A Gull on the Roof (18 page)

I sometimes wonder whether the ghosts of the cottage cast a spell over us, enabling us to accept this abuse of twentieth-century comfort in the way we did. Inconvenience had pervaded the cottage for over five hundred years, so was it inevitable that we should act as if it were natural? The twentieth century decorates life like a Christmas cake, but it still cannot do anything about the basic ingredients; and there seemed to be a starkness in our companionship which enabled us to find a fulfilment without the aid of man-made devices; as if the canvas of each day was so vast that mirrorsmooth techniques of living, coma entertainment like television, would only make it unmanageable. We are still without electricity and we remain thankful we have no telephone; yet it would be a pose to pretend that self-denial did not seek its compensations.

We have revelled in occasional brisk returns to the life we used to know, being flattered because we were new faces in an old circle or rejoicing in the stimulation of reunions. It was fun being at the first night of A. P. Herbert’s musical play ‘The Water Gypsies’ which he wrote at Minack, to stay at the Dorchester because Richard Aldrich wanted us to be present when his book
Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs A
was launched. All this was the sugar that titivates a day but does not provide its bread; and the basic fact remained that we could not build Minack by playing as if it were an accessory to our life instead of its foundation.

These sorties to an existence which used to be our daily round confirmed the wisdom of our escape, but, at the time, we were doped by the paraphernalia of sophistication. We delighted in the silliness, the laughter in cocktail bars, relaxing late in the afternoon over lunch, parties at night. No one could have called us peasants. But when we returned to Minack we looked back on those gilded shadows and were thankful they had passed over us so briefly. We felt pity instead of envy for our contemporaries whose company had regained for us so much pleasure. Success in this age breeds only a rackety happiness, providing little time for its own enjoyment. The bite of competition is too sharp for leisure, so success is either pimped by others to further their own ends or creates its own demoralisation and betrays the truth from which it sprang. There is no freedom in twentieth-century achievement, for the individual is controlled not by his own deep thinking processes but by the plankton of shibboleths which are currently in fleeting fashion; and by his own desperate need to maintain financial survival in the glittering world he has found himself. Jeannie and I have also to fight for survival, but it is an easy battle compared to that in a city. At least the countryman still possesses the luxury of being able to live at the same leisurely pace of another age.

We took over Pentewan meadows and briskly decided to cultivate them by modern methods. They were, for the most part, large sloping meadows which from time immemorial had been shovel-turned in the autumn, shovel-planted with potatoes in early spring, shovel-cropped in the summer. They had never seen a machine, and even the laborious task of hacking the ground into suitable condition before planting had always been done by hand. Obviously my new landlord had found an extra man would be needed on the farm if the meadows were to be worked, and unless the wage was that of a coolie profits would be small; and in any case he could not be bothered with the trouble that labour in such circumstances often involves.

I, on the other hand, untrammelled by tradition, was convinced that the answer to the problem was mechanisation; and that once I had gathered around me the correct assortment of machines I would forge ahead with the same relentless success as a gang on a motorway. I was not thinking in terms of the normal-sized tractors but of the hand-controlled variety, one of which I had already tried out at Minack; and I thought that if I had a motor-hoe and a motor-driven hedge cutter, tedious time-absorbing tasks would be cut to the minimum.

I bought the Minack tractor second-hand, a monstrous looking thing with a plough, and an engine that kicked like a mule every time I started it. Tommy, who could handle any horse, had nothing in common with this example of progress, and he behaved to it always as if he were a fox sniffing danger; and when one day I suddenly saw Tommy careering down the big field towards the cliff, hanging on to the handlebars with the tractor quite out of his control, I decided it was time to get rid of it.

It was exchanged for a second-hand rotovator and this was the machine with which we first went into the attack on the Pentewan meadows. It was a dualpurpose machine, for if I exchanged the normal small wheels for large ones, removed the rotovator from the engine and substituted a specially designed shaft I could use it with a plough; and a plough can sometimes do work for which a rotovator is useless. For instance some experts will say that a rotovator used often on the same ground will pommel it into uselessness; and that ground should be spared the rotovator and ploughed instead at least once every two years. This probably applies where blades are used but in this instance I had claw-like tines fitted to the machine which churned the soil as if they were forks being used at maniacal speed. The theory was right but the execution wrong, because every time a tine hit a rock hidden beneath the soil it would snap; and as there were many such rocks this method became ridiculously expensive.

I soon found, too, that the machine did not like me; for time and again when I set out to rotovate, the engine obstinately refused to start. Usually, of course, on such occasions the fault can be quickly corrected by a mechanic, and the mechanic, if you possess the most elementary knowledge, should be yourself. Check plug, clean carburettor, make sure the ignition is all right . . . I used to perform these tasks, secure no result, then storm back to Jeannie. ‘The bloody thing won’t work,’ I would shout, ‘and I’ll have to get them to come and see it.’

‘Them’ were the Helston people from whom I had bought it, and in due course a kindly mechanic would arrive, tinker an hour or two with the engine, gain no response, then remark: ‘I’ve never known an engine like this before.’ My years at Pentewan – and other rotovators behaved in the same way as this first one – are filled with memories of mechanics in various meadows where the rotovator of the moment had broken down, unscrewing things, screwing things up, with me beside them hopefully staring, waiting for them to arrive, or thanking them for coming. ‘I can’t help thinking,’ said one, grimly trying to be cheerful, ‘if the firm wouldn’t be wise to pitch a tent here.’

Yet this first rotovator had the advantage of being the spearhead of our hopes; and the tantrums were forgiven because we were, in our own minds, revolutionising the cultivation of cliff meadows. Others might think their commercial value was dying out but we were proving that a new outlook, a dashing grasp of experts’ advice, would lead them to prosperity. Our landlord had a man called Joe who looked after the cascade of meadows below our own, vineyards of meadows where no machine of any kind could reach, falling to the sea amid hedges of escallonia, apple trees, and banks thick in winter with the fragrance of wild violets; and Joe would leave a meadow which he had been laboriously turning with a shovel, and come to watch me at work; to stare at my method of rotovating or perhaps just to help me with advice on how to get the engine started.

Joe belonged to the cliffs in the same way that a cliff fox or a cliff badger belongs; and he disapproved of change in the same way that anyone disapproves of action that changes something directly concerning his own heart. He distrusted the rotovator. He would stand at the bottom of the meadow where I was working, an old felt hat on his head, a pipe in his mouth, eyes that were set wide apart, young middle age, looking at me bringing the rotovator down the hill then reversing upwards, my foot on the metal cover to keep it from lurching the handlebars high from my grasp. He would watch and say nothing, chewing the stem of his pipe; and then weeks later I would be in some pub, and I would be told: ‘I hear that that there rotovator brings all the soil down bottom of meadow.’ I do not agree that this view was right; but it made me aware that Joe, as he meandered from his own particular world so near the sea, was watching and judging me as I bent the ways of the clinical present to better the integrity of the past; and so I, too, watched and listened.

Joe used to bicycle to the cliffs from his home with Bish his bull terrier trotting at the wheel; and when Bish grew old Joe carried him on the handlebars. Like all his breed Bish was a fierce protector of his owner and of his owner’s belongings and as we shared the same hut there were often occasions when Bish would not allow us to enter. The hut was known as the Pink Hut because it was built of corrugated iron once painted a red that had faded to pink over the years; and as its main function was for the ‘shooting’ of potatoes it was so designed inside that layer upon layer of boards could be fixed, each layer rising above another which had received its quota of potato seed. Joe had one half of the hut with its boards, we had the other; and there were times when we wanted to use our half when only Bish was resident in the other. Then Bish, so friendly when nothing of his owner’s was threatened, would bare his teeth, snarl, bellow, and frighten us into cupping hands to mouth and shouting downwards towards the sea: ‘Joe! Joe! Come up will you? Bish won’t let us in!’ There would be an answering cry like the hoot of an owl, and in a few minutes Joe would slowly arrive, and Bish would wag his tail and grin at us and apologise.

Joe accepted wild-life, not as some countrymen do with the object to kill, but as a means of sharing enjoyment. He hated trapping and when on one occasion he was instructed to do so, he found a badger in one of the traps the next morning. A badger is notoriously, and for obvious reasons, a deadly dangerous animal to release from a trap; and a trapper, if for no other reason except his personal safety, will make certain he has killed it before there is any question of touching it. Not so Joe. He was grievously upset when he found the badger struggling to escape as he walked along the field towards it; and he decided the only thing he could do was momentarily to stun it, then quickly release the foot from the trap. He picked up a stick and hit it, and the badger lay still. Ten minutes later it was still lying there, breathing but without any other signs of life; and so Joe picked it up in his arms, a heavy full-grown badger, and carried it gently to the Pink Hut.

I came to the hut later in the morning when Joe was having his tea break, and found the badger lying on a bed of sacks, with another sack so folded that it acted as a pillow. Bish was quiet in another corner, Joe puffing his pipe. ‘I hit it too hard,’ he said to me sadly after he had told me what had happened, ‘that’s what I did. I hit it too hard.’

Jeannie and I were, at the time, ‘shooting’ potatoes and this tedious task kept us for hour upon hour in the hut. This gave us the advantage of keeping an eye on the patient as it lay there. It was early in the afternoon over twenty-four hours later that it stirred, an eye opened, and it whimpered. A badger is beautiful to look at in its true setting, a wild path of its own treading, the moon lighting the white streaks of its head, dark shadows its armour; but lying there in the hut, impotent without our help, a heavy immovable body, its appeal was not in its mobility but the common denominator of suffering. I went outside and down the mountain-like track to where Joe was digging. ‘It’s coming round,’ I said. The smile was one of relief rather than pleasure. ‘It is?’ and he jabbed his shovel into the ground and came back with me to the hut.

The badger was a patient for six weeks, and every day Joe fed him with bread and milk, then when he got stronger shared his sandwiches. Bish was quite unconcerned and showed no jealousy, and the badger in his turn seemed to accept Bish; and then came the time when the badger, gaining confidence, remembering freedom, began to show restlessness. ‘To my way of thinking,’ said Joe, ‘it won’t be long before he’s ready to go.’ In this he was correct but he did not foresee the manner of his going.

At weekends, while Joe remained at home, Jeannie and I used to take over as nurses, and one Sunday evening we fed him as usual, saw that he was comfortable, and shut up the hut. I was first back there in the morning and when I had opened the door, a glance was enough to show the badger had gone. The floorboards had been ripped from the centre of the hut as if a man had been at work with a pickaxe, and as there was only soil underneath, it was then easy for the badger to rejoin the wild where he belonged.

Joe used to refer to each meadow as a garden. ‘That garden by the quarry is frosty,’ he would say. Or: ‘I’ve dug three hundredweight from this garden before May month . . . handsome samples.’

I was in this particular garden one November afternoon during this first year we rented Pentewan, grimly pursuing my task of rotovating the ground. Machines, when seen in a catalogue, appear to perform their duties magically on their own; and if there is a picture of the operator, a broad grin on his face suggests his presence is only a formality. Perhaps it is when the ground is level, but at both Minack and Pentewan the meadows are steep and contracted; and an hour with the rotovator leaves the body pommelled and aching as if it had been stretched on the rack.

The rotovator works the ground downhill and in order to keep the tines deep in the soil, it is necessary to weight the body on the handlebars, at the same time being prepared to lift it if you get warning of an under-the-soil rock. When you return to the top of the meadow you disengage the rotovator, then put the engine in reverse; but in order to control the machine, to prevent the handlebars shooting skywards, you have to do this job by pressing one foot on the cover of the rotovator while hopping backwards on the other; and at all times your arms are also having to force the handlebars downwards. The job is a punishment, a self-inflicted torture which awaits its compensation only when all the land is rotovated, and you rustle the sweet knowledge in your mind that you have achieved in a week what a labourer with a shovel would have done in eight. The pain was repeated twice a year, first in the autumn and then when the potatoes were being planted, the second occasion, of course, enabling the shoveller to dig through the soil at great speed; but it is a November afternoon that I am remembering in a garden that Joe once prized as one of his best. As I performed my routine, the engine roaring, my limbs craving for rest, I saw John in the distance with a pair of horses ploughing the field that edged Pentewan and his own.