by Alf Townsend
You couldn’t, in all honesty, describe my adopted home in Penryn as a farm. I suppose a small-holding would be a fair description, albeit a very run-down and ramshackle affair. It’s funny what the brain stores in its memory bank for years, isn’t it? But I can’t honestly remember much about the husband of the house, ‘Uncle Sid’. He was a dead ringer for his son: fat, rude and ugly. I can’t ever remember him speaking to me during my stay – even while I was helping him pen the pigs, or bringing in the cows, or collecting the chickens’ eggs. He was a big, chunky man with a rosy complexion – it could have been the booze – and he always wore a battered old flat cap and forever had a fag-end in his mouth. But what fascinated me about his fag-ends was that they were never, ever alight. He must have been rolling his own with cow dung or the like! His way of speaking was just a grunt or two and a finger pointed at what he wanted me to do. It was the same over the dinner table on the very rare occasions that I was allowed to eat with the family. Then, he’d just get up when he’d finished eating, rudely emit a loud burp, and walk out without a word to anyone. We’d hear the front door crash a minute later and that was him down the local village pub for the night with all his farmer friends. I often used to be laying still awake in bed and still freezing cold when he came back from the pub well into the night. By that time and with all the booze in him, he was full of Dutch courage and would stand up to the Witch and give her back as much as he got.
‘What time you’me call this Sidney?’ she would yell out loudly. ‘Oye calls this after closing time and that be the end of the matter,’ he would slur in reply. ‘Well,’ she would yell back, ‘it b’aint be the end of the matter with me. You’re a drunken bugger, just like your father and your brothers.’ Then Uncle Sid would really go off on one with the help of the booze. His voice rose to a crescendo and you could hear him bash his fist against the wardrobe. ‘Is that so?’ he yelled. ‘My bloody so-called drunken father and brothers were sober enough to tell me not to marry you, them always did say you were no bloody good. Them did say I’d be better off with a sheep or a cow.’
Now it was open warfare and Uncle Sid had gone over the top with that remark. Suddenly, there was the sound of a loud, solid bang and a yell of anguish from Uncle Sid. ‘What d’ya wanna hit me with that there chamber pot for?’ he screamed out in terror. ‘You’me just get into that bed this minute, you drunken bugger,’ snarled the Witch, ‘or you’me be getting another whack somewhere you won’t like.’ Then there was the sound of the bed creaking as poor old Uncle Sid got in and surrendered the argument. Then, peace and quiet, with just the sound of the wind gently blowing through the trees and casting shadows across my window. I just chuckled to myself as I settled down for the night. Even with a bellyful of booze, poor old Uncle Sid still couldn’t win an argument with the Witch and he never would!
A scruffy Alfie, pre-war. (Author’s collection)
With the passing of time and the benefit of hindsight, I now realise that my sporadic invitations to the family dinner table just happened to coincide with the sporadic visits from one of the ladies in green uniforms. The Witch wasn’t daft, she was mean and cunning. She made doubly sure her evacuee money of 8s 3d a week wasn’t jeopardised. At the outset and long before I discovered what a cold-blooded pig he was, I felt quite sorry for poor old Uncle Sid. It was painfully obvious, even to a young nipper like me, who wore the trousers in this household. The spiteful Witch was the guv’nor and Uncle Sid kept quiet and did her bidding, just to keep the peace.
I recall with horror one fine morning when she said to me: ‘You boy!’ (I still didn’t have a name with her), ‘go and fill up that bucket with water, take it out to Uncle Sid in the barn and tell him to take care of those bloody kittens right away.’ How exciting, I thought in my innocence. We’ve got some new kittens and I’m going to help wash them. The four newborn baby kittens were lying on the floor of the barn looking very cosy on the straw and snuggling up to their mother’s tummy. ‘Can I hold one please, Uncle Sid?’ I said. He grunted in his normal manner and shook his head and then, to my absolute horror and disbelief, he picked up the kittens one by one and proceeded to drown them in the bucket without showing the slightest flicker of emotion. Just puffing away on his unlit dog-end and grunting as he held them under the water. It was almost as if he was just doing the washing-up. My distraught screams and shouts of protest brought the Witch rushing to the barn. No sympathy for me, and yet again I was given a clump around the ear, thrown into the dark woodshed as a punishment, without my supper yet again.
As a city kid, I had a lot to learn about life on a farm and the cruel way many of the farmers used to treat their livestock. In my childish brain, the cows, pigs and the hens were like pets to me. Not so to Uncle Sid: many was the time I watched in utter horror and disbelief as he punched and kicked the cows and the sheep. And what was their ‘crime’? Well, according to my good Uncle Sid, they were ‘lazy buggers’. The Witch instructed me one day to go out and tell Uncle Sid that she wanted a big, fat chicken. I duly obeyed her order and followed Uncle Sid to where the chickens were clucking about, totally oblivious of what this red-faced monster was going to do. He strolled among the chickens looking them over, picking one up and squeezing it in the tummy and putting it down again. Suddenly, he grabbed one by the neck with his big, beefy hands and almost casually – as if he was ringing out a wet cloth – he wrung the wretched bird’s neck. The poor old chicken who had been clucking away and eating its food just seconds before let out one loud squawk before expiring. That wasn’t the end of the horror. Uncle Sid grunted loudly, puffed on his unlit dog-end, looked up and attempted to pass me the still-warm corpse of the chicken to carry back to the Witch. I just ran off in horror screaming like a mad thing. Needless to say, I had to pay again for my disobedience with another spell in my prison.
To be fair to the rest of the country people, it wasn’t all doom and gloom in Penryn. I loved the beautiful countryside, I loved the animals and I loved being with them. I especially enjoyed some of the jobs that were allocated to me like feeding the lovely, fat old pigs and making clucking noises when feeding the chickens. My very first job before breakfast was to return the huge milk churns to the cowshed. Now, in those far-off days, every farm or smallholding had a wooden platform outside the front gate. It was built exactly to the same height as the milk lorry that called every morning. The milk guy used to back alongside the wooden platform, load the full churns and replace them with empties. And it was my job to waggle them down the wooden steps and spin them up the muddy path to the cowshed. I can’t really explain why, but I thoroughly enjoyed wheeling the milk churns into the cowshed and saying a friendly ‘good morning’ to the three old cows. Mind you, cows are lovely, gentle animals. For sure, they can be a bit on the dopey side but they’re never aggressive. I recall being so upset one morning when I breezed into the cowshed to say good morning and saw Buttercup, the old cow, laying on the ground, with her feet up in the air. Even I knew something serious had happened and my frantic calls brought Uncle Sid a-puffing up the path. He looked down at the stricken animal and for once in his life he spoke to me, muttering those immortal and ‘sympathetic’ words. ‘Bugger that cow, it’s going to cost me a pretty penny to replace her’.
Later in the day a lorry arrived with some lifting gear on board. Poor old Buttercup was attached to the cable, then dragged unceremoniously from the cowshed and hoisted on to the lorry. That was that. A short trip down to the knacker’s yard to make more food for all the fat pigs and life went on as before!
I’ll give the country folk their fair due – they did stick together and help each other in times of need. One day I noticed the Witch was doing a lot of cooking and baking and I overheard her talking to a neighbour and managed to grasp the gist of the conversation. It seemed that one of the local farmers had tragically lost his wife during childbirth. He was absolutely devastated with grief and had let his property go downhill. So all of the locals planned to go round to his farm, men
d some of the neglected fences and reap one of his fields to feed the cattle. The women would supply the food for the men, do some bits and pieces in the house and tidy up the place in general. I found it particularly fascinating that fine, sunny day, when all the neighbours headed for the farm to help out. Every lane and every thoroughfare en route to the farm were jam-packed with locals carrying their tools and their food. Over fifty years later, that very same picture came to mind while I was watching that excellent movie Witness, starring Harrison Ford. Only that time, the people who all descended on the farm to help build a new barn were the lovely Amish people – the ladies in their old-fashioned clothes and the men with long beards. Incidentally, the Amish are a US Mennonite sect which traces its origins back to Jakob Amman, a seventeenth-century Mennonite bishop. The dictionary tells me that they are ‘a Protestant sect that rejects infant baptism, church organisation and the doctrine of transubstantiation and in most cases refuses military service’. Okay, so I am digressing, but I like to learn and I find facts like that very interesting!
Anyway, my job was to lug all the boxes of pies and pasties around to the farm. But it was one of my most enjoyable days since I was parted from my big sister. The Witch buggered off somewhere while I mingled with all the other people on the grass outside the house. It was a lovely day, everybody was in a happy mood – especially old Uncle Sid who was knocking back the cider as if there was no tomorrow. And, like a starving animal, I had eaten so many of the Cornish pasties I thought I might throw up. Then came the shout from one of the beefy, Cornish farmers. ‘We be a-going down to the bottom field to cut it. Bring all the food and drink and the guns down there, okay?’ So everyone picked up their stuff and followed the tractor and the reaper down to the bottom field. I settled myself down over by the far hedge as they started cutting the grass. Suddenly, all hell broke loose. As the grass was being cut, so the rabbits and the field mice made a run for safety under a barrage from the shotguns. How one of the kids, or even one of the onlookers, didn’t get shot, I’ll never know. The guys firing the shotguns were not only wild, they were also all well boozed-up on cider. Surprisingly, nobody got injured and, even more surprisingly, there were plenty of dead rabbits to share among the locals. Believe me, if you haven’t had the pleasure of eating meat for quite a while, then rabbit stew tastes like the finest feast! It’s a strange fact, but we humans always seem to just remember the good things in life and conveniently forget the bad!
Conversely, my chilblains were weeping and getting even more painful and my bad nightmares and my bed-wetting were getting worse. These obvious signs of a young lad in distress were aggravated even more by longer spells in the woodshed for what the Witch decreed as ‘wilful disobedience of a proper adult’. I must have looked and smelt a bit of a wreck, because even my schoolteacher, who generally never took a blind bit of notice of me or of any of the other vacs, said one day: ‘What be the matter with your fingers lad and what be that funny smell about you?’ ‘I got chilblains, sir,’ I replied, happy that someone had at least noticed my plight. ‘And that funny smell,’ I went on, bringing a chuckle from the class, ‘is because that bleedin’ Witch I live with keeps chucking me in the freezing cold bleedin’ woodshed and I keep peeing the bed.’ He stepped back and his nostrils dilated as he caught a whiff of me. Then, just the slightest look of concern crossed his face as he said. ‘Watch your language boy, go back to your seat and I’ll look into it.’ To give him his due, he must have had a quiet word in the Witch’s ear, because things were never quite as bad again. Suddenly, I was sitting at the dinner table on a regular basis – even when the lady in the green uniform wasn’t due to make her sporadic visits. I wouldn’t say the Witch was exactly motherly towards me – she wasn’t the slightest bit worried about my welfare. Her only concern was keeping the money coming in!
Alfie’s sisters Joan and Irene at school. (Joan Westmore’s collection)
Suddenly, one bright sunny day – it must have been the start of summer – my Mum appeared on the doorstep with my two sisters and my dreadful ordeal was over. I was off like a shot, running down the lane and screaming out like a mad person – without as much as a goodbye or a backward glance! I left it to my Mum and my sisters to collect all of my belongings while I made a bee-line for the bus stop! After that terrible experience I could well have been scarred for life and grown up a nutcase, or even a psychopath. But, luckily, apart from monstrous nightmares well into adulthood, I became a kindly person without a hint of a bad temper and with a strong sense of humour. I’ve always taught myself a message in life, and it works for me. If you’re at rock bottom and you’re at the end of your tether – maybe with the loss of a loved one, or severe domestic traumas – remember this: the only way left for you is upwards!
ALL TOGETHER AGAIN IN PERRANPORTH
I well remember that our eventual arrival in Perranporth was a time of great joy and happiness for me. At long last I was free from my tormentor. No more clumps round the ears, no more pain and abuse and no more humiliation, bed-wetting and dark woodsheds. With the benefit of hindsight, I could well have been one of the luckier evacuees in Cornwall. I only had to suffer the mental and physical abuse for one winter. What about the unknown number of other poor kids who were cursed with their tormentors, year after year? I remember, fifty years later when I was a London cabbie, and one of the other guys in the café was relating his evacuee experiences. He and his two brothers were evacuated to a farm deep in the country. To cut a long story short, they were almost starved by the brute of a farmer and his boozy wife who were always down the village pub. So, one dark night they decided to run away and make their way back to the East End of London. I don’t know how in God’s name they managed it, but they eventually hitchhiked all the way back home. Their close-knit East End family were absolutely appalled when they saw the state the kids were in, so they decided to do something about it. Their father and his three brothers were all London cabbies, so one day soon after, they piled into one of their taxis and headed for this particular farm, with two of the wives also in tow. Imagine the surprise of the brutish farmer when they arrived? Suffice to say they beat the shit out of him before dumping him into the muddy pig sty! The boozy farmer’s wife was given the ‘treatment’ by the two angry wives as well!
My arrival in Perranporth had coincided with our country’s lowest ebb in the Second World War. My keen young ears had perked up on grown-ups saying things like ‘Jerry’s big push has put our lads in trouble at Dunkirk’ and ‘it won’t be long before Adolf comes across the Channel and lands on our island.’ The faces were very serious, but I didn’t really have an inkling of what they were talking about. Perranporth was a pretty little Cornish seaside town. We were staying with other evacuee families in a hotel way up on the top of the hill overlooking the town. I can always remember the steps opposite our hotel that led steeply down to a beach that seemed to stretch for miles.
It was only much later that I discovered this huge stretch of golden sands had been a popular venue for motorcycle races before the war. Now, the whole length of this lovely beach looked like a veritable scrapyard, with mile after mile of rusty barbed wire and equally rusty scaffolding. I was informed by one of the bigger boys that these miles of scaffolding were tank-traps and they were to ‘Stop Jerry invading England’. They failed miserably to stop a crowd of young lads climbing all over them and I hesitated to think of the outcome if a full battalion of well-armed German soldiers had ever arrived! What I saw of the old boys in the local Home Guard drilling with broomsticks instead of rifles didn’t exactly instill confidence in any future encounter with the enemy!
Yet life was good for me in Perranporth. I had my Mum and my two sisters with me and even my little brother. Every day seemed to be sunny, that’s probably because it was summer, and I used to spend hours on the beach with my mates. One of our favourite and more dangerous games was to sit on the bottom of the huge steps that led down to the beach as the tide came in. It was the a
ge-old game of ‘dare’ that young boys like to play to prove their manhood. Believe me, when the tide raced in over those sands, it was scary and violent. But us young lads used to hang on to the iron rail for dear life in an effort to win the game. The first one to move up the steps to safety was ‘chicken’, while the rest of us just got soaked to the skin. How one of us wasn’t swept away to a watery death, I’ll never know. Strange to relate, but there never seemed to be any going to school or adults looking over us, but we survived.
One fine day, while we were playing on the sands, we noticed a group of men and a policeman gathered around a bundle on the beach. Being kids, we crept up to see what was going on and to find out why the copper was there. One of the locals was talking to the copper in a serious tone. ‘Yarp officer,’ he said in a strong Cornish accent, ‘I be a-walking my dog and I did see him when the tide went out.’ ‘It be a crying shame,’ replied the copper, ‘by the look of his uniform he be one of our Merchant Navy boys. I expect a Jerry submarine got his ship out at sea and the tide has just washed him ashore.’ The other grown-ups in the group just nodded their heads sadly and continued to look down at the bundle on the beach. This was too much for an inquisitive little urchin from London. I pushed past the grown-ups to have a good look at a real dead sailor. But I only saw some bare feet with the rest of the corpse covered in some sacking, before someone tugged at my hair and shouted angrily in a loud Cornish voice. ‘Bugger off, this b’ain’t be a bloody peepshow.’ So, we all ran off down the beach laughing like stupid idiots and feeling just a little bit scared at what we’d witnessed.