A Gull on the Roof (21 page)

During the following days inland farmers roamed the cliff in the same way some people like to visit and stare at the scene of an accident. They were solicitous, but one suspected their sudden appearance was connected with assessing how our misfortune might result in their good fortune. They got on Tommy’s nerves. ‘Serve ’em right,’ he snorted, ‘if they have hard frost after Buryan feast.’

Feast Day was the second Sunday in May and it was traditional that frost could be expected up to that date but not afterwards; and so Tommy was wishing them ill at a time when their potatoes would be at the same advanced stage as ours had been. But Tommy’s personal chip of revenge was no reply to the predicament with which we were faced. We had gambled so heavily on the prospect of a harvest with handsome returns that failure inevitably would drain the last of our capital reserves. We would either have to return to London or Tommy would have to go, and leave us to carry on with the work on our own. It was the kind of situation which lies naggingly at the back of your mind but which you refuse to accept seriously while an element of hope still exists; and both Jeannie and I could not believe that such total defeat was possible. Our armour was our enthusiasm and, just as useful, our ignorance. We were, therefore, both determined to attack the next few weeks as if energy provided the certainty of victory.

But there was little we could do. Convalescence cannot be successful overnight, nor can plants grow with the speed of those in a nature film; and the only action we could take was to dose the meadows with nitro-chalk. Among potato growers nitro-chalk is considered a menace by some and a blessing by others. Its purpose is that of a pep pill and given convenient conditions such as warm and damp weather, the effect begins to show within a fortnight by veining the leaves with dark green; thus strength enters the leaves which, on reaching maturity, return it to the developing potatoes. This description sounds like the alluring advertisement of a quack medicine, and it possesses in degree the same deception; for the success of nitro-chalk depends on conditions over which you have little control at the time of sowing. Moreover, and this is the chief objection against it, nitro-chalk, though increasing the size of the crop does so at the expense of making it later. Thus if a spell of dry weather follows the time of sowing before rain comes to wash it in, the crop will be later than ever.

‘I wouldn’t use it if I were you,’ said one. ‘I’d certainly sow nitre,’ said another. My final decision was based on the fact the plants looked so battered and terrible that I felt compelled to take some kind of action to help them; and, as it happened, that was the only satisfaction I had. The nitro-chalk on this occasion provided no sudden elixir of potato life; and to prove it there were two meadows side by side one of which had received its quota of nitro-chalk, while the other had been spared it. Six weeks later the tops of both were still the size of mushrooms, and by this time the grim fact had emerged that the harvest would resemble that of peas rather than potatoes. The plants had been unable to recover, not even our caution in leaving the seed uncut had been able to save them.

We had, however, an ace up our sleeves. It is an obvious calculation that the sum total of man hours required to dig potatoes is the same if there is one man at work or four. Thus one man would take four hours to perform a task which would take four men an hour; and so the pursuit of this idea inevitably led us to the tempting prospect that if we were able to engage two men to help us, the harvest would be cleared in half the time it would take Tommy and myself; and that more extra men would further reduce the time in proportion. Thus, according to this theory, we still had a chance to save the situation by disposing of our miserable harvest when the price was still high; and it could mean, we argued cheerfully to ourselves, that we could take just as much money as with a crop twice the size but half the price.

Our neighbours, however, did not agree with these views. They never had spent any money on extra labour and they were not going to do so now. It was an attitude that pleased us. It gave us an understandable source of contentment that we had a chance to show our teachers that we had the intelligence to cope with a crisis. The problem was, however, where to find the men to help us.

It was now that we had a stroke of luck. We remembered the miners from St Just, Jack and Maurice, who had dug us the well, and off we went to see them.

St Just is a solid town which revolves around the Geevor tin mines and spreads a spider’s web of grey cottages with the square as its centre, the sea on one side, and the wild hilly moorland on the others. It is unique for a town of its size in that it is five miles from the nearest railway station, Penzance, and this fact, along with the Atlantic fogs which sweep through the streets in winter, seems to exude a sturdy self-sufficiency among its inhabitants. They are tough, reliable, kind, and aim to see a good day’s work performed before they add up the money which rewards it.

Jack and Maurice promptly agreed to help but they would only be able to do so between shifts at Geevor. They therefore proposed they should organise a succession of miners, and that by running a shuttle service in the Land Rover we would collect and return them at times to dovetail with each shift. Thus we could if we so wished collect one group at eight in the morning after the night shift, another at three in the afternoon after the early morning shift, and another at six in the evening after the day shift, the latter working on till dusk. We were also able to engage a retired miner called Willie and a postman, Eddie, both of whom were ready to come full-time – the latter taking his annual holiday specially to do so. This galaxy of manpower so excited Jeannie and myself that we marvelled with gratitude that the fates should so generously come to our rescue.

Within a week we had cleared the Minack cliff, sent away five tons and had grossed £250. We were up to schedule both on time and price. But the tight little meadows restricted the use of our full labour force, and only Willie, Eddie, Jack and Maurice provided the extra help. It was a scouting force compared to the army to come, and which proceeded to descend on the larger, sloping meadows of Pentewan.

I now had what I thought was an excellent idea. The method of gathering potatoes in a field is for a tractor to drive its length while the pickers-up are each given a station of perhaps twenty yards for which they are responsible. I decided to adjust this method to the meadow. I fixed the plough and the large wheels on my hand-controlled tractor, gave each miner a station, then grimly drove the machine in such a way that the plough tipped each row to one side where hands seized the tops, shook them, and picked up the potatoes.

It was a method suitable for a flat field, but I had chosen meadows that were square, oblong, round, steep in one direction then in another, with rocks as obstacles, requiring strength and ingenuity even to get the tractor with its large wheels to enter them. Obstinately I stuck to my task, stripped to the waist, my hands ripped with blisters, my body aching with fatigue, dazedly going on and on in the belief that I was the instrument of speed.

It was a delusion. The tractor broke down and when, in its place, shovels were used, the primitive once again proved its superiority over the modern. Two shovellers each took a row, and racing each other up the meadow, they tossed the plants to one side, leaving the rest of us to scramble our hands through the soil bruising our fingers against the stones, chaffing each other with mock accusations.

‘Hey, Eddie, have you gone home?’ meaning that he had been slower to pick up than the rest of us. Or if a shoveller had sliced a few potatoes as he thrust up the meadow, ‘We’ve got the chips, Willie, so now you’d better catch the fish.’ The forced jokes which come with monotonous tasks, remarks which are contrived to bolster minds and bodies which are tiring. ‘Dick’s in love . . . that’s why he’s leaving them all behind.’ ‘Them’ being potatoes and Dick being a hunk of a miner who had just got engaged. Long silences, then inconsequent comments on sport. ‘Good boy Peter May . . . he’s a good boy Peter.’

Periodically Jeannie would appear with tea, cakes and sandwiches, heavy loads which she carried over from Minack, balancing them as if they were jewels while she clambered over the hedges; then a break for everyone, and afterwards Jeannie would join the pickers-up, in shorts, with delicate hands and quicker than any of them. A group had to go back to Geevor and another collected. ‘Don’t you ever need sleep?’ I’d say. ‘Well we can last till Saturday.’ Tough, cheerful, unsparing in their willingness to help, I felt a tiring sadness that the rarity of their unstinting capacity of giving was tainted by the inevitability of failure.

The price had begun to drop. ‘What is it today?’ one of them would ask. ‘Gone down to thirty-five,’ I would answer, and there would be silence; and although they would be getting their pay at the end of the day, such was their rugged, honest independence that they did not feel at peace that they should gain and we should lose.

Jeannie and I became unaware of days and nights, we blazed with the fanatic’s zeal to remove every potato from Pentewan in time . . . we were up at dawn to weigh and address the bags, then one of us would collect the first group from St Just, then load up the Land Rover two or three times until yesterday’s digging had been driven to the place where Carbis, the St Buryan carrier, would load them on his lorry and take them to the station. Waiting for the post and prices, tea and sandwiches, drive a group back to St Just and collect another, more tea and sandwiches, another drive to St Just, then in the evening rough cider with the sandwiches and jokes afterwards: ‘Maurice is seeing so many double taties that he can’t pick up one.’ Then back to St just with the last group, and because we were both very tired we would go together.

We were aware soon after beginning Pentewan that we were doomed. Minack meadows had survived in some degree because they were new, the soil was fresh to production and had reserves to face the wound from the slash of a knife, but those at Pentewan were like tired old men who saw no virtue in fighting nor possessed the capacity for doing so. The crop almost uniformly was the size of marbles; and when the shovellers had disposed of a meadow and I looked up in my record book to compare the seed potatoes we had planted and the harvest we had gathered, I found it more comforting to keep the information to myself.

Yet speed might still save us. Jeannie and I clung to the belief that time was our ally, that our town-inspired briskly intelligent ideas would outweigh the true facts. We maintained the illusion until one night, after returning the last of our friends to St Just, we called in on the way home at a pub whose outward fame is its name, The First and Last (pub in Britain), but whose inward fame was provided by the Lancashire brothers who had kept it for twenty-five years. ‘You’ve heard the news?’ said Jesse Fox, one of the brothers, as I raised my glass, ‘taties have hit the floor. They’re £6 a ton at Bristol.’

Next morning I looked at Tommy when he arrived, the old shabby clothes, the faded Panama hat, and I said to myself: ‘Why does he look so distinguished? It would be so much easier if he looked sour and bad-tempered.’ He performed the motions of his job seemingly unaware that his time with us was at an end. I delayed. When it was all over and Eddie and Willie, Maurice, Jack and our passing friends like Tommy May, nightwatchman at Geevor and collector of sea debris by day, and Dick and all the others . . . when I had said good-bye to all these, I was faced with the vacuum of telling Tommy Williams that his time with us was over.

I had braved myself to do so when, as I was leaving the cottage, a man arrived whom I had casually met a few days before. He was a brisk, efficient young man possessed with the certainty that his current opinions would secure his advancement. He was like hail on a summer’s day, and as I watched him, uninvited, undo his knapsack, then heard him say: ‘It’s quite all right, don’t worry about me, I’ve got my own sandwiches’ . . . I felt only too ready to brain him.

But, and this was the irritation of the occasion, there was a security about his behaviour which mocked the unreasonableness of our own. He represented sense and an arid existence, while Jeannie and I had nothing to show him or anyone else except an intangible happiness. Thus, unknowingly, he provided me with an angry brashness, a reaction to his own normality, when at last I saw Tommy and said I could not pay him any more. ‘I knew that was coming,’ he said, and his eyes were looking far out over Mount’s Bay; ‘I’ll go back to Birmingham where I was for a time during the war. I’ll get a good job there in Birmingham Parks.’

He was down the bottom of the cliff when I told him, and I had a long way up to walk with the knowledge that an unpleasant task had been achieved. I did not feel despair but anger, as if the zest which had led us to the kind of life we had chosen had been stung into fury by conformism pirouetting in self-justification. Ah, you fool, I heard voices mocking, you should have stayed with the herd, the herd breathes safely in the expanse of the plains, its thoughts locked in convention, moving through time sheltered in the security of dullness. The herd does not look for trouble as you have done. The herd is content, it is not greedy like you.

I climbed slowly up the cliff path and found Jeannie waiting for me at the top. ‘He took it very well,’ I said, ‘he’s going to sell his caravan and go north. He says he’s certain to get a job with what he calls Birmingham Parks.’ I spoke with assurance as if I were certain that Tommy was thankful his mind had been made up for him. ‘It’s funny,’ I added, ‘but I’ve always had an idea he hankered after Birmingham Parks and he’s only stayed with us because of a queer notion it meant scoring a revenge over the farmers he detested.’

Jeannie did not reply and we began to walk arm in arm up the field towards the cottage. The silence hurt both of us. We had been consumed by the mission I had just fulfilled, and now we were left with thoughts that frightened us. We had not only lost our gamble, but were faced with retrieving its cost without anyone to help us. We had not bargained for failure when we left London, and its arrival, the sudden barefacedness of its arrival, brought unbearable depression.