Kisses on a Postcard by Terence Frisby

immensely popular song ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was constantly on the radio, generally delivered by Vera Lynn. Gwyn loved to parody her. He would emote extravagantly, arms thrown wide, and sing, ‘We’ll meet again, when they’ve blown up Big Ben,’ holding ‘Ben’ for ever with massive vibrato. Seven-year-old me found this the height of musical satire.
    I wondered about those mountains, unknown things to me. Our train rides to our great-aunts in Brighton took us through the South Downs; but mountains? And the Brecon Beacons? What were they? And why were they cold in the summer? Uncle Jack soon had his atlas out from the one or two shelves of Serious Books that filled the bookcase in the rarely used front room. I was in it for hour after hour while I was in Cornwall when it was too wet or cold or hot or dark to go out. And often when it wasn’t. There were cities with exotic names that became battlegrounds in the war; mountains, seas, oceans, plains, deserts and rivers that were being fought over; the shapes of the continents fascinated me; the outlines of the countries, each with its own individual colour; the vast amount of pink where the thin red line had passed, nearly half of the world, it seemed, was the British Empire. I swelled with pride: our empire.
    Some evenings in Gwyn’s week’s leave Uncle Jack went for a drink in Liskeard with him and on Sunday morning after Auntie Rose had put the roast in the oven we all walked down to Halfway House – our nearest pub down the main road into the valley, halfway to Bodmin Road station (now, prissily, Bodmin Parkway), the next stop on the line – for drinks before Sunday dinner: beer for the men, shandy for Auntie Rose, pop for Jack and me, crisps for all of us. Then back with bottles in the men’s jacket pockets. We learned to value our pleasures: it was three and a half miles there, three and a half miles back, mostly uphill, singing all the way, led by Gwyn.
    ‘Gwyn’s going to be a singer after the war,’ Uncle Jack had told us and anyone who would listen.
    ‘Going to be. He never stops,’ Auntie Rose complained insincerely.
    She was a different person with Gwyn there, like an opened flower. Uncle Jack quietly glowed instead of his usual half-scowl. The place was lit up, full of Gwyn’s song and laughter. And then he was gone.
     
    The woods, in summer, became our playground. They were as good as they promised when we first saw them: endless trees to climb; little streams everywhere, some of which dried up in hot weather and others that only appeared when there had been a lot of rain. Even these were often, to our surprise, full of tiny fish, minnows or sticklebacks, which you could catch in a jam-jar and take home. But they soon died so we gave that up. These streams we dammed or re-routed; we collected watercress from them and took it home for the table. I saw a kingfisher that had built its nest far from the river and was earning a living and raising a family on one of these tiny, gurgling flows.
    But it was the River Fowey that was the magnet to us. It hurried along in its dappled cavern, with deep pools that swirled mysteriously, could suck you fatally down and held fish of giant size in our imaginations. It splashed over rapids that it seemed no fish could possibly negotiate. There were little sandy beaches in places with backwaters where you could examine the insects and trout fry in close proximity, making a pool which they could not escape from until you dug a channel with your hand and watched them swim away. Tree trunks lay across it, deliberately felled or just left to make bridges for the more agile. Further upstream, beyond the limits of the Doublebois House estate, the woods thinned out and the river flowed through meadows until you traced it back to open moorland where the buzzards soared and the wind always seemed to be blowing too much. But that was quite a walk, rarely undertaken.
    Of course, when they visited, our parents were taken to