7
Maddie couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this excited. But it
wasn’t just excitement, it was more than that. If she’d been the superstitious
type, she’d have used the word portentous.
Yes, that’s what it felt like. Momentous, some omen of life-changing
importance. But then, she wasn’t given to superstition, so maybe the excited
shivers working their way from the back of her neck and along her spine
were only due to the damp chill of a winter’s day in Cornwall. And the cold
leather of the car seat tugging at her.
She was off on an adventure; an explorer, eager to grasp each new
sensation; intrepid, ready to face the unknown with confidence. But not
entirely unknown, she supposed, for at least she had a map and was even
now heading towards the romance and drama of the Lizard Peninsula, a
place she’d read about and dreamed of exploring.
Thanks to the rather pompous Captain Andrews, she was able to follow
that dream. He’d ordered her to ‘Drive somewhere. See a bit of the
countryside… Consider it a forty-eight-hour pass’. Well, not quite forty
eight: the rest of the day and a full day tomorrow, but more than she’d
expected.
Maybe she would even find herself a bed and breakfast lodging for
overnight, make it a real holiday. Helston was close to the Lizard, there
must be places to stay there, for she imagined it to be a fairly large town.
And even in wartime, people still had to travel, needed somewhere to spend
the night.
Is your journey really necessary? She thought about the words on the
railway poster. People were discouraged from making ‘frivolous’ trips, as
resources had to be saved for crucial wartime endeavours. Maddie
understood all that. But then, she wasn’t taking up a precious seat on a train,
was she? Drive somewhere, the captain had ordered. Maddie grinned to
herself. Maybe her trip was frivolous, but orders were orders, right? And
she’d already filled up the tank with the jerry can of petrol the captain had
instructed Corporal Williams to magically produce.
Corporal Williams had been on barrier duty when she’d driven away
from the camp. He, and a squaddie she’d never seen before, had been
sheltering from the cold in the small sentry box by the front gate.
Maddie had sat patiently behind the wheel of the staff car, waiting to
escape; to start her adventure, butterflies stretching their excited wings in
her stomach. But the prisoner transport ahead of her had been held up for
ages at the barrier. She’d been lined up behind the canvas-covered lorry for
a long time before she’d finally been allowed the freedom of the open road.
There seemed to be some confusion that she didn’t understand, and at
one stage all of the German POWs had been hastily unloaded from inside
the lorry, ordered to wait by the gatehouse, counted twice by Corporal
Williams, and made to answer their names in a roll call. While the prisoners
were milling around outside, the other British squaddie had gone inside the
lorry to conduct a search.
A gaggle of interested prisoners had also gathered around her car. But
Maddie hadn’t been intimidated by them, for even though there’d been
some pushing and shoving, a bit of play-fighting, it had all seemed light
hearted banter, and in good fun. Maddie hadn’t got out to discourage or
disperse them, as she knew how it went: the squaddie would figure she’d
overstepped her authority. She was a visitor, an ATS driver. A woman at
that – not a real soldier, then. So, she’d left him to get on with it. But she
hadn’t failed to notice that one of the men was the tall, thin German with
the piercing blue eyes. He’d even smiled at her when he caught Maddie
watching him.
The butterfly population in her stomach had doubled.
After the search of the prisoner transport, she’d half expected her own
car to be inspected, for there seemed to be some sort of flap on. But
Corporal Williams had just waved her on through. He’d added another
wink, like they were some sort of co-conspirators.
The drive from the camp at White Cross had been easier and quicker than
she’d thought, at least as far as the town of Redruth. Not much traffic on the
roads, either. But after that, it became far more of a challenge, and took all
her driving skills to keep the staff car safely on the road. Hardly a road, she
reminded herself, for sometimes the route between Redruth and Helston had
narrowed into a country lane. With so many hairpin bends and the
abundance of potholes, she’d fought every inch of the way, gripping the
steering wheel with an intensity that left ridges in her hands.
Fields of brown slid by her drab, olive-green staff car. Bleak winter
colours in the fields, unremarkable, dreary even. And in places, high
Cornish hedges, designed as windbreaks, boxed her in on either side. Their
claustrophobic presence felt oppressive. The abundance of wild hedgerow
flowers that normally clung to them, forcing their way through the
buttresses in a riot of colour, were missing. Winter had robbed the hedges of
their magic. She’d hoped for something different, more uplifting, to feed
her spirit of adventure.
She passed through villages and small hamlets, their grey Cornish
granite breaking up the landscape. But even these places seemed to be
crouching down in a kind of enforced hibernation. Four Lanes, Pencoys,
Burras: collections of houses and chapels, marked on her map, but Maddie
saw no evidence of human habitation, as not a single person walked their
streets or waved a cheery greeting to her. There was just an eerie silence.
She felt suddenly alone, as if she were the last human on some alien,
inhospitable planet. Where was everybody?
And now, as she came onto the moorland again, a thin, wispy mist
clutched at some of the low-lying fields with a spectral hand. She shivered.
Not excitement, this time, but due to the anxious caveman part of her brain,
throwing up ancient fears and superstition.
Her explorer’s anticipation slowly dwindled into disappointment.
Somehow, she’d expected more. But maybe once she got to the Lizard,
headed towards the sea, things would be different.
She shook off the sombre mood, forced herself to smile. Some people
just don’t know when they’re well off, she chastised herself. And that
seemed to work, because she suddenly saw people. Up ahead, two of them,
young girls wearing the brown and green uniform of the Women’s Land
Army, steering a herd of cows across the road to a field on the other side.
Ten cows. Maddie counted them as she slowed to a stop in the road. You
see! There were other people on the planet, she wasn’t totally alone.
Once the parade of cows had been safely dispatched, one of the girls
came over to the car.
Maddie wound the window down.
‘You one of they army women?’ The tone was friendly and the young
girl’s face broke into a grin.
‘I am,’ agreed Maddie. ‘ATS driver.’
‘Must be great, driving a fancy car like that. You an officer, like?’ asked
the girl, wide-eyed. She seemed impressed.
‘Nope, just a plain old private.’
‘Well, you sounds like an officer. Like a toff, dead posh like.’
‘Can’t help where you were born,’ said Maddie. Hampstead. Her
parents had moved there because it was where the right people lived.
‘Ain’t that the truth? I were born in a village up the road. All old folk
there now, all the decent blokes gone off to fight. Dead dull and boring.’
‘Sometimes boring’s good,’ said Maddie.
‘Yeah? Tell that to this lot.’ The girl pointed at the cows and laughed.
‘Me name’s Annie,’ she said, and stuck her hand through the window in
welcome. ‘Very pleased to meet a lady from the ATS.’
‘Same here,’ said Maddie. ‘Pleased to see a friendly face. People seem a
bit thin on the ground.’
‘They keeps themselves to themselves round here. Don’t mean we
Cornish don’t welcome folk, proper like. Even incomers.’ The girl laughed
again, a high-pitched, friendly sound.
‘So, you come from around here?’ asked Maddie.
‘Wendron. Up the road, after Trenear. You off to Helston? Them’s
building a new airfield up there. And one out at Predannack as well. Be lots
of they gorgeous fly-boys coming through soon, I reckon.’ Annie chuckled.
‘Wouldn’t say no to one of they. If he asked proper, like.’
They said goodbye, and Maddie drove off with the sound of Annie’s
laughter still hanging in the air. It signalled the return of her own optimism.
Maybe this trip would be fun after all, enough to renew her enthusiasm and
make the rest of the assignment with the morose Captain Andrews more
palatable.
She had no illusions about why he’d given her a forty-eight-hour pass.
The man wasn’t being kind, he wanted her out of the way. Maybe he didn’t
feel that comfortable with a woman around while he tried to sort out
whatever mess he’d been landed with. But it was the army. They were in
the middle of a war. There was always some kind of mess.
The village of Wendron, where Annie hailed from, turned out to be a
beautiful, picturesque place. Maddie imagined it on a hot summer’s day
ablaze with the roses that crept around the doors – colour everywhere,
tugging the eye away from the stark Cornish granite.
It was a sleepy, picture-postcard place, a Cornish idyll where visitors
might come to relish its peace and tranquillity. But she could see how
someone like Annie would feel trapped and stifled by it.
After the war, when folk could travel again, they’d go there to remind
themselves of another world, another time. They’d walk through the ancient
lychgate, explore the churchyard, the defunct tin mines whose engine
houses were now mere skeletons on the landscape, a reminder of different
times when men worked like slaves prising tin from the earth, so that others
could get rich.
She drove on through, didn’t stop. Maybe she’d stop in Helston before
travelling on, find a café. It was almost lunchtime and Maddie was hungry,
hadn’t had anything to eat since the breakfast of bread and dripping. That
seemed a long time ago now.
The sun had come out, its rays glinting, bouncing off the impressively grand
buildings of Coinagehall Street in Helston. Georgian, some of them, and
Victorian, the friendly old man had said, when she’d stopped to ask the way
to some kind of eatery.
He’d told her where to park the car and given her directions to
Coinagehall Street, impressing on her the need to visit the Angel Hotel.
‘Historic,’ he’d told her, with pride in his voice. ‘’Course, it ain’t what it
used to be, what with the blast tape on the winders and the sandbags and the
like…’ The old Cornishman had shrugged his shoulders, philosophically.
‘This bleddy war, eh?’ He’d called her my bird and given her a full-face
grin, and made her feel welcome – even though she was one of they
foreigners from across the Tamar.
Maddie was getting used to it now – the way the Cornish seemed to
classify people by whichever side of the River Tamar they came from. One
side Cornwall, the other side England. But there seemed no rancour in the
description, no insult intended, no them and us, just a practical explanation
for the differences in folk and a shrug of the shoulders or a scratch of the
head when discussions involved ‘they English’.
He’d been right about the hotel: it was impressive. And yes, there were
sandbags at the front and blast tape on its mullion windows. But the tape
criss-crossing the many tiny box-like panes of glass in each window drew
attention to the ancient façade rather than detracting from it. The antique
building seemed to shout its history from the moment she saw it; Maddie
could imagine it as an old coaching inn.
The elderly waitress, who brought her tea, told Maddie that the Angel
had once been the elaborate townhouse of the wealthy Godolphin family,
who’d owned tin and copper mines. They were proper Tudor gentry, the
woman told Maddie proudly.
But Maddie couldn’t dismiss the juxtaposition from her mind. Such
wealth, side by side with the poverty of the very miners who toiled in
dangerous conditions for a pittance to provide riches for the mine owners.
Maybe she was just a left-wing socialist as her brother had claimed – he’d
used the accusation as a slur, his eyebrows lifting into his hairline in that
intimidating way of his. But was it a bad thing, being a socialist? If it was,
then Maddie didn’t mind being bad. Fairness. That’s what was needed in the
world now. Wasn’t that what they were fighting this war for? A bit more
fairness and sharing, and people having the same chances of a good, safe
life? Equality wasn’t a bad thing, surely?
Maddie knew why she thought like that, of course. For years she’d
watched her mother make judgements about people based on class, treating
some with contempt, sucking up to others. Maddie had been discouraged
from making friends with anyone below her. When she was young, it had
confused her – these orders that she was allowed to speak to some people,
but not others. Weren’t people all just people? Now she was older, she was
no longer confused, just saddened that her mother was a bigot and a snob.
‘How’s the cottage pie? Something wrong? You ain’t touched much.’
The enquiry from the elderly waitress wasn’t a criticism, more of a
motherly concern that Maddie should be eating properly.
‘Eh?’ Maddie dragged her mind away from her mother, back to the
woman hovering anxiously by her elbow.
‘The pie. Cook calls it cottage’ – the woman lowered her voice as if she
was giving away secret information that shouldn’t be shared – ‘but if it
were proper cottage, there’d be some sort of beef in there.’
Maddie caught on quickly, felt she should contribute something to the
conversation, especially as the older woman seemed to be going out on a
limb. ‘So, no beef then. I was never really sure what was in a cottage pie
anyway,’ Maddie owned up. ‘What makes it different from a shepherd’s
pie? Or maybe they’re the same,’ she said.
‘Oh, no, they ain’t the same. Shepherd’s pie ’as got lamb in there. Think
of shepherds and their sheep, makes it easy to remember,’ the waitress
added. Her voice had the ring of experience and authority to it, and Maddie
believed her.
‘I see,’ she said. Though to be fair, the whole conversation felt a bit
surreal to her.
‘Cottage, on the other hand – well, that’s got beef in there, instead.’ The
woman chuckled. ‘Least it should have. You’d need a magnifying glass to
find the meat in that one there.’ She pointed accusingly towards the pie.
‘It’s lentil.’
‘Ah.’
‘Brown lentils. S’posed to be good for you.’
‘Really?’
‘Minister of Food says so,’ said the waitress, a sarcastic edge to her
voice. ‘But I aren’t convinced some fella in London wearing a bowler hat
and a fancy pinstripe suit knows what’s good for us. Has the bloke even
been in a kitchen?’ She raised her eyebrows in scorn.
Maddie struggled for a reply. She couldn’t say for certain whether or not
anyone from the Ministry of Food had ever been in a kitchen, but suspected
they had.
She eventually ate all the mock pie – shepherd’s or cottage, whichever.
It was quite tasty, unlike some of the other strange concoctions she’d eaten
in the mess hall that masqueraded as food in these trying times. But folk
hardly ever complained; only the odd grumble about powdered egg or the
ubiquitous spam, or sausages with only gristle in them and plumped up with
water that made them explode in the pan when you tried to fry them. They
were given the nickname ‘bangers’. Exploding sausages! You had to laugh.
Well, laugh or cry, thought Maddie. Two choices. And laughing was always
better.
She laughed quite a bit with her new friend at the Angel Hotel. The
elderly waitress was called Lizzie, and for some reason the woman was
drawn to Maddie, taking a motherly interest in her. Even persuading the
hotel cook to come up with a couple of sandwiches.
‘A sort of picnic,’ Lizzie said, ‘in case you can’t find a place to have tea
down there in Gunwalloe. It’s only a wee place,’ the waitress continued.
‘You’ll not find much there other than the beach and an old churchyard and
barbed wire. I hear tell there’s even a minefield down there. You’ll need to
be careful.’
There was a flask of tea with the food, with instructions to return it
whenever she was able. ‘The sandwiches are only meat paste,’ Lizzie
complained. ‘I’d hoped Cook would be able to spare a bit of cheese, but
well – it’s the war.’ And she assured Maddie that the two bottles of Cornish
Spingo would make up for any shortcomings in the picnic.
Maddie was overwhelmed by the kindness and hospitality of the
Cornish. And Lizzie Retallack in particular. She tried to pay for the Spingo
but the offer was waved away with an airy hand and the explanation that the
beer was brewed in the Blue Anchor in Helston, right there in Coinagehall
Street, and she was to have it as a souvenir.
Maddie waved goodbye, and made her way back to the car with a smile
on her face and a spring in her step. And a homemade wicker basket
holding a flask of tea, four meat-paste sandwiches and two bottles of beer
that would put all but the strongest man on his back.
You had to laugh. So, she did
