大象传媒

PILLATON - 1941

After I had been bombed out of two schools in Plymouth in nineteen forty one my father was talking to a colleague at work whose father wanted a live-in housekeeper. As this man's father was the rector of Pillaton in Cornwall, mother went as housekeeper and I went as an evacuee to his rectory, and from there I was soon booked into the village school.

As it was a Church of England school it was located on the opposite side of the road from the church and its western end wall was in the rectory drive. The head teacher was a Mrs Smith who had a daughter of about my age and an elder son. Several times she added me to her family as we went for walks around the countryside. Secretly Jane Smith was the first girl I had a bit of a crush on, although she drove me nuts because her lips silently repeated everything she said immediately after she said it.

Of course the rector knew nothing of this, as according to him Mrs Smith was a terrible woman because she was a Methodist and should never have been allowed to run a C of E school. He was convinced that she had got the appointment by false pretences and should be thrown out. She told us that she had made sure the selectors knew of her faith but as the rector was absolutely stone deaf, he had no idea what was actually said at the interview.

The second teacher was a Mrs Shropshire, a homely woman who had come down from London with the crowd of evacuees who now substantially outnumbered the local children.
Even as a twelve year old I was capable of the thought that it was a mercy the rector was as deaf as a post, because on Sundays the singing in the Methodist chapel could be heard clearly in the rectors' across the valley from it, obviously a crowded chapel in contrast to his parish church. His congregation often comprised only my mother, myself, the lady organist, Tom Dolley the choir man and his two choirboys. One choirboy was local and the other an evacuee if I remember, although the evacuees for the most part fitted in so well it was difficult to know t'other from which.

Tom Dolley was very unhappy for a time. He was a Home Guard and had been on duty at the Royal Albert Bridge which takes the Great Western Railway from Devon into Cornwall. Part of the structure of this bridge comprises two huge tubular steel arches. This night a bomb had bounced off one of those steel tubes as he was patrolling inside it. The ringing in his ears lasted for a fortnight and what he was calling Hitler was not truly befitting a good chorister even though he had a temporary difficulty with trying to sing in tune.

I soon learned that the village was divided into two distinct groups. One group supported the chapel. The other would have supported the church, if, they had been able to see eye to eye with the rector who had fallen out with most of them anyway.

Within the village community you were either a Fowel, a Dolley, a Doney, a Pearce, or a foreigner. The Greenaways ran the post office so that was no problem but the Pearce's ran the shop, some members of the other families went two and a half miles to do their shopping. A foreigner always ran the pub.

The children鈥檚 war effort was waste paper collection and as I had a bicycle I went around a number of the outlaying farms quite regularly doing this task, this with my trips out with the Smith family and the wide ranging games of the children soon taught me my way around the locality.

THE FETE

To catch a bus it was necessary to walk the two and a half miles from Pillaton to St Mellion. To give a little flavour of the war situation a story from here will not come amiss.
The government in its wisdom had decided to ban the making of clotted cream. Instead of scalding any milk left over at the end of the day the dairyman had to throw it away, something to do with economy. However there is no way of separating the Cornish from their cream. The stuff other people call cream is referred to as ream or as top of the milk.

Then came the St Mellion church fete and tea, several farmers offered "proper" cream which was of course refused by the vicar as he could not be seen to be breaking the law and the village policeman would be there. Then the Lord of the Manor sent some cream, there was no way of refusing anything from that source. I have yet to work out how a policeman can eat something without knowing it is there; except, perhaps? A combination of the Nelson touch and old fashioned Cornish smuggling traditions.

PILLATON RECTORY

The rectory itself was a grand old house with seven bedrooms and a study upstairs, a fine bathroom on a mezzanine floor, and downstairs a bit of a maze. The front door led directly into the entrance hall with the library and the music room on the right, and on the left another door led to the rest of the house.

Inside the back door the route to the wash house which led to the laundry was under a landing and so low that even at twelve years of age I had to duck, it must have cracked many skulls in the years it had been there.

The sole occupants of this mansion were the rector, mother, me and Mlle Asheman. Also Jessie came in from the village to do the heavy cleaning and old George came in to tend the kitchen garden.

The super bathroom was supplied with water from an overhead tank built into the structure and which collected its water from the roof. When rain was scarce in the height of summer this tank had to be topped up by manually pumping water from the well.

This was a very hard task and although I had a go I could only manage about ten minutes at a time pumping slowly, Tom Dolley would keep going steadily for an hour or so and Jessie could keep up a frantic pumping action for about twenty minutes.

In winter the tank would overfill and then the water could siphon back into the pump if we got the taps wrong. As this was our main drinking water supply we then had to clear the highly dubious roof water from the pump system. Then we could be sure we were only getting the supply from the well.

Mlle Asheman was a real character, a one time governess who had been driven a little askew by the thought of the Germans tramping all over her beloved France and the panic of her escape from them. She did a little light cleaning and tidying, and swatted flies.

The rectory was in five acres of jungle. Well laid out but grossly overgrown gardens in fact and a heaven on earth for a twelve year old. There was also an orchard in the south western corner of the grounds. There were masses of apple trees, one pear tree, weeds up to four feet tall between them and a chicken house. This was surrounded by the remains of a tall fence.

THE CHICKENS

Now it is no use trying to explain to chickens that they should keep inside, the defined area where a fence has been, so the flock also had the run of the rectory grounds and neighbouring fields. They all came back to the house in the evening for a meal and individual hens returned during the day when they wanted to lay an egg.

At night the idea was to lock them in an outhouse so that they were safe from foxes, but they had other ideas, so took to roosting in the over-grown laurel trees high above the roof of the place they were supposed to be in.

Getting to their perches was quite an event as the normal flight path of a well fed domestic fowl is about forty five degrees in a downward direction. After walking up the earth bank under the laurels to get onto the outhouse roof it meant hopping from the roof onto a low branch, then clucking enticingly at the next branch up before making a supreme kerfuffle with a couple of loud squawks to get onto it. This process was repeated until the chosen height was reached when it was often necessary to jump on top of several other hens that had already made it, in order to force a way in to the line. Frequently this resulted in the hen at the farthest end of the thin branch falling off, protesting loudly she then flew down to the courtyard, trotted out of the courtyard door, up the earth bank, back onto the roof, and started all over again. In the morning when I went out to feed them they all flew down.

It took one of them a long time to learn that she had to run a few steps on landing and until she did she perfected a three point landing technique, two feet and beak. Often at first the downward fluttering mass resulted in aerial collisions but they soon learned to take it in turns to launch themselves from their perches. Even then if one hesitated when it was her turn and the next went on cue, collisions still took place as they glared at each other in flight, and flew in the direction they were looking.

Their favourite snack for breakfast was the live black beetles from the traps set out in the kitchen the night before. If I put these out first they forgot their manners and all launched off into the air at once with potentially disastrous results. In charge of the hens, or so he thought, was a cockerel, his presence however helped to keep them in a cohesive group as they wandered around the grounds.

STOLEN NEST

Among the group were three black hens, a plump one, a middling one, and a skinny one, then the plump one took to vanishing except for one meal a day. It was obvious that she had "stolen a nest". That is, she had created a nest for herself somewhere in the area. The problem was that a nice plump hen was in mortal danger from foxes, especially when her brood started cheeping. I had to find out where she was hiding so after putting out their feed I waited and watched, then, when she started to go back to her hidey-hole it was a case of discreetly following her, or so I thought. The hen however would have none of this, seeing me trailing her she panicked, ran round on a circle, and half flew, half leapt, into the overgrown laurel bushes. Ah well, try again tomorrow.

Afraid that if she saw me again she would abandon her future family, I took up a position the following day from where she could be watched without her spotting me, and then I waited. Sure enough she appeared on the path, trotted into the orchard, took the right fork, and then disappeared from view. On the third day I repeated the ploy, hiding up a tree to get a good view of the path. My view of the path, starting from where she had gone out of my sight the previous day. When she had gone by it seemed clear that she was heading for the bottom of the orchard which was waist high in stinging nettles and brambles.

Then on the fourth day, from another tree giving me a good view of the bend in the track by the road, I watched her trot down, turn that bend, walk on about thirty yards, turn sharp left and leave the defined trail. After a decent interval to let her settle I followed-quietly. At the point where she had turned left there was another, ill defined, minor track, and gingerly I followed it. There, an angry squawk and two furious eyes were glaring at me from a black and brilliant red face told me where she was. Muttering tactful apologies for disturbing a lady about her private business I discreetly withdrew and went on my way.

At a guess, judging from the time she had been behaving so furtively, she had eight or ten more days to go before her family arrived and a check of her nest when she was feeding next day confirmed this, her eggs were polished to about the right degree. I decided to leave her to it. Sure enough, a few days later she failed to arrive for her meal, this could only mean one of two things, either she had been found and eaten, or her chicks had hatched. In fact her family was hatching, mum hen was clucking soothingly and odd little heads were taking quick glimpses of this big strange world from various gaps in her feathers. Calling her a clever girl I let her continue with her business. The following day I took her some food, she was still sitting tight to the nest so there were probably more eggs to hatch. Then at my next call she was showing her family around, the remaining unbroken eggs abandoned and possibly addled.

CHICKEN HERDING

Having warned my mother that it was my intention to try to usher her back to the safety of the house I started doing this, slowly and carefully so as not to fluster her. All went well until we reached the tunnel in the laurels to our left which led through to the lawn. This is where the hen first asserted herself, and went straight on, up toward the big barn.

This route took us over the well which was at the end of an alley off the courtyard of the rectory. This alley was between two retaining walls as high as the outhouse roofs and there was nothing between the upper level and the sheer drop to the courtyard. I then wanted her to take her brood around to the steps at the far end of the courtyard, she seemed quite happy with this arrangement. She was lulling me into a false sense of security. At the top of the steps she again asserted herself. Here she led her chicks onto the path to the left of the steps; this went behind the roofs of two of the outhouses before leading back to the sheer drop area over the well. As I stood there wondering how to cope with this she flew off the edge of the path, and down the ten foot or so to the courtyard closely followed by her faithful children.
"Oh Mum." I wailed, "What's happened to them."
"They're all right." She replied "They opened their little wings and just floated down."

THE THREE GRACES?

"Seeing the hen looking after her brood, my mother decided to call her Grace, but hens are inclined to scratch to find offerings for their offspring and often injure chicks which get under their feet as they do so. For this reason we confined Grace to a pen with an attached run for the chicks which they could get through the bars between the pen and the run, but we did not think to cover the run. We then found the other two black hens in with the chicks, my mother promptly christened the middle size one Disgrace and the skinny one Skipgrace.

One day when the chickens were out in the courtyard being looked after by their doting mum we heard a terrible raucous screech. Darting out to see what was up I found Grace standing in the middle of the yard puffing herself up to three times her normal size, not a chicken could be seen except the two I had passed on the way out and which were hiding in the outside W.C.

Looking up I saw a circling hawk, so I joined Grace in convincing it that this was not a good place to try for a meal. When the danger was well and truly past Grace started clucking and little chicks appeared from everywhere, shed doorways, under a Russian rhubarb leaf, other weed patches, and of course the two I had passed on the way out. Grace counted them carefully and so did I.
To be continued....

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