A Drake at the Door (9 page)

‘Geoffrey!’ I would shout above the rumble of the diesel, ‘don’t you realise the risk you’re taking?’

He did not want to realise. He was having fun out of the challenge he was creating; he was covering with a tractor the same kind of ground which he used to dig with a shovel, so had he not got something to prove? He was securing a victory over tradition. He would have something to boast about.

‘You should have seen me,’ he yelled back at me, grinning, ‘when I was ploughing that piece above the obs where the badgers are.’

I had already observed the result. He had ploughed a previously unproductive bracken-covered piece of land, part of which was a badgers’ playground. He had done it when I was out for the day, and it was so steep that I would have thought twice before driving the Land Rover over it. It was a neat example of ploughing. But Geoffrey had driven the tractor and plough across the hill, as if he were inviting it to upset; and the last furrow was within a couple of feet of a bank which dropped three feet to the meadow where the obs bloomed in the spring, the miniature King Alfred daffodils with an ugly name, yet so exquisite to look at.

‘I’ll have to get Emily to talk to you,’ I said, Emily being his fiancée, ‘perhaps she’ll make you see sense.’

It is my weakness that I prefer to carry someone with me instead of imposing my wishes. I find it easier to appeal rather than to order. And if you have a concern like ours, so small and intimate, it is more essential than ever to have a spirit of cooperation. In my anxiety to achieve this cooperation I find I usually expect too much. I so desire to skirt the prospect of a mood on the part of someone I am employing, that I fall into the trap of failing to give clear orders. I prefer to rely on a kind of telepathy. I state the position as I see it, then expect the individual concerned to react in the same way, wishfully and foolishly thinking that my tedious process of thought has been shared by the other. I forget that I was alone when I assessed the future; that I alone endure the strains of raising finance, of carrying the burden of a crop disaster, of hoping to see daylight in another year. I should not expect the wage-earner to feel and think as I do.

Geoffrey, for instance, used the tractor more as a sport, while for me it was a weapon in a campaign. It was a fine weapon, but within a year I knew that it alone would not solve our problems. I was forced to realise that, although we were now able to cultivate so much more of our land and thus increase the scope of our crops, prosperity did not follow. We were too dependent on the weather. We were unbalanced. We were also at the tail-end of an era and this we had yet to wake up to.

We had come to Minack when any amateur could make a living out of flowers and new potatoes in our part of Cornwall provided he had decent land and worked hard enough. The mildness of the winter and the earliness of the spring meant that West Cornwall followed the Scilly Isles with daffodils. There was a leapfrog of daffodil harvests that went on all the way up the country from the Scillies to Lincolnshire; and because the Scillies and the Land’s End area were earliest we naturally had the best prices. In those days the Channel Islands did not grow the vast quantities they grow now. Nor were there pre-cooled bulbs housed in acres of greenhouses throughout the country, producing artificial daffodil harvests all through the period when we used to have the markets to ourselves.

So, too, with potatoes. The new potatoes dug from the cliffs along the edge of Mount’s Bay were considered both as a delicacy and a necessity. The grind of carrying the seed down the steep paths to the meadows, the planting, the weeks of caring for the plants, the shovelling out of the crop, the wearisome climb back up the cliff with the harvest . . . all this effort was repaid with a fair price. In those days the harvests of other countries were not being shipped into the country at the same time. In our part of Cornwall one could risk the spite of the weather because one year’s profit would cover another year’s losses. Our laborious efforts faced no competition.

There were the other flowers, the violets, anemones, stocks, wallflowers, calendulas, forget-me-nots – all these could earn their living. Wages were low and so was the cost of transport; and there were no jets speeding flowers to Covent Garden from all parts of the world. The cities needed our flowers and were ready to pay for them.

Thus when Jeannie and I began our life at Minack our course appeared to be straightforward. We had to absorb the tradition of the area, and the best way to do so was to ferret out the old hands, seeking their advice and following it. In our innocence we thought this method would be foolproof. We had no clue that science and the cost of living were on the verge of destroying the old standards. We held the simple belief that we had only to master the technicalities of growing the crops which everyone else grew in the area, for us to earn a living. For the climate was an unshakeable ally. It would overcome our inexperience. All we had to do was to listen and learn and work.

We used, therefore, to hang on to the words of the old growers as attentively as we used to listen to prominent politicians at times of crisis. We would fuss over an old chap in a pub about the merits of wallflowers with the same zest as we once sat in the Savoy’s Grill Bar hearing the confidential views of some editor.

‘Mark my words,’ the old chap would say, sipping his beer, ‘wallflowers are a proper crop. Cheap seed, can treat ’em rough, quick to pick, and a shilling a bunch.’

This was the kind of remark we loved to hear. A high priest was talking. He was passing us on information as valuable as a bar of gold. We used to go back home to the cottage, take pencil and paper, and calculate; and the calculation used to make us dizzy with excitement. It was simple. If we grew several thousand wallflowers we really would not have to grow anything else.

And there was another line of talk which warmed our hearts. It happened whenever someone praised Minack and hinted at its golden future. I remember meeting a taciturn farmer who charmed me by describing the land around Minack as the best in the district. Such flattery coming from one who was noted for his lack of good humour impressed me greatly; and I hastened to ask him why he thought so and what he would grow in my place. He was recognised as a very good farmer and his family had lived in the district for generations.

His eyes lit up.

‘Taties along those cliffs,’ he said, his voice coming to life, ‘have fetched ten shillings a pound . . . and princeps eight shillings a bunch!’

He had no cliffs on his farm. He had had no opportunity to share the exploitation of the war and post-war years. It had rankled ever since. It had so seared into his mind that the cliffs had become to him a golden mirage. He was envious of me. He jealously saw a glorious future for me as a grower of potatoes and a picker of princeps, the hedgerow daffodil the most common of all. Greed had pushed him to praise the land around Minack.

But this I did not realise at the time. Nor did I appreciate that many of the others who made us happy by their remarks were only reflecting frustration. We had the chance which they wished for themselves, although in fact the value of the chance was wildly inflated. Their envy sprang from an extinct El Dorado. A memory which had no relation to the present or the future.

The aura of their attention, however, had its effect on Jeannie and me. It blinded us. We never for an instant saw that progress would be our danger and there would come a time when the system of our kind of market garden would have to change. The cliffs, we thought, were immune. The softness of West Cornwall everlasting. The only challenge that had to be met lay in ourselves. We had to emulate the peasant. We had to bring ourselves so close to the earth that we knew by instinct how to tend our crops. This, and patience and an endless capacity to accept hard labour were all we required to achieve prosperity at Minack.

Then, as the years passed, we began to realise that this formula did not measure up to its simplicity. The realisation came slowly, like the drip of water on a stone. We had found our perfect environment but we were losing the material battle. We had considered ourselves isolated from the penalties of progress. We had freed ourselves from the entanglements of conformism. No electricity, no telephone, no television. We were peasants. We were spared the impact of an industrial society. We had no need to look over our shoulders, catching sight of those who wished for our jobs. We were independent. Hard labour our pleasure. And yet, like a creeping paralysis, we were being embraced again by the fears we had left behind.

What ought we to do? It was in April that I most often used to pose this question. April was our month of assessment. We were between harvests. It was the month in which we measured the results of the flower season just ended and began preparing for the next. One winter merged with another, meadows of discarded plants alongside others of rich, bare soil, awaiting seeds.

Where once bloomed the daffodils were carpets of green foliage. Here and there were flickers of yellow, heads which were damaged or had come too late for market. There was desolation under the April sky; the daffodils had erupted in their glory, smiled their loveliness in a thousand, thousand homes, and were now forgotten. I would wander amidst the green waste remembering that the Magnificence had had a poor year or the King Alfreds a good one, or that by some curious chance the once-despised California had brought us the most money.

I would stare at the winter-flowering wallflowers, shorn of their primrose and stained orange and deep red blooms, sticking up from the ground like cabbage stalks. I would remember the seeds last April, the weeding, the transplanting in June, the weeding again, the wonderful moment in November when enough stems were plucked from the plants for the first box to be sent on the flower train from Penzance. A year of caressing, and battering gales, and sweet scents, and heavy baskets lugged to the packing shed; and now they awaited obliteration from the rotovator and the plough.

Sporadic flowers peered from the beds of anemones, stocks and violets; and, maddeningly, the beds of calendula were a riot of orange. I would look at them thinking of the frost which crushed their buds into pulp, delaying them for weeks until, the season ended, they were no longer wanted. The violet plants, plump green cushions, were reaching to each other across the rows, perfume from the leaves touching the air; row upon row of them ready for dismemberment, a dozen runners from each, to be pushed into the ground in May, to fatten in the summer, to bloom again in the autumn. It was always thus in April; we ended and we began.

What ought we to do? I do not make wise decisions when I try to be logical. My arguments, on either side of the problem involved, cancel each other out with such effect that I am left hanging in midair; and I do nothing. I like, therefore, to act out of emotion. I find that what successes I have had in my life have been born out of flashes of insight, the seizure of an opportunity which would have died a sudden death had I stopped to reason. And I have usually found that a most inconsequential event promotes the opportunity I need.

One April afternoon a few months after the tractor had been bought, Jeannie and I had gone into the packing shed with the idea of cleaning it up. The odd dried daffodil stalk lay on the floor in the corner, a few withered leaves of wallflowers under the table, cardboard boxes, bottoms and tops, were strewn on a shelf, address labels and contents labels were higgledypiggledy on the windowsill like a spilt pack of cards. Jam jars, galvanised flower pails, some still undrained; and at random on shelves and table were the clippers which trimmed the daffodil stems, a much thumbed invoice book, rubber bands small enough for the violets and big enough for the wallflowers, a stapling machine to fix the labels, a half-used ream of white paper, and flower sticks with their metal sharp ends which secure the bunches in the boxes after they have been packed. We began to put order into this chaos when Geoffrey suddenly appeared at the door.

‘What’s up, Geoffrey?’

He looked at me shamefaced, a smile trying to hover.

‘Tractor’s upset.’

I had been expecting this to happen for so long that at first I accepted his news as calmly as if he had been reporting that his shovel had broken. Then I had wonderment and thankfulness that he was unhurt. It was incredible.

It had happened in our big field which slopes unevenly down to the top of the cliff and which is locally known as the cemetery field . . . so called because from time immemorial the old cattle and horses used to be buried at the bottom where the hedge crests the cliff. He had been charging across it when a rear wheel hit a rock, he was flung out, and the tractor somersaulted down the hill and came to rest with its wheels in the air.

I could not, of course, refrain from pointing out to him the number of times I had warned him what would happen if he continued to drive so fast; but I could not be angry. For one thing he was so ashamed, for another, the tractor had miraculously suffered only superficial damage. Indeed, having inspected it and, with Geoffrey, pushed it back on to its wheels, I had a curious feeling of elation. A magic had saved us from tragedy. I had such a sense of happiness and gratitude that I wanted to burst into song. It was in this mood I returned to the cottage and found a stranger awaiting me.

He was a salesman of greenhouses. He seemed surprised by the enthusiasm with which I greeted him. He was accustomed to make the patter of sales talk, but here was I bubbling with excitement.

I suddenly knew what we had to do. One greenhouse was not enough. We had to have more. And I was not going to listen to the logic that we could not afford them.

I launched my grandiose plan before I had time for second thoughts. It was flamboyant. It had no relation to our financial resources but it projected an image of such likely security that the cost could look after itself.

I ordered two mobile greenhouses each seventy feet long and eighteen feet wide, and provisionally ordered two more.

This fling at the fates so intoxicated our imaginations that we drew up a blueprint for the coming year so vast in its scope that if it came off our material problems would be solved for ever. It was also sensible. We were not allowing our enthusiasm to interfere with our judgement. And yet, in retrospect I wonder if our gesture was not prompted by an emotion similar to that of a losing boxer in the closing rounds of a fight . . . fists flying in a desperate bid for a win. We had lost patience with caution. It was time to take a gamble.