CHAPTER FOUR: A Cornish Interlude

When my sister was a few months old our parents sold the house in Morgan Crescent and we moved to Cornwall. They knew the county quite well because my grandmother’s sister, Frances, lived in Falmouth with her husband, Cliff. When they were newlyweds, my mother and father were surprisingly adventurous and they used to walk the fifty miles from Plymouth to Falmouth carrying rucksacks and wearing stylish shorts and walking boots. However, I don’t think family ties were in any way the reason for this unexpected upheaval: it is more likely that my mother had some silly, romantic notion about Cornwall being some kind of Promised Land where one could escape from the tedious routine of life as she knew it and begin a new, better one in idyllic surroundings.
We moved into a semi-detached house in Dracaena Avenue, the main road into Falmouth. I can’t remember what my father did for employment at this time but I believe it was something connected with cars because I have a clear memory of a certain occasion when he left to go somewhere up-country in order to drive a car down to Cornwall for a client and on his departure, my mother kissed him goodbye. It was the first time I had ever seen them kiss and I was astonished.
I quickly became fond of Auntie Frances; my mother called her Aunt Fan behind her back and warned me on no account to address her in the same way because it would cause great offence. Uncle Cliff had an office job at Falmouth Docks and although I was still very wary of all men, I felt at ease with him because he made me laugh and didn’t speak to me in the patronising way that most adults address children. Besides, he took me on a tour of the docks and I was thrilled because there was a busy little train which chugged and whistled its way around a network of tracks. My aunt and uncle had no children and my mother told me many years later that it was because he was never man enough to consumate their marriage. He had no family, apart from a niece with whom, according to my mother, he carried on an incestuous affair for years without Auntie Frances finding out. She also said he was a dirty old man because he’d once told her that she had the prettiest legs he’d ever seen.
I was enrolled at the Beacon school in Falmouth and my mother informed me that although she would show me how to get there, I would have to take myself to school because she had too much to do in the mornings. Not surprisingly, this prospect caused me great consternation. When it was time to set off that first morning, she saw me across the main road and I walked slowly up the hill to where I was supposed to turn left for my new school. Riven with anxiety, I looked around for the road I was meant to take but couldn’t remember which one it was. Aware that my mother would be absolutely furious, I made my way back home. I stood in front of our house, shouting at the top of my voice for her to see me across the road and eventually she opened the front door; she was, indeed, very angry with me because she had to go to all the bother of getting Jean ready and into the pram so that she could march me back up the hill to school and speak to my teacher to apologise for my lateness.
From the beginning, I disliked my new school. The atmosphere was unwelcoming and made me feel uneasy. Also, the children weren’t as open and friendly as the others I had known. Most of all, I disliked the teacher. She was very strict with us and she lost her temper frequently. She was also spiteful. One day, when we were making things out of paper and glue, she asked me to pass her the scissors; I did so, but handed them to her with the pointed end first.
‘You must never hand scissors to anyone with the sharp end towards them!’ she screeched at me. ‘This is what could happen.’ She grabbed my hand and jabbed the point of the scissors into my palm. I was so shocked and surprised that my eyes began to fill with tears and when I looked at my hand I saw that she had not only left a red mark, she had almost drawn blood. On another occasion, after a very minor misdemeanour on the part of a boy, she gripped the poor little lad’s earlobe between her finger and thumb and tugged it with such force that I thought she meant to pull it off. The sun was streaming through the window and illuminating the ear in such a way that it looked as though it was attatched to a bright red, transparent stalk. The boy cried out in pain and sobbed quietly to himself for a long while afterwards. My sense of justice was outraged and I decided that she should be punished. Just how I was going to make my teacher suffer for the offence I had no idea; in the event, the opportunity came very soon and it was very easy for me to carry out my revenge.
One day, our teacher was showing us how to make things out of raffia. She plaited some lengths together and then stitched the interlaced strands into a circle which formed itself into a miniature straw hat.
‘Look everybody! ‘ she exclaimed. ‘What do you think of this? Isn’t it a little gem!’ She was obviously very proud of her handiwork and made everyone in the class look at it and admire it. I watched her put the raffia hat away at the end of the lesson and when I was certain no-one was watching, I snatched it and hid it up the sleeve of my cardigan. A couple of days later she discovered it was missing and after emptying out the entire contents of the cupboard where all the arts and crafts materials were kept, she asked the class if anyone had seen it; I shook my head with the rest of the children. She was very angry but she didn’t know who to blame and I was satisfied that justice had been done.
The meals at the Beacon School were not as good as those at my previous school and, amongst such unappetising things as sago pudding and cheese pie, I had to face the unpleasant experience of tasting brawn for the first time. I stared at the grey slab of jelly on my plate, thinking it looked decidedly unpalatable, and asked the girl sitting next to me what it was.
‘Boiled pig’s head,’ she informed me, cheerfully. ‘Brains and all.’
It tasted even worse than it looked: salty, bitter and nasty. I thought it was cruel to expect a child to eat something so revolting and was astonished to see the others tucking into theirs with unconcern: some of them seemed even to be enjoying it. Every day after lunch, all children had to go to the gym to rest. We had to lie on the floor for what seemed to me an interminable age and I thought this enforced siesta was a very curious custom indeed; I couldn’t wait to get out into the playground and felt as though I’d been cheated of what should have been quality playtime. Although I didn’t think much of my new shoolmates, there was one girl to whom I had taken a liking. One day I asked her if she’d like to come to my house for tea; the warning bells rang in my head but I thought that my mother would, surely, on this occasion, be pleased that I’d made a new friend. We set off, hand-in-hand, chatting happily. We had to make a detour on the way so that she could let her mother know where she was going. My heart sank when she showed me where my she lived and I began to doubt the wisdom of my impetuous action.
Old Hill was, and still is, an ugly scar on the face of Falmouth. At that time, it was a large, open space on which had been erected temporary dwellings similar to those I had seen in the East End of London. However, whereas the ones in London had been well-kept and neat, these had an air of squalor about them. My friend opened the door of one of them and I followed, full of trepidation. Her mother was sitting on a shabby armchair and leapt up when she saw me; she seemed very pleased to meet me and was delighted when she was told that I had invited her little girl to tea at my house. I looked around me with curiosity because I’d always wondered what these funny buildings were like inside and saw that not only the armchair was the worse for wear; everything about the place was dingy and dilapidated and there was an unpleasant, cabbagy, hard-boiled eggs sort of smell in the room. Glancing at my friend and wondering why I hadn’t noticed it before, I saw that she, too, had the same air of scruffiness about her: my mother, most definitely, was not going to be pleased.
It came as no surprise, then, that when my mother’s gaze fell upon the little girl from Old Hill, her face froze into an expression of undisguised distaste.
‘Is it all right if she stays to tea?’ I asked, nervously.
‘She’s got to go straight back to where she comes from!’ hissed my mother, angrily. Deeply embarrassed, I said an apologetic good-bye to my friend. As I was marched indoors, I turned and saw her making her way, looking very crestfallen, up the hill. Afterwards, we never spoke to each other again.


With the arrival of summer, my mother, my sister and I made regular excursions to the beach. To me, the best thing about Falmouth was the main beach, Gyllingvase, and although I couldn’t swim, I had a large inner tube, acquired for me by my father, which did duty as a rubber ring. My happiness knew no bounds; indeed, even today when I smell sun-warmed rubber, I think of that inner tube and endless, untroubled days of sea and sunshine. In those pre-Lycra times, swimwear was made from cotton fabric ruched with many rows of shirring elastic to make it stretchy. When you went into the sea, the weight of the water would pull the swimsuit right down to your knees so that if you were anxious to preserve your modesty, you had to give your costume a mighty hitch before you came out. Even my sister had one and my mother would sit her on a towel from which she would watch me splashing about on the shore, her eyes screwed up in the sun. Skin cancer was unheard of then and no-one seemed to bother about skin protection; I had dark skin and always went brown but my sister, being so very fair, must have suffered from sunburn.
We visited Auntie Frances and Uncle Cliff often. They lived in a large, end-of-terrace house called Arwyn House. It had a big, front conservatory in which, amongst the plants, were objects of great curiosity to me. For example, there was a large mangle with a handle far too heavy for me to turn, although I always tried. Auntie Frances had breasts which hung down to herv waist because she didn’t wear a bra and my mother said it was a wonder she never caught her nipples between the two giant cylinders. There was also an umbrella stand, filled with walking sticks and ancient umbrellas, decorated with mosaics of broken china which I tried to pick off when no-one was looking. Everything in the house was old-fashioned and the living room was like a Victorian parlour: there was a vast, heavy, wooden dining table, covered with a baize cloth, and matching, equally heavy chairs on which you had to be careful not to bark your shins when you squeezed past. In front of the fireplace was a big chaise longue upon which you had to lower yourself with caution because any abrupt movement would cause clouds of dust to rise up. My mother said Aunt Fan’s habit of carefully brushing chairs before sitting down whenever she went to other people’s houses made her laugh when you considered that she never took a duster to her own furniture. Auntie was fond of china and she had a number of ornaments, mostly Staffordshire, which decorated the room but I was forbidden to touch any of it in case I broke something. She also had some Victorian prints, typically representing a variety of sentimental subjects, which I found intriguing, especially the one entitled ‘Little Lady Bountiful’. It depicted a fine lady, seated at a picnic table under a tree; her little girl, attired in a beautiful dress, carried a tray laden with sumptuous things towards two ragged, barefoot children who were looking on with exaggeratedly wistful expressions.
Auntie’s house had no electricity and instead of light bulbs they had gas mantles; decades later their house was, in fact, one of the very few left in Cornwall with gas lighting. The lighting of the gas every evening was something of a ritual performed only by Uncle Cliff. After dusk, visitors would have to sit in the gloom until, at no given signal, he would suddenly leap up and attend to the business of striking matches and tugging the little chains which hung down from the glass shade.
Uncle Cliff was a chain smoker and the walls and ceiling of the front room were stained a yellowy-brown so that it was difficult to see what their original colour must have been. My parents were also chain-smokers and after a while my eyes would begin to smart so much that I would wander outside into the front garden in search of fresh air. It was a very small, walled garden in which Auntie grew a few shrubs and summer annuals. To me, the most interesting feature was the fact that it had no gate; it used to have a splendid, wrought-iron one, she told me, but during the War the Government needed all the iron it could get to make battleships to fight the Germans and so it was taken away. The idea of Auntie’s front gate being used to fight Germans amused me greatly.
Uncle Cliff believed that it was dangerous to deposit money in banks or saving accounts and so all the cash they possessed was hidden under the bed in cardboard boxes or stuffed into pillowcases. Fortunately, they were never burgled although, on one occasion, a very drunk Danish sailor forced his way into the conservatory and urinated all over Auntie’s mangle before collapsing, face-down, on the floor. My mother said this incident was probably the most exciting thing ever to happen to them.

In December, my sister celebrated her first birthday and her second Christmas. Although I anticipated the thrill of opening my presents on Christmas morning, I was full of apprehension because it was inevitable that the day would be ruined by my parents quarrelling. Every year, without fail, my mother would say to my father: ‘Don’t go wasting money on buying a present for me!’ If my father took her at her word and she didn’t get a present from him, her expression would darken and she would go very quiet. By now I had come to realise that quietness on the part of my mother was ominous, like the calm before a storm. She would brood silently for some while and then, just as I was beginning to think that everything was going to be all right, she’d confront my father. Firstly, she’d look him up and down with lip-curling contempt and then, in a low voice, subject him to a torrent of abuse. Like a storm gathering force, her voice would get louder and the abuse more vicious; my father was the mildest of men but there was only so much that he could endure. Finally, he would snap and a full-blown row would ensue.
There were to be other years when he would think it might be prudent to ignore my mother’s injuction not to waste money on a Christmas present and after much brain-racking, tearing of hair and despairing ‘What can I get your mother for Christmas?’ he would go out and buy something guaranteed to displease her. She would accept the gift ungraciously, unwrap it, examine it and say nothing. After a period of tight-lipped silence, she would suddenly turn on my father and accuse him of insulting her by giving her a load of cheap, tasteless tat. Whatever my father did to try to please my mother, Christmas Day would always end in rows.
My father used to say that they had never had a neighbour with whom my mother hadn’t quarrelled. Next door to our house in Dracaena Avenue lived an extremely pleasant and kind woman called Mrs. Robinson. She adored my baby sister and as soon as Jean was able to crawl, she’d make a bee-line for Mrs. Robinson’s. Robbie, as I called her, made a gap in the hedge so that we could call on her whenever we liked, which was often. After a while, my mother began to resent the obvious affection we had for Robbie and started running her down. She declared that ‘that woman’ had no right to invade other people’s privacy by making gaps in hedges and an unpleasant scene ensued with the outcome that we were forbidden to speak to or go anywhere near Mrs. Robinson again. It was very difficult living so close to someone of whom we were so fond and not being allowed to have any further contact with her. It was especially hard for my sister who was far too young to understand the sudden severing of the relationship: but I was not too young to understand that my mother’s unreasonable behaviour had been motivated by jealousy. It had taught me a lesson and I resolved that if, in future, I took a liking to anyone, I would make sure she didn’t find out.

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