‘No, I can’t have.’ She gestured to demonstrate. ‘ ’Twas in my purse, which was in my handbag, which was in my shopping bag, which was in my basket.’
Uncle Jack couldn’t resist such an opening. He chipped in with a friendly smile. ‘Must have been Dick Turpin to get that off you.’
Miss Polmanor’s temperature went up. ‘ ’Tis not funny, Mr Phillips.’
‘Did you leave it in the off-licence?’ His concerned expression looked quite real.
‘How dare you!’ She was quite rattled by this and went too far. ‘They children jostled I just now. One o’ they must have taken it.’
Uncle Jack took this seriously. He rounded on us. ‘Have one of you got Miss Polmanor’s purse?’
Fervent denials all round.
‘There.’ He spread his hands to her as though the matter were concluded.
Mr Ede was genuinely helpful. ‘Look round on the floor, my dear. ’Er must be yere somewhere.’
Everyone started looking.
‘There’s more than two pounds in there,’ wailed Miss Polmanor.
We all redoubled our efforts, some of the children overdoing it a bit. ‘Wow.’ ‘Quick. Where is it?’ ‘Do I get a reward?’
A vackie called John White started to leave the shop. Miss Polmanor jumped on him. ‘Where be you going?’
‘I was gonna look outside,’ said John, upset at the implications.
‘Escaping, were you?’ She went on to dig her own grave, something she had probably done her whole life. ‘You’m hiding it somewhere.’
John, a gentle boy who later became a Methodist minister, was near tears. ‘I haven’t got your rotten purse.’
‘Us should search all of ’em. One of ’em has it, ’tis sure,’ continued the distracted Miss Polmanor.
Uncle Jack strolled to the door, seething. He muttered, ‘I don’t think I can stand it in yere.’ He raised his voice. ‘I suppose I can leave, can I? Without being searched?’ and added to me, ‘I’ll be outside, boy, when you’re released.’ He growled something in Welsh as he left.
Miss Polmanor pointed at me, perhaps someone she felt she could trust. ‘You stand guard by the door, boy.’
Once more I was her unwilling accomplice.
Mr Ede, too, was upset. ‘Well, how’s us gwain to search they?’
She was at a loss for only a moment. ‘The boys can empty they’m pockets to start with.’
The boys reluctantly started to do this as, outside, I saw Uncle Jack meet Jack, who had been talking to a friend. ‘Look, Uncle Jack, I’ve just found this purse over by Miss Polmanor’s bike.’
Uncle Jack gave a thin, bitter laugh. ‘Take it in the shop. She’s in there having kittens. Tell her where you found it.’
Inside, the melodrama continued. I had no chance to open my mouth. Mr Ede looked at the girls in their flimsy summer dresses. ‘How’s us gwain to search they maids? They bain’t got nowhere to hide naught.’
One boy pointed at Elsie. ‘You’ll have to look in her knickers. She puts everything in there.’
Elsie coloured up as all the children except me giggled. To have searched her would have been ludicrous: she lived with Miss Polmanor.
At which moment Jack came in. ‘Is this your purse, Miss Polmanor?’
She grabbed it triumphantly. ‘There. One of ’em has it. I told you.’
Mr Ede protested that Jack had just come in.
Jack said, ‘I found it on the ground by your bicycle.’
Miss Polmanor was humiliated and confused. To cover her embarrassment she checked the contents as Jack added earnestly, ‘I didn’t look inside, Miss Polmanor. I didn’t like to.’
She left, trying to gather the shreds of her dignity. The moment she was outside excited giggles and chatter burst out among the children. ‘She blames us for everything.’
‘Blinking old bat.’
Mr Ede wasn’t having that in his shop and we were all driven out to where Uncle Jack was in conversation with Miss Polmanor. He was chewing a matchstick and grinning. ‘So the vackies didn’t steal your purse after all, then?’
‘Little devils. You don’t know what they’ll get up to next.’ She turned quickly away to her bicycle. ‘Oh. Look at this. I’ve got a puncture. A flat tyre.’
‘Oh, bad luck,’ said Uncle Jack. Then an even bigger exclamation of sympathy. He pointed at her back wheel. ‘Look at that. Both of ’em. That’s terrible. Where have you been riding it? In the quarry?’
Miss Polmanor stared at her bike. ‘
Two
flat tyres. It’s they vackies again.’
‘But they was all in the shop with you,’ said Uncle Jack. ‘You kept ’em in there. Remember?’
She was silenced.
He looked away down the road to Doublebois and the army camp. ‘I reckon it was one of those two soldiers who were here just now. I saw them fiddling about by your bike.’
Miss Polmanor was near tears. ‘Soldiers. Vackies. I’ve left my pump at home. I’ll have to push it all the way.’
Uncle Jack dived to her rescue. I think he was starting to feel genuinely sorry for her. He called the biggest vacky boy over. ‘Hey, Frank, wheel Miss Polmanor’s bike over to the garage and pump her tyres up for her and she’ll give you sixpence.’
She grabbed the bike. ‘Don’t worry. I can do it myself.’
‘No, no, you mustn’t. There’s help here aplenty.’ He turned to Frank again. ‘You do it and
I’ll
give you sixpence. We can’t leave her to do it on her own, can we?’ He reached into his pocket. ‘Miss Polmanor will just say, “Thank you very much. You’re a good boy.” ’
‘I shall do no such thing,’ she said firmly and pushed her bike away, leaving everyone longing to say something but waiting till she was out of earshot.
‘Cor,’ whispered Elsie. ‘How did she get two punctures?’
‘I reckon someone let her tyres down,’ said Frank.
There was much
sotto voce
excitement at this, quite a daring crime in all the circumstances.
‘I told her. I think it was those two soldiers. I saw them messing about.’ Uncle Jack again pointed vaguely towards Doublebois. ‘D’you know how they did it?’
‘Easy,’ boasted Frank. ‘You can do it with a matchstick.’
Uncle Jack took the matchstick from his mouth and gestured with it. ‘That’s right, boy. You just use the matchstick to push the valve in and . . . psssss . . . there you are.’ He gave the matchstick to Frank. ‘But don’t you ever try it on my bike or I’ll tan the hide off you.’ He winked at Jack and me. ‘Come on, boys. Home for some dinner, is it?’
Doublebois and Dobwalls were due for more shocks. Once more the soldiers piled into their Bedford lorries with their kitbags and rifles and rode away, waving to us kids and singing bawdy songs. We again had the run of our glorious playground, Doublebois House and grounds and the empty Nissen huts.
The district just had time to heave a corporate sigh of relief before the rumours started as to who would be next to occupy it. The Land Army? People who had been bombed out? The Commandos? Everyone except the Germans, it seemed. The roar of different motors was soon heard. Vast, high-bonneted, high-sided lorries which the occupants called trucks, with names like Dodge and Chrysler. And jeeps, a stylish updating of the English Land-Rovers. Yes, it was the Americans.
A year earlier Hitler had declared war on them to show solidarity with his friends the Japanese after they attacked Pearl Harbor. Churchill had been trying to get the Americans in from the beginning and Hitler generously did his work for him. The outcome was no longer in any serious doubt. Now England was being flooded with American soldiers prior to D-Day and the invasion of Europe.
In our part of Cornwall, people from the next village were strangers; Englishmen from across the Tamar were foreigners; Americans might have been from Mars. And that wasn’t all: to cap everything, they weren’t just Americans, they were black, a whole regiment of them. Many in the village had never seen a black man; I don’t think I had.
‘They’m BLACK,’ some squawked at each other.
‘What? All over? All the way up and down?’
‘They got white palms to their hands, I saw when I shook ’ands wi’ one o’ they.’
‘It wears off, that’s why.’
‘Does it wash off?’
‘They can see in the dark.’
‘They’d have to, wouldn’t they.’
‘And their lips!’
The men lowered their voices. ‘They got John Thomases like Crago’s bull.’
‘Twenty-two inches of uncontrolled flesh.’
‘They’m mad for white women,’ one man whispered to Miss Polmanor.
She needed no encouragement. ‘Us’ll all be raped in our beds.’
Her informant reassured her. ‘Don’t you worry. They’ll make an exception in your case.’
It’s no good thinking in terms of colour prejudice. The village wasn’t prejudiced – it was astounded. Although we were at the centre of the British Empire, populated with millions of every size, shape and colour, this was a remote part of Cornwall in
1943
.
And we kids in Doublebois, we loved them. They made our own soldiers seem drab. Their uniforms, their equipment, their cigarettes, their sweets and, above all, their very colour. We wore their hats, chewed their gum, held their strange hands and ate their candy. Rides on army vehicles doubled. Jeeps were the big treat: tooth-loosening, rebounding joy-rides across the fields. We drilled with their rifles and learned their slang. I had a tap-dancing lesson on a sheet of plywood at the army camp gates from a man from New Orleans itself.
I was in Ede’s shop with some other people just after they arrived, when a couple of them strolled in. They politely took their caps off and greeted us.
Mr Ede was always kindly but perhaps he sensed trade. He practically curtsied behind the counter. ‘You’m welcome to Cornwall. ’Taint much but ’tis home to us.’
‘This is paradise. You should see where we come from.’ The deep voice and Southern accent astonished me. It wasn’t like the voices in the Westerns we had seen every Saturday morning before the war.
A man asked the question all Americans got asked. ‘Where you been to these last three years? ’Tis nearly all over.’ But it was lost on these two and somehow seemed scarcely fair. All of our images of America were white – with blacks occasionally being goofy or loyal in the background.
The second GI asked, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but we see you have two churches in your city. Is one – maybe – all right for coloured folk to worship in?’
‘They be Church of England and Wesleyan Methodist. Which be you?’
‘We’re Baptist.’
‘I reckon that’s the same as Methodist, don’t you, Miss Polmanor?’ someone asked maliciously.
There was another camp concert given with the ubiquitous Looe Fishermen’s Choir performing and us kids singing traditional and patriotic songs for our guests. Then their own jazz band played for us. It was sensational; the whole room was soon rocking. I had never heard music like it. But when GIs started jitterbugging there and then in the aisles with each other and the few girls who were present – their dresses swirling up above their waists – it went too far for most. Opinion about our guests’ behaviour divided between those who couldn’t wait to join in – mostly girls – some who didn’t mind, and most – or possibly the most vocal – who were shocked rigid. The arguments to support the shocked-rigid view became wider and wilder. A dance at the army camp, always an attraction for the younger females in entertainment-free Doublebois, Dobwalls and wider, became a must for all who could or dared.
And these smiling, flamboyant-to-us, gentle men who came from God knows what hells in the Deep South of the segregated USA let us pat and pull their hair, rub their skin to see if it came off, examine their pink palms, marvel at their very existence – and then they were gone just as suddenly as they had appeared and were replaced by other Yanks, white ones, no less friendly, no less generous, but with not a tenth of the exotic appeal of their black comrades.
C
hapter
F
ifteen
Fighting was a part of living for a boy, most boys I suppose, in those days. I know that I was always willing to defend myself or my position or my rights even if the other boy was a bit bigger. And not just to defend myself. I was willing to attack, too. If he was too big I would hit him and run. I don’t think I was brave; we just thought like that. It established pecking orders and settled disputes, even for boys as young as me. At first the vackies fought the village kids. When that calmed down and many vackies had returned home – quite a few simply became fourteen, left school and went home to work – so that we were outnumbered, we fought each other, God knows what about. I remember having a strolling casual fight with Alan Packham all the way home from school one day while his older brother Harold walked with us and looked on. We were evenly matched in age and size; we walked a bit, punched a bit, walked and skirmished, breathing heavily from emotion as much as exertion; it was inconclusive. When he reached his house, the district nurse’s house across the road, he went in and I walked the few yards to the Court. I crept into the wash-house, washed the blood off and bathed the scratches from where we had fallen into the hedge as we grappled, before going in for my tea. Such things can’t have been as casual as all that, feelings and passions were clearly involved, but that is how I remember them, the causes long forgotten.