I made a strategic decision to arrive at the Kings Head before anyone else, mainly to scoop up those who have already started drinking in the public bar and get them upstairs before they’re out of their minds. But however early I get there, Dick is always in place. Dick has always been rather reticent about his More
More Memories of POLPERRO: Being August, there was a lot of harvesting. I remember lurking round the edges of the wheat fields ‘helping’ with the gathering. There were no combine harvesters or such then, it was cut with scythes, collected and bunched into cocks. These were stacked together – about 4 or 6 propping each other up – and then the next day either a tractor drawn cart or a horse drawn cart would collect them up and take them off for threshing. I was more actively involved in picking blackberries, damsons, sloes [to make gin] and other hedgerow fruits and nuts.
There was one harvest to be collected that had nothing to do with August and everything to do with the march of progress and scientific discovery: penicillin. Nowadays antibiotics are made chemically and mass-produced in factories but back then as far as I know, there was only penicillin, the first antibiotic suitable for human use. It was not mass produced and was in such short supply that, my mother told me, it was only used for the armed forces. There was not enough for it to be widely prescribed for civilian use. Apparently, there is a certain type of seaweed that has alginates in it that were used to enhance penicillin production. This special seaweed was found in the coves around Polperro, especially Tallend Bay. We were paid to collect it at low tide, bundle it into sacks and these were put on the cart and taken off somewhere. I think we got paid but that would have been mum, not me. I remember all climbing into carts and being horse driven to a bay at low tide. Then across slippery rocks pulling off the seaweed and stuffing it into the sacks.
Polperro is just along the coast from Plymouth – a naval port at that time. It was badly bombed and the village was full of bombed-out families. I used to play on the beach with them. Because of the war, there were no buckets or spades so we bought wooden spoons, jelly moulds and cake shapers from the village shops and used them instead. There was only a small triangle of beach when the tide was out. This was just behind the outer harbour wall. It was nice soft sand. There were plenty of shells to decorate whatever we built – when the tide was out the floor of the harbour was carpeted in scallop shells, hundreds of them.
There was an American base nearby and I remember once they came to the village and up on the cliffs they dealt out all sorts of goodies to all us children; not only sweets and chewing gum and chocolate (all rationed and virtually unobtainable) but also trinkets and bits and bobs. I was given a red and silver coloured plaited bracelet that I think must have been made of plastic.
One of my favourite artists is Oskar Kokoskha. Then as now Polperro was a favourite place for artists. When I wasn’t on the beach or helping with the harvest or collecting seaweed, etc. I used to go up to these cliffs and sketch the views, the same as the grown-up artists did. Some had easels and were painting. I now know that Oskar Kokoskha was one of these. (He was a Nazi refugee) The Courtauld Gallery has several of his paintings of Polperro.
The summer of 1944, the horizon was continuously full of ships sailing east – towards Europe, this was just after D-Day.
Then, come 1945, Victory in Europe had already been declared and everyone was waiting anxiously for Victory in Asia. Wherever we were, we had to hurry back to be near the radio at 1.00pm for the news. It was finally declared in the middle of August sometime and this was the signal for all sorts of celebrations. We all went to Looe to watch the first Carnival they had since before the war. They had floats up the river that runs through the centre. Some of them were square shaped and I remember one with some girls dressed in Hawaiian grass skirts being banged into. The float tipped over and they all fell in the water.
Another day, the whole village joined in a Cornish floral dance. They had some musicians and we all danced along behind them up and down the four or five roads there are in Polperro, out round the harbour, up the hill at the side and back down again. It was a lovely sunny day and great fun seemed to be had by all.
The next time I visited Polperro was in the 1980’s for a day when we were holidaying nearby. We went for lunch in the pub on the harbour that mum used to frequent with the villagers – called the ‘Pilchards.’ It was packed with tourists and we had to share a table with another couple. We got chatting and it turned out the man was one of the children I used to play with on the beach back in ’44 and ’45.
1945 – VICTORY AT LAST: First in June, there was Victory in Europe and then in the August, after bombing them with the Atom bomb, the capitulation of the Japanese. I remember a neighbour’s brother had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. He had a number tattooed on his right wrist and was stick thin when he arrived at their house.
I remember a street party where everyone had to wear red, white and blue – I had little red, white and blue bows fixed on some navy shorts and a blouse with little blue flowers on it. All the children in the street were sat on trestle tables and we had fish-paste sandwiches, buns and various weird, fatless cakes mums had made with the standard watery orange squash to drink. In the evening it was the grown-ups’ turn and they had got beer and a wind-up gramophone. As I watched from my bedroom window, they all seemed to be having a great time. This must have been to do with VE Day because we were in Cornwall for VJ Day.
Some time afterwards I remember ice cream being allowed to be made once more. I had no memory of it. On that day I was shopping with mum and granny in Oxford Street and all along the pavement and in many of the shops, there were ice cream stalls. As soon as I finished one, I was bought another. By the time we got opposite Selfridges [we had started up the other end by Tottenham Court Road] I was violently sick in the gutter and have hated ice cream ever since.
OB©2012
After the unfortunate incident of the tea party, the relationship between Lorna and me drifted into the doldrums. Neither of us knew quite what to do. More
So just when I have decided to put Mark out of my life for good, I discover that he is sick, and I am riddled with guilt at what I’d said to him the last time we met. I have racked my brains wondering how I could find out what was wrong with him. But Charlene is not talking to anybody in the village since the bust up at Axis, so nobody knows anything. More
Greenwich – the mid 1930s
As far as I could ascertain, the family moved to Greenwich in about 1934, it may well have been earlier, but whenever it was, I did not recall the move at all. My first recollections were just a few years prior to starting my first school which was at Royal Hill Primary School in Greenwich in September 1936. More
I wish I had seen the inside of the café before I went in. It was raining hard and very cold, and there was half an hour before my bus was due, so, seeing the word ‘CAFÉ’ on the condensation-fogged window, I dashed inside, More
I was beginning to dread the postman calling, there had been four of the letters over the past fortnight, and I was very, very frightened. They were all the same, a plain white envelope with a typed address label stuck on it, containing a sheet of plain white paper with a short typed message. More
