Protecting Port Gaverne

Protecting Port Gaverne
(An excerpt from the book “South of Lobber Point” — to be published in November 2005 by Creighton Books ISBN 90 807808 3 9)
By
James Platt

NOTE: Predating the declaration of war by about a month, I was born in the village of Port Isaac in North Cornwall on 8 August 1939, where I lived throughout the war years. The episode described below took place on the beach of the cove of Port Gaverne, a quarter of a mile to the east of Port Isaac, in 1944.

The harbour at Port Gaverne, lacking the benefit of either protective Cow and Calf rocks as they had at Port Quin, or a pair of breakwaters at its mouth like Port Isaac , wasn’t considered a suitable place in which boats (great or small) should be safely moored. In spite of this however the harbour was apparently considered by the parish council to represent an attractive opportunity to Hitler and his cohorts for bringing in landing craft from which tanks or other machines of war could be run ashore.
As far as Hitler and his immediate circle were concerned, apart from the fact that I knew they all belonged in Bodmin at the loony bin, I had heard in song in the school playground that, “Hitler — he only had one ball. Goering had two, both very small. Himmler was very similar, but Goebbels had no balls at all”.
In spite of any reluctant sympathy that any of us may have had for Hitler’s testicular condition, it was deemed essential to ensure that even if his tanks turned up at Port Gaverne none of them would be able to leave the beach. In order to deny any strategic advantage, tank traps were set up all over the Port Gaverne foreshore. These had the form of staggered ranks and files of concrete pyramids, each around a yard high and spaced about two yards apart. A rusty chunk of iron thrust up like a secret weapon from the peak of each pyramidal installation.
Immobilised by tank traps, the tanks on Port Gaverne’s beach would be sitting targets for destruction by a defending arsenal of shotguns (twelve bore and four-ten), .22 rabbit rifles and air guns (both rifles and pistols).
The tank traps remained in place during the immediate couple of post-war years. Perhaps it was thought better to be safe than sorry. The scars sustained by the tank traps came from battles with the sea. Wave action moved a couple of them a few feet on from their original sites. Whether or not the tank traps might have frightened the Germans off was never put to the test. What they did serve to do was provide excellent suntraps for beach veterans to lean against in summer for the purpose of consuming watercress, lemon curd, crab apple jelly and marmite sandwiches, all the while swigging stewed tea poured from venerable thermoses.
A year or so before the end of the war it was on the beach at Port Gaverne that I tasted marmite for the first (and last) time. One and one only encounter with marmite was quite enough to suit me forever and a day. Although in my well-formed opinion lemon curd was high on the list of the most fearful things ever to be placed on bread, beef dripping notwithstanding, the sandwich filling that eventually placed genuine loathing in my heart was marmite.
I was on the beach with my best friend Roger Keat, his Aunt “Queenie” Welch, and Queenie’s two tiny children. The rare treat of a picnic was in prospect for us. Anything related to food ranked high in my estimation. Queenie handed me a quarter-round of a sandwich, which I seized with alacrity. When I put my teeth into it however, I sensed that my eagerness was misplaced. The quarter-round of bread shut in an excruciatingly vile-tasting brown paste. Had I been of a less tender age, I might well have screamed out “Shit!” and have hit the nail smack on the head.
Subsequent enquiries led to the identification of the brown paste as marmite. At the time, what it was called seemed to be less important than what it was doing to me. The impact of my first bite at it was only equalled by a jolt I got when our cottage was connected to the electrical mains and I pushed a forefinger into a light bulb socket and received in return a surge of energy that threw me from one wall of my bedroom to another. The electric shock only affected the arm attached to my questing finger. By contrast the taste of marmite shook my whole body. I could feel it shivering in my hair and toes.
I held the bite of Queenie's marmite sandwich in my mouth for what must have been at least half an hour until an opportunity arrived for me to crawl away and surreptitiously spit it out. Death would have shaped up as a preferable option to swallowing it.
Against the backdrop of the array of tank traps it was one thing for me to disgorge a single bite of a quarter round of marmite sandwich, but quite another to eliminate the balance of the quarter round, which I had managed to squash into a brownish oozing ball in one of my hands. Since “Don’tcha know there’s a war on” (a meal-time declaration regularly made by my Granfer Jim Creighton even after there wasn’t a war on any more) was still in place, all food needed to be eaten up, irrespective of the eater’s distaste.
Taking great pains not to be observed, with my free hand I scraped a hole in the sandy shingle against one side of the tank trap in front of which Queenie’s picnic was taking place. When I believed the hole to be deep enough, I proceeded to inter the balled-up remains of the quarter round of marmite sandwich in it without the rites of funeral.
This disposal certified that during the war at least one dangerous item fetched up against Port Gaverne’s array of tank traps. I supposed that a compliant ground sea took the item away eventually, at a time when peace reigned and the spectre of a rejected quarter round of sandwich invading the beach was no more to be feared.

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