I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  I spent the last months of my stay at Goran in a small flat above the kitchen regions. It was known, in my honour, as ‘The Hermit’s Lair’. (I may mention that it was lent to me, characteristically, rent-free.)

  For several reasons, this was an extremely important epoch in my career. One of them was that, since I had left the convent, this was the first time I had ‘done’ for myself.

  It was in the Lair that I first experienced the thrill of boiling a kettle; learnt that when you peel and boil potatoes, it is necessary to add salt: cooked a sausage (laying a mine could hardly have provided me with greater excitement) and knew the triumph of having fried my first bacon and egg.

  The furniture which my sister had sent me from her flat in London arrived one day, and was installed in my small bed-sitting-room. After that, my happiness was very nearly perfect. I had a Place of My Own at last.

  It was a pity there was not a single cottage to be had in the neighbourhood of Goran. Or—was it? Looking back, I think Providence—for once—was right. The coast is magnificent; but the china clay industry has ruined the St. Austell district. I rather doubt whether it and I would ever have become close friends.

  (4)

  After Goran I spent some time in a seaside bungalow at Trevone, on the north-west coast of Cornwall. It was lent to me by the Lady in the Fur Coat whom I had met, it may be remembered, when I was staying down in Sussex with my aunt.

  It was an enchanting neighbourhood. But I think the place which attracted me most was an odd little valley somewhere between Porthcotham Cove and Bedruthan Steps.

  I called it ‘The Little Goat Cove’. That wasn’t its real name—(I have never yet discovered what that was); I just called it that because it seemed to suit it. Not that there were any goats to be seen in it: the point was that although you couldn’t see them, you felt quite certain that they were there. A narrow stream of silvery, ice-cold water poured down through some fields into the gorge near the mouth of the cove. The sand on either side was rather dirty, and printed with small, cloven hoof-marks, as though it had been recently scampered upon. It was these hoof-marks that fired my imagination. The colour, atmosphere and general feeling of the place seemed to belong to another age and nation. And as I picked my way across the stream on stepping-stones, I felt distinctly that unseen eyes were watching me from behind the boulders, and that where the strong, pungent odour of goat was most noticeable, something half-glimpsed, half-guessed at, was observing me furtively. Goats? Satyrs? Fauns? Or simply imagination? All I know is, that to me it appeared as an exciting, half-pagan sort of place, filled with presences which—did one only remain there long enough—would eventually materialize.

  (5)

  It was about this time that the idea came to me of buying a wooden hut and settling somewhere in the neighbourhood until the day when at last Trevelioc should open its gates to me.

  I even got as far as plans and estimates.

  And then—suddenly—things started happening in a way which made me wonder what could have caused Providence once more to take an interest in my affairs.

  One morning in November I received a letter from a cousin, enclosing a house-agent’s advertisement.

  ‘I know,’ wrote the cousin, ‘that you’ve long been looking for a Cornish cottage. What about this?’

  This was the description:

  ‘Freehold, vacant possession Jan. Two-roomed granite cottage on cliff-ledge overlooking sea. Electricity and every mod. conven. kitchenette, electric griller: indoor lav. and bathrm. with electric geyser. Stands sheltered from wind in own small cliff garden. Magnificent views. 5 min. village. 15 bus.’

  ‘If you are interested’, the letter continued, ‘you had better wire immediately to the agent and, if possible, go down to view it the same day as you get this. Houses these days get snapped up almost before they are advertised.’

  I turned over the agent’s list to see the price and locality of the cottage.

  The price would have swallowed all and more than all of my carefully hoarded savings. But the locality was Trevelioc Cove.

  My summons had come.

  (6)

  Exactly three-quarters of an hour later, after having wired to the house-agent, I was seated breathless but triumphant beside the driver of the car which, at hideous expense, I had hired to whirl me down immediately to Trevelioc.

  My enjoyment of the drive was rather spoilt by a cold fear lest someone might already have rushed in and snapped the cottage up.

  The lovely road rushed past us: St. Merryn, with its ancient, secret-looking church; Little Petherick and Trelow Downs, grey-green and smoky lilac in the November sun; Wynnards Perch and the long road leading to St. Columb Major. Scorrier followed. After that, I was inclined to shut my eyes. The hideous, jerry-built cottages of the miners on the way to Redruth are a blotch on the face of Cornwall; and the Camborne houses blight the earth on which they stand. It was a relief to escape on to the long straight road between Hayle and Marazion and to see the frill of foam round the rock-base of St. Michael’s Mount. At Penzance the tide was high. We dodged immense green monsters that broke occasionally over the parade. Then up the appalling hill, past Paul turning and on through Sheffield village to where the strange bleak country that heralds the Land’s End region first appears. It seemed that there was another approach to Trevelioc—a narrow lane labelled ‘impracticable to motors’. I urged the driver down it. We crept along.

  The lovely zigzag led to the dark, rushing stream that flows through the Trevelioc Valley. The bridge took us up past the handful of cottages known as Trevelioc village—down the winding precipice road with the stream on one hand and the brushwood cliff on the other—and so, at last, out into Trevelioc Cove.

  It was strikingly different from the way I remembered it two years ago in summer. The sea was grey-green; and immense foam-crested breakers flung themselves in clouds of silvery spray across the ruined pier. The trees were almost bare, so that one could see down into the gorge where the stream, swollen to a roaring torrent, rushed, in a wild series of cascades, down to the sea.

  But what struck me most about the change that had come over the place with winter was the appearance of the Stones.

  Of course, one had always known that they existed; bits of them had even pushed themselves up between trails of honeysuckle and tufts of flowers. Now, however, they had come out into the open. And no one who had looked on them as they stood there in their stark and savage greyness could doubt the fact that the Stones were masters of the Cove.

  The cottage was perched on a narrow terrace half-way up the cliff-side. A white gate led into a minute cliff garden, so small as to be almost like a shelf. In the midst of this the house was planted, its long, lean-to roof almost hidden by a windscreen wall whose crenellated top gave it the appearance of a fortress on a lilliputian scale.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly small enough,’ remarked the driver.

  It was indeed. In fact, it was the smallest house I had ever been inside. The living-room was simply the frame for an enormous casement window that looked out across the cove on to the sea. Another even smaller room adjoined it, used, apparently, for kitchen, bathroom, lavatory and store. There were no shelves or cupboards anywhere and the ‘kitchenette’ mentioned in the advertisement had apparently been used as the kennel for a dog. The walls of the living-room, instead of being papered, were hung with silken taffeta attached to wooden frames. The design was of a forest glade with bluebells growing beside dark water under shady trees. It made one feel as though one were standing in a fairy forest shut in by trees and flowers instead of walls.

  ‘It’s heaven.’

  I murmured the words rather quietly, in case the driver, who had just returned from examining the drains, should hear.

  ‘They seem Okay,’ said the driver, without enthusiasm. ‘But the garden’s no larger than a piece of toast.’

  I followed him into it. It was hardly more than a ledge of granite. Yet it had vast possibilities. At th
e far end, the cliff rose steeply behind a thicket of blackthorn, continuing like a high wall round the back of the house.

  ‘I like this corner,’ I said, peering through the blackthorn to where bits of the granite rock-face were still visible. ‘If all this stuff were cut down, one could strip the cliff and make a marvellous rock-garden.’

  We returned to the cottage.

  ‘I expect I shall buy it,’ I announced in a voice which perhaps, in the circumstances, may have sounded over-enthusiastic. The driver’s expression of faintly amused disapproval was a little dampening. He said, Well, of course, that was for me to decide. He would not presume to give advice.

  After further poking and prying we locked the door and I went round to take a last look at the view from the garden. More than ever my shoe-laces felt as though they were tied to the ground beneath my feet.

  ‘It’s like the cell of a medieval hermit,’ I reflected. ‘It’s my Cottage-in-the-Clouds come down to earth. It’s so perfect that it might have been built on purpose for me. In fact, I believe it was….’

  My heart had begun to thump with a strange excitement. Suppose this were to be the end of all my voyagings and ventures? Well—why shouldn’t it? After all, the decision lay with me.

  We drove back from Trevelioc to Penzance in silence.

  In Market Jew Street, I got out and telegraphed to the agent that I would buy the house.

  (7)

  I moved into my cottage just before midnight at the beginning of February.

  Snowdrifts had prevented the furniture van from reaching Goran—(whither I had returned to collect my belongings after leaving Trevone)—till nearly six o’clock in the evening. When we started, it was already dark. I climbed into the seat between the driver and a muscular Remover whose teeth chattered so dismally that he could hardly cope with his cigarette.

  It was quite the coldest drive I can remember. There was snow falling and the road opened up in the glare of the headlights like torn linen as we sped along. St. Austell—Truro—Camborne, and then seaward again towards the lights of Marazion and Penzance.

  The rattle of the van was so deafening that conversation was impossible. I was glad, because I was tired to death and had drifted into a sort of dream. The noise made by the van was curiously rhythmic. The air, too, seemed full of harmony. Presently it all resolved itself into a sort of symphony in which I myself and everything all round me seemed to be taking part.

  But the real music only started as we turned into the lane that leads to Trevelioc. (I can’t describe it because it was the sort of music that one hears not with the ears but with the heart. In places it was rather like the ‘Grand March’ in Aïda—majestic, full of colour and rhythm and with plenty of tune.) I had the impression that I was entering Trevelioc in a kind of Roman triumph: and that I was doing so after an absence of several thousand years. A white snow carpet had been spread over the last lap of my progress, on either side of which the invisible inhabitants were thronging silently to welcome me. Strange shapes and stranger presences were stirring in the deep gloom among the bushes: the secret life of the place had awakened and was moving to a rhythm older than time.

  The climax came at the last bend in the road where the cove springs suddenly upon one. It-was black as night except where the moon had let down a ladder of silver over the sea. The driver stopped at the foot of the path which led up the cliff-side to my cottage. And in the silence that filled the timeless instant between the engine’s stopping and the noise and movement which inevitably followed it, I heard the music leap up, swift and sudden as a flame—draw all the magic of the night into its harmonies, and sink back, losing itself in the splash of the stream and the waves’ roar and the long shiver of the wind among the trees.

  In the darkness I stumbled up the narrow path to the little porch that stood half-hidden in the house’s shadow.

  Then, unlocking the door of my Cottage-in-the-Clouds, I went in.

  Copyright

  © Monica Baldwin 1949, 2015

  First published in 1949

  First published by Robert Hale Ltd 1994

  This digital edition 2015

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1644 4 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1645 1 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1646 8 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1643 7 (print)

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of Monica Baldwin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988