A Donkey in the Meadow

by Derek Tangye

  Derek Tangye (1912–1996) was the author of the much-loved books that collectively became known as The Minack Chronicles. They told the story of how he and his wife Jean left behind their cosmopolitan lifestyle in London to relocate to a clifftop daffodil farm in Cornwall. There they lived in a simple cottage surrounded by their beloved animals, which featured regularly in his books. In their later years, the Tangyes bought the fields next to their cottage, which are now preserved as the Minack Chronicles Nature Reserve.

  Also by Derek Tangye

  A Gull on the Roof

  A Drake at the Door

  A Cat in the Window

  A Donkey in the Meadow

  Derek Tangye

  Constable • London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Michael Joseph Ltd., 1965

  This edition published by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2014

  Copyright © Derek Tangye, 1965

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

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-993-4 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47211-026-8 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Cover design by Simon Levy

  Illustrations

  Penny at Monty’s Leap

  A month later Fred is born

  Fred outside the stable

  Fred takes his first walk

  Then his first gallop

  Boris leads Fred . . .

  . . . to the door

  Jeannie, Penny and Fred

  Lama contemplates . . .

  . . . making friends with Fred

  Lama, Fred and Penny

  Fred looks out to sea where the Juan Ferrer was wrecked

  Helicopters hover above the wreck

  Fred and Penny look at Peter the gull

  Fred rolls in the snow

  Fred with Susan and Janet

  Fred’s birthday party

  His guests vie with each other

  Penny at Monty’s Leap

  A month later Fred is born

  1

  ‘When do we go?’

  It was a sunny April morning, and we were sitting on the white seat beside the bare verbena bush eating our breakfast; a liner aslant from the Lizard on the horizon, Lama, the little black cat at our feet, and Boris, the muscovy drake, staring at us a few yards up the path.

  ‘Have you really made up your mind?’

  I knew what Jeannie was thinking. We had discussed holidays before. We had perused the map, had our passports renewed, thought about Brittany, decided on Paris, then changed our minds to London, and in the end had gone nowhere.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you have persuaded me.’

  A holiday sometimes begins as a course of duty. There are people, for instance, who have to be exploded out of their homes in order to escape to the enjoyment of a holiday. I am one of them.

  ‘The point is,’ Jeannie had said to me earlier. ‘you haven’t been away from Minack for eight years.’

  ‘I haven’t wanted to.’

  ‘You’ve worked very hard all these years on the flower farm.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘You’ve also written two books that in successive years were high up in the Sunday Times bestseller list.’

  ‘Flattery!’

  ‘You’ve also sold one for a Walt Disney film.’

  ‘What’s all this leading up to?’

  ‘It’s time you saw one of your books in a London bookshop.’

  ‘You’re appealing to my vanity.’

  ‘Seriously . . . I’m suggesting you see in their own surroundings the people you work with.’

  ‘A business holiday.’

  ‘If you like to put it that way. You would be able to wake up in the morning without having to worry about gales or what’s made the tractor break down or what disease has hit the freesias . . . and concentrate on your other career.’

  ‘And find out which is the more satisfying?’

  ‘You can’t deny,’ said Jeannie, flinging a bacon rind at Boris, ‘that things have been changing. I mean pressures have been put on us that remind us of the reasons why we left London to come to Minack.’

  ‘The grit in the oyster.’

  ‘And because of these pressures you haven’t been able to put your mind to the flower farm as you used to do.’

  ‘The old story of being unable to serve two masters.’

  ‘Sooner or later we’ll have to reconcile the two, and by going to London it might help. Afterwards we might see things in better perspective.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘We’ll have a gay time in London, a time of forgetting, that’s all. When we get back we’ll have to face facts. We’ll have to make a choice. We’ll have to decide whether to keep on the flower farm. And the only way to solve that problem is here at Minack.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain,’ Jeannie said, and Lama was gently rubbing against her leg. ‘I know you’re right. We can’t go on as we are. But in the meantime it would do you good to have a holiday.’

  ‘You too. Especially now after the flower season.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I agree then,’ I said, ‘when do we go?’

  Minack is a lonely spot with the nearest farm a half-mile inland. The cottage sits snug by a wood, an old granite cottage with a massive chimney which in olden days was a beacon to sailing ships making their way across Mount’s Bay to Newlyn. It has one large room, a small bedroom, and a spare room and bathroom. The site is carved out of a hillside and it faces, after a few hundred yards of moorland, the expanse of the bay. There is no other building except our old barn in sight, no road, no pylons, nothing to offend the view. The eyes peel across the gorse and the bracken, old hedges and boulders, to the sea and the distant shapes of houses far away on the Lizard peninsula.

  Our fields slope down to the cliff, a hundred feet above the sea, then are replaced by a series of small meadows tumbling in odd shapes down to the rocks. Here grew our earliest daffodils, blooming so early in the year that they rivalled the pampered, heated daffodils that come from the vast glasshouses of Spalding. We had several tons of daffodils in our fourteen acres. We also had four large mobile greenhouses covering two sites, a small and a large static greenhouse in front of the cottage, and all of them were heated by oilburning heaters each with an electric fan. The fans drove the hot air through polythene ducting.

  Had we foreseen, when we first came to Minack, such equipment and opportunity we would have been goggle-eyed with excitement. We possessed then only our hands, enthusiasm and ignorance to drive us forward in the pursuit of making a living. We had no capital. There was no route for a car to reach the cottage. There was no water except the rain from the roof, and thus no bath. Our light came from paraffin lamps and candles and, as now, we had no telephone. But we had in our hearts the exquisitely sweet relief of being freed from twentieth-century entanglements. The deceptive gloss, the gritty worship of false values, the dependence on the decisions of tin gods, all these we had escaped from; and we had the years ahead of
us in which to dwell with the primitive and to discover whether within ourselves we could earn contentment.

  One discovers in these circumstances that one’s own shadow remains the enemy. During the honeymoon of the first years a magical impulse drives you forward, seducing you into believing that each setback is a jest and each complication a momentary bad dream which has no reality in the life you are leading. It is easy to believe, at this time, that you have devised for yourself a way of life that for ever will be protected from the tendrils of computer civilisation. You delude yourself into believing that you have the same freedom as an aborigine of the South American jungle. Cut off from the do-gooders and the progress-makers you feel able to find your own level of happiness. Unharnessed by man-created shibboleths and conventions you feel you at last have the opportunity to release the forces of your secret self.

  The balloon of these inspirations remains inflated until the setbacks and the complications begin monotonously to repeat themselves; and then it gradually dawns on you that the period of illusion is over, that it ended as abruptly as a school holiday without the merit of your knowing it, and that considerable determination will have to be exercised to stop yourself drifting.

  Of course, it is pleasant to drift, as it is to lie in bed in the morning half awake. I was once a beachcomber on the island of Toopua two hundred miles south of Tahiti where my only neighbours were a Tahitian family; and I was contentedly able to develop a beachcomber mind because I knew my indulgence could not possibly last for long. I had a boat to catch and I had to come home.

  There was, however, no timetable to govern our lives at Minack. Time was our own. We could lie in bed all morning if we wished, or treat hot summer days like holidaymakers, or start a job of work, get bored, and give up. We had a roof over our heads in a setting we loved, and so long as we had enough to pay for our food we could wander along in indefinite idleness. A perpetual holiday, in fact, leading nowhere. The convential conception of the escapist.

  We were able easily to reject such an attitude, but in doing so we made a miscalculation. We still imagined we could remain in isolation spiritually, if not materially, from the force of twentieth-century progress, and from the consortium of greed, envy and guile which sponsors the rat race.

  Such a foolish error was due to the rawness of the life we led. Our pleasures were not designed for us at great expense by others. We had only to go and look out of the door, and whether the sun shimmered the Lizard in haze, or a raging storm thrust the foam and the waves into a darkening, winter sky, or the moon silvered the grey rocks that heaped around the cottage into the illusion of fairyland, we had only to see these things to shout to the heavens that we were alive. The sea breathed into our souls, the wind talked. We were part of the ageless striving of the human being. There around us, reflecting from the rough granite grey stones fingering up the walls of the cottage, were the calls of haymakers and the echo of carthorses, fishermen bringing their catch to the door, centuries of truthful endeavour, blazing summers, gales sweeping in from the south, justice in uncomplicated judgement, babies born and wagons carrying the old. All this we were aware of. All this elated every moment of our life at Minack. All this was our stronghold.

  We had yet to learn that no one can escape from his shadow, and in order to survive in our new kind of life we had to compromise. We had to pay court to those who project the success of others. We had to flirt with the sponsors of the rat race. And by embracing the slippery, transient applause we faced losing what we had set out at Minack to achieve.

  2

  April is the between-time of a Cornish flower farm. Where once bloomed violets, anemones and daffodils, there are wastes of green. Soon the anemone plants are ploughed into the ground, and those of the violets split up into runners and planted again to flower the following winter. Only the daffodil beds remain and the foliage, as the summer advances, withers to yellow, pointing to the moment when the bulbs, if need be, are dug, separated, sterilised and planted again.

  It is a time of planning. Shall we have the violets again this year? They take much time to pick and to bunch. If the weather is kind they flower profusely and a glut is inevitable. If it is bad, prices may be high but there are few blooms. And anemones? They, too, are at the mercy of the weather, so could not the time involved in looking after them be better employed in other ways?

  We had decided this April to streamline our programme. We would concentrate on crops in the greenhouses, except for the outdoor daffodils. Thus tomatoes were already planted in neat rows in the greenhouses, two thousand five hundred of them; and by the beginning of May we would have planted the freesia seeds. Some would go in a couple of thousand whalehide pots, and the rest would be planted in the open sites of two mobiles; and they would all be covered by glass as soon as the tomatoes were finished.

  ‘Obviously,’ I said firmly, ‘this is the time to go for the holiday. Now. Immediately.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Jeannie, ‘you take eight years to decide on going away, and now everything has to be arranged overnight.’

  ‘I’ve got myself excited about it,’ I said, ‘I want to get away before any doubts set in.’

  ‘Why should there be any doubts?’

  ‘Doubts always set in if you stop to think.’

  ‘Don’t think then.’

  ‘I’m not going to, but I have to plan. I have to plan the work for the student and arrange how he and his wife are going to look after Lama, Boris and the others.’

  The student came from an agricultural college and was working for us while he looked for a place of his own to go to. He was the only help we had.

  ‘What are you going to do about Lama, for instance?’ I asked, ‘she’s never been left on her own before, and without us she might go wild again.’

  ‘I think the best thing is to give her plenty of her favourite foods,’ said Jeannie, ‘and then we can hope that she will sleep most of the day.’

  Lama came into our lives three years before. A mysterious arrival. The vet who then examined her said she was three months old, an exquisite little black kitten with one white whisker. It should have been easy to trace where she had come from because farms and cottages in our district are so few and far between. We visited each one for miles around. Nobody owned up to her. So where had she spent her first three months?

  My first sight of her was at the beginning of that daffodil season, a black spot in the distance; but a couple of weeks later I was passing by a meadow of marigolds when I suddenly became aware of her scrutiny. She was three-quarters hidden within a mass of orange flowers, a small black velvet cushion with a pair of yellow eyes which followed me as I went by. I was acutely conscious of her steady stare; and I felt I was being assessed by a possible employer as to my qualifications in regard to a job.

  My first touch of her was nearly disastrous. I found her one morning in the chicken run, and foolishly believing we could be friends I advanced to pick her up. Instead she hurtled herself against the wire netting, crazily tried to thrust her head through the small holes, then escaped from my fumbling hands by shooting up a tree and leaping like a monkey from one branch to another until she jumped clear, and disappeared into the wood.

  Jeannie’s approach was more subtle. She wooed her by placing saucers of milk at strategic places distant from the cottage, then reporting excitedly when the saucers were found to be empty. This courtship, this fencing between Lama and ourselves, continued until Easter Sunday afternoon when a tremendous storm blew in from the sea.

  We were sitting in the cottage, the roar of the gale battering the walls and the roof, and Jeannie was reading her diary of almost exactly the year before. Monty, our old cat, was then dying and she read from her diary the account of the efforts she had made to save him. She also recalled what I had said to her at the time. I had said that as far as I was concerned, and she agreed, we would never have a cat again because we would never be able to repeat the love we had for Monty. Then I added, and this she also reca
lled, I would be ready to make one possible exception to this decision. That was if a cat, uninvited and untraceable, came crying to the door in a storm; but it had to be black.

  Here we were then, on that Easter Sunday, sitting in the cottage when above the noise of the gale I heard a miaow, and another, and another. I leapt from my chair, opened the cottage door; and into our lives came Lama.

  Lama, therefore, while we were away, had to be suitably cared for, and so Jeannie decided she would have her favourites. Cod and whiting would be in the deep freeze, an emergency packet of Felix would be in the pantry; and to launch our departure there would be a special supply of pig’s liver. Fed at steady intervals by the student and his wife, Lama would sleep and forget us. That, at any rate, was the aim.

  There remained Boris, Knocker, Squeaker and Peter. Boris, the muscovy drake, had measured habits which had to be adhered to. He was a strong character who lived alone in the large one-time chicken house deep in the wood to which he retired without persuasion every evening as dusk was falling. He would waddle there, taking his time, then fly ponderously up on to his perch; and later we would come along to lock up his door and safeguard him from any prowling dangers of the night.

  In the morning he could be difficult. He would explode in wrath if we were late in letting him out, hissing his fury and flapping his wings, charging after us as we returned to the cottage so that sometimes I have found myself murmuring: ‘I’m sorry, Boris.’

  He had arrived at Minack three years before in the arms of Jane, the young girl who then worked for us. A young farmer had attempted to woo her by bringing Boris in a sack to her cottage, and offering him for her dinner.

  Her response was to burst out in anger, remove Boris quickly from the sack, and take him up to her bedroom, where he remained for two days. Then her mother thought it was time for him to move, and Jane brought him to Minack.

  His sense of independence, however, would make it easy to leave him. He enjoyed being undisturbed. He pottered about in the grass, dipped his yellow beak frequently in the pail of water kept full for the purpose, and two or three times a day plodded up the steep path to the door of the cottage for any titbits that might be available. He would, of course, miss these rewards, and Jeannie decided to compensate him by preparing a plentiful supply of his favourite home-made bread.