A Gull on the Roof (13 page)

I once pinned one of these highly paid gentlemen in a corner in an effort to extract from him a practical programme for a mythical market garden. He was well qualified to give me the advice and I had a simpleton’s belief that he would provide an answer. ‘Supposing,’ I said earnestly, ‘you were offered £5,000 on condition you gave up your job and spent it on planning a market garden in Cornwall. How would you set about it?’ The man looked at me in astonishment, then roared with laughter. ‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘I’d forget the condition and put the money in Consols!’

Of course, like all who are prejudiced, I am being unfair, expecting too much, forgetting the occasions when those whom I attack have helped. I rely, for instance, on John Davies, Horticultural Advisory Officer for West Cornwall, in the same way that in the old days one relied on the family doctor. If a plant shows signs of a mystery disease, if I want soil samples taken, if I want bulbs tested for eel-worm or basal rot, if I just want him to walk round Minack and to listen to his comments, then John Davies will be at my service. And Rosewarne has helped me personally, though it seems to me the expenditure lavished on it far outweighs its usefulness to the ordinary grower.

It is like a wonderful department store where none of the goods are for sale; packing sheds, bulb stores, machinery buildings, heave into the sky like jet liner hangars; an elaborate oil heating apparatus pipes heat to the greenhouses and offices; pedigree cattle and pigs are kept solely for the manure they produce; tractors of the latest design fuss over the land, labourers swarm like bees where mechanisation is impotent; dutch lights and cloches of various shapes and sizes cover an area like a frozen lake. The whole is laid out with the vision of a Capability Brown – avenues and cross sections, myriads of plots where groups of similar flowers or vegetables are grown under different conditions, their progress of growth meticulously noted. It is a vast laboratory, like the site of a space rocket where no expense is spared yet it would be a shambles without a mastermind of organisation. One is envious. One feels if one could hitch a particle of the skill and money expended to one’s own particular programme, the cares would dissipate. I look at the hedges, thousands of yards of them running sturdy and thick across the open land and marvel at the shelter belts of trees now twenty feet high; and then I come home and stare at the wispy things which represent our hedges, the long gaps between them, the trees which have remained obstinately stunted, tangible evidence of disappointment.

I can plead the excuse of expense. I found that escallonia, the type of hedge planted at Rosewarne, cost £160 for every thousand eighteen-inch plants, that other suitable hedge varieties were around the same price; and so, as I was unable to afford rooted plants I had to use my initiative to take their place. There were already around Minack patches of elder and privet, and at my old home of Glendorgal there were hedgerows of tamarisk. All three stand up to salt winds but, compared to escallonia, they have disadvantages; privet sucks the ground of its goodness and nothing will grow satisfactorily within a few feet of it; elder, when full grown, is often attacked by woodworm and decays into a petrified hedge; while tamarisk usually leaves an unwelcome gap of two feet, through which the wind rushes, before the feathery foliage branches out. But they were free. That was the point which appealed to us, and we gaily treated the difference between cuttings and rooted plants as of no importance whatsoever.

I asked for advice and the advice I received was of the kind I wanted to hear. ‘Just stick ’em in the ground,’ said an old gardener, ‘no need to concern yourself. They’ll take.’ Tommy, too, was our ally, and for an encouraging reason; he had pushed elder branches into the ground where, the year before, he had dug the meadows in the cliff and now each was a vigorous little plant of its own. It seemed, therefore, that success was limited to the labour involved, and so we proceeded to collect a load of tamarisk branches from Glendorgal, and added hundreds of privet and elder from Minack. It was autumn. It took a week to stick them in the ground, and the winter to find that only a hundred or so had taken. Rabbits were partly to blame, for they used the thin cuttings to test out their teeth, nipping them neatly like secateurs, even ignoring the stinking paste I smeared on the bark to check them. Yet the cuttings which escaped their interest fared no better and when in the spring, in irritation, I began pulling them up to see what had happened, the few inches that had been stuck in the soil were as dead as a walking stick. ‘Let’s put some more in now,’ said Tommy, ‘they might grow on through the summer.’

We painstakingly collected a further pile of cuttings and once more laboriously stuck them in the ground; and as a gesture to conventional methods I bought a hundred rooted plants called New Zealand Ollearia. Our defeat, on this occasion, was caused by a hot, dry summer; there was not enough moisture to excite the cuttings nor to satisfy the Ollearia, and when autumn came round again the Ollearia had been cut by half and the cuttings had gone the way of the winter ones.

I was beginning to lose patience. At this point, however, I learnt of a chemical solution in which the cuttings could be soaked, which would hasten the growth of the roots. I decided to give it a chance, and off we went collecting cuttings again. We tied them in bundles, dropped them in the tin bath specially bought for the purpose, and waited the required time for the chemical solution to perform its magic. Then, instead of sticking the cuttings haphazardly in an embryo hedge, we arranged them a few inches apart in a meadow. Now, I said to myself, I have at last done the right thing and by the spring we will have several hundred rooted cuttings to transplant. Unfortunately it was the coldest Cornish winter of the century and for a month the ground was frozen like cement. None of the cuttings survived.

This tale of misfortune, I now realise, need not have happened had I been more methodical. The soil does not accept impatience, short cuts, or the attitude of take it or leave it; and it rewards only the careful. The weather is a market gardener’s standby excuse but it also covers a multitude of his sins. Hedge plants, like roses, need weeding and watering and the fact that there may be hundreds of them does not hide this necessity. I now know that it is my fault that hedges do not ring Minack. They bored me. There were so many other things to do. They grew too slowly to capture my imagination; and once I stuck them in the ground I forgot them. They could look after themselves.

Jeannie spent the first winter locked in the chicken house we used as a spare bedroom, writing ‘Meet Me At The Savoy.’ There was the camp bed used by her father in the 1914 war and now strewn with her papers, the rug, a second-hand kitchen table with her typewriter, an upturned box as a chair, another box where a paraffin lamp hissed at night, except when the winds blew and then it was silent against the roar outside. ‘Where’s Jeannie?’ some friends who had called would ask. ‘In the chicken house,’ I would answer, ‘here’s the key. Go and see if she wants to be let out.’

This apparent brutality, I say in self-defence, was at her suggestion because she was aware that incarceration was the shortest way to completing her book. She had no one to help her in the cottage, and though it was small and though I did what I could, the eyes of a woman saw work to do; and so if she had freedom of movement the mind would fuss and time be wasted. Thus I would clean and light the stove, make a gesture of dusting the two rooms, do the shopping, provide a snack lunch and endless cups of tea; and then in the evening Jeannie would emerge to cook the dinner.

She performed this tiresome task quite unconcerned that the world she had left on her typewriter was a gay and glamorous one, while reality was that of a peasant. The essence of marriage is ease of companionship and this the two of us shared. Our professions had forced us to mix with people as a duty, and it was a duty which we often enjoyed; but neither of us were ever dependent on mass companionship, the sickness of being afraid of being alone. And now that time was ours we saw no virtue in leaning on conventionality; attending gatherings whose purpose was to hide the boredom of those who gave them. We kept to ourselves. We did not have to escape to pleasure, for pleasure was watching Monty jumping Monty’s Leap or noting the time the woodpecker went to bed in the hole of the elm twenty yards from the cottage, or wondering what bird called a piping cry at dusk, or opening a parcel from the London Library, or becoming aware of the colours of lichen, or that of old stones, or rejoicing that we were both so lucky. We would have dinner with the candlelight flickering the white walls, and discuss what she had written and what she planned to write on the morrow, and I would give an account of what I had been doing during the day. And then we would clear the table and cover it with newspaper, for there was still work to do.

Violets waited to be bunched.

We had planted the violet runners in June – six thousand Governor Herrick in the top half of the field, the cemetery field where we had cropped potatoes; and two thousand Princess of Wales in the meadow walled by elms near the cottage which we whimsically called ‘Gee’s Meadow’ at the request of Gertrude Lawrence. ‘It would give me a nice warm feeling,’ she wrote to us from New York, ‘if I knew there was a corner of England which was for ever me.’ Sentimental, loyal, enchanting, provocative Gertie – what compelling force made me go into that meadow one August evening and be quietly standing there when Jeannie came running, calling: ‘Gee’s dead! . . . a cable from Richard . . .!

Death can bring anger as well as grief. The old die creeping gently into our sorrow but those with uncompleted lives, promise unfulfilled, gifts unspent, savage the placid sweetness of our memories, thrusting frustrated yearnings into our hands, bruising the tears with cries of what might have been. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the sun!’ said Dylan Thomas.

Gertie’s life – or Gee or Gertrude – although she herself preferred Gee, belonged to the age when talent of the arts was leisurely matured so that the future was always more enrichening than the past. Time hovered instead of rushing, yielding the opportunity to delve into the secret self, extracting from its recesses the uncorrupted truth. Temptation was not always at the elbow to offer the illusion that sudden fame was permanent success, because the arbiters of achievement – the Charlots and the Cochrans – were governed by standards that did not admit false values. Thus Gertie, steered in her youth by their guidance, was able to find as she grew older the gifts deep within her which earned the homage that dipped the lights of Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue on the August evening that she died.

Gertie had an irrepressible ebullience which enabled the sleek or the humble to rejoice in her company – an audience of ‘Private Lives’ or that of troops in a concert hall. She had no conceit and beneath the gloss was a perennial wonderment that the little girl who once danced to the barrel organ outside Kensington Oval had become a star in two continents. She preferred to remember her childhood rather than to forget it, and this was the strength of her sympathy for those who were struggling. Danny Kaye made his debut on Broadway in ‘Lady in the Dark’ of which Gertie was the star, and on the first night he brought down the house with a song he sang just before her own big number. Danny, instead of being delighted, was terrified. How would Gertie react? He could not believe that she would be pleased – but of course she was and insisted that he be promoted to star billing. A few years later Danny came to London to repeat his first big triumph at the Palladium, and at the same time Gertie had a great success in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘September Tide’.

‘How’s Gee?’ he asked Jeannie on the morning of his first night. Jeannie replied that she thought she was rather lonely. ‘You see,’ Jeannie said to Danny, ‘here she is with London at her feet but she is so famous and glamorous that people hesitate to ask her out thinking she would never come anyway, and the result is she often gets left out.’ Danny picked up the telephone and asked for Gertie’s room. Jeannie heard her tinkling voice reply, then Danny saying: ‘Will you be my girl tonight, Gee? The American Ambassador is giving a party after the show.’ And there was another day when Danny came rushing into Jeannie’s office. ‘Do you know what day it is?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ she answered, ‘it’s Independence Day.’ ‘No, not that . . . it’s Gee’s birthday! Here’s a card, get someone to send her masses of flowers, and they mustn’t cost less than ten pounds.’

I was in San Francisco before the war when Gertie was playing ‘Susan and God’ at the Curran Theatre, and one evening we decided to make a tour of Chinatown. The Chief of Police offered to be our guide and off we went along the dark alleyways and up rickety staircases, pretending all the time we were risking the dangers that had not existed in years. A British warship happened to be on a courtesy visit to ’Frisco, and towards two in the morning we saw three able seamen swaying slightly in the middle of Grant Avenue. They affected both of us with nostalgia for home, and so we went up to make their acquaintance. By way of introduction, Gertie, in her delightful confident way, with the words going up and down the scale, said: ‘I am Gertie Lawrence!’ We waited in suspense for their reaction. ‘I am Gertie Lawrence,’ repeated Gertie, ‘you know . . . the actress!’ They looked at her a little unsteadily; then one of them mumbled: ‘Well . . . if you are . . . sshow ush where we can get shome women!’ Gertie pulled three ten-dollar bills from her handbag and gave one to each bewildered, weaving seaman. Then she turned to the Chief of Police: ‘I think these boys are looking for trouble . . . couldn’t you arrange to get them back to the ship . . . gently?’ And he did.