A Drake at the Door (17 page)

There may have been another reason why he chose the coal shed as his dining-room table, beside his growing confidence; and that reason was Gregory, the one-legged gull. I always presumed that Gregory had lost his leg in a trap. In the terrible days of the gins, gulls – when storms blew and they settled for the night inland instead of on the rocks – would guilelessly choose a field which was ringed with traps; and the inevitable would happen. I do not see how else he could have lost his leg.

We called him Gregory after Gregory Peck, who at the time was making the film of
Moby Dick
and playing the one-legged captain. We had no particular reason to do so, it was just that the name seemed to fit. And so whenever one of us saw him sail down on to the apex of the roof we would call out that Gregory was here; and quickly tend to his wants.

We had to be quick because Hubert did not like him, nor did our other occasional gull visitors. The hate was so strong and Gregory’s fear so great, that we used to see him in the field across the valley, a speck against the green, watching, waiting until the roof was clear and he could safely visit us.

He would arrive usually at twilight, and when we had appeared and seen him, he would flutter down to the coal shed and hop about like a man with one leg but no crutches. But only for a minute. Then, having gained his sense of balance, he would wait there motionless except for his head which would follow us as we came out of the door with the delicacy we had chosen for him.

‘Here you are, Gregory,’ and we would toss him a piece of meat.

Then, having got it in front of him, he would look up into the sky. He was always on guard. He was always expecting attack. He was always frightened that the hindrance of one leg, which made it so slow for him to take off, would result one day in his being caught unawares.

And it did. I do not know when or where it happened but there came a day when he did not appear, then another; then a week, then a month. We never saw Gregory again.

There had been occasions, however, when Hubert had caught him on the roof or on the top of the coal shed having a meal. Hubert was enraged. He had no doubt been somnolently basking on a rock when the idea occurred to him that a snack at Minack would be pleasant; and he would sweep in from the sea and find Gregory already enjoying one.

Hubert would scream his fury, diving at Gregory, who would desperately try to escape; and always did. But Hubert on these occasions behaved like a bully and we obviously gave him no sympathy. He was jealous. Minack was his kingdom. And we had the effrontery to feed someone else. And in a different place. It was from the moment when he first caught us in the act of feeding Gregory on top of the coal shed that he decided to use it himself.

Poor Hubert. For months we had observed how he had been ageing, how he himself was often attacked and then chased over moorland towards the sea by one of the brash young gulls who wanted to usurp his place on the roof. The old tale of the wild destroying the old. The inevitable conquest of youth. And there was nothing we could do except watch and be sad. Hubert was receiving the treatment he used to give to others. And now, like his old enemy Gregory, he was standing on one leg on top of the coal shed. Who had shot him?

I could see the hole quite clearly, an airgun pellet, I guessed. It was a neat opening and it appeared that the pellet had gone right through the foot. There was blood, but no swelling as far as I could see; and Jeannie pointed out hopefully that when she first saw him he had, in the effort to keep his balance, momentarily put the foot down. The bones of his leg, therefore, were certainly not damaged. We were staring at him anxiously when he suddenly decided that he had had enough of our attention. He gave us one more glare, then heaved himself into the air and flew off, seemingly as independent as ever. We watched his flight, and it was so powerful that we found ourselves thinking we might be worrying unnecessarily. We ought to be thankful that he had escaped with his life. A miracle, in fact, that he had done so; but we felt enraged at the thought of the person who had aimed his rifle at him as he peacefully stood on a rock by the sea.

The next morning Jeannie and I were up early waiting to tell Shelagh and Jane. Something so pleasant about these two was the prospect of seeing them every day. They were usually sleepy for the first hour or so, silently pursuing their duties in a daze, but by ten o’clock they woke up. They began to talk. And if there were subjects of mutual interest to discuss, I used to wait until that hour to discuss them.

On this particular morning, however, our news shocked them into immediate wakefulness. They loved old Hubert, and they would always be telling me something they had seen him do; chasing another gull or himself being chased, or telling me as if I hadn’t known it already that Hubert was squawking his head off, and asking if one of them should go and feed him. Hubert was as much part of their lives as he was of ours.

They too were, of course, enraged; but Jane had also some important information to impart. Jeremy, her young brother, apparently had an indignant row with some boys who had been walking along the cliffs the previous day. And the reason for the row was because they carried air guns and were taking pot shots at any gull they could see on the cliffs. It seemed to be plain that Hubert had been one of their victims.

Why is it that airguns and .22 rifles can be used without licences by anyone of any age? Why are parents so callous as to allow their children to have them? It is a streak of stupidity and brutality that I will never understand. No doubt it is due to lack of imagination; and as a result birds and animals are killed in the name of pleasure, a pleasure which masquerades as sport.

We next saw Hubert at lunchtime. He flew around above the cottage for a few minutes as if he were wondering how best to make his landing; and as he did so I called the girls so that they too could see his wound and make their comments. He hovered for a moment or so above the roof, then came down gently, and made a perfect landing on the coal shed. As he did so he put out his foot as if he had forgotten it was hurt, then immediately retracted it; so there he was glaring at us on one leg.

He was otherwise unperturbed that the four of us were close to him; and in any case he was far more interested in the juicy pieces of chopped roast beef that Jeannie had kept for him. He began to gobble so quickly that he had to pause and stick up his head, so that we watched the meat bulging down his neck and throat. He certainly had not lost his appetite.

‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘What shall we do?’

I was appealing to their instinct which I felt would be surer than mine. My intellect, in times of distress, becomes mixed up with my emotions, creating a confusion in my mind that flusters my ability to make decisions. Jeannie knew this, and the girls guessed it, so my request for their opinions was not really necessary. They had already, without intent to offend me, decided to ignore my views; not, as it happened, that I had any to offer.

The questions to answer were these: how serious was Hubert’s injury? Should we try to catch him and keep him somewhere until he was fully recovered? Should we catch him and take him to the Mousehole Bird Hospital? Should we take the chance of letting him live on among the rocks and seas he knew so well, feeding him with special delicacies in the meantime, trusting that he would best stage a recovery in these natural surroundings?

The speed with which Hubert had devoured his meat influenced the girls and Jeannie into believing the injury might not be so bad. There had been time for the reaction of shock. He could have been listless. If it had been really serious, he would not have wished for any food at all. Hence they decided to let him be for the while; and, needless to say, to keep a special watch out for him.

He came regularly for the next four days, and he seemed neither better nor worse. Jeannie had made a special visit both to the butchers and the fishmonger, and had also doubled our weekly order for bacon from the St Buryan grocer. Hubert, even if he lacked an appetite, was to be tempted to have one.

It was on the fifth day that he made a foolish mistake. In a moment of overconfidence, or perhaps it was touching evidence of the trust he had in us, he settled on the apex of the roof as if he were roosting. He was up there like a pigeon having a sleep on a branch. I had never seen him do it before, his habit had been to strut on the roof, up and down, up and down, like a sentry. But there he was, white chest puffed out, enjoying a rest in the sun; and I felt afraid that it would only be a matter of a few minutes before one of his rivals would see him.

Sure enough from the direction of the Carn which stands upright like a monolith above Mount’s Bay, a half-mile away, I saw a speck speeding towards us in the sky. Nearer and nearer it came across the moorland with the inevitability of an express train. I guessed it was Knocker, Hubert’s particular enemy; and so named by us because whenever it wanted attention it would bang its beak on the roof with the rat-tat-tat of a woodpecker. A few seconds and it was over the stables and poised for its dive of attack.

‘Hubert!’ I shouted, clapping my hands, ‘Look out!’

The old bird looked round just at the instant that Knocker, screaming his war cry, swept past him within a few inches of his head. I picked up a stone and threw it at Knocker who was now high in the sky again, wheeling, a beautiful murderous savage, ready, ready to dive again.

I saw Hubert gathering himself together, like an old man trying to rise from his chair; but instead of standing he slipped, then slid down the roof to the gutter which halted him for a second before he overbalanced, and fell like a half-opened parachute into the garden. Up above Knocker cried out his triumph.

Jeannie arrived at this moment. She had been somewhere in the wood and heard the noise, and guessed what was happening; and as she rushed past me Hubert staggered a few feet down the path, then managed to collect himself, heaving himself into the air, so that we were able to watch him together struggling to keep airborne, skimming the stable roof by a few feet, then over the may tree that borders Monty’s Leap, towards the moorland and the sea. And all the while Knocker was sweeping round him, twisting and turning above and beneath him, escorting him like a triumphant fighter pilot beside a crippled bomber, taking him further and further from the safety we could have given him.

‘I should have caught him when he fell,’ I said angrily. I was cursing myself for failing to react instantly. I had gaped like an onlooker at an accident. Had my mind not been so ponderously dull, I could have held him in my arms within a few seconds of his falling; and we could have looked at his wound, and nursed him, or taken him to the Bird Hospital. It was a failure I would always remember.

‘Next time he comes,’ I said determinedly, as if words would compensate me for my feelings, ‘we will catch him and . . .’ I added, doubts about my ability to do so brimming again, ‘you, Jeannie or one of the girls had better try and do the catching.’

But Hubert never did come again. A gale blew up that night and raged across the sea from the south, surging the waves on the rocks where Hubert used to shelter, tearing with the sound of tube trains round the cottage, doom in the noise, so that Jeannie and I lay awake talking and wondering and afraid; and in the morning the gale still blew, and it was so fierce that even if Hubert had been well he would have stayed away from the cottage. He always used to stay away in a storm; and then, when we saw him again, swooping down from the sky to perch on the roof, we used to say a prayer of thanks. Rage had been expended, peace had returned. Normality had replaced cruelty.

Jane said it was lucky I had not caught him. She believed that as he had lived along this stretch of the cliffs all his life, it was better that he should die at some point along them. He would have died in any case cooped up in a cage.

‘He died free,’ she said. And there was wisdom as well as comfort in her words.

It was the middle of May and a sizzling summer lay ahead; and as the sun beat down parching the soil, denying germination of seeds, drying up the wells, killing transplanted plants, burning us all as brown as South Sea natives, I found no peace in what the holidaymakers called a wonderful summer. Once again we were laying the foundations of another flower season, yet we were being hindered from the beginning. There was threat in the sun and the blue skies. We could not have another year of failure and still hope to keep Geoffrey and the girls. We wanted rain as those in the desert want rain; and it never came.

The anemone corms, which in normal times would peep green shoots within ten days, were as hard and dry as nuts six weeks after sowing; fifty thousand corms lying dormant which had to puff out sturdy plants by late September if they were to stand a chance of blooming through the winter. And ten thousand corms which I had failed to lure into growing by soaking them first in water, were dead. The root tendrils, deceived by my cleverness, had pushed out into the dusty soil and, finding no moisture to sustain them, had withered away into nothingness.

But it was the wallflowers which tested our patience the most. We succeeded in germinating them, in nursing them through the stage when weevils and flea beetles attack them in dry weather, in growing them to hand-high plants ready to bed out in their winter quarters; and then the trouble began. Poor Jane and Shelagh. I admired and pitied and was grateful for their endeavours, but I rebelled against helping them. I preferred more congenial tasks. I spent endless hours watering the freesias, for instance, dangling a hose from my hands vacuously watching the spout of water darkening one section of soil, then another. But I refused to help Jane and Shelagh, although Jeannie did occasionally when she could spare time from the tomatoes. The desperate slowness of their task, the vast number of inevitable casualties, the apparent threat that the wallflower crop had already failed before even it had begun to flower, depressed me into inaction. I did not want to see what was happening. I preferred to believe the problem did not exist. Let Jane and Shelagh get on with it. I could trust them to do their best.