'I'll take us all out to dinner tonight,' she announces when we return Annabel to her rightful place in the village. 'To make amends.'
She does and after a glass or two of wine, we're all laughing hysterically over the incident. But not as much as I laughed when, sitting in the car, I watched and listened while Annie apologized to Annabel's owners and tried to explain her actions. The bemused look on their faces, the tolerant rolling of the eyes and shaking of their heads as Annie turned to walk away from them, had me in stitches all the way home.
The last week in February is half term, and once again most of the second-homers are in residence. When I get to Adam and Elizabeth Johnson's house, I'm relieved to see them. 'Good to see you back,' I say to Mrs Johnson when she answers the door.
She looks distracted. Behind her, there are the shrieks and hollers of two children seemingly murdering each other. 'So sorry, it's the twins,' she says and shouts at them to stop whatever they're doing at once.
I hand her the post and she takes it, thanks me and starts to shut the front door. 'Er, Mrs Johnson, about Marmalade?'
'What?' she's hardly listening to me as the noise inside the house starts again.
'Marmalade?' I repeat.
'Oh, uh, no thanks, I brought all those basics down with us from London.'
Before she can shut the door again I say quickly, 'I meant your cat, Marmalade. He's still in our freezer back at the post office.'
She looks at me as if I were a lunatic until the penny finally drops. 'Oh, that Marmalade, of course. I'm so sorry, I'm not quite with it today. Such a chore, getting organized to come down here. And Adam not able to get away until the weekend.'
'I'm sure it must be,' I say, trying very hard to be sincere. Having a second home is such a burden, I want to say, I'm so glad we haven't that worry.
We stand there looking at each other for a moment. I'm waiting for her to tell me when she's going to collect her frozen cat but she doesn't say a thing, only stands there politely waiting for me to go. Finally I say, 'You wanted us to keep him until half term so your children could have a funeral. So will you collect him yourself from Morranport? Or would you like me to deliver him with your post?'
She looks horrified. 'Oh dear. Oh no, God no.'
'That's fine then. You can collect him any time from nine to five. Nell will be there at the post office, she knows where to find him.'
But Mrs Johnson is shaking her head. 'Look, uh, oh sorry, I've forgotten your name . . .'
'Tessa Hainsworth.'
'Tessa, I'm so sorry to put you to all this trouble but the children seem to have forgotten all about Marmalade. In fact we've already got another cat; he's in London with Adam. So if you don't mind disposing of the, uh, carcass, I'd very much appreciate it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go and sort out the twins.' She closes the door firmly without another word.
Back at Morranport Nell says, 'I've got a good mind to go meself to that fool of a woman and leave the body on the doorstep. What she be thinkin' of ?'
'I don't know but it looks like we're stuck with a frozen cat in the freezer indefinitely.'
She glares at me. I shrug, rolling my eyes.
And then, as we usually do in ludicrous situations like this, Nell and I begin to giggle, then laugh, with such abandon that a customer walks into the shop, takes one look at us and walks out hurriedly.
'We've got to stop this,' I gasp when I can talk again. 'You've just lost a customer.'
'Must of been a stranger,' Nell gasps when she can speak again. 'Anyone else would of stayed on, found out what be goin' on so he could join the fun.'
No doubt others did. The tale of frozen Marmalade was all around Morranport by the next morning.
March
I'm feeling so settled into my job now that I've decided to make a real effort to fit into the community. The first thing I do is to get involved in an after-school gardening club for the children at our local primary school.
I run it together with Daphne. My relationship with her is still the same, confined to a chat in the village shop and at school functions. Once or twice I've hinted that we meet more often but she pretends she doesn't get it. I'm resigned to it by now though it still saddens me.
The gardening club idea came to us while Daphne and I were waiting for the children one afternoon. We were standing near the wonderful garden attached to the school which was unused and overgrown. Daphne and I agreed that it was a waste, all that lovely space gone to seed, and that was how it all started.
Twenty-five children sign up for our club. First I'm excited then worried. What do we do with them? What will we grow? Where will we get all the seeds, the young plants, the compost, the pots? But first things first, I tell myself.
Daphne has a couple of cows calving and she's unable to concentrate on the gardening club during this time so I'm on my own the first day, with twenty-five eager young faces gleaming at me ready to be inspired.
By me? I panic. I can already hear Annie's giggles as I tell her about this. She knows I've never been a gardener who knows what she's doing but there's a first time for everything, isn't there? It's a cold cloudy day but at least it's not raining, not yet. A strong sou'westerly is beginning to blow but I'm determined to keep the troops' morale high. 'Chocolate digestives, children,' I shout, brandishing the biscuit packet high above my head. It nearly blows out of my hand but before my audience can dissolve into anarchic laughter I cry, 'And orange squash for all! Let's picnic before we start, and when we finish we'll have more treats.'
Biscuits crunched and drinks downed, the youngsters set to work with spades and forks, setting into the overgrowth like a wraith of pint-sized furies. It takes a number of after-school sessions and the help of several parents we've roped in before finally the ground is cleared and dug over, ready to be planted when the planting season is upon us. Right now it's wet and freezing but it won't be long till spring.
'Miss, what will we plant?' one of the more precocious children asks me.
'Not sure.' I hadn't thought that far ahead. I was far too concerned with getting the ground prepared while the rains held off. Just as well too, for it's pouring now. Wildly I look around for Daphne but she's just gone home. The rest of us have all run inside the school house where we are waiting for the storm to let up.
Others are taking up the chorus. 'What will we plant, Mrs Hainsworth? What are we going to grow?'
'Runner beans!' a bright-eyed sprog of a child shouts. The others start to add their penny's worth.
'No, peas. I love peas.'
'Onions! Great hu-mun-gous onions to make the girls cry!'
'Shut up Alan, I bet you cry as much as girls.'
'Don't.'
'Do.'
'Sunflowers! Let's grow lots and lots of sunflowers.'
'And pink flowers and red flowers and blue and yellow and . . .'
'And onions!'
'And beans to make the boys fart!'
'We never!'
This is getting out of hand. 'SHUSH EVERYONE.' I put on my stern no-nonsense voice. 'We'll grow everything we can. IF you all behave yourselves.'
Foul weather hits Cornwall so our gardening project has to move inside. Daphne and I get everyone to write recipes for things we'd like to cook with the vegetables we'll grow. We draw pictures of gardens and make paper flowers. We collect yogurt pots to fill with compost and plant seedlings. The trouble is, we have no compost, no seeds or seedlings, and no money to buy these things. And so I take my problem to my customers.
By now I'm getting to know them quite well. Mr Hawker, my poor, dear, sad, old man, has become almost a friend in that we always chat for at least ten minutes, sometimes more, when I deliver his post. I've discovered he likes KitKats so every week I take him a pack of six small ones. He thanks me solemnly and profusely. He gives me things too – an old women's magazine he found in one of his cupboards somewhere, an apple left over from a box that Martin and Emma Rowland gave him last autumn. I accept all these thi
ngs with the same profusion of thanks and solemnity he gives me when I present my KitKats.
Other customers are beginning to give me things too – the odd bunch of early spring flowers, a jar of home-made marmalade, some frozen blackberries in an old margarine carton. Susie told me at the start not to refuse anything, no matter how mouldy the fruit, or how many jars of marmalade I already have gathering dust in my cupboards. 'You'll be hurtin' their feelings bad,' she said to me gravely, 'if you don't take their gifts.'
Now I am going to beg for gifts. I tell all the customers I get a chance to talk to about the school's gardening club, tell them how we're on the scrounge for supplies. By the next week, people on my route are waiting outside as I arrive to give me half-filled bags of compost, plastic pots, ceramic basins and cuttings from favourite plants.
When I deliver to Trehallow, the 'doggie' hamlet as I call it in my head, I risk Batman's wrath to accept sprigs of rosemary from his keeper, my favourite little old great-grandmother. Batman is usually inside when I arrive, howling his huge canine head off. 'He likes you,' Great-grandmother tells me. 'That's his bark when someone he knows and likes comes around.'
Silly me, not recognizing a happy bark, I think as I go away with the cuttings. Pity Royal Mail didn't add How to Talk Dog in their induction.
Others in Trehallow are generous too. Lily, the border terrier who is on a perpetual diet, is actually allowed three green biscuits while her owner rummages in her garden shed and comes out with a tray of leek seedlings. 'The luck o' the Irish to you, maid,' she says as she always does. I've given up wondering why this Cornish woman always wishes me Irish luck and just accept it gladly.
Blackie, the next door's mongrel, hears me and is yapping for her biscuit before I even get to the garden gate. It's bone-shaped yellow biscuits for Blackie and as I drop them into her salivating mouth her owners, the roly-poly Tweedledee and Tweedledum, come waddling out and say in unison, 'Oh Tessa, we be hearing 'bout your garden club.'
They, and Blackie, herd me into their greenhouse and by the time I leave, my van is full of marvellous cuttings and tiny plants: courgettes, runner beans and lettuce, ready soon to be planted out into our newly prepared soil.
When I tell Martin and Emma Rowland about the school gardening club, they're more enthusiastic than I am. Since they lost the farm and had to open the B&B, they've taken to gardening in a big way. 'Never had time for it when we were farming,' Emma told me. 'But I find time now, even during busy season. Soothes my soul. Soothes Martin, too. He's never got over not working the land, so working a garden is at least next best.'
When I next deliver to them, they're both waiting for me. They too start filling my van with all sorts of plants and cuttings, mountains of them. They add some organic fertilizer – 'We've got loads' – and even some old tools that they say they don't need any more.
I try to thank them but Martin scowls, trying to look blustery. ''Tis nothing, maid.'
Then his face lightens. A pick-up has arrived and in the back, sitting on a clean pile of straw, are two small brown goats. 'Look, the little 'uns are here,' he beams at his wife.
He takes them out, one by one. They've just been weaned, the farmer who brought them tells us. Martin is already talking to them, calming them like his own children, as he leads them to their waiting field and pen.
Emma says, watching him, 'He does miss his animals so. I thought if we got a couple of goats, it would be something. He can go out and talk to them when the guests drive him up the wall.'
From Trelak Farm, I go to Mr Hawker with one lone envelope, obviously a circular. He hears me coming and is standing at his open door waiting for me. We exchange a few words about the weather then he stiffly, awkwardly, thrusts something out at me, obviously wanting me to take it. 'I heerd tell from Martin you be doing a garden thing with the kiddies. Here be some seeds fer it.'
I take the two packets of runner bean seeds. They're covered with dust and grime; the packaging looks old-fashioned, the colours faded. Mr Hawker must have dug them out from a shed or cupboard where they'd stood for years, maybe even decades.
'Why thank you, Mr Hawker,' I say, moved once again by this kind old man. 'This will certainly be a help.'
As I drive away I turn to look at him. He's still standing in the open doorway, his hand up in a slight wave.
I bring my loot to the school and Daphne smiles while the kids hoot and cheer. 'My goodness, Tessa, haven't you done well,' she says.
'Not me, my customers,' I tell her.
During the next week, while the weather remains foul, we put plants in pots, cuttings into compost and plant seeds in long planters. We label and make notes with all the enthusiasm of those early Victorian plant gatherers.
And then, when the weather improves, it's time to put some of the plants out, early though it still is. For this is South Cornwall where things of a seasonal nature happen far earlier than anywhere else in England, like plants growing and birds nesting. Which they're doing now, some of them. I hear them in the early morning dawn, making their birdsong. Blackbirds, robins, skylarks, doves – the sky seems full of melody as winter turns slowly into spring. Often these days I stop the van on lonely country lanes to listen and watch. In London my only connection with these marvellous feathered creatures was the odd bedraggled pigeon but here you can't help but be a bird lover. We've even learned to love chickens. Impulsively, longing for free range eggs, Ben and I have bought half a dozen point-of-lay chickens, beautiful brown Rhode Islanders with yellow legs. Ben built a house for them in the back garden and we've fenced off a section of lawn where they can roam freely and happily. I can't wait to start eating the eggs.
Easter comes at the end of March this year and there is a school fête to raise money. It's a Saturday afternoon and the whole village turns out: children, parents, grandparents and siblings, dogs and cats and even a pet rabbit on a lead. It's another balmy day with the March winds mercifully at bay today. Ben, the kids and I walk to the school and as Will and Amy go on ahead, we linger at the kaleidoscope of colour in the village. The magnolias are in full bloom and are now joined by rhododendrons and azaleas. The colours are dazzling – bright blues and purples, pale pinks and creamy whites, oranges of every shade from pale marmalade to dark amber. It will go on like this next month and the next, this chaos of colour.
We get there early as I'm going to man our gardening club stall while Ben runs a 'Pluck the Pheasant' stall. He's made a free-standing wooden pheasant cut out with feathers he got from a gamekeeper's wife, and the child that plucks a feather tipped with red nail polish wins a lolly. There are food stalls and tea stalls, great tables laden with clean quality used clothes for a jumble sale, an assortment of games to play – guessing how many coins in a bottle, throwing hoops and tug-of-war.
I have several young helpers on my gardening stall and they're doing just fine, so I let them take over while I roam around. Daphne stops to say she'll take over our stall for the last hour, to free the youngsters. She's with several of her friends from the village, all laughing and talking easily. I watch them as they go off and mingle with the crowd, thinking of what several non-Cornish residents have told me, that it takes about twenty years to be accepted, so it's early days yet.
I go back to our stall which was crammed with all the seedlings and other plants we didn't have room for in the school garden. Unfortunately, the labels the children had so carefully placed on everything had smeared, so that no one knew what they were buying. Despite that, everything has gone, even the dozen small pots with the rosemary cuttings dipped in root powder that I'd helped the kids to plant. 'Ah,' I say when I realize they've gone. 'Oh dear.' I'd put them aside when I saw that the rosemary hadn't taken, that these were all small pots of dead stalks. 'Well, it was for a good cause,' I mutter to myself, counting the great wad of money we'd just made for the school.
That night, flushed with success – Ben's stall had made a huge profit too – we go down to the village pub for a drink after dinner, t
aking advantage of the fact that Will and Amy are staying overnight at a friend's house. The pub is packed, with lots of folk from both our village and the neighbouring ones. We stop to chat to people at the bar before weaving our way through the rowdy crowd looking for a table for two.
On our way we pass Daphne and her husband Joe, sitting at the long low oak table in the corner with three other couples. 'Well done, Tessa,' she says. Then, to the others, 'The gardening club's produce raised the most money at the fête today and the whole thing was Tessa's idea.'
While I try to protest that Daphne was as much responsible as I was, everyone praises me, saying complimentary things and sounding as if they really mean every word. I feel touched by it all. But then there's an awkward moment when the talk runs out and we're still standing there. Joe asks us, belatedly, to join them, and Daphne nods her head, smiling. Somehow it's too late. Though perhaps sincere, it doesn't sound natural. They've got a closed group, a group of old friends with years of shared experiences. To join them would be to alter their dynamics; we would feel intruders. So we say truthfully that there's no room and that anyway we're not staying long. No one tries to dissuade us.
We find a corner with a table for two and have a drink, some crisps. The pub is like countless others both in Cornwall and all over England – low ceiling, oak beams, horse brasses, beer-smelling, dark but pleasant – and comfortable enough. We talk about the fête, about our jobs, about the children, and then decide to get home for an early night. Everyone waves cheerily as we leave.
Easter also brings the first wave of 'emmetts', the Cornish word for tourists. In Devon I've heard that the word is 'grockles'. The two counties are careful of these distinctions; I know that people who live in Devon can be quite as sniffy as the Cornish when both places are lumped together as a vague West Country entity. Everyone is quite clear that when you cross the Tamar River, you cross a line from one world to another.
Up With the Larks Page 12
