Kisses on a Postcard by Terence Frisby Page A

Jack carried the evidence about with him. ‘I smoked when I was your age and look what happened to me.’ As he drew himself up to his full five foot nothing his eyes twinkled in self-mockery and his rebuke floated away like exhaled smoke. To redeem the seriousness of the moment he urged Ken and Jack to take a full drag and inhale. Of course they both choked and he strode away knowing that he had done all he could to discourage the unstoppable habit.
     

     
    Uncle Jack’s ‘If I was your father, I’d—’ was the start to many a threat that held few terrors for Jack or me. ‘Bloody Cornish,’ he would say without rancour. ‘God-bothering, Bible-punching Tories.’ And then the sentence that was applied to anyone who had a moan about something or who displeased him in some way, ‘Send ’em down the mines for a bit, then they’d know they were born.’
    I wondered what Tories were and why they punched Bibles. Jack explained. ‘It’s just an expression. They don’t actually punch them. I think they just bang them down hard in church or chapel. I’ve seen them do it with hymn books. And cowboys do it in the pictures too. They talk about punching cattle but they never do; they just punch each other.’ I stared at a cow in a field and imagined punching its massive forehead, wringing my fist in agony as a result.
    ‘Bloody Churchill.’ This was another of Uncle Jack’s remarks that seized our shocked attention. ‘He sent the troops in against us at Tonypandy.’ ‘Us’ were his beloved South Wales miners, on strike for a living wage. His complaint, I later learned to my dismay, was in reference to the notorious government reaction to that strike in 1910 when Churchill was Home Secretary.
    ‘Nye Bevan, there’s your man. On the Opposition benches all by himself. Attlee, Morrison, Bevin, they’re all in the Government. Part of it. Sold out.’ The Labour Party, who he had voted for all his life, had united with the arch-Conservative Churchill to form a coalition government and win the war. They earned only Uncle Jack’s contempt. Nye Bevan, Uncle Jack’s Welsh, left-wing idol, was the man who stood out virtually alone against the war and coalition (though he rejoined his colleagues in the Labour government that swept to power in the aftermath to found the National Health Service).
    Of course, even though we were children of a couple who were also Labour – neither had any time for the Establishment, Dad because of his trade-union background and Mum because of her suffragette, musical family – the politics was over my head at first, but I learned.
    ‘Ernie Bevin . . .’ Uncle Jack rumbled to a bitter, thoughtful silence.
    We knew of Bevin, a major trade-union figure, now Minister of Labour, former official of the Dockers Union, powerful and popular in our eyes, subsequently Foreign Secretary in Attlee’s post-war government. Whatever was coming next? ‘Yes? What about him?’
    ‘He tried to call a general strike of all the British unions and the German ones to stop the first lot in 1914. They called him a traitor. Now he’s one of them. Urging us all to join up and fight. Huh. Bevin Boys.’ (Young men who couldn’t or wouldn’t be conscripted into the army were often directed down the mines to help the war effort under Bevin’s rule, known as Bevin Boys.)
    There were the one-sided arguments that Uncle Jack had with the BBC Home Service newsreaders.
    ‘It’s no good, Jack, he can’t year you and the boys and me aren’t listening,’ Auntie Rose would interject.
    But we were. It was from these outbursts that Jack and I learned the political and religious geography of our world. I found these attacks on people I had barely heard of, but had been conditioned to hold in esteem, thrilling and subversive. They gave us the references that influenced our lifelong political thinking. One day I asked Uncle Jack why he came to Cornwall if he didn’t like it. ‘Work, boy, work. No work there in the