A Gull on the Roof (3 page)

I feigned my displeasure and as it was to be my task to take him back to our house overlooking the finishing post at Mortlake, I insisted I would drop him over Hammersmith Bridge. But we passed the bridge and he was still in the basket, and though I swore he would only be a kitchen cat, he slept that night on our bed. From that day he shared with us doodle-bugs, rockets, a bomb on the house, wore a light blue ribbon each Boat-race day, sat for hours at night on the window sill waiting for our returns, made many hours happy with his purrs, and was always universally admired.

To call him a ginger cat would be a mundane description. The postman at Minack, when he first saw him, called him red – after the red cats of Zennor. There is a legend that a woman many years ago came to the village of Zennor, on the North coast of the Land’s End peninsular, and announced she was going to breed tigers. The local authorities, not unnaturally, stepped in and forbade her to do so. The woman thereupon declared that if she could not breed tigers she would breed a red cat as fierce as a tiger; and now if you go from St Ives to Zennor it is the strangest fact that nearly every cat has a tinge of red. But Monty was not red. He had a snow-white shirt front, magnificent whiskers, white paws except for a front one which had a puddle of orange on it, while the rest of his person was covered with a semi-Persian fur the colour of bracken in autumn. ‘Like a fox,’ a farmer said, ‘and you’ll have to be careful when the hounds are around.’

We had left London after lunch on a Friday and in the back of the car were a mattress and blankets, a Valor Stove, other camping equipment, and Monty in a wicker basket specially bought for the occasion. The basket was my idea. I had visions of Monty escaping from the car and disappearing into the countryside; but by the time we reached Andover he was clearly losing his temper, miaowing his head off and clawing at the sides of the basket in fury. ‘Perhaps he wants a walk,’ I said. We found a quiet spot off the main road, carefully lifted the lid, and fitted him with a blue harness and lead which had also been bought for the occasion. His fury swept the quiet spot like a storm and he would not budge as I pulled at the lead. ‘Let him be,’ said Jeannie, ‘let’s get back in the car and let him sit on my lap.’ In a few minutes he was purring contentedly and staring with interest out of the window at the passing scene; and the wicker basket and the lead and the harness have now been for years in the attic as a discarded monument to my foolishness in treating him as a cat who did not know how to travel. He came several times by car before staying at Minack for ever, and once by first-class sleeper. I was at Minack on my own and was expecting Jeannie down for the weekend. I was on the platform at Penzance when the night train drew in, and I saw her waving excitedly from a window. I went up to the door of her carriage and she said: ‘Come and look what I’ve got in my sleeper!’ I opened the sliding door, and there on the bunk was Monty. She had been dining at the Savoy when she suddenly had the whim of bringing Monty with her. She rushed back to Mortlake, found him by torchlight walking along the garden wall, wrapped him in a rug and carried him to a taxi. At Paddington he behaved like any prudent conspirator as he was smuggled into the train, and Jeannie awoke every now and then during the night to find him purring peacefully beside her. He stayed on with me for a few days after Jeannie returned; then we drove back together to Mortlake.

It was nearly midnight, on that first visit, when the three of us reached Penzance. A gale was blowing in from the sea and as we drove along the front cascades of spray drenched the car as if coming from a giant hose. We crossed Newlyn Bridge, then up steep Paul Hill and along the winding road past the turn to Lamorna Valley; then up another hill, Boleigh Hill, where King Athelstan fought the Cornish ten centuries ago. Rain was whipping the windscreen when we turned off the road along a lane, through the dark shadows of a farm, until it petered out close to the cliff’s edge. I got out and opened a gate, then drove bumpily across a field with the headlights swathing a way through a carpet of escaping rabbits. This, the back entrance to Minack, was the way we had to use until the bramble-covered lane was opened up again; and after I pulled up beside a stone hedge, we still had two fields to scramble across in the darkness and the rain and the gale before we reached the cottage.

I lit a candle and the light quivered on the peeling, yellow-papered walls. Everything was the same as the day we first pushed open the door; the ancient Cornish range, the pint-sized rooms with their matchbox-thick divisions, the wooden floor peppered with holes – only it was raining now and above the howl of the gale was the steady drip, drip of water from the leaking roof.

We didn’t care. The adventure had begun.

The phase in which daydreams had to be turned into facts had also begun. The romantic, escape-from-it-all atmosphere in which we had battled for the possession of Minack was now dissolving into the uncanny realism of victory. I had the same sense of living in the third dimension as the day when I enlisted in the Army and exchanged emotional patriotism for the discipline of the unknown. We could no longer talk of what we were going to do, we had to act; and the actions increasingly enmeshed us in a condition of living from which there was no turning back. As our first visit was succeeded by others, individuals entered our lives who pushed us forward linking our future with their present, as if they were pylons of a bridge. First we had looked for a bolt-hole from the kind of life we were leading, then we relished the emotion of its discovery, now we met the responsibilities of success. We found ourselves faced with a challenge that defeated our brittle egos, that was only to be accepted by the selves within us who found tranquillity in integrity.

Ashley Thomas was the carpenter in our village of St Buryan. Tubby, with twinkling eyes, always wearing a peaked cloth cap to cover his bald head, he reminded Jeannie of Happy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His family had been carpenters in St Buryan for over two hundred years and craftsmanship was his second nature. And along with his tradition of skill was a quixotic nature akin to the carpenter of a neighbouring village who, after years of never sending out a bill, piled them all in his yard a few weeks before he died – and set them alight. Ashley Thomas never sent out an account within three years of the work being completed; then he would present it most courteously in person, while the account itself was a masterpiece of script, a scroll it should be called, in which every nut, nail and inch of wood was meticulously tabulated.

Ashley Thomas looked around the debris of the cottage, notebook in hand, with a pencil behind his ear, and promptly provided the assurance that order could soon be created. Our plans were not ambitious. A new roof, that was essential; the thin boards of the ceiling could remain but the matchbox-thick divisions had to be ripped away providing us with one large room in which to live and a small one that would be our bedroom. The Cornish range was useless so a modern stove that both cooked and gave warmth would be its substitute. The rat-gnawed planks covering the floor would be torn up and in their place a damp-resisting cement flooring would layer the earth. The mustard-yellow paper would be peeled off the walls, and the crater-pitted slabs lime-washed white. The battered front door would be removed, replaced by one divided in half, like that of a stable. There would be no sink or bath and the lavatory would remain an Elsan, posted in a hut like a sentry box thirty yards from the cottage. Water, until we could sink a well, was going to be a tricky affair. We would have to collect the rain from the roof into a water-butt or fill a jug from the stream; but in the summer the stream dried up, and if the waterbutt was empty as well, we would have to go three miles to the village tap in St Buryan square. ‘Never mind,’ said Ashley Thomas looking at Jeannie, ‘it’s lovely at Minack in summer and lack of water won’t worry you . . . but how you’ll stand it in winter I just don’t know.’

While Ashley Thomas provided the guiding hand within, Tom Bailey from the inn at Lamorna, acted as adviser without. He arrived at the cottage on a drenching afternoon when the sky seemed to have changed places with the sea. Clad in oilskins and sou’wester he looked as if he had come from a lifeboat. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s walk round’ – and he said it as if the sun were shining. Tall and spare, Tom was the man the villagers called on first in times of trouble. He had the dark cadaverous Cornish good looks with a watch in his eyes like that of a sailor, as if much of his life had been spent staring at the signs of the weather in the skies. He had been head gardener of a neighbouring estate before he began his own market garden, and his lifetime experience of growing was at the disposal of anyone who sought it. He was gentle in his manner and never dogmatic, and the advice he gave came hesitantly as if he considered it an insult to correct, however ignorant might be his listener. And he had the gift, despite his knowledge of technical difficulties, of fanning enthusiasm instead of blighting it with past evidence of personal failure.

‘That’ll make a nice meadow,’ he said, looking at the bog which sided the wood below the cottage. It was the second of our brief visits and, despite the rain, we had spent the morning in this bog channelling an escape route for the water using a broken cup and a trowel. I do not know what we expected to achieve except to re-experience the pleasure of bucket and spade on a seashore. The task ahead was enormous and though Tom was right, and it did in the end make a nice meadow, it took two years of experimenting and two hundred yards of underground drain pipes before it was dry enough to grow a crop. Then we grew violets and sent away to market five hundred bunches in six months.

‘That’s yours?’ He was looking at the ancient building bordering the lane, half of which was a stable, half a general-purpose shed. It was not ours, only the roofless, age-stricken buildings came within our agreement. ‘It’s John’s,’ I replied.

John also was a new arrival – as Harry Laity’s dairyman he had come to live at the farm at the top of the hill and was our nearest neighbour. The land he worked dovetailed into ours. We, of course, had accepted the uncultivated land. His consisted of the weirdly shaped, beautiful meadows that bordered the cliff and ran down to the sea’s edge, and the green fields which lipped the pocket garden of the cottage. He had called one morning when we were cooking breakfast on the oil stove.

‘You’re John,’ I said, and shook his hand in welcome. He was squat and powerfully built, like a miner. He had a round face with skin coarsened by the open air. His eyes were grey and they looked at me is if he were saying to himself: ‘I wonder how long these people are going to stick it here.’ He wore an old raincoat and a mottled brown cloth cap aslant on the back of his head, showing his black hair tinged with grey; a cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth and he fiddled a foot with an imaginary stone. And as I talked with him I suddenly became aware of a warning emotion within me for which my town conception of a country life had not prepared me. There was a hint of a challenge in his manner. It was as if I had had a punch on the nose to remind me we were amateurs who had a hazy, paradise notion of country life that had no relation to reality. We did not belong. We were as out of place in the kind of life we were intending to lead as John would have been in the Savoy Grill. I could see him wondering what mystery had brought us here. Why, because we possessed smooth ways, did we think we could exist in a land where skill was the product of generations of struggle? We were typical city dwellers who had the conceit to believe it would be easy. He had seen them come and go before, and we would be no exception. There would be the customary froth of enthusiasm as we put the cottage in order, the showing off to up-a-long friends, the token effort of manual work, the gradual boredom with discomfort. Anyhow
she
won’t last. Then, and I could sense the question revolving in his mind: ‘Who will get the cottage?’ His visit had a salutary effect on us for it promised the stimulus of battle, the realisation that we were going to be watched and judged and expected to fail. He was another pylon of the bridge.

We led Tom Bailey to the little wood, a forest of blackthorn and elm tree saplings with grey boulders heaving up in groups between them. ‘Cut them down and dig up their roots,’ he said, ‘and by dodging them boulders you’ll have three, maybe four meadows out of here. They’ll be sheltered . . . be all right for daffodils.’ And all this time we were pestering him with elementary questions. What varieties of daffodils would be best for us? How do you grow them? What about violets . . . and anemones . . . and potatoes? We left the wood and took the path to the big field and the cliff, into the scrub, the wasteland smothered with gorse and brambles where one day, we hoped, the crops would grow which Tom described to us. ‘Mind,’ he said, ‘everyone will tell you different and no season is ever the same . . . but this is how I find it.’

There are several thousand different varieties of daffodils and narcissi but only a comparative few are recognised in the markets as established commercial successes – such as the yellow trumpet King Alfred, Magnificence, Carlton, Rembrandt, and a hundred or so others. Some of these are early varieties, some middle season, some late, and the aim of the grower is to have a succession of blooms from the end of January to the end of March, usually ending up with the white narcissi such as Cheerfulness, a double white bloom with an exquisite scent. The normal custom is to buy bulbs by weight, which means the bulbs will be of different sizes – most will flower the first year but others will take a year or so to reach flowering size. If you buy by numbers you can expect all the bulbs to flower the first year but, quite apart from it being a much more expensive way of doing things, you run the risk of the bulbs taking a rest the following year with the result you pick few flowers. In any case bulbs are expensive. Cornish growers usually buy their bulbs from Holland or the Isles of Scilly and the price, of course, varies according to the variety; normally, standard types such as King Alfred, cost about £150 a ton. The big growers plant bulbs with a plough, placing them two or three inches apart within the rows; the small growers, in their cliff meadows, use a shovel and, when the time comes to dig them out, a special clawed digger. Seven tons average the acre and a good yield per ton is 28,000 flowers.