A Gull on the Roof (9 page)

An hour before Tommy was due to go home, he and I used to begin carrying the chips up the cliff. We carried them one in either hand, a hateful, exhausting, back-breaking task, forgivable when the price was high, but when it began to dip I used to mutter curses, as I climbed, against the city dwellers who had no notion of the endeavour that lay behind the potatoes on their plates. Jeannie and I were too tired to weigh them in the evening, and we would have a meal and go immediately to bed, falling into a revolving kaleidoscope of dreams – potatoes with human faces, crushed haulms served for lunch at the Savoy, the
Scillonian
in the guise of a whale, stinging nettles dancing like a chorus, running a cross-country race on a magic carpet that never moved, Tommy looming out of the sky like Mephistopheles. We awoke as tired as when we went to bed, limbs aching, our minds fogged by our dreams and the prospect of another day of chain-gang labour. I would get up and put the kettle on the paraffin stove and when it had boiled replace it with a saucepan for the eggs. Then, breakfast over, we would walk along the path to the top of the cliffs where the chips in neat rows awaited their weighing, and suddenly, as if an icepack had melted miraculously before our eyes, we became aware of the glory of the early morning. We looked down on to the sea, glittering from the sun which rose above the Lizard, spattered with fishing boats hurrying to the Newlyn fish market like office workers scurrying to town. A cuckoo flew past, topping the undergrowth, calling as she went. A cormorant perched on the rock that is called Gazell, its black wings extended, drying them against the softness of the breeze. High in the sky a wood pigeon courted another, clapping its wings, then swooping silently and up again, and another clap as sharp as a pistol shot. Around us bluebells brimmed the green grass and foxgloves pointed to the sky like sentinels. Meadow sweet and may blossom clung the air with their scent. A woodpecker laughed. And the sea, sweeping its cool tranquillity to the horizon, lapped its murmur against the rocks below us. Here was the heightened moment when the early morning, unspoilt like a child, is secure from passing time; and when a human being, sour with man-made pleasures, awakes to the sweet grace of freedom.

I weighed, while Jeannie tied the cardboard tops to the chips with binder twine, and while we worked we worried where we would send them. ‘I think Birmingham,’ I would say, and then, a few minutes later: ‘Of course that Scots salesman did say Bristol was very good.’ Jeannie would suggest Covent Garden. ‘After all,’ she reasoned, ‘the West End restaurants surely want Cornish new potatoes and should be ready to pay a decent price.’ But a few moments later: ‘What about Glasgow – the man with one arm said it topped all the other markets last week.’ ‘All right,’ I would reply, ‘We’ll send to Glasgow.’ There would be a pause while I hooked another chip on to the crook of the spring balance. ‘Of course there’s all that extra freight to think of,’ Jeannie would murmur, ‘Oh, hell,’ I would answer, ‘let’s send to Birmingham.’ We would pack the chips into the Land Rover, make out the invoice and despatch note, and I would drive to Penzance station. And there, as I waited my turn to unload, doubts would arise again for I would see some farmer of great experience and ask him where he was sending. ‘Liverpool – I always send north at this time of the season.’

Our indecision could be blamed on inexperience, but as the years passed the guesswork has continued. Growers despatch their produce to the market, and then, like punters, hope for the best, and storm with irritation when they back the wrong town. There is no way of gauging the see-saw of demand. A salesman said to me once: ‘Cardiff is going to be very strong at the beginning of next week. I’ll take all that you can dig.’ We hired extra labour and sweated through the weekend until we had one ton of potatoes to despatch on Monday and off they went to Cardiff. Three days went by and I received no sales returns – and when sales returns are delayed, it is usually an ominous sign. They came a week later and the price, as by then I had expected, was disastrous. I did not see the salesman again till the end of the season when he appeared at the door to ask for seven chips, the balance of those his firm had sold me and for which I had not paid the price of 9d. each. ‘They’re broken,’ I said truthfully, but grimly, remembering Cardiff. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to show them to me, or pay.’ That was enough. I burst. Jeannie and I had worked for a month in the manner of peasants of a hundred years ago, and we were exhausted both with potatoes and salesmen. ‘Get out of my sight,’ I yelled, ‘go down the cliff and find them yourself.’ I have never seen him again.

There are the same lottery selling methods for flowers. Except on special occasions such as Christmas, Easter and Mothering Sunday, no one seems to have a clue when flowers will or will not be wanted. I have had a telegram from a salesman at 10 a.m. saying, ‘Market is glutted,’ and another, two hours later from the same man saying, ‘send all you can.’ There was one February week when the weather in Cornwall reminded one of the Alps. The St Buryan road was impassable with drift snow, no buses could climb the hill out of Newlyn, and the flowers, of course, were unpickable. Yet we ourselves did have a meadow of Magnificence daffodils growing close to the sea which were bravely coming into flower although the ground was white around them. ‘We ought to get five shillings a bunch for these,’ I said to Jeannie. We proudly picked, bunched and packed them, two boxes with fifteen bunches in each, and then set about thinking how we were going to get to Penzance. We had been cut off from the main road for five days but, propelled by the excitement of our achievement, we spent five hours digging away a track for the Land Rover; and when we reached the station we were greeted as conquering heroes by the porters. ‘Nothing going away at all,’ said Owen, who was head porter on the flower train platform, ‘nothing at all.’ Three days later we received our sales returns and scribbled across the bottom were the words: ‘Sorry, it’s too cold for the buyers.’ The price was sixpence a bunch.

There are, too, the hazards provided by British Railways. I have known a consignment of our potatoes take a week to reach Newcastle by freight train and three days to Bristol. During a period when the price is swiftly falling day by day, such delays mean financial loss for which we can claim no recompense. It is, however, when our flowers are delayed that Jeannie and I are most enraged, and the fury is the more violent because one is impotent to do anything about it. We have pursued the arduous task of growing the flowers, then picked, bunched and admired their exquisite freshness in the packed box—only to learn later that they never reached the market in time for sale. There was the time, on a Tuesday, when we sent forty boxes of Wedgewood iris by the special flower train to Hull. The engine of this train broke down, the truck containing our flowers was put in a siding, and none were sold till the Thursday when a shipload of Guernsey iris swamped the market and brought the Wednesday price of twenty-five shillings a box down to five shillings. Thus we had lost £40 through no fault of our own and, as usual, we could claim no compensation – for British Railways absolve themselves from blame provided the flower boxes reach the station of destination within thirty-six hours of the original arrival time. The fact that the scheduled service has failed to deliver them for the next day’s market is immaterial.

Such frustrations, however, lay ahead, for during that first summer we had beginner’s luck; and when the potato season was all over and the meadows were strewn with the withering tops of the plants which a month previously had looked so green, with a broken chip lying here and there, an unused sack and the crows poking in the soil among the untidy desolation for the potatoes which had been left behind, we estimated we had made over £200 profit. This figure, minute against the background of a year, inflated our expectations owing to the comparative ease with which it had been gathered. If, with so little land yet under cultivation, with only thirty hundredweight of seed, we could make that sum of money, surely in another year we would have room for four times the seed and make four times as much.

My mother, who had rejoined us for the last week of the potato season, was delighted with these calculations: she had spent most of each day standing in the field holding open the sacks for us to fill, making the professionals smile by her ardour, but saving time and temper for Jeannie and myself who had not yet mastered the knack of tipping a basket without spilling the potatoes. Her gaiety, however, was tempered by increasing concern over our water supply. There had been no rain for a month, the water butt was empty, a pencil-sized trickle was all that was left of the stream, and Jeannie had been forced to discover that soap does not really lather in sea water. My mother, naturally, was unable to adjust herself to the situation, and I used to drive to the village tap at St Buryan, fill up a milk churn I had bought and bring it back for her use. It was inevitable that sooner or later we would have to sink a well, and in view of the drought it seemed best not to waste any time.

‘Tommy,’ I said one morning, ‘we’re going to dig a well. What do we do?’ Tommy, of course, rejoiced in a question which gave an opportunity for a display of his knowledge and he proceeded to inform me of his personal theory that all spring water in the Land’s End peninsula came from Switzerland, that the snow in the Alps melted through the crevices to deep underground, and then slowly crept during the course of hundreds of years across Europe and under the Channel to Cornwall. As often happened, he spiced his imaginative discourse with a practical point. ‘You can get a subsidy for sinking a well, I fancy,’ and so, at his suggestion, Jeannie and I paid a call at the dingy Penzance offices of the local branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. We had been there once before.

It was shortly before we came to live at Minack and we wanted to seek the advice of the then Agricultural Adviser as to how we should grow potatoes and whether he could arrange for a soil analysis of our land. We were ebullient with enthusiasm and naïve with our questions, but the grizzled-faced man greeted our fervour with: ‘We don’t want anyone else growing potatoes down here . . . you’ll be wasting your time and your money.’ Incensed at such a reaction to our zest, I said to Jeannie, ‘Come on, let’s go, we don’t want to spend any more time with this moron.’ We went back to Minack and the next morning as we were sipping coffee on a rock outside the door, a neat Homburg-hatted gentleman, dressed in a double-breasted black suit and wearing shiny black shoes, suddenly appeared. ‘I have come to test your soil,’ he said solemnly, in the manner of a doctor who might say, ‘Let’s hear how your chest sounds.’ We were delighted, and as I led the gentleman to a meadow we required tested, I found myself feeling ashamed that I had left the dingy office so abruptly. We came to the chosen meadow and our friend bent down, ran his fingers through the soil, then heaped some into a little canvas bag. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘this
is
a kindly soil . . . I should say this is a
very
kindly soil.’ There was a note in his voice which made me suspicious, and a few minutes later I asked him how long he had been with the Ministry of Agriculture. He smiled at me blandly. ‘Only three days,’ he said, ‘I’ve just been transferred from the Ministry of Labour. They change us around a lot, you know.’

I was sceptical when I arrived at the dingy office once again and I was thus prepared for the Alice in Wonderland conversation which followed. ‘The Ministry,’ said the girl clerk, ‘cannot grant a subsidy unless a sample of the water has been passed by the County analyst, and you may not start work on the well until an analysis has been approved.’ I looked at her limply. ‘How can I have a sample of the water analysed if I have not got the water?’ She smiled primly. ‘That’s what we wonder too.’

Our next step was to find the source of water on our land and this could only be done by a water diviner or dowser. The mysterious gift of dowsing defies scientific explanation and if you are not born with it, it can never be acquired. Its use is of immemorial antiquity, but not until Elizabethan times is there any record of its first practical use in Britain; and then some merchant adventurers finding the Germans using it in the Harz Mountains for the prospecting of minerals, introduced its use into the tin mining industry of Cornwall. Scientific instruments can now, of course, trace minerals underground but they still cannot trace water; and whether you live in a cottage or belong to a great oil company planning a reservoir in the desert, you have to pin your faith on the man who communes with water. But a dowser not only has to possess the instinct to trace water. He has to have the sixth sense to gauge the depth underground of the spring, its strength, and its course within a foot or two. There are many stories of dowsers who have judged wrong, of wells that have been sunk at great expense only to produce no water, and my own particular sixth sense on this occasion warned me that unless we were very careful we too might be unlucky.

Our first dowser charged five guineas and displayed such showmanship that he made us feel like natives witnessing black magic. He was a Londoner who had come to Cornwall a few years before and he had, so he told us, made a lifetime study of water divining. ‘I’ve developed a method,’ he said proudly, ‘that has made water divining almost scientifically accurate.’ We gaped in belief as, opening his suitcase, he produced numerous gaily coloured little flags, and a dozen or so forked hazel sticks. ‘Now leave me alone,’ he said, ‘I need to get in the mood.’

We left him and promptly went inside the cottage to watch from a window; and in a few minutes he rose from his prayer-like position and began to shuffle down the lane, his head bent, his hands holding the hazel stick. Suddenly he stopped, took a flag from his pocket, dropped it and then shuffled on. He stopped again, dropped another flag, then came back to the point where he had started and went off in another direction. It was an hour before he called us to join him, and then he proceeded to give us a lecture as to why, under a pink flag forty feet from the cottage, we would find a spring strong enough to flood St Buryan. ‘But how,’ asked Jeannie meekly, ‘are we to sink a well so near the cottage when there are rocks to dynamite?’ ‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘that’s not my problem.’