A Gull on the Roof

by Derek Tangye

  The tadpole problem remained until they grew into frogs. I used to crouch beside the stream with a jug and a cup, flicking the tadpoles out of one and emptying the water into the other. It was a laborious way of fetching water, and more so when we needed water at night, and then Jeannie would gleam the torch on the swimming black spots while I repeated my methods of the daytime.

  We were, in fact, leading the life of two campers, and the prospect of continuing to do so appeared to stretch far ahead. The cottage was sparse of furniture. We had no bed and we slept on a mattress laid on the floor. Our pride was a fitted carpet in the sitting room but with it we had only one armchair, a divan, a table and three kitchen chairs. We saw no reason to grumble. We had left our furniture behind for the very good reason it was earning us money.

  The house at Mortlake which we ourselves rented unfurnished, had been let by us to a young Embassy official and his wife. The profit we derived was to be our income at Minack, and we therefore took care to see that our tenants would be satisfied. He was a solemn young man, and neither he nor his wife had been away from their native land before; and when, after a lengthy inspection of the house they expressed their desire to rent it, I proposed that it first should be vetted by the chief of his department. The chief arrived, inspected and gave his blessing both to the house and the rent; and as the young man wanted to move in as quickly as possible, he and I came to a gentleman’s agreement that he could take possession without waiting for the formal agreement to be signed.

  Hence, although we were now without furniture we did have a small income . . . but not for long. Three months after the young man had moved in, just as the lease was about to be signed, he moved out. I contacted his chief and also the Embassy concerned, but with no result. A gentleman’s agreement was not a valid document. Thus Jeannie and I suddenly had our income cut off, had an empty furnished house on our hands, and were three hundred miles away from superintending its reletting. It was a worrying situation until I said to Jeannie: ‘Look, we’ve been compromising by keeping the house. At the back of our minds we’ve been thinking we might want to go back. We won’t and we know it. Let’s give it up.’

  Early one late summer morning we got out the Land Rover and drove up to London; and by the following day we had seen our landlord, given up the lease and sold him the fittings, and had arranged for some of our furniture to be sold, some to be transported to Minack.

  The incident was a warning that escape is not an end to itself and it sharply removed from our minds the pleasant reflection of its achievement. London was no longer our home. It was now vital to make a success of the apprenticeship in the way of life we had chosen to follow; and it is the story of this apprenticeship that I am ready to tell.

  4

  April passed, the potato season drew near and the inhabitants of the district, including ourselves, began to develop the mood of prospectors in a gold rush.

  Three and four times a day Jeannie and I inspected the land which Tommy Williams had planted with one and a half tons of seed – the small meadows he had cut out of the top of the cliff, and the upper part of the cemetery field. The sight fascinated us. We stood and stared at the dark green leaves, hypnotised by their coarse texture, greedily calculating the amount of the harvest; then we would bend down and tickle a plant, stirring the earth round it with our hands, and calling out when we found a tiny potato . . .

  ‘Need a nice shower,’ Tommy would say, ‘and they’ll treble in size within a week.’ Or in the lane, I would meet John who, in answer to the inevitable question: ‘How are the taties looking?’ would say gloomily, ‘Been known for a gale to come at this stage . . . blast them black and only the weight of seed been lifted.’ It was not only the size of the harvest which was at stake, but also its timing. There was a rivalry among growers as to who would be the first to draw, like jockeys at the starting gate; and the information that was circulated was as inspired as that on a racecourse. I would go up to Jim Grenfell’s pub at St Buryan in the evening and listen to the gossip.

  ‘Bill Strick was cut by frost last night.’

  ‘Over at Mousehole they look handsome.’

  ‘Nothing will be going away until after Buryan Feast.’

  ‘William Henry starts drawing Monday.’

  These rumours and false alarms increased as the pace of excitement grew faster every day, and by the end of the month the inevitable question had become: ‘Started drawing yet?’ The disinterested – the postman, the man at the garage, the proprietor of our St Buryan grocers, put the question as a matter of politeness; our fellow growers, whether neighbours or others living a few miles away, jerked it out as if they were apprehensive we might spring a surprise. Our land, having never grown potatoes before, might upset the balance of prestige . . . supposing Tangye was first to draw? Of course, we caught the fever ourselves and went staring jealously at meadows other than our own, and asked repeatedly: ‘Started drawing yet?’

  The mounting tension had an effect similar to the concern of a general who feels he is being pushed into battle before he is ready. There was the pressure of local prestige on the one hand, hard economics on the other, and the economics were very confusing.

  Supposing the price on a certain day at the beginning of the season was 1s. a pound but a week later it dropped to 8d. a pound. In that week the crop may have doubled in size and you would therefore be receiving 1s. 4d. a pound. On the other hand the increase in weight would cost more labour and more in freight, and require twice as many chip baskets; and in any case the price might have dropped to 6d. a pound and the crop failed to increase as expected. Moreover for the early potato growers like ourselves whose crop is grown in the cliffs, there was always the shadow of the farmers. We had to hand-dig our crop with a shovel, while they careered through their fields with tractors towing spinners. These spinners threw out the potatoes so fast that with sufficient labour a farmer could send away ten tons in a day; and so our economic survival depended on clearing our crops before they began.

  There was the bewildering problem of marketing. No difficulty existed about finding a salesman, the problem was which salesman to choose. Several had visited us representing different firms and different markets but their methods of approach were the same; they smiled winningly, talked jovially, and then offered us identical terms. We had to pay 9d. for each chip basket (chips were used at the beginning of the season), pay the freight charges and ten per cent commission on the gross sales, and had to trust to luck for the price obtained on the morning our consignment arrived in the market. With this information I was able to calculate approximately how much each ton of potatoes we sent away would cost us. One hundred and sixty chips were required for a ton—£6. Each chip was scheduled to contain 14 lbs of potatoes but another 1 lb was required to allow for shrinkage in transit; if the price, then, was 8d. a pound, we would give away £5. The charge for freight to the Midlands or London (and it had to be passenger train in order to travel overnight) was another £10 a ton. There was paper to put in the chips, string with which to tie them, and the cost of taking them to Penzance station – another £5.

  Thus we had to pay £26 a ton, or about 3d. a pound out of the price we received in the market – in addition to the ten per cent commission. Then there was the cost of the seed, fertilisers and labour involved, all of which had to be covered before we made any profit ourselves. From the purist’s point of view all new potatoes should be in chips because they travel and keep much better than when they are in sacks; but the 56 lb sacks cost only a shilling, the shrinkage required for each sack is only an extra 2 lbs and these are despatched by freight train instead of by passenger train. Hence there would be a stage during the season when the potatoes had begun to arrive in the market in bulk with the consequent drop in price, when sacks would replace the chips.

  One Monday morning Tommy Williams came striding up the lane while we were sitting on a rock sipping cups of coffee, idly watching Monty stalk a mouse in the grass. Tommy was now work
ing the first three days of the week for us, another two days for John; and thus his loyalty to the potato meadows was divided. On this particular morning he had an evangelist look, his chin thrust out, and his tall figure in ragged working clothes like a prophet on the warpath. ‘John’s told me he’s starting to draw this morning,’ he rushed out as if he had brought news that war had been declared, ‘we must go down the cliff at once and see what ours are like. You bring the chips and I’ll take the shovel.’

  We swallowed our coffee and off we went, Tommy with the shovel over his shoulder, I with a bundle of chips, and Jeannie walking hopefully behind. The weather was perfect. The sea was smooth as a pool and flecked with gulls swimming nonchalantly like ducks; and as we trudged down the cliff the old steamship Scillonian sailed past outward bound to the Scilly Isles, cutting through the water as gently as a yacht. Tommy brought out the telescope he always carried with him. ‘Got a car on board,’ he said importantly. In the summer she sailed to and fro the islands every day, and in the winter every other day in each direction except when the Scilly flower season was at its height. She was a friendly sight and she became, as her successor has also become, a timepiece. ‘Has the Scillonian gone past?’ I would call out, or Tommy or Jeannie.

  Her course took her parallel to our meadows a half mile out, a sea-green painted hull and a yellow funnel; and sometimes in a storm when the sea was running mountainous waves we would watch with our hearts in our mouths as she lurched toy-sized among them. Then Tommy – brutally – would roar with laughter; ‘I bet them passengers are feeling bad.’ In fair weather she berthed at Penzance, in bad she made for Newlyn, and as she was the link between the Scilly flower growers and the mainland markets, her skipper sailed her in seas when she might have been expected to remain in harbour. There was one occasion when, after leaving the islands, a gale so fierce blew up that when she reached Mount’s Bay she was three hours late and it was dark. The skipper, a Scillonian, unexpectedly decided it was too dangerous to enter Newlyn harbour, and chose to spend the night steaming to and fro across the Bay, sailing out the gale. There was wry laughter in the Scillies when this was known. The Government, a few weeks before, had announced that the Scillonians were to be liable for income tax – and off the boat the following morning stepped two sick-looking Inland Revenue Inspectors.

  We reached a meadow at the top of the cliff and I cut the string of a bundle and singled out a chip while Tommy banged the edge of the shovel on his boot in the manner of an acrobat calling attention to a special trick. Then, with Jeannie and me standing expectantly beside him he stabbed under a plant and turned it upside down. Several little white potatoes connected together as if by a string lay in the soil. Tommy said nothing and moved to another part of the meadow and stabbed again. The same thing happened.

  ‘Look’s like we’re going to be disappointed,’ he murmured, ‘we’ll try the May Queen over there. They should be ready.’ We walked over to the meadow which was steep and fringed with bluebells. Tommy turned over one plant, then another, picked up the stems and shook them, and ran his hands through the soil. We were out of luck. The May Queen were no better than the Pilot we had tried first. ‘Marbles!’ Tommy snorted with disgust, ‘just marbles!’ We gathered up the little white things for ourselves, cross and disappointed, and trooped back silently, disconsolately, to the cottage. As Tommy put away his shovel he looked at me, his eyes no longer blazing, and grunted: ‘Don’t say a word to anyone in the village about this. Keep your affairs to yourselves. Some of them are a mean lot and they’ll be pleased.’ I nodded solemnly in agreement.

  Our village of St Buryan stands on high ground three miles from the coast on the road to Land’s End, and the church spire is a beacon to ships far out to sea. It is a sturdy village of neat granite cottages with grey slate roofs and no pretensions about being quaint. It is a businesslike village and makes you feel that it prides itself in brawn and courage rather than in brain and guile, in the basic virtues rather than those which are acquired. Until a year or so ago there was no main water and the village supply was tapped from a spring in the square opposite the inn; so that when you stood in the bar looking out of the window, you watched the inhabitants filling their pails of water as their ancestors had done patiently for centuries before them. It is a village which challenges the sensibilities and yet soothes them, as if it were an integral part of the gales which lash it and the calm which follows. It is not a village in which to live and be idle, for work conscientiously performed is the yardstick of value. It is generous both in spirit and in pocket, for no worthy cause fails to meet with success; but if it is willing to like, it is also quick to distrust, and slow to forgive. It is, in fact, a village of character.

  The name comes from that of an Irish girl saint and is pronounced Berian. How she came to the Land’s End peninsula is obscure, but in ancient days Irish pilgrims used to travel to the continent by way of Padstow and Mousehole. The object was to avoid the stormy passage around the ‘corner’ of England by landing at Padstow, travelling overland to Mousehole and embarking in another ship for France. It is believed that in the sixth century she was one of these pilgrims. In any case the shrine of St Buryan existed in the tenth century when King Athelstan swept into Cornwall to drive out the Danes who garrisoned the county and the Isles of Scilly. His final great battle in Cornwall was at Boleigh Hill, two miles from Minack, and he afterwards rested his troops at St Buryan before setting out from the beaches of Sennen near Land’s End to invade the Isles of Scilly. On the day before he sailed he worshipped before the shrine and vowed, if the expedition was successful, that he would as a thank-offering build and endow a church.

  The original church decayed into rubble during the fifteenth century and at the beginning of the sixteenth the present one was built. It is a beautiful old barn of a building, and in a village whose limited number of inhabitants are divided between Methodists and members of the Church of England, it has the effect of a cathedral. In a corner of the church is a collection of ancient finds that have been made in the district and which were gathered together by a remarkable old man named Croft who was Vicar of St Buryan when we came to Minack. It seemed that Croft was as much interested in the past as he was in his parishioners and he spent much of his time seeking the history of the parish from ancient documents and in leading groups of earnest archaeologists in excavating from the soil the traces of Stone Age settlements.

  A few months after our arrival, a mason repairing a wall in the cottage had discovered a cavity, neatly roofed with small stones, which he explained was an old oven dating back some five hundred years. A few days later I looked out of the window and saw an old man struggling slowly up the steep path to the door. ‘The Vicar’s come to call!’ I cried out to Jeannie, and Jeannie in those few split seconds between the sight of an unexpected visitor and his arrival, rushed round the room picking up papers and hiding unwashed plates. ‘Why didn’t he warn us?’ she moaned, while I wondered how I was going to explain why I never went to his church. I ushered him into the room and he sat down on the sofa, panting from the exertions of his walk. He sat silent until he had recovered himself then, with a gleam of excitement in his eyes, looked at me and said, ‘I’ve come to see the oven!’

  The trail of archaeologists used to irk the inhabitants of St Buryan and there was one old man, many years ago, who became a hero to the village for the trick he played on a group. He was a specialist in stories about Athelstan’s Battle of Boleigh which, he declared, had been handed down from father to son in his family from generation to generation; and so sincere was his note of authenticity that historians never failed to bring out their notebooks in excited belief. The fields where the battle is supposed to have been fought are known as Gul Reeve which is the old Cornish for ‘red field’; and as neither the soil nor anything else in the neighbourhood is red, it has always been presumed that the name is derived from the blood that flowed. Nearby is a farm and the old man declared one day to a group of believers that the
dead of the battle were buried in a long trench in a field adjacent to the farm buildings. He knew the exact position, having carried in his head the number of paces from each corner of the field that led to the trench, details that had been told to him by his father. A score of men dug for two days and not a bone was found. The archaeologists were angry, the men who had done the digging happily pocketed their pay, and the old man grinned. ‘If mistake there be,’ he said, ‘it be due to father.’

  On these same Gul Reeve fields stand, some distance apart, two massive upright stones which are known as the Pipers. They are, in fact, Peace Stones, representing the Conqueror and the Conquered, erected presumably after the Battle of Boleigh. But during the centuries in between they acquired the name of the Pipers so that they might dovetail into the story that the elders of St Buryan told their children about the circle of nineteen stones known as the Merry Maidens which stand in a field a few hundred yards away on the other side of the road. The elders told the story as a warning against playing on Sundays. The nineteen stones were nineteen maidens of the parish who were lured by two young men to dance on a Sunday afternoon; and while the girls tripped daintily hand in hand, the young men played their flutes – until there was a flash of lightning and they were all turned to stone.

  Our post came from St Buryan, and the telegrams from a sub-post office at Lamorna. Our first postman had an eccentric sense of delivery and his route to the cottage across fields and over hedges was to him an unwelcome steeplechase. Letters, therefore, sometimes reached us two days late, sometimes three, sometimes not at all. This waywardness fitted our mood until one morning I received a writ for an unpaid account without ever having seen the letter of warning which preceded it. The telegrams also came across the fields, and the authorities awarded the sub-postmaster with a special bonus of sevenpence for each delivery. Usually they were from Americans who had arrived at the Savoy to find Jeannie had left, and a telegram would arrive asking us to lunch the following day as if the distance between Minack and the Strand was that between Chelsea and Kensington; or else it would be a request for us to telephone at some inconvenient hour as if the charge was a fourpenny call and the call-box in our front garden.