rose took us on, only once, I think, was to Wadebridge and Padstow. We went through a village on the branch line with the glorious name of Washaway.

At Wadebridge the Great Western Railway met the Southern Railway line which came down north of Bodmin Moor from Launceston and Okehampton. It was a measure of our estrangement from home that the green livery of the Southern Railway coaches looked drab after the Great Western chocolate and cream, and the un-Great Western shape of their engines with the numbers painted on instead of on fitted metal number plates looked alien – even inferior – to our eyes. Our own and Dad’s Southern Railway a second-class stranger. What next? Wadebridge, with its arched bridge over the river, I remember only as being gaunt, granite and dull. We trailed after Auntie Rose looking at the uninteresting shops, then onto a Southern Railway train to trundle along the ravishing Camel Estuary to Padstow, another ‘quaint’ fishing village that tumbled in down the hills on all sides on to the port. The only item of interest to us boys was that the railway line went straight on to the quay to get the fish directly from the boats and then away non-stop to Billingsgate. My principal memory of Padstow is the smell of fish, not unpleasant but very strong.

Jimmy Peters and I went to Bodmin one day, I think to visit a relative of his in hospital. The hospital was next to the county lunatic asylum, a place of outlandish stories about the mad men and women who inhabited it. We walked across some gardens to the hospital and saw a few pathetic, vacant-looking people shuffling about on the grass. Are they the dangerous lunatics, I wondered. No, I was told later, the dangerous ones are locked away; I believed that, but the sight of those in the gardens stayed with me as the sad image of madness, blotting out the demented screamers of my previous dreams.

We managed to buy a
Beano
, quite an event, and read it together on the train back. One of the comic strips, about Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator, was called ‘Musso Da Wop, He’s A Bigga Da Flop’, which we found uncontrollably funny. We were overcome by giggles which we could not contain as we sat in the full compartment. People stared, then smiled and soon were chuckling with us. The better their humour, the more hysterical we got. Perhaps playing to the audience, we speechlessly pointed to the drawings and captions, the reasons for our incontinence. The adults’ good humour grew and we all got out to change at Bodmin Road with grins on our faces and said goodbye like old friends. Then the fun evaporated, everything went flat. We stood spaced along the platform waiting for our train, once more back in our own separate worlds. The whole group of us embarrassed, it seemed, by our former exuberance.

A circus came to Liskeard. The children were told to bring money to school to book a seat if they wanted to go in a party. I was left out. Somehow or other Jack and I failed to ask Auntie Rose for the money. I don’t believe she would have refused us. Or she or Uncle Jack had said circuses were trashy things, or this one would be no good, or Jack was doing something else (what else would a boy be doing when the circus was coming to town?) and I was too shy to ask – another unlikely prospect. Anyway, I was alone, didn’t have a ticket and felt very hard done by when most of the children crowded onto the bus and left school early. A few of us remained to scatter drearily to our homes.

‘You’re early. What’s up?’ asked Auntie Rose when I got in.

‘Everybody’s gone to the circus early from school.’

‘Well, why haven’t you gone?’ she said, surprised.

I was near tears when I realised I could have been on that bus. It was all a misunderstanding. Now there was no bus and the next train would be too late. Auntie Rose gave me the entrance money, a shilling and sixpence, plus the fare home from Liskeard in case I couldn’t get on the bus coming back, a sandwich, and pushed me out to thumb a lift from one of the rare passing cars or lorries. Actually, I needed no pushing. I ran towards Dobwalls. I ran through Dobwalls, still no cars. Out of Dobwalls, down the winding hill and up the long, long drag past Moorswater. Still no lift. Four miles I covered and arrived at the circus, pitched in a field between Liskeard station and the town, to find that the show had started and, anyway, the marquee was full. I stood there with no breath, gasping with exhaustion and frustration, only just holding down my sobs.

My heartbeats and breathing slowed down as I wandered about listening to the laughter and applause from inside, more gall to my soul. Someone was selling candyfloss, unheard of during the war. It tasted filthy even to my eager tongue. I couldn’t finish it. I went round the back and saw some dejected-looking ponies, which I tried to pat until abruptly told to leave them alone. I moved resentfully away among the circus people who were bustling about.

Just as I was about to give up, a baby elephant came out of the marquee, having done its stuff for the moment. This creature, with its huge ears and searching active trunk, seemed like a miracle. I swear it glowed. It stood shorter than I did and must have been very young. I stared at it in wonder, then sidled up to it and was allowed to pat it. I felt the sensitive top of its trunk explore my clothes, searching for my sandwich, I suppose. This was no mirage but a wonderfully solid, magical, gigantic pet. I asked its handler, an unbossy woman, if I could give him some sandwich. She inspected it and said yes, adding, ‘She’s not a him.’ So, breaking my sandwich into the smallest pieces I could, I fed it bit by bit to the elephant, who stood there waiting for more, its trunk running over my clothes and hands, thrilling me with its touch, not always gentle, always demanding. When my sandwich was finished I asked the woman what else the elephant liked.

‘Fruit,’ she said.

‘What fruit?’

‘Apples.’

I raced out of the field to the nearest greengrocer’s, still just open, bought a pound of apples and tore back. The elephant was gone. Lungs again bursting I nearly cried with frustration but it reappeared from the tent, having done another turn. It headed straight for me; I nearly died with joy – elephants, apparently, do remember – and I fed it the apples until told by the woman that that was enough, she had to take her away. I patted my new best friend goodbye, tried and failed to hold her trunk for a moment, watched her amble away, spent my remaining pennies on a bag of chips, had my last apple and, penniless, walked contentedly home.

C
hapter
F
ourteen

Uncle Jack’s antipathy to
all things religious turned a minor incident involving Miss Polmanor into a comic and shaming episode. It was their polarised attitudes that caused it and I am certain that he, at least, regretted it. His atheism was founded on or confirmed by his experiences in the First World War. Any faith he may have had was – like the faith of many others – blown to pieces in the trenches along with the thousands of their comrades and nominal enemies. His real enemies were not German soldiers, of course, but all people with civilian power over him: bosses, owners, all officers above a certain rank, staff officers perhaps, who ordered the soldiers into danger as opposed to sharing it with them. Bestriding all of his world was religious authority, then so much more important than now. So a woman like Miss Polmanor, who, though she paraded her faith, was in reality a sad lonely figure (as Auntie Rose recognised), was a red rag.

Some Saturdays Uncle Jack would take Jack and me into Dobwalls for our regular visit to the barber. There, in a glass-covered annex to a house on the right just as we entered the village, sat a barber’s chair which looked across the road at Rowe’s garage opposite and at Ede’s village shop on its right. A smaller road and three lanes joined the main road here; it was as near to a focal point that a village which straggled along one road for over half a mile could have. The house was a few steps above street-level so the barber’s chair was a splendid place from which to watch the world – or Dobwalls, anyway – go by. And to gossip. Uncle Jack sat there chatting to the barber while his little ring of hair was cut even shorter and shaved at the neck. Jack and I – and all the other children in the village – were seated on a board set across the arms of the chair and ruthlessly given pudding-basin haircuts in spite of our wriggles. Up the back of the neck and over the crown went the clippers, short back and sides it was called, very nearly short back, sides and top. This haircut was thought to keep the nits to a minimum and it probably did. A forelock was all that was left of my former fair-haired tangle; my mother hated it when she visited: her boys in hobnail boots and cropped hair like hobbledehoys.

One Saturday, with newly shorn heads and itchy bits of hair caught down the inside of our shirts, we left the barber’s to see if there were any sweets or comics to be bought in Ede’s. It was a busy morning: there were several vackies and village kids in the road, some villagers were chatting and Miss Polmanor arrived on her bicycle with its shopping basket.

In the shop children were pestering Mr Ede. ‘Haven’t you got the
Beano
?’ ‘No
Dandy
?’ ‘Any gobstoppers?’ ‘No sweets at all?’

He was a pleasant man who got on with most people. ‘No, no, no, us don’t have naught.’

‘You said you’d have the
Beano
today.’

‘Us can’t do naught about the paper shortage.’

‘You’ve got the
Farmers Weekly
.’

‘That’s vital for the war effort.’

And the children would make a ragged chorus of that ritual answer to all complaints: ‘Oh yeah. There’s a war on.’

‘Go on, you children, off you go. Don’t block up the shop. What can I do for you, Miss Polmanor?’

She was rummaging anxiously. ‘I’ve got my list here but I can’t find my purse.’

Mr Ede addressed Uncle Jack. ‘Morning, Mr Phillips, what can I do for you?’

Before Uncle Jack could answer, Miss Polmanor spoke loudly. She was getting agitated. ‘My money. ’Tis not yere. I must have been robbed.’

‘Perhaps you dropped it,’ said Mr Ede helpfully.