Kisses on a Postcard (18 page)
What appealed to me was to find a nest with eggs and return to see them hatched: scrawny, bald, ugly little chicks with gaping beaks into which we put worms or insects while the anxious parents fluttered and scolded us from nearby bushes. We were soon told not to do that as the parents would abandon their chicks if they were fed by someone else. I have never really established whether this old country saw is true but such sayings are generally based on fact. The wild, naked, vulnerable scraps had none of the appeal of the day-old chicks that appeared in our chicken run every spring: fluffy, Disney objects that touched all hearts before they grew big enough to lay if they were hens or go into the pot if they weren’t. The wild-bird chicks developed down, then feathers and were soon perched on a twig or on the clothes line in the garden, or on farm buildings in a row before they challenged gravity. Songbirds were all round us; we didn’t need to go down to the woods to find their nests – although we sometimes did – they were in every bush and hedgerow.
But buzzards were different. Buzzards were big, nested in inaccessible places and their eggs were prized. If you got one it proved that you had dared and achieved something.
Ken and Eric Plummer, Jack and I set off one day for the quarry. A buzzard had been seen circling there. It was the right time of year, there must be a nest somewhere. The quarry was down the main road, past the Rabbit Field and on the right, just where the woods started, a great chunk which had been blown out of the hillside bit by bit to get the slate. When they were blasting, which wasn’t often, we were forbidden to go near it; notices were put out on the main road and traffic was held up until a satisfying boom was heard and it could go through.
We crouched way down in the quarry and searched the sheer faces and steps of slate above us. It didn’t take long. A buzzard wheeled in and settled on the bough of a stunted tree near the top of the quarry. There was the nest, a ramshackle affair of sticks and bits, in the tree. The other bird was sitting. It soon took off and the first one took its place. We set off round the quarry and up the hill through the woods until we were near where the nest should be. We crept through the undergrowth to the edge of the quarry and peered about us. There was the nest with the bird on it. It hadn’t seen us. One of the Plummers found a broken branch and we stripped it of twigs. We crept nearer. She saw us and stirred uneasily.
Ken, the older Plummer, crept forward with his long stick and prodded at the bird. He could barely reach her. The tree hung out over the quarry. The bird briefly pecked at the stick, but was soon intimidated. Reluctantly it shuffled to its feet and took off, falling away on a glide before it languorously flapped its way up and out of sight. In the nest, snugly lined with moss and leaves, lay three glorious buzzard’s eggs, white with brownish veins or marks, a little smaller than hen’s eggs.
The problem was: how to get them? The tree bent alarmingly when we tested our weight on it; we didn’t want to tip them out; the ground was a long way below for either eggs or boy to fall to. The solution was obvious from the first: as always, I was the smallest and lightest. We made a chain, Ken anchored himself to a tree and I slid out along the branch, which creaked beneath me. I reached out with one hand but couldn’t make it. Bits of earth and loose stones rattled down the slates below me. I looked down into the quarry and clung tighter to the tree, reducing my reach. I tried again and could just reach an egg by all of us moving forward in our chain. I heard the slithering of heels in the ground behind me as I strained for the nearest egg. I got it and was passing it back when there were shouts and consternation. The furious buzzards had returned together, mewing and flapping. Nearly dropping me and the egg into the quarry the others dragged me back and we all fled. You don’t realise it until you are close up, but a buzzard’s wingspan is about a yard and a half and its beak looks enormous when coming at you.
We proudly showed our prize to Uncle Jack. He was unimpressed. ‘Oh, what did you want to do that for? They’re not harming you. They’re on our side, the buzzards. They eat rabbits and moles and rats. Put it back and leave ’em alone in future.’
Abashed, we wondered what to do. Uncle Jack’s disapproval meant less to the Plummer boys than to us but nobody prized the egg any more. They shrugged the matter off and walked away. As for Uncle Jack, he couldn’t possibly have known what risks his casual ‘Put it back’ involved Jack and me in. We made our resolution: the next day we went down to the quarry, frightened away the sitting bird and, once more, I slid out along the tree, insecurely held by Jack, and replaced the egg. Just as well I didn’t slip; he would have had to let go or come with me. I don’t believe the egg could possibly have hatched; we probably knew that at the time, but it seemed like atonement.
We went and watched out for the buzzard chicks to hatch but couldn’t really be sure as we were soon back to school after the Easter holidays, chastened and cured of bird’s-nesting. When I think now of the risks we took then and on numerous other occasions, as we ran free and wild in the Cornish countryside, it seems a miracle to me that of all us vackies only little Teddy Camberwell met his premature end there.
Putting ha’pennies on the rail before a train went through was something we all tried; the incentive, apart from experimental curiosity, was to turn a ha’penny into a penny. After the train had gone over it, it was certainly twice the size but you could never pass it off as a penny or use it again as a ha’penny. We soon desisted from this expensive pastime.
Shunting in the goods yard went on all the time. We often tried to join in. We knew the porters, guards and the men on the footplate of the various tank engines. If they were in the right mood we could throw the points levers, run beside the rolling wagons, pull the brakes on and even go on the footplate. But the sight of the stationmaster walking down the slope off the end of the platform, across the main line and under the bridge towards us, meant that we quickly vanished and the men wouldn’t let us near again for a while, clearly having been told off. When there was no shunting and the stationmaster was off duty we played among the stationary goods wagons at will. If we could find one that was well down the siding out of the way we took turns to lie down under it between the rails and, using a shunting pole, roll it over the boy on the ground to prove the point that a train could go right over you without hurting you. There were many stories of people having saved themselves from being killed by doing just that, hurling themselves down under sixty-mile-an-hour expresses and walking away unscathed. Our games with the goods wagon were a preparation for one of us to do that on the main line one day. We stood beside the line and, with heightened senses because of our project, examined at close hand the massive rush and roar that a speeding train makes as it thunders by. Nobody volunteered to go first. The thought of the major trouble you would be in if you survived was as much a deterrent as the prospect of a mangled death.
During the war all road signposts and signs identifying stations were removed so that, in the words of the man on Welling station, ‘The Germans won’t know where they are when they get here.’ The stationmaster Mr Rawlings would promenade up and down the platform whenever a train pulled in saying, ‘Doublebois,’ with an upward inflexion, followed by, ‘Doublebois,’ on a downward. He did this very quietly. When a
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Hall-class or Grange-class engine was letting off steam, having climbed the bank from the valley, his little melody, ‘Doublebois,’ up, ‘Doublebois,’ down, was completely inaudible. People would lean out and ask where they were when only a foot or two from him. This gave great pleasure to Dad when he visited, who compared him to the man at Eltham Park, two stations from Welling, who, over a silently arriving electric train, would bawl, with the second word on two wavering notes, ‘Elt-ham Pa-a-rk,’ so that he could be heard across the whole of Eltham in the blackout.
During our school holidays we were taken by Auntie Rose – and sometimes Uncle Jack if he was on his fortnight summer break – on outings, always with packed lunches and bottles of pop. The trips I remember best were to Looe, the most frequent destination. After that came Polperro, Newquay and Padstow. All were by train, with our privilege tickets reducing the cost because Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack were a railway couple and we were railway children. Dad would sign vouchers and send them to Auntie Rose and we would go down to Doublebois station and present our Southern Railway credentials to the ticket clerk in this heart of the Great Western Railway empire, always a moment to savour. Occasionally some of these outings were with Mum and Dad when they came down to see us, some four or five times in the three years – Mum more than Dad – all they could manage.
The branch line to Looe with its loop from Liskeard and reversal of direction at Coombe Junction under Moorswater Viaduct was my favourite. First, it left Liskeard station at right angles to the main line, going due north, the wrong direction for Looe, curved to the right in a semicircle and dived underneath the main line before continuing to circle back to Moorswater, once more facing north, where the engine changed ends and the train reversed to continue its journey directly south to the sea. The branch line was shaped like a giant question mark with Looe the full stop at the bottom. It went under the main line twice on the circular part. The tiny halts with wooden platforms at St Keyne and Causeland were the names, brought us to Sandplace, the tidal limit of the East Looe River, with the exciting smell and promise of the sea. Beside the widening estuary, the train continued past tidal mudflats until the confluence of the East Looe and West Looe Rivers opened out the view. There was a portion of the water on the far side fenced off to make the boating lake on which we would later have an hour if we were lucky. Out at Looe station to walk along the quayside with all sorts of fish in crates for us to examine curiously. They looked nothing like the fish, or bits of them, that we had on our plates to eat. These were surprising, had more detail, often an iridescent
beauty, but mostly to our ignorant eyes were far more ugly, more from another planet than merely another familiar element. The lobsters and crabs in baskets had more character, more foreignness when seen here, tentacles and claws waving, sightless eyes staring, still alive, just out of the sea.
Occasionally a Royal Navy motor torpedo boat with a gun on its bow and torpedo tubes with torpedoes lashed on the deck would cruise menacingly in from the sea or be berthed. We longed for a trip in one of those, but never got it. Inspecting them from the quayside, we imagined those tubes unleashing hell at U-boats out in the Channel, though I don’t think many were there: they were all in the Atlantic sinking our convoys.
As the river reached the sea it was contained by a high hill to the west and a longish jetty to the east. This jetty ensured that the entrance to the port was navigable. It also helped to create the sandy beach that stretched away eastwards and on which we could play and bathe in specified areas between the tank traps, pill-boxes and barbed wire, there to repel the Germans. There were, reputedly, mined areas too with warning skull-and-crossbones notices, but I don’t remember them and I think I would. We spent most time in the rock pools – I once caught in a toy bucket a cuttlefish the size of my hand, to me a weird, alien creature which I wanted to take home but was persuaded to put back. After a day on the beach if it was fine we wandered round the town, looking fruitlessly for an ice cream, having fish (now reassuringly white and flaky) and chips with pop, or tea in a café and – the highlight before we took the train home – an hour on the boating lake, rowing round and incompetently round. I learned the hard way not to have one foot on land and one on the unmoored boat as you board it. I stood there, while Jack rowed fruitlessly to keep the boat where it was, my legs spreading until I was dropped waist-deep into the water in the widening gap.
To get to Polperro we took a bus from Looe. Polperro was Mum’s favourite. ‘Quaint’ was the word I most often heard used to describe it. Now a tourist trap, packed with Cornish ephemera, it was then utterly deserted, bereft of its pre-war trade. Only the port produced income – from the fishing. There was the odd newsagent’s which had unsold picture postcards, and I first learned the word ‘piskie’ – Cornish for ‘pixie’ – from those cards in Polperro and saw the illustrated prayer that was before the war – and has been since – posted round the world: ‘From ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us.’ Even I, not yet ten, succumbed to the charm of the place as I followed Mum and Dad from one chocolate-box view to another.