Gosh what a lovely lovely book.
Yes folks I always believe in starting a book review with an intellectually thought out, pithy turn of phrase and this is it 'Gosh what a lovely lovely book'.
And it is. A parcel from Bloomsbury arrived last week, I think they are a lovely lovely publishing house as well, and this was contained therein. I was in back recovery mode at the time and decided to combine resting on the sofa with Kisses on a Postcard, a tale of Wartime Childhood. I opened it up and that was it, instant enchantment, totally beguiled and I sat and read it straight through and when finished just sat with a smile on my face and tears in my eyes.
Terence Frisby is a playwright, actor, director and produced and his most famous play, There's a Girl in my Soup, was London's longest running comedy and a worldwide smash hit. I remember it well. He and his elder brother, Jack aged eleven, were evacuees 'vackies' and were sent to the tiny Cornish hamlet of Doublebois where they lived at No 7 Railway Cottages with Uncle Jack, an irreverent ex-Welsh miner with trenchant views on more or less everything, and his warm hearted wife Auntie Rose. The Kisses on a Postcard was a code thought of by their mother and they were to send a postcard back to their parents on arrival.
"Now this is the code. Our secret. You put one kiss if it's horrible and I'll come straight there and bring you back home. You put two kisses if it's all right and three kisses if it's nice, really nice. Then I'll know"
They put kisses all over the postcard....
Jack and Terry were in Cornwall for three years, the woods and river became their playground and they were delighted to see that the the main London to Penzance train line ran right through the cutting where they were to live. Children of a railway man, this made them feel at home immediately.
Doublebois was full of the usual eclectic mix of inhabitants. One dominant character was Miss Polmanor, a narrow minded and upright Wesleyan Methodist who seemed to be determined to make life something to be endured rather than enjoyed. There was no hypocrisy about her, she might have been tough on everyone but she was even tougher on herself. She lived frugally and in order to earn extra money to live on she had acquired, rather bizarrely, the local concession on Corona, a firm that made fizzy drinks very popular with the children at that time. She had crates full of bottles in her cellar and Jack and Terry were allowed to have a glass each with their Sunday meal. "Our favourites were cherryade (sweetly disgusting) and ginger beer". Miss Polmanor would not trade on a Sunday and therefore the drink had to be purchased on a Saturday. One Sunday when the boys forgot this, Terry was dispatched to see if he could wheedle a bottle out of her despite it being the Sabbath.
Not a hope it seemed, but when she discovered that he sang in the church choir she consented to let him have a bottle of Corona and he would pay the next day. After that, he was sent up on a regular basis which led to an unwelcome intimacy. He was invited inside her old fashioned house packed with bric a brac and other mementos and there, on the sideboard, a silver framed photo of a man turned into a modest shrine "standing on a little tapestry with candlesticks on either side". The discovery of who this is later on in the book is guaranteed to make any lip, no matter how stiff and upper, quiver. It did mine.
One of Terry's friends was Elsie, a precocious and sexually aware young teenager, eager to show him how to play Doctors and Nurses, a game which he found fascinating and terrifying in equal measures. In what must be the worst allocation of billets in the village, Elsie found herself sharing with Miss Polmanor who struggles in vain to install good behaviour in her and to and save her soul from eternal damnation. As she grows older, Elsie abandons Terry for more grown up companions and when the US are stationed near by, she is in a permanent state of delirious excitement.
"In our part of Cornwall, people from the next village were strangers, Englishmen from across the Tamar were foreigners, American might have been from Mars. And that wasn't all, to cap everything they were BLACK..........it's no good thinking in terms of colour prejudice, the village wasn't prejudiced, it was astounded. Although we were at the centre of the British Empire, this was a remote part of Cornwall in 1943"
The soldiers thought they were in paradise 'you should see where we come from' and asked 'we see you have two churches in your city. Is one - maybe - all right for coloured folk to worship in?' the villagers took them to their hearts.
"These smiling flamboyant to us, gentle men who came from God knows what hells in the Deep South of the segregated USA, let us pat and pull their hair, rub their skin to see if it came off, examine their pink palms, marvel at their very existence, and then they were gone just as suddenly as they had appeared and were replaced by other Yanks, white ones, no less friendly, no less generous but with not a tenth of the exotic appeal of their black comrades"
I could carry on quoting huge chunks from this gorgeous book ad infinitum, but I do want you to buy a copy and read it for yourselves. Uncle Jack and Auntie Rose are two warm hearted and generous people and Jack and Terry were lucky that they chanced upon them as when evacuees arrived they were herded into a church hall and the locals came along and chose them, so they could have ended up anywhere. We know that some evacuees were unlucky and were treated as slave labour by some less than kindly people, and so they were doubly lucky to be chosen by Uncle Tom who just laughed when told he had to take both of them or none at all, and duly did so.
Of course, the time came when they returned to London. As well as the main danger having passed, Jack and Rose were taking Elsie into their home and they no longer had the room to house the boys. She had, rather predictably, fallen pregnant by one of the US visitors, did not know which one and as her mother had deserted the family and she had no notion of the whereabouts of her father, Elsie would have found herself in one of the grim homes for Fallen Women that were the only refuge at the time, if it had not been for Jack and Rosie.
So the parting arrives and they are taken down to catch their train:
"Goodbye boys....Uncle Jack choked, stopped, tried to grin at us and failed miserably, tears ran down his cheeks. Auntie Rose cut in 'Don't cry Jack for God's sake, you'll start me off' and she started to cry"........Uncle Jack and Auntie Rose. Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack. Not father and mother, not distant either, just in between relatives. Of course they weren't even that..........but even now sixty-seven years later, I still cannot say their names without a full heart and a lump of gratitude in my throat"
I have a lump in mine as well as I write this.
I will say it again, a lovely lovely lovely book.
