A Gull on the Roof

by Derek Tangye

  After a sequence of such requests I made enquiries about installing a telephone, half-hearted enquiries which were more of a gesture to conventionality than a desire to have one; and made in the confident belief that the cost of installation with its half-mile of wire and poles would in any case be prohibitive. I was surprised when the Post Office informed me that the cost would be twelve shillings and sixpence and the installation immediate; and the Post Office was surprised when it received my letter explaining I had changed my mind and did not want one after all. We still have no telephone and although it is sometimes irritating to drive two miles to the nearest call-box, we are spared the far greater irritation of a menacing ringing bell.

  A month after our arrival, and when the tension of the impending potato season was reaching its climax, we received a telegram, ‘Expect me tomorrow night’ and signed ‘Uncle B’ – the nickname by which many knew Baron, the photographer. He was to be our first visitor and the first to pose a problem difficult to solve. If you earn your living from the land you have to work regular hours like anyone who goes to an office, but unlike the office worker, you do not have the security of an office building to shelter you from your friends. A further difficulty is that most people who visit Cornwall are on holiday with time to spare and an inclination to look up old friends or to stay with them for a night or two at the same pressure of gaiety as in the days of their former acquaintance. On our part although we usually quailed at the prospect of visitors, we surrendered when they arrived and suffered penitence for the lost hours after they had departed. Our real difficulty arose when such visitors arrived in sequence throughout a summer, each an old friend regained from the past, each deserving the full attention of a merry reunion. It was on such occasions, and those when we paid rare visits to London, that our ego of sophistication reasserted itself leaving that of the peasant to provide the remorse.

  The gusto of Baron was that of a roaring gale which eventually exhausts itself into stillness. He pounded every twenty-four hours like a punchball, working, playing, loving, talking, drinking, dazzling his friends with his wit, kindness and a great gentleness. His behaviour was often outrageous. He once asked me to introduce him to Mike Cowles, proprietor of the American magazine, Look, and I arranged that we should all meet at Claridge’s for drinks. After an hour and there was no Baron, Jeannie suddenly turned to me, ‘Heavens,’ she said, ‘it’s Thursday!’ Thursday was a notoriously unreliable day for Baron as it was the day of his weekly Thursday Club luncheon. Another half-hour and we saw him beaming smiles at surprised strangers as he weaved his way towards us. ‘Jeannie, Jeannie,’ he cried, ‘forgive me, forgive me!’ And he thereupon knelt down in the dignified foyer, clasping his hands together in mock prayer. A few days later I was with him in the Savoy bar when Mike Cowles passed by and I waved. ‘Who’s that?’ asked Baron. I told him. ‘That’s the very man I want to meet,’ he replied, ‘do introduce me.’ I put down my drink and looked at him. ‘I have done so already . . . we all spent an hour together the other evening at Claridge’s!’

  Our spare room at Minack was a chicken house which we had bought and converted. We had erected it adjacent to the cottage with its floor lifted clear of the soil by pylons of stones, and the windows looked out on the croft and Mount’s Bay. On the floor was a rug, and the furniture consisted of a camp bed and chest of drawers. We had painted the walls white and there was little sign of the hut’s original purpose except a small hatch door at ground level where the chickens should have come in and out. Baron was delighted. ‘Just the place for an old rooster like me,’ he said. He stayed with us on that occasion for twenty-four hours and during that period we visited every pub in the district. We ended the first evening at the Tolcarne in Newlyn where Gracie Thomas rules tough seamen of many nationalities in the manner of a kind headmistress. We had been there ten minutes when I saw Baron was the centre of a group of French fishermen who were roaring with laughter. ‘En avance à bateau,’ he called out when he caught my eye, and off we all went to the French crabber in the harbour and spent two hours of drinking from a demijohn of wine.

  We waved Baron goodbye and felt no nostalgia for the life he represented. We were enjoying a honeymoon with the primitive and tasks that could become monotonous – fetching the water from the stream, filling the paraffin lamp, cooking, cleaning, lighting the stove – possessed the brisk pleasure of the unusual. When I first knew Jeannie she could not even boil potatoes, and the first meal she gave me consisted of cinder-burnt chops due to the fact that she was unaware that frying required fat. She now had a file bulky with recipes and it was not long before she added two more – those for Cornish cream and home-made bread. She collected four pints of milk from the farm, poured it into a bowl and allowed it to settle for a few hours. Then she put the bowl on the edge of the stove where there was a gentle warmth and left it overnight. On the first occasion she tried this out I watched her, as excited as a girl going to a first night, skim off a thick layer of yellowy cream and then, with the confident air of a farmer’s wife, serve me with thunder and lightning – treacle and Cornish cream on slices of bread. A few weeks later I had a pain in my side and I said to Jeannie, ‘I believe I’ve got appendicitis.’ I was nervous of going to the doctor and put off doing so until the pain or ‘feeling’ became so persistent that I had no alternative but to make an appointment. As I entered the surgery I visioned the hospital, the operation, the convalescence which would keep me incapacitated throughout the potato season. The doctor examined me and poked my side, then asked, ‘Have you been eating a lot of Cornish cream since you came here?’ And with his question the pain disappeared.

  Jeannie’s mother sent the recipe for the bread and it was such a success that we never bought a shop loaf again. She makes four one-pound loaves out of three pounds of wholemeal flour and three teaspoonfuls of dried yeast. While the yeast is dissolving in a cup of warm water, she mixes half the flour, a tablespoonful of brown sugar and one of coarse salt in a warmed basin. To this she adds the dissolved yeast, about one and a half pints of warm water, mixes it all into a batter and leaves it on the back of the stove for fifteen minutes. The rest of the flour is then emptied into the mixture and kneaded for five or ten minutes – after which the dough is cut into four sections, put into warmed, greased bread tins and left to rise on the back of the stove until the dough has doubled in size. Finally the tins go into a piping hot oven for about three-quarters of an hour, and the sweet smell of baking fills the room.

  My mother had arrived to stay when we dug our first potatoes. She came loaded with gifts for the cottage including dust cloths, saucepans, detergents, a pair of sheets, and a water filter. My mother was never thrusting either with her views or with her presents, and when out of a packing case she produced the water filter, she very softly said, ‘I was thinking of the tadpoles, dear.’

  It was on the first evening of her stay that she saw the square figure of John leading his horse and cart, piled high with potato chips, past the cottage. She was irritated that he should be meeting with potato success while we were sitting back and waiting, and she urged that we were not showing enough confidence in our meadows. I explained that we had planted our seed later than he had done, that our meadows in potato parlance were considered later than his, and that in any case Tommy had warned us to wait another week. My mother, however, had the gambling instinct inherent within her and she insisted that no harm would be done if I collected the shovel and the three of us went down the cliff to try a few plants.

  The bright light of day had gone from the cliff when we reached it and the sun was dipping to the sea on the other side of the Penwith peninsula. The shadows of the rocks were enjoying their brief passage of life before dark, and the sea was dotted with the waking lights of the pilchard fleet. I poised the long-handled shovel and cumbersomely jabbed it under a plant, lifting the bundle of earth and tossing it to where Jeannie was standing. She stooped, shook the sturdy leaves, and ran her hand through the soil. And there, g
leaming bright in the dusk, were six potatoes, each the comfortable size of a baby’s fist.

  Jeannie and I were up at dawn the following morning and I drove the Land Rover over the shoulder of the cemetery field and down to the top of the cliff. It was a heavenly morning with a haze hiding the horizon, the first swallows skimming the landscape, the white parasols of the may trees pluming from the green bracken, and the scent of the bluebells mingling with the salt air of the sea. In the back of the car we had a spring balance weighing machine and a tripod on which to hang it, a bundle of chips and a ball of binder twine with which to tie the cardboard tops when the chips were full, a pair of scissors, the shovel, a box full of salesman’s labels with printed addresses of different markets. It was a lush moment of hope blissfully blinded from the realities the years would see.

  5

  During the days that followed, smoothly dressed salesmen appeared on the cliff, watching me dig and ache my way through a meadow, bantering me with news of prices better than their rivals.

  ‘We paid 8½d. home at Bristol,’ one would say, and then another two hours later would announce: ‘Manchester is strong. We expect 9d. tomorrow.’ They served too as the errand boys of news from other potato areas and I would clutter my worries over the prices with the threats that these areas, so much larger than our own, would soon be in production. These threats became progressively worse in their nature, beginning gently with: ‘Marazion starts next week,’ edging dangerously to ‘Gulval are opening up their fields,’ or the generalised black news that ‘the farmers begin Tuesday’: and growing to a climax with ‘Jersey are at their peak’ or ‘Pembroke has a bumper crop,’ and then, most disastrous of all: ‘Lincoln has begun.’ If you have not cleared the cliff by the time Lincoln stream their potato lorries to the markets, you might as well tip your potatoes in the sea. Nowadays these threats have become internationalised and one goes dizzy with the news that Covent Garden is flooded with Morocco, Birmingham with Cyprus, Liverpool with Malta; and it is only when you hear that France has Colorado beetle and has stopped sending that you have a glimmer of hope.

  Tommy Williams, during the three days of the week he worked for us, dug in one meadow while I struggled in another; and at the end of the day he would have forty full chips to my fifteen. The Cornish shovel has a long handle like that of a rake and, until one becomes accustomed to it, is a most unwieldy instrument to use. You do not dig as if it were a spade, but scoop under the potato plant using your leg just above the knee as a lever, the left if you are right-handed, on which you poise a section of the long handle. As I lunged away my mind rattled with the absurd game of guessing how many potatoes would be under each plant. A meadow of potato plants is seldom uniform, some have squat stems, some thin, some elongated as if they were trying to reach the sky instead of making potatoes among their roots. The ideal plant has a tall firm stem with the shine off the top leaves while the bottom ones are yellow – these are called ‘going back’ and the fattest, most numerous potatoes should be under them. But, as usual, the dogma of experts was frequently at fault, and I dug plants with squat foliage which had many fine potatoes, some with copy-book stems which had few, and some with green leaves and plenty of shine which had plenty. Sometimes I would be digging a meadow where the crop was light and it seemed to take an age to fill a chip. In another, where the crop was good, the chips seemed to fill on their own and I would shout: ‘Lovely samples here, Tommy!’

  Tommy’s mood varied according to the meadow he was in. If it were large enough for Jeannie to follow behind him, she in blue shorts thrusting her hands in the soil and dropping the very small ones in one chip, the rest in another, and he shirtless in patched brown trousers and wearing a sun-drenched Panama hat, he would treat her to endless dissertations on the problems of the world and his theories on their solution: and from the meadow I was in I would hear the drone of his talk with the gentle voice of Jeannie interrupting every now and again. If he were happy and in a meadow by himself I would suddenly hear the roar of his bass voice, startling the placid cliff with the fragment of a hymn. ‘When I start singing in Chapel,’ he once told me, ‘the congregation stops singing so that they can listen to me solo.’ The Scillonian was always subjected to close scrutiny. ‘Got a tractor on board,’ he would say severely, as if it had no right to be there. Or he would spy through his telescope a group in the stern: ‘Look to me like Indian students.’ And this remark would provide the excuse for a monologue on British policy in India.

  Sometimes this telescope annoyed me, for there were days when it seemed more a part of him than his shovel. ‘Every time I look at Tommy,’ I would say to Jeannie, ‘he’s staring out to sea.’ And Tommy, unaware of my annoyance, would call out: ‘That’s a Frenchy coming in,’ or ‘Never seen that white crabber before,’ or, if there was a liner on the horizon, ‘That’s the Mauretania bound for Cherbourg.’ His diet came from tins and when Jeannie, sickened by the jellified mess of meat he ate for dinner day after day, offered to warm the tin in the oven, he replied, ‘It’s proper as it is, thanks very much.’ There were occasions when he would work for nothing. ‘I know what your expenses are,’ he would say to me, ‘but I want to break the back of this meadow and I won’t charge you.’

  He did not seem to be happy working for John. ‘Mark my words,’ he warned, ‘I don’t think I’ll be with him for long.’ And sure enough a couple of weeks later Tommy came raging into the cottage. ‘It’s all over between me and him,’ he shouted, and poured out a torrent of detail which was difficult to follow. From then on he worked for us full-time, but the row which parted him from John seemed to irritate. He proceeded to carry on a pinpricking feud with John, sometimes to my embarrassment. One morning I found him planting a clump of lilies in a piece of ground in front of the cottage. ‘Where on earth did you get those from, Tommy?’ I asked. ‘They came from the wood,’ he replied without looking up, ‘and they belonged to my sister.’ Tommy’s sister had been married to the man who had the farm before John – and he had been killed in his barn by a falling bale of straw. ‘I like to think they are hers.’ This same line of reasoning governed a later occasion at the time of the flower season when I saw Tommy climb over our boundary hedge and pick a bunch of wild daffodils on the other side. ‘You can’t do that,’ I shouted. ‘Oh, yes, I can,’ he shouted back – and then I caught sight of John a little way off, silently watching, his cloth cap on the back of his head, a grass stalk in the corner of his mouth like a pipe. I strolled up the field to him, anxious to disclaim any part in the affair. ‘I’m very sorry about this, John,’ I said, ‘Tommy was over the hedge before I could stop him . . . here,’ I began to fumble in my pocket, ‘here, you’d better have 1s. 6d. for the bunch.’ I held out the money and John, like a magistrate’s clerk accepting a fine, thrust it in his pocket. ‘As you like,’ he said, and then turned away.

  Tommy’s roughness was balanced by his tenderness for birds and animals, and I have seen his eyes soften in wonderment at the sight of a young robin being fed by its parents. Once I saw him halfway up a tall elm, climbing with one hand while the other held a tiny object. ‘A baby owl,’ he shouted down at me, ‘I won’t be a minute before I put it back in its nest. You look at the bottom and you’ll see two mice its mother must have brought it during the night.’ There was the incident of the fox cubs who chose one of our potato meadows as a playground, gambolling at night among the green plants and crushing flat the leaves and stalks. It was the custom in the neighbourhood when this sort of thing happened for the farmer to set traps; and I have seen of an early May morning four cubs each in a corner of a meadow with a leg caught in a gin. I remember how curious it seemed to me that they did not appear frightened, as if it were still part of the game they had started to play in the night; and they waited there as the sun rose until the farmer, in his own good time, arrived to knock them one by one on the head. We, however, were prepared to leave the playground as it was, losing the potatoes to the cubs, but Tommy, on the other hand, was mo
re practical. ‘We can’t afford to lose the taties,’ said he, ‘and we mustn’t hurt the cubs. I know a way of persuading the vixen to move them to another earth. You leave it to me.’ He never told us what he did, though I can guess. In any case the meadow was never used as a playground again.

  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.