CHAPTER EIGHT; The Caravanners

Our journey ended the next afternoon at a campsite on the outskirts of Falmouth. Once again, my parents would have to go property hunting and in the meantime we were going to live in a tent. This prospect was very exciting to my sister and me; we were having a lovely time running around the big field and playing with the children of other campers. That night, my mother slept badly and woke up in a bad temper. She sent us to buy eggs at a farm down the road and set about cooking breakfast on a tiny portable stove. Usually, I disliked the combination of fried eggs, fried tomatoes and bacon but eaten outdoors it tasted much better and, for the first time in my life, I actually found myself enjoying my mother’s cooking.
Things were not going well and my parents started to argue; camping evidently did not agree with my mother. So, in the end, we packed up again and made our way to a caravan site a couple of miles away. To Jean and me, this was even better because the site was just a few minutes walk from the beach and there were woods and fields as far as the eye could see. Overhead, to my very great delight, a pair of buzzards wheeled and mewed. It was the first time I had ever seen these birds and I was awed and thrilled. It was all going to be so wonderful! Jean and I laughed for pure joy and made up our minds that we would spend the entire summer on the beach.
Swanpool Beach gets its name from the nearby lake which, when I was a child, was a rather eerie, mysterious stretch of water lined with trees and dense, reedy undergrowth. As well as swans, many kinds of wading birds, including coots, moorhens and rails, made their homes there and innumerable, elusive, small birds nested in the surrounding trees. On the path leading to our campsite was a bank on which tall plants I had never seen before grew; they had yellow flowers which came out only at twilight and my mother told me that was the reason they were called evening primroses. Not very far away was a fenced-off area with a sign saying ‘Ethyl Sludge Buried Here’ and my sister and I wondered why Ethyl Sludge hadn’t been buried in the graveyard like everybody else. There were many trees in those pre-Dutch elm disease days and it was a beautiful, flowery, unspoiled area with great scope for childish adventures. Sadly, over the years, all the wildness and mystery of Swanpool disappeared and today it is no more exciting than a duckpond in a public park.
Swanpool beach, however, has altered hardly at all; the big, granite slabs on which I loved to scramble are still piled up on one side of the beach and there are rock pools and little, secret coves at low tide as well as the mysterious cave with its dark, narrow tunnel which, they said, went all the way to Falmouth and was used by smugglers to transport illicit goods. How happy Jean and I were during those carefree summer days! We used to wake early, don our swimsuits and run off to the beach with our buckets and spades. I taught myself to swim and had no need of a rubber ring. I was becoming fashion-conscious and as it was the mode that year to wear a swimsuit with a narrow frill around the hips, I tore up a piece of rag, gathered it and stiched it around my plain costume; I was very pleased with the effect but my mother said I looked ridiculous.
One day, Uncle Cliff presented me with two model fishing boats which a colleague at the docks had carved out of wood and painted in bright colours. Even with my unsophisticated, childish taste I could see that they were very crudely fashioned, amateurish affairs but, nevertheless, I was thrilled and couldn’t wait to get to the beach to try them out in a rock pool. I raced to the beach but, to my infinite frustration, it was high tide and so I had to wait for the water to recede enough for the first rock pools to appear. Surely, I thought, the tide had never taken so long to go out before? At last, there emerged a pool with sufficient water in which to launch my boats; I carefully placed the first into it, gave it a little push and it promptly capsized. I did the same with the second one and that capsized, too. No wonder the person who made them didn’t mind giving them away, I thought, ruefully.
With the arrival of August came the holidaymakers and the beach filled out. I was showing off my swimming skills one day when another swimmer, a woman, began to chat to me.
‘Isn’t it lovely here!’ she said.
I agreed with her and she asked me if I was on holiday in the area.
‘No,’ I replied, nonchalantly. ‘I live here.’
‘Oh!’ gasped the woman. ‘Aren’t you lucky!’
During those sunny weeks I became so brown that visitors took photographs of me. One day, I came out of the sea to find my sister crying and being comforted by a middle-aged couple.
‘Do you know whose little girl this is?’ the woman asked me.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘ she’s my sister.’
The couple told me that Jean had been climbing over the granite rocks, slipped and banged her head. They managed to placate her at last by offering her chocolate and, seeing my expression of envy, they were obliged to offer some to me, too.
‘She’s too young to be playing by herself on the beach,’ chided the woman.
Surely, I thought, I wasn’t expected to have her hanging around me all the time?
I told my mother what they’d said about Jean being unattended and she retorted that some people should mind their own business. Nevertheless, she started coming down to the beach every afternoon from then on to keep an eye on us.
My parents began to argue one morning and as the day went on the quarrel grew worse. The incident of Judy in the woodshed was brought up again and the verbal abuse became so vicious that I genuinely thought that they were going to come to blows. It was the most violent row they had ever had and I was so frightened that I felt I had to intervene. I raced around to the other side of the caravan, picked up the broom, ran back and fixed myself between them, brandishing it. They were so astonished that they broke away from each other as abruptly as two fighting cats with water suddenly thrown over them.
‘It’s all right,’ said my mother, realising how frightened I was. ‘We were only having a little argument.’
They made it up later that night in bed. There was a lot of giggling and my father was talking to my mother in a low, persuasive voice.
‘She was very brave, wasn’t she, to pick up that broom like that?’ I heard her say.



That summer, our mother took my sister and me on a day excursion, by coach, to Kynance Cove, one of Cornwall’s best known beauty spots. Although I was by now familiar with all the beaches in Falmouth, I had very little knowledge of the rest of the coastline of the county and so, when I saw the magnificent cliff scenery of this most beautiful part of the Lizard point, I was filled with awe. From a distance, the rocks grouped about the sandy beach appeared jet black; only when you came close could you see that they were actually a dark green veined with red and purple. In fact, everywhere you looked, there was colour; the pure blue of the perfect summer sky, the pale gold of the soft sand and the intense turquoise, ultramarine and cobalt of the sea all contrived to dazzle the eye with their brilliance.
The tide was receding and I wanted to be the first to plant footprints in the sparkling, wet sand. I had to wait while my mother settled herself on the beach under a rock and unwrapped the sandwiches she had made earlier that morning. The filling was tomato and although my sister took one, I declined because there is nothing in the world more boring than a tomato sandwich; besides, I was too excited to eat and impatient to explore. At last, with warnings to keep well away from the sea because it was dangerous, we set off in the direction of the nearest rock pools, Jean trailing behind me as she took bites out of her sandwich. Suddenly, there was a loud splash, like a dog plunging into water and, startled, I turned around and saw, to my astonishment, that my sister had vanished. I looked about in bewilderment and then I spotted, floating on the surface of a pool, two triangles of bread and several slices of tomato. Of Jean, there was no sign. Although it could have been only a matter of a second or two, it seemed an eternity before she emerged, spluttering and choking, from the depths of the pool. Shocked, wet and cold, she sucked in her breath and with a mighty gasp let out such a deafening howl that even the sound of the sea roaring in the distance was drowned. She ran, crying hysterically, back to our mother leaving me to contemplate, with fascination, the remains of the tomato sandwich in the rock pool, still floating.


The last week of the school holidays was accompanied by loud thunderstorms which shook our flimsy caravan and frightened my sister and me. My mother said if you didn’t boil the milk when a storm was approaching, it would go off. One afternoon, while she was out, I heard thunder rumbling in the distance and so I took it upon myself to boil the milk. Although I spilled a good deal of it and burned the bottom of the saucepan I thought my mother would be impressed by my initiative and when she returned I was offended not to receive the praise which I considered to be my due.
By the end of the summer a suitable house had been found but we could not take possession until December; until then, we were going to have to continue living in the caravan. As it happened, the new house was directly opposite the school which I was going to attend: Clare Terrace County Primary School. It sounded very grand. My sister, being still an infant, would have to attend the National School until she was old enough to go to Clare Terrace. At my new school I would be wearing a uniform. It was a rather attractive uniform consisting of a brown, pleated skirt, a turquoise blue, brushed cotton blouse and a brown tie. The skirt had straps which crossed over at the back and were fastened to the waistband at the front with buttons but because I was short-waisted, the position of the buttons had to be altered. My mother had no brown thread so the next time we went shopping in Falmouth she sent me into the haberdashers’ to buy a reel of Sylko. The shade I selected was called ‘Nigger Brown’.
Swanpool was quite a distance from our new schools and it meant that we would have to catch the bus into Falmouth every morning. Our mother did not like having to get up early to get us ready for school and her bad morning moods grew even worse. I hated the journey to school. The bus took us to a place called The Moor, in the centre of Falmouth; from there, we had to ascend a long, steep flight of granite steps aptly named Jacob’s Ladder, arduous enough for the very fit and certainly an exhausting feat for little legs.
But if I hated the journey, I hated the school even more. From the moment I stepped through the entrance on the very first morning I was fearful. It was uncannily quiet. Talking in the corridors was forbidden and strict discipline was exercised in the classrooms. Few girls were brave enough to misbehave. I was put into the élite class, which had the grand name of Form One. These were the brightest girls who were expected to pass the eleven-plus. Our teacher was called Miss Jellis and although there were more than forty of us in that class, there was not a single girl who would have dared step out of line. Every morning, at roll-call, we had to recite our class number and our names: I was forty-one Margaret Walker, the next girl was forty-two Susan Wall and so on. The headmistress was called Miss Prince and although she was a very short woman, she struck terror into the hearts of the tallest girls. In fact, my sister, herself a tall girl by the time she went to Clare terrace, was told by an exasperated Miss Prince:
‘The tall ones are always the most stupid!’

With the start of the new term, our idyllic summer was at an end. The weather was cold and damp and Swanpool beach was bleak and windswept; the happy days my sister and I had spent there now seemed a very distant memory. Inside the caravan it was cramped, but cosy. I was given homework to do, now, and my father and I used to shout at each other as he tried, with little success, to help me with my arithmetic. One night, grappling with decimals, I shouted with such ferocity that I dislodged a kipper bone which had been stuck in my throat since lunch-time.
Bonfire night arrived and the caravanners built a huge bonfire in one of the fields above the site. There was an infectious excitement in the air and everyone - even my mother - seemed to be having the greatest fun. Uncle Cliff gave me some obsolete life-boat rockets which were an enormous success because they shot up into the sky with ear-splitting reports and seemed to light up the whole bay. There were Roman candles, Catherine wheels, golden fountains and other thrilling things which delighted Jean and me because not only had we never had a bonfire on the fifth of November but also the only fireworks we had ever been allowed were a shared packet of sparklers.
There was only one person living at the site whom people disliked. She was a young, unmarried woman with a baby and in those days such a state of affairs was considered scandalous. People referred to her as ‘that tart’ and were shocked that she left the baby unattended whenever she went out. One night, I was awoken by a commotion. My parents were outside and there were many shouting, excited voices; there was another sound, too, that I couldn’t identify at first, followed by that of breaking glass. I realised, then, that the strange, crackling sound was something on fire and as I threw off the blankets and crawled to the end of the bunk in order to look out of the window, my mother came back inside accompanied by the two children from the caravan next door.
It appeared that ‘that tart’ had gone out, leaving the baby alone as usual, and a fire had started. The caravan was locked so one of the men - he must have been very brave - smashed the back window and managed to grab the baby and bring her out, unharmed. Within minutes, the whole caravan was in flames and the people in the adjacent ones had to evacuate theirs for fear of the fire spreading. My sister, the neighbouring children and I all crawled on to my bunk and watched the spectacle in awe. The speed at which the caravan burned was terrifying and by the time the firemen arrived there was nothing left but its blackened skeleton. I was never told what became of the young woman and her baby; I only remember someone saying, in a tone of incredulity:
‘She had over forty pairs of shoes! Can you believe it? Forty!’

By Christmas, we had moved into our new home, a spacious, end-of-terrace, Georgian house with fourteen rooms and the rather distinguished name of ‘Clare House’. My mother wanted somewhere large enough for her to be able to do bed-and-breakfast so it seemed ideal. It was very close to the town centre and not an unreasonable distance from the beach; also, it had fine views of the harbour and the distant Fal estuaries from the front bedrooms. At the top of the house were two large attics with little doors leading to smaller attics and you could climb out of the window with ease on to the front parapet. There were three flights of stairs and so many bedrooms that our mother said we’d have to keep changing our rooms in order to keep them aired. Underneath the house was a cellar in which some previous owner had left an old-fashioned diving suit hanging from the low ceiling. It loomed out of the darkness like a ghoul and gave me such a fright the first time I stepped into that room that I never went there again. The kitchen was disproportionately small so it was decided to convert one of the large back rooms into a kitchen and install an Aga. My mother said we were going to need acres of carpet, lots more furniture and that it would take a long time to get everything ready in time for the guests next summer.
All the houses in Clare Terrace had front gardens so small that they could hardly be called gardens at all; we were privileged because, being at the end of the terrace, we had a walled garden as well as the front one. It was not large enough to offer much scope for entertainment but the house seemed so enormous after the restricted space of the caravan that Jean and I didn’t mind. We had had to share a bunk while we were living in the caravan but now we each had our own room and I revelled in my new-found privacy. However, our mother said, next summer we would have to share not only a room but also a bed because the house would be filled with guests and all the rooms would be occupied. If any guests turned up unexpectedly, she warned us, our father would have to sleep downstairs on the floor and we would have to sleep with her. We didn’t mind sharing a bed with each other but the prospect of having to sleep in the same bed as our mother filled both of us with extreme dismay..........


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