Memories of Old Cornwall: The past remembered – an occasional note by William Morris. Photograph shows Bertha and Archie’s great great grandchildren, Florence (on the right), Paloma and Gabriel.
I should tell you the story of Archie and Bertha, because there is much of the sad bittersweet old Cornwall about it.
Archie lived in the back cottage with his parents and eleven siblings. That was the Morris family. As with many homes in Cornwall the house had no name. Just the Morris’ place. Bertha lived in one of the two front cottages, with her parents and ten siblings.
Now these cottages were two up, two down, usually with bare granite walls but Bertha’s father worked for the Great Western Railway Company and so his was a cut above most cottages and their walls were plastered. The floors of both cottages were hard earth dusted with sand. That was commonplace in those days. A bucket of sand was thrown down fresh each week after the old sand was brushed out. Which worked well enough. Most cottages, including ours, didn’t get concrete or tiles on the floor until the early 1950s. But we are back a while now, pre the First World War.
Interesting how the children slept in two up, two down cottages. But the beds were crammed in and the little children slept top and tail so you could get as many as four to a single bed, two up and two down.
Anyhow Bertha was a beauty, dark eyed with a fine Roman nose, and Archie was sweet on her. And Archie was a rascal, moreso than the rest of the Morris brood, who were of mining and farming stock; and Bertha was sweet on him in turn as many a girl has been on many a rascal in their time. Then the boys from the Morris family and the boys from the Hicks family grew to be young men and there was no room at home for so many strapping lads and it was time for them to make their way. So they all upped and left and emigrated to America. The Hicks boys migrated on a huge transAtlantic paddle steamer, as perhaps did they all. That I know because the picture of that boat hung in the parlour even when I was a boy until eventually it fell apart because it was only a print pasted on cardboard. And the Morris family moved away and went to live in Crowlas, what was left of them. And the Hicks girls presumably married because Bertha was the only one left with her Mum, whom they called Buddha, and her Dad. But Bertha remained sweet on Archie and didn’t look at the other boys who came calling.
Archie, meanwhile, had landed up at Ma Tolver’s boarding house in Detroit, Michigan and worked as a carpenter in one of the great car assembly plants. There he settled in well and ran the numbers racket for the mob. The numbers was much like the lottery. You bought your ticket with hope in your heart that the draw was not fixed and somebody won that week’s pot.
And then in the fullness of time, the Americans entered the First World War and so did Archie. So did most of those Cornish boys. For one thing it meant your citizenship was fast-tracked. For another the common belief was once America threw its weight in, the thing would be done with in a trice. So Archie became a GI. And the war took its toll on the Cornish contingent as it did on one and all. But eventually it was over and Archie and his comrades were demobbed in Britain. And Archie went to claim his childhood sweetheart who had waited faithfully through the years. They were soon wed, then Archie left on a troop ship back for America, telling Bertha he’d send money for her to follow and leaving Bertha heavy with child.
And so in due course my father was born and christened Archibald Claud as the year turned 1920. And meanwhile, back in America, events were conspiring to throw a spanner into the works and mess with the course of true love.
What happened was one of Bertha’s elder brothers, all of whom you will remember had emigrated, was to settle in the Mid-West and make his way as a farm hand. His name was Sam. He married a fine Cornish girl and took her with him: Charlotte from Penzance who lived at the top of the arcade steps. And Charlotte was to have four children. Gladys and Clarice the two little twin girls were called. Identical twins and there was an elder boy called Gordon. And a little baby called Louise. But then one unbenighted day, out on the prairie, when the baby was just six weeks old, their mother Charlotte was struck by lightning and as fate would have it, she was killed stone dead. So Bertha’s brother took a new wife called Anita but she was not so smitten with the idea of taking on the dead wife’s offspring and rearing them as her own. And so it was decided that the two twin girls and the boy would be shipped back to the family home, Angwinack, to their Grandmother Buddha, to be reared (the new wife said she would take little Louise, the babe in arms). Angwinack is and was our home. “An-gi-win-ack” Clarice and Gladys pronounced it to the end of their days which is the Cornish way. Not the English way we call the place now “Angwynyack” but times change. Gladys, or was it Clarice, one of the two, no it was definitely Clarice. She, Clarice, used to work in a dress shop but was given the chance to study to be a secretary and bettered herself. She was the first woman in West Cornwall to own a convertible motor car and was photographed for “The Cornishman” newspaper looking oh so bonny. She used to enter the “Blue Hills” motor trials near St Agnes in North Cornwall dressed in a helmet and long leather coat that would have bested a German officer. One of her beaus gave her an Airedale terrier named “Tush” and it sat up in the back of the convertible and went with her everywhere. The car also had a name. “Tondego” she called it for reasons long lost in the mists of time. But I digress. The point is that Bertha now had these children to look after, her own baby boy Archie Claud, and the two little girls, Gladys and Clarice, not to mention the older lad.
And then at last, true to his word, Archie sent the money for the boat ticket to America for his wife and child. Well you can guess what happened next I imagine. Buddha put her foot down. “You are not going to America and leaving us the girls to manage. You must stay at least until they are old enough for us to cope, just a year or two ..”
But then times were hard and Bertha’s father had retired from the railways and they needed to keep body and soul together and the boat money got spent on the assumption that Archie would send more. But Archie lost patience and never did, and went off chasing gold in Alaska. Later still, we heard he set up with someone his family called “the woman”. He may have married her as well for all I know. But for certain he never divorced his Bertha. My father never did meet his father. Nor would he ever even let anyone call him Archie. He was Claud Morris to the end of his days and when he buried his mother up in Ludgvan churchyard he set the words “She gave her life in love” on the stone. Which she did, I guess.
And Gladys and Clarice? Their brother Gordon had come over with them but he was six or seven when he arrived in Cornwall and as soon as he was old enough he went back to America. But not the twins. Gladys married Frank and Clarice married a tall thin lad called William in the Summer of 1933. He was from close by in Goldsithney. They stayed home in Cornwall. And they lived happily ever after.
William Morris 