by Rachel Malik
He worked hard to be a good visitor at first, he even cooked them some curry – he’d brought a tin of red powder with him. It made their eyes water and Rene sneeze, but they ate it with cold beer and potatoes, and goodwill. He spent part of each day writing letters, at least one a week to Bertha, written at the kitchen table, always with a message for Ruchee and a kiss for the baby, Susan. ‘You can’t call a baby that colour Susan,’ Elsie said to Rene after he showed them a photograph. He wrote other letters too, which came downstairs licked and stamped. He always had stamps, that and tobacco and change for the kiosk. Elsie noticed he didn’t have Rene’s fine handwriting. He gave them fifteen shillings a week for his keep at the start.
But it didn’t take long for Leo to outstay his welcome. The money dried up, he was never out for any length of time and he got in the way of their quiet evenings. While he was about, they never shared the sofa. Often Leo sprawled there, other times it sat empty – lonely, thought Elsie, like the detectives that lay unread, for Rene was shy of reading aloud when Leo was there. Once or twice, Rene, with Elsie’s agreement, gave him money for the pub in Occanby and he was happy to oblige. It was splendid to be back to themselves, hard to forget he wouldn’t be gone for long. And when Leo did return from the Duck that first time, he had news they didn’t like. They were quite a talking point in the pub, he told them, the ladies at the top of the lane. Elsie looked uncomfortable and Rene wondered about the ladies; Leo clearly enjoyed their discomfort.
And then one day Elsie came back to the cottage and found Leo by the coop. He’d been feeding the chickens, he said, but when he stood up and brushed himself off she thought she heard the clink of something. She followed him back to the cottage, wondering.
Elsie hated thinking quickly, it wasn’t her way. She had been going to make a pot of tea, but she didn’t want to risk turning her back, so she stood watching him as he sat down at the kitchen table and pulled his chair in close. She heard the clinking sound again, noticed his hand awkward in his jacket pocket. He didn’t seem to want to look at her, just started humming a tune.
‘You’ve been stealing,’ she said. Her voice sounded loud.
‘No, no!’ he exclaimed, quite put out. ‘It’s just a loan, a little loan. I know I should have asked first but I was in a hurry, sorry.’ He smiled and shrugged, looking far too comfortable.
Elsie foundered. She didn’t know what to say to that.
‘Rene wouldn’t mind,’ he said boldly, looking at her straight, claiming his priority.
Well, she wasn’t having that.
She looked back, just as straight. She’d always found it hard to smile at men, especially if they were her age, or younger.
‘How much have you taken?’
There was a pause. Elsie sat down at the other end of the table and wondered if he was going to bolt.
But Leo had realized his mistake.
‘I don’t know,’ he fumbled, and started to take the money out of his pockets.
She knew exactly how much was in the tin, to the ha’penny.
He knew pretty well because he’d taken it all.
He continued, nervously, a mass of pockets and patches – there was a guinea in each of his socks. The money made a surly pile in front of him.
The little table had never seemed longer.
He pushed the pile to the centre in a gesture Rene would have recognized. Steadily, Elsie began to draw the coins towards her with a careful forefinger, separating them carefully as she did so. She’d always been good at arithmetic. Before she’d finished counting the coins, he’d got out his shabby wallet and taken out a £5 note, handing it to her directly.
His things were all packed. He’d been planning to get the Knaresborough bus at four. He’d even written a letter for Rene, explaining about the ‘loan’.
Slow, quick, slow, slow, quick. Elsie’s head was banging. Moira had given up trying to teach her to dance. You could do it perfectly well, you know … you just can’t be bothered. Quick, quick, slow.
When Rene got back to the cottage that evening, Elsie was nowhere to be found. Instead she saw a letter from Leo resting against the stone-cold teapot. There was no sign of him either. She tore it open, half suspecting something.
In writing far tidier than his usual scrawl, Leo explained that he’d had to leave for Manchester that afternoon, something about his magic act and a touring show, and then Rene saw Elsie’s name. Elsie had given him £1 for his expenses. He’d write properly soon.
Kind of Elsie. If Rene hadn’t been so relieved, she might have wondered about Elsie’s generosity or Leo’s sudden liking for Elsie’s name, but she didn’t wonder because she was just so happy that he’d gone.
‘Three pounds – that was a lot, Els.’
‘He won’t make much of a magician,’ Elsie said. ‘And where’s he going to find rabbits for his act now there’s mixy everywhere?’
And that should have been that. Except that the following day, the Laceys came up to the cottage, both of them. Leo had broken into the house and Mrs Lacey had caught him trying to steal a pair of antique pistols. He’d been sent off with his tail between his legs, no need to call in the police. The Laceys didn’t want any trouble, any unpleasantness, they were sure that Rene and Elsie knew nothing about it. But they couldn’t see how the two women could stay on in view of what had happened. Rene and Elsie couldn’t see how either.
Cant Farm, St Minver, 1950–52
A brisk cycle to the tiny, cramped Rex in Wadebridge. The programmes didn’t always change on time.
BRITAIN CAN MAKE IT.
Their first journey into Cornwall took them to the north coast; their cottage was a direction – past the white cottage – halfway between the village and a cove with wonderful bathing.
Sheep, apples, a bit of this and that. Good people, the Carnes, but struggling, shades of Starlight. A brave new world was supposed to be unrolling: horizons growing, wartime in peacetime, but the message hadn’t got through to Cant Farm. Not enough work for the two of them most of the time, and Rene was often away, ‘loaned out’ for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Nearly two years of this, and in the end it didn’t last. Despite Mr Carne’s pledge to die on his own land, he and his wife sold up and moved to Torquay. The new owners were not farmers; they needed the cottage but not Rene and Elsie.
Crew Farm, Coldridge, Crediton, 1952–3
A four-mile walk to Copplestone to catch the bus for the Exeter Regal.
Out of Cornwall, back east to Devon and it felt like another country. Tom Crew, a young man, lame and yellow from fighting in the East, with wandering sunken eyes. His mother had salted some money away and he used this to buy more cattle and, with a careful loan from the bank, invested in the new milking machinery. MODERN WONDERS. For all that Tom Crew tried to look to the future, his eyes couldn’t stop wandering: the enemy were everywhere. There was an upset over the rent book and they had to move on. SPIES ARE LISTENING. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Trent’s Last Case. Their last farm-cottage: the link in farm-cottage was coming untied.
Lintern Farm, Budock, west of Falmouth, 1953–4
Back into Cornwall. There had always been daffodils at Lintern, the farmer told them, as they spread and boxed the limp, pale stalks, trying not to touch the flowers, their fingers numb under the gloves. Rene received a letter from Alan’s sister: You may be interested to know that both your children have left my home. It would be better if you were forgotten – you are certainly not forgiven.
Gull Cottage, Cywednack, St Keverne, 1954–8
Rene loved the ferry that took her across the Helford, then on to Falmouth and the Arden Picture House, once second to none, now growing tatty.
‘It’s a very small cottage. The second bedroom’s just a box room really.’
‘Thank you. We’ll manage.’
‘You’re sure you’ll be able to manage the rent? We’ve tried to keep it down but it’s not easy these days.’
TELL HER NOTHING. SHE MIGHT BE
AN AGENT.
In the years immediately after the war, they were still familiar figures in the landscape – there were so many women without men. Many didn’t ask, they just assumed, and the ones who did ask were easy to lead, very slightly, astray.
‘So many people who’ve lost people.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know a soul who didn’t lose someone special.’
‘You’re right about that.’
‘Sometimes it still feels like wartime.’
‘I know just what you mean.’
In the fields they stayed camouflaged longer than they might have elsewhere. Timeslip. Tiger in the Smoke. Over time, though, the questions started to come a bit sharper.
‘So are you both on your own?’
And:
‘Will you be working or do you have something coming in?’
‘Both.’
Both – not quite the truth.
Gull Cottage was not so very different from Heathwater, or Crediton, or Budock. It was the nearest they had ever lived to the sea, and everything was greyish-green and bleached by the salt and wind. The first house in the village, or the last – from the front door you could see the village spread neatly along the road: Mrs Wallace’s house with the palm tree in the garden; the general shop, as it was called. From their patch of garden at the back, you could look out across the marram grass to the slaty glimmer of the sea.
Elsie gave up regular farm work now: she wanted to be in walking or cycling distance of the cottage. But if she wished to stay close to home, Rene had to go further afield – there wasn’t enough work close by. Often she was away the whole week, coming home dead tired on Friday evening. In St Keverne, Elsie worked as a gardener for an old army man, Major Veesey. A chance meeting in the post office: the major had a beautiful terraced garden at the other end of the village that sank deep into the valley. From the top of his garden you could just see the sea, but by the time you zigzagged down to the bottom, it had vanished out of sight. The major was exacting and inclined to the experimental; Elsie borrowed books from Boots and spent lonely evenings in the cottage, thinking over his proposals. Sometimes she talked to Rene about this and that and the major’s plans when she wasn’t there. At some point during these years, she had become ‘Bert’. Rene had never liked her middle name, but Elsie was very taken with Roberta. And Roberta became Bert. ‘Like your brother?’ Rene asked. ‘Oh no,’ said Elsie, ‘you’re not like him at all.’
‘You’re a wonder,’ the major told Elsie. He wasn’t quite sure what to call her – if she’d been a man it would have been her first name, and he couldn’t do that. But he was a plain-speaker and ‘Miss Boston’ was a little fancy. A fine figure of a woman. The major offered Elsie all manner of things from his overstuffed house: a barometer, a nest of prettily inlaid tables he’d brought back from India, a glassed forest scene with a red squirrel. They had no room for such things in Gull Cottage, but she always thanked him carefully. Then came the day when he offered her his old wireless, and she accepted so quickly they were both startled. ‘See,’ he said, showing her a drawing in a catalogue, ‘this is the new one I’m getting. I’ll be able to take it to the bottom of the garden. Now that really is something.’ Elsie agreed that it was. When Rene came home the following Friday, the wireless had already found a home on the windowsill in the front room. Within a month, Elsie had memorized the schedules and rearranged her early-evening chores to fit with The Archers. No Norwegian any more, but Warsaw and Moscow; when she reached them on the dial, she didn’t know whether to speed up or linger. Once or twice Elsie heard a programme in the afternoon for older children. It was called I Want to Be …
Elsie still had her gift, her knack, for growing. Pigs-might-fly gardening, she called it – but the pigs did fly, with good strong wings, in the most unlikely of places. Soft buttery lettuces, spinach and nice fat cucumbers through the summer months – all from a bed that rarely got full sunlight and couldn’t be protected from the wind. The cucumber they pickled, to eat with pilchards and mackerel through the winter. Their late-summer treat was tomatoes, ripened on every ledge and sill. All their gardening was aided by generous helpings of Corry’s Slug Death. ‘You should put up a card in the post office,’ said Rene, but Elsie didn’t like to be that public. She did any other local work that came her way – the major didn’t take up all her time – and she started to breed chickens and, after an interval, rabbits, in larger quantities to sell.
They had no visitors and not many letters. Muriel wrote from time to time and Mrs Carne sent a card at Christmas. The only person who wrote reasonably regularly was Bertha. Sometimes Rene left the letters open on the table; more often they disappeared into her bag and were never seen again. They heard nothing from Leo, but Bertha kept Rene informed. The magic tour had not been a success. She had put her foot down about Ruchee and Susan, and Leo had come to take them away; since then, she hadn’t heard a word.
Nothing from Lambourn: there was no one to write to them and Elsie wouldn’t like the news. The valley was changing. More stables, more horses, fields opened, hedgerows scorched, the less recalcitrant downlands reclaimed. Ainsley had been right about Berkshire at least: modern methods were thriving. The Townsends were bought out, the cuckoos ousted. Another miserable seaside retirement: Phil slow-stepping, with a stick in one hand and George on his arm. George, resentful, furious, still hoping, wondering if there was any money he didn’t know about, still looking about himself, as he crawled along beside his uncle. Elsie’s revenge.
Good years for Rene and Elsie, hard but good. The only thing it seemed to be difficult to grow was money. PLAN YOUR FUTURE. SAVE WITH A PLAN. Sometimes they would take less than they were owed just to have money – but the jar and later the tin, an old black tea-tin patterned with pink and yellow flowers, remained stubbornly half empty. They rented themselves to the harvest, joining the mesh of locals and strangers. With the other hired hands, they enjoyed the work, left to themselves, trusted to get on with it, part of the fizz and buoyancy, hearing little eddies of talk and laughter as they worked late into the night. A rich pleasure for Elsie, deep and uncomplicated. But Rene, seeing her fellow workers’ faces up close, found a heavy mirror. So many were no longer young, some were struggling with the work, and yet she could see they would never settle to the comforts of the new council houses. At the almshouses in Heathwater, Rene gloomily remembered the sign ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO THE WARDEN. At best, old age was a room in a boarding house owned by the council, tea at five, cocoa at half past eight; two rooms – she doubted they’d be allowed to share. There would be other rules, inspections probably. Living under other people’s eyes, she and Elsie would become strangers. She found herself getting to an ending like this far too often. It cast her very low and she found she could say nothing about it to Elsie.
Travelling to and from Gull Cottage on bus or bicycle, in and out of the shops, the post office, there were more and more signs, more messages, far more than the war. Some of them spoke so direct – CLEVER YOU – and you were sure they must be talking to you especially, but then you looked closer and realized they couldn’t be – CLEAN YOUR TEETH. Occasionally she felt the person they were talking to was standing just beside her – WIVES! She couldn’t really justify the cost, but she still bought magazines when she could. Many of the stars she had known as a girl had died – she hadn’t seen mention of Vicky – of Mona – for years.
Rene and Elsie knew better than to get too comfortable at Gull Cottage, but that didn’t make leaving any easier when it came. The owners could see the future, holiday lets were the coming thing, they were going to clear a path down to the beach, a driveway for a car.
Major Veesey was very sorry to see Elsie go. ‘Will you come back in the autumn to help me tidy up?’
In the event they didn’t go far. Rene kept her dairying job.
When I was a young girl, I went to live at Starlight Farm, Lambourn, Berkshire, with my parents. When I was about thirty years of age
my father made the farm over to me by deed of gift.
In June 1940, Miss Hargreaves came to the farm as my land girl and I have known her ever since.
In 1958, we came to live at Wheal Rock, Rosenys …
9.
Wheal Rock
The cottage was a ruin when they took it.
The agent drove them over from Falmouth in a rickety old Ford. ‘No one’s lived here in a while,’ he said, as they bumped up the lane. As he got out of the car he flourished the key, but it turned out to be unnecessary: the door was set a little ajar. It was stiff too and wedged into hardened sludge; Rene and he had to prise it open.
Inside, the kitchen was sticky and dark with grease, and in the little sitting room the walls were dappled with mould. There was a coat of reddish hairs on the sofa, and a dense smell which led with an animal reek and ended in damp.
The agent directed them up the tiny staircase – there wasn’t room for three. Elsie led the way. Upstairs, she walked straight across the bedroom to the tiny window and looked out at the fields beyond. Rene lingered in the doorway, staring at the fantastical map stains on the bed; a stack of mouldering linen had been left, forgotten, on the floor.
‘You can’t see the chimney from here,’ Elsie said, pushing the window open and sticking her head right out. There was a heavy, fluttering sound of birds disturbed from the eaves.