Kisses on a Postcard

by Terence Frisby

  ‘But you’ve got two.’

  ‘One is my mate’s, Ifor Davies. Faceman from Ystrad, even smaller ’n me.’

  ‘But if Ifor Davies was one of the seventeen why didn’t he keep his badge?’

  ‘There were plenty more battles, boy.’

  It took a moment to realise the meaning that his chilling answer led us to.

  ‘You were lucky, weren’t you, Uncle Jack?’ Jack said.

  He looked thoughtfully at us, his mind far away. ‘That’s right. Lucky. Survival is an accident, boy. Chance. We learned that in the trenches but it applies to everything. It’s not destiny; it’s not bravery, nor cowardice; it’s not God paying you back because you’re good or bad; it’s not even survival of the fittest. It’s an accident.’

  ‘But you lived through it. I bet you were clever and kept your head down,’ I said, clinging to some certainty or other in this bleak assessment of the world by our diminutive soldier philosopher.

  Uncle Jack allowed no get-outs. His voice rose with a bitter nasal tang. ‘No one was clever, boy. The clever ones weren’t there at all. No matter what happens to you in your life, just remember this: there’s no justice. There never was and there never will be. But you’ve got to pretend there is. We call that being civilised.’ He looked at our dismayed faces and perhaps relented a little. Anyway, he could never resist a final twist to anything he said, and though his expression remained serious, he paused, betraying his lighter intent. ‘Just remember two things: it’s not fair . . . and don’t be late. Live your life like that and that’s all you can do.’

  I turned the massacre in the woods over and over in my mind. I acted out the scene in our woods below Doublebois, creeping through the undergrowth down by the river. I hid behind trunks as shells ripped through the foliage, tearing the boughs off; splintering the green wood, uprooting forest giants, converting trees and men to blackened stumps. Why did the thousand of our men go in here? And why did the Germans? Who wanted to capture a wood anyway? All those little Welshmen hugging the ground, getting blown to pieces in spite of their lack of inches. The event had horror, fascination and mystery, which I could leave only briefly behind as I emerged into the Rabbit Field, one of seventeen survivors going home to tea and the polished mementoes on the mantelpiece.

  Uncle Jack, when pressed by us, had other stories. ‘It was raining. Raining. Raining. The soaking summer of 1916. Everything was sodden. Your boots rotted on your feet. Mud, there was mud everywhere; chest-deep sometimes. Men disappeared in it.’

  I held my breath. ‘What do you mean? Disappeared?’

  ‘Vanished. Got swallowed up.’

  ‘But . . . but . . . couldn’t you . . .? They can’t just . . . go.’

  ‘Oh, couldn’t they? You had to make sure you didn’t follow them. Stay on the boards.’

  This acceptance of death in so casual a way was harder for me to swallow than bangs and bullets.

  He continued. ‘But there was no clean water to drink, of course. I had to draw ours from a shell hole near by. Then it stopped raining. The water went down and we saw there’d been a dead Frog in there all the time. Just as well I boiled it.’

  I was puzzled. ‘What’s so terrible about a dead frog?’

  Jack knew. ‘Stupid. He doesn’t mean a frog. A Frog is a Frenchman. A French soldier.’

  I was horrified. ‘Uragh. Ergh.’

  Jack wasn’t. ‘Was he all bloated like that cow in the river?’

  Uncle Jack laughed. ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘Oogh. I feel sick.’

  Jack was enjoying himself. ‘I bet he was rotting, like your boots.’

  ‘Ergh.’

  ‘There’s lots of ways to die,’ Uncle Jack reflected, looking back into his war. ‘The only ones who don’t die are the generals . . . except of old age.’

  Auntie Rose came in. ‘Now stop that, Jack. Filling the boys’ heads with all that rubbish. That war’s over twenty years ago.’

  Uncle Jack was not abashed. ‘This one’s on now, isn’t it? D’you think it’s any different? If it goes on long enough Jack could be in the army easy. Home by Christmas, we was told. How long is it since we’ve seen Gwyn? Over a year he’s been out there.’

  Our war took on a new, dreadful fascination for me. It was no longer an imaginary ‘Bang-bang, you’re dead,’ with sanitary corpses – mostly German – and bandaged, tidy wounds. It became headless and bloated, covered in mud, mutilated and disembowelled, like the rabbits we snared then messily gutted with our penknives.

  One morning during the bombing of Plymouth I stood in the Court unable to believe my eyes. I stared up the railway line and raced in to Auntie Rose. ‘Auntie Rose, Auntie Rose. There’s a German plane coming. Look. It’s ever so low.’

  She came quickly out. ‘Where, boy? Oh don’t be daft. It’s Red Cross. Look.’ She pointed at the crosses on the plane. The plane was barely above us, following the railway, limping slowly along. The crew in their bubbles were clearly visible.

  ‘It’s not. It’s a Dornier 17.’ I knew precisely from my Dinky Toys what plane it was. ‘They’re German crosses. See?’

  She wasn’t listening. ‘Look, you can see him, plain.’ She waved.

  ‘He’s the gunner. Look, one engine’s not working.’

  ‘He’s waving back. Wave, boy, wave. Woo-oo.’

  ‘I think he’s going to crash.’

  ‘If they’re Germans they’d shoot us.’

  We watched it fly over the station and down the valley.

  ‘Look, it’s coming down.’

  And it did. A distant explosion and a plume of smoke, just like in the pictures.

  Auntie Rose put a hand to her face. ‘Oh my God. D’you think they were Germans?’

  ‘Course they were.’ I was annoyed at her naivety.

  ‘Why didn’t they parachute?’

  ‘I think they were too low.’

  She was most upset. ‘Those poor boys. I saw them. Young, like my Gwyn. Why didn’t he shoot us if they was Germans?’ She clasped me to her, too late to save me.

  ‘I think he must’ve been a Saxon, one of Uncle Jack’s friends.’

  Chapter Ten

  Spring unfolded into our second summer in paradise, the summer of 1941. Clearly not paradise for all, because the drift of vackies back to London had begun in spite of continued heavy air raids. The worst of the Blitz was over but there was still plenty of bombing, and more to come. Things were still going badly for our forces. We were very much in reverse, being quickly, almost contemptuously, dismissed from Greece by panzer divisions and from Crete by parachutists in preparation for Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia. Rommel had arrived in North Africa and was driving us back to Cairo. That was the campaign that we followed avidly, poring over the maps in our atlas and in the Daily Mirror: Gwyn was there.

  My life now was that of a country boy. Of course many things were different from Welling but surely most different of all was our relationship with animals. In Welling there was the odd pet and the tradesmen’s horses. Here we were surrounded by all sorts of creatures: wild ones and the farm and domesticated ones.

  The fish migrations were part of the rhythm of the year. When we fished for trout we would walk the banks or lie on the fallen trees over the river, spot them and – rarely in daylight and with our basic equipment – catch them; they were there all year. But the salmon peel, the local name for sea trout, much bigger and rarer, were visitors, nosing their way upstream to breed, and even harder to catch. Most spectacular and rarest of all, the migration of the eels, elvers about an inch long, filling the river and turning the shallow pools near the banks into flashing green-and-silver kaleidoscopes. They came in on the spring tides. Glass eels, they were called when very small. If you laid one on your palm you could see its organs through its flesh. There was a fish run, I suppose it was called, a channel some eight feet wide, with sluice gates, that made a bypass round the rapids just below the road bridge. We lay on our stomachs in the grass and stared int
o the clear water filled with countless millions of these tiny creatures swimming from – so I was told – the Sargasso Sea on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I went home and looked at the world atlas in the front room in wonder. How could those tiny things swim from there to here? Virtually the only other time you saw an eel was when a full-grown one all too frequently took your trout bait and you cursed the twisting, knotted, furious thing you had to get off the hook without it biting you. It often ended with your having to saw its head off and throw the two bits back into the river. We didn’t eat eels, though the river was full of them, nor elvers.

  We would occasionally see an otter in the river, flashing elusively through the water. ‘That’s the end of fishing for the day,’ the locals used to say.

  There was even, very rarely, a salmon to be seen in the river. When we learned of one, and if we could, we would hurry the mile or so down to the pools near the road bridge to catch a glimpse. ‘Well, it was there yesterday,’ the platelayer or labourer or fisherman who had seen it would tell us disappointed kids.

  In summer we would go looking for adders in the woods, sometimes finding one and keeping our distance behind long sticks as we tormented it till it slid away. Our tales of ridding the woods of adders far exceeded our actions. Their poisonous bite held sway in our imaginations.

  We saw rabbits daily, foxes and badgers occasionally. Moles were everywhere, but you didn’t see them, only their runs and molehills, cursed by farmers and gardeners. Mrs Langdon, the teacher of the junior vackies’ class, decided she would make a moleskin coat for herself so we were offered sixpence a skin. I couldn’t catch a single one, though I set snares on their runs in our gardens and surrounding fields. Neither, I believe, could any vackies. For once the village kids, especially the bigger boys, showed their superiority: during dinner breaks a stream of them came to our class with skins and claimed their sixpence. I don’t remember ever seeing Mrs Langdon’s finished coat.

  But the domestic and farm animals were the ones that engaged our attention daily and were part of our lives.

  Peter, Auntie Rose’s canary, brightened the day with its singing, especially when the sun got round to the window in the afternoon and struck its cage, an event which it always greeted with a burst of song. On some evenings the doors and windows were closed tight and the canary was given a free fly round the room, fluttering in a trail of feathers from picture frame to picture frame to the top of the dresser. I am not sure that the canary enjoyed these outings as much as we did. It always seemed in a panic. It was never a great problem to usher it back into its cage and sometimes we would hold it gently in our clasped hands, its anxious head darting this way and that, its tiny warm body so light and fragile-seeming, with a heart that beat fit to burst.

  The cat was always locked out for these outings. The tabby that lived with us led a schizophrenic life. I loved just to touch it but it had to be constantly on guard; as far as cats were concerned Auntie Rose was unpredictable. It wasn’t fed too much as it was encouraged to be a good mouser. As a result the canary was the subject of some pretty hungry glares when it sang. The cat would rub itself against Auntie Rose’s leg, hopefully purring for food or milk, but if she was busy or tripped over it you would hear, ‘Oh Duw, get out of it,’ and a kick sent the cat running. Or she would pick up a broom, in which case it became a blur as it shot out of the back door. One day I found our cat in one of the fields over the other side of the railway with a young rabbit in its mouth. It growled a warning at me as I approached in case I meant to take its prey but I had no such intention.

  Our cat had, I suppose, an idyllic life compared to one unfortunate animal, victim of a vacky with an experimental turn of mind. He used to make parachutes out of handkerchiefs, tie them onto the cat and throw it out of the upstairs window. We watched fascinated as the cat hurtled through the air with the handkerchief having no effect on its descent. It would land with a thump on the grass and shoot off into the bushes with its useless equipment dragging behind it.

  ‘I can’t get the parachute to open properly, that’s the trouble. I will. You see,’ said the boy as he hunted for the animal and another try.

  The hens in their run were something that fascinated us for only a short while on our arrival. But to collect their eggs was always a good moment. A squawking and fluttering often announced the fact that there was one to be had, or we would just have a speculative look in the coop. And there in the straw, often with bits sticking to it, still warm, better than a shop egg, was a perfect white or brown ovoid with its smooth hard shell which you could hold and wonder at before taking it in and watching Auntie Rose break it and cook it. Or perhaps she would just put it in boiling water and serve it to you in an egg cup so that you could tap it harder and harder until the end of it was a jigsaw of cracks, its beauty gone, now just something to be eaten.

  We once had a lodger, a signalman. I remember coming down to breakfast and finding a boiled egg at my place, waiting to be eaten, a minor treat. I tapped at it with an anticipatory spoon and picked off the bits only to reveal that it was empty; the signalman had already eaten the contents for his breakfast and the shell had been inverted in my egg cup. There was laughter and I joined in, waiting for the genuine article to be put in its place. But there wasn’t one. As I remember, Jack, Auntie Rose and the signalman were the only ones present; Uncle Jack had already gone off to work. This practical joke seems so out of character for Auntie Rose that I still wonder at it, but it happened. Perhaps it was done when her back was turned and she was trapped. An egg for breakfast wasn’t that common and I felt betrayed.

  Occasionally there was a chicken which was due to be eaten, a young cockerel, one too many in the run, or a hen that no longer laid. When they went broody they were put in the woodshed, I don’t really know why, but they stood in there for a day or so on the logs and then were returned to the run. It seemed to work. But if one permanently stopped laying she ended up in the oven. Then it was a fight between Jack and me: we both wanted to be allowed to kill it. I cannot believe now what bloodthirsty creatures we were, but killing rabbits, chickens, any small living thing, seemed to be part of us, a treat almost. I don’t think it was cruelty. We just wanted to do what the grown-ups did. It certainly involved curiosity. Anyway, Uncle Jack always did it quickly, so quickly that we barely saw it happening, though we were watching. Then the chicken was hung up on the clothes line to bleed. When Auntie Rose cleaned out its innards I remember marvelling at the tiny, half-formed, soft-shelled eggs it contained.

  At one point, we had a pig in the linney. Uncle Jack brought the little piglet home one day, its head sticking out of a sack inside his jacket. It thrived and reached a good size, living on bran and kitchen waste that Auntie Rose would boil in a huge pot on the kitchen range to make swill, which smelled frightful and drove us out until the windows had been opened. Still the traces remained. Then it was time to eat the pig. A big treat in the war. A permit to kill it was required, all to do with meat rationing, and when all the red tape was done Uncle Jack prepared to hang it up by its hind legs in the linney, slit its throat and let it bleed to death. That was how it was done. Jack was allowed to help string it up but I wasn’t. I was considered too young. I sat seething with disappointment in the house with Auntie Rose while Jack helped in the preparation, then he was thrown out and Uncle Jack and the Bunneys’ Uncle Ned, who came over from Taphouse especially, did the deed. Auntie Rose was salting and cutting the carcass on the kitchen table for what seemed like weeks; sides of bacon seemed to hang everywhere. ‘No more pigs,’ she said.

  All round us were the farms, exciting places full of activity. There were three I visited often: the Bunneys’, Crago’s and little Tredburgey, owned by the Verrins, where the Burfords were billeted. At the Bunneys’ we were often allowed to help in one way or another and that was good enough, to become part of that strong-smelling world, to shovel, gather, carry, round up, milk, just do things until you were tired, hungry and glad to go home. ‘Old
Bunney been getting some free labour again, has he?’ would be Uncle Jack’s greeting. But at Little Treburgey with the Burfords I remember that we played: in barns, where we could hide-and-seek and slide down chutes of straw and hay; round the pungent dung heap, which we turned over with pitchforks to envelop ourselves in the overwhelming stench of rotting straw and cow dung cleared from the milking sheds, great rich waves of it; on the tractor, excellent source of entertainment, whether still and silent as you pretended to drive it into battle against the Germans, or when you rode with Mr Verrin, bouncing across lumpy, bumpy fields to the roar of the motor.

  But best of all were the animals. We helped drive the cattle in for milking and learned how to do it, grasping the long warm teats as instructed, pulling and squeezing and producing nothing – at first. I remember the fleshly feel of them, the massive size in my hands, almost embarrassed at the intimacy of the contact. The cow gave nothing, then little squirts of milk followed by regular full jets as you got the idea and she decided to put up with your incompetence and release her udderful, probably as relieved as you were. Mechanical milking was just coming in but even where a farm had it fitted the cows had to be finished off by hand and we were keen to do it. As you milked them they chewed straw put in the stalls or just the cud. This produced prodigious quantities of wind; the noises of bovine flatulence rang round the shed, the fruitier noises often followed by the plopping of wet dung landing on concrete. Best of all was when these two events happened to one cow simultaneously. The vackies’ covert grins and giggles became overt. My efforts to suppress my sniggers sometimes drew the beast’s attention and she would turn and look at me with those large gentle cow’s eyes, almost – to my overheated imagination – reproachful of my mirth at her loss of dignity. A cow’s more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look would reduce me to helplessness.