by Derek Tangye
I soon found, too, that the machine did not like me; for time and again when I set out to rotovate, the engine obstinately refused to start. Usually, of course, on such occasions the fault can be quickly corrected by a mechanic, and the mechanic, if you possess the most elementary knowledge, should be yourself. Check plug, clean carburettor, make sure the ignition is all right . . . I used to perform these tasks, secure no result, then storm back to Jeannie. ‘The bloody thing won’t work,’ I would shout, ‘and I’ll have to get them to come and see it.’
‘Them’ were the Helston people from whom I had bought it, and in due course a kindly mechanic would arrive, tinker an hour or two with the engine, gain no response, then remark: ‘I’ve never known an engine like this before.’ My years at Pentewan – and other rotovators behaved in the same way as this first one – are filled with memories of mechanics in various meadows where the rotovator of the moment had broken down, unscrewing things, screwing things up, with me beside them hopefully staring, waiting for them to arrive, or thanking them for coming. ‘I can’t help thinking,’ said one, grimly trying to be cheerful, ‘if the firm wouldn’t be wise to pitch a tent here.’
Yet this first rotovator had the advantage of being the spearhead of our hopes; and the tantrums were forgiven because we were, in our own minds, revolutionising the cultivation of cliff meadows. Others might think their commercial value was dying out but we were proving that a new outlook, a dashing grasp of experts’ advice, would lead them to prosperity. Our landlord had a man called Joe who looked after the cascade of meadows below our own, vineyards of meadows where no machine of any kind could reach, falling to the sea amid hedges of escallonia, apple trees, and banks thick in winter with the fragrance of wild violets; and Joe would leave a meadow which he had been laboriously turning with a shovel, and come to watch me at work; to stare at my method of rotovating or perhaps just to help me with advice on how to get the engine started.
Joe belonged to the cliffs in the same way that a cliff fox or a cliff badger belongs; and he disapproved of change in the same way that anyone disapproves of action that changes something directly concerning his own heart. He distrusted the rotovator. He would stand at the bottom of the meadow where I was working, an old felt hat on his head, a pipe in his mouth, eyes that were set wide apart, young middle age, looking at me bringing the rotovator down the hill then reversing upwards, my foot on the metal cover to keep it from lurching the handlebars high from my grasp. He would watch and say nothing, chewing the stem of his pipe; and then weeks later I would be in some pub, and I would be told: ‘I hear that that there rotovator brings all the soil down bottom of meadow.’ I do not agree that this view was right; but it made me aware that Joe, as he meandered from his own particular world so near the sea, was watching and judging me as I bent the ways of the clinical present to better the integrity of the past; and so I, too, watched and listened.
Joe used to bicycle to the cliffs from his home with Bish his bull terrier trotting at the wheel; and when Bish grew old Joe carried him on the handlebars. Like all his breed Bish was a fierce protector of his owner and of his owner’s belongings and as we shared the same hut there were often occasions when Bish would not allow us to enter. The hut was known as the Pink Hut because it was built of corrugated iron once painted a red that had faded to pink over the years; and as its main function was for the ‘shooting’ of potatoes it was so designed inside that layer upon layer of boards could be fixed, each layer rising above another which had received its quota of potato seed. Joe had one half of the hut with its boards, we had the other; and there were times when we wanted to use our half when only Bish was resident in the other. Then Bish, so friendly when nothing of his owner’s was threatened, would bare his teeth, snarl, bellow, and frighten us into cupping hands to mouth and shouting downwards towards the sea: ‘Joe! Joe! Come up will you? Bish won’t let us in!’ There would be an answering cry like the hoot of an owl, and in a few minutes Joe would slowly arrive, and Bish would wag his tail and grin at us and apologise.
Joe accepted wild-life, not as some countrymen do with the object to kill, but as a means of sharing enjoyment. He hated trapping and when on one occasion he was instructed to do so, he found a badger in one of the traps the next morning. A badger is notoriously, and for obvious reasons, a deadly dangerous animal to release from a trap; and a trapper, if for no other reason except his personal safety, will make certain he has killed it before there is any question of touching it. Not so Joe. He was grievously upset when he found the badger struggling to escape as he walked along the field towards it; and he decided the only thing he could do was momentarily to stun it, then quickly release the foot from the trap. He picked up a stick and hit it, and the badger lay still. Ten minutes later it was still lying there, breathing but without any other signs of life; and so Joe picked it up in his arms, a heavy full-grown badger, and carried it gently to the Pink Hut.
I came to the hut later in the morning when Joe was having his tea break, and found the badger lying on a bed of sacks, with another sack so folded that it acted as a pillow. Bish was quiet in another corner, Joe puffing his pipe. ‘I hit it too hard,’ he said to me sadly after he had told me what had happened, ‘that’s what I did. I hit it too hard.’
Jeannie and I were, at the time, ‘shooting’ potatoes and this tedious task kept us for hour upon hour in the hut. This gave us the advantage of keeping an eye on the patient as it lay there. It was early in the afternoon over twenty-four hours later that it stirred, an eye opened, and it whimpered. A badger is beautiful to look at in its true setting, a wild path of its own treading, the moon lighting the white streaks of its head, dark shadows its armour; but lying there in the hut, impotent without our help, a heavy immovable body, its appeal was not in its mobility but the common denominator of suffering. I went outside and down the mountain-like track to where Joe was digging. ‘It’s coming round,’ I said. The smile was one of relief rather than pleasure. ‘It is?’ and he jabbed his shovel into the ground and came back with me to the hut.
The badger was a patient for six weeks, and every day Joe fed him with bread and milk, then when he got stronger shared his sandwiches. Bish was quite unconcerned and showed no jealousy, and the badger in his turn seemed to accept Bish; and then came the time when the badger, gaining confidence, remembering freedom, began to show restlessness. ‘To my way of thinking,’ said Joe, ‘it won’t be long before he’s ready to go.’ In this he was correct but he did not foresee the manner of his going.
At weekends, while Joe remained at home, Jeannie and I used to take over as nurses, and one Sunday evening we fed him as usual, saw that he was comfortable, and shut up the hut. I was first back there in the morning and when I had opened the door, a glance was enough to show the badger had gone. The floorboards had been ripped from the centre of the hut as if a man had been at work with a pickaxe, and as there was only soil underneath, it was then easy for the badger to rejoin the wild where he belonged.
Joe used to refer to each meadow as a garden. ‘That garden by the quarry is frosty,’ he would say. Or: ‘I’ve dug three hundredweight from this garden before May month . . . handsome samples.’
I was in this particular garden one November afternoon during this first year we rented Pentewan, grimly pursuing my task of rotovating the ground. Machines, when seen in a catalogue, appear to perform their duties magically on their own; and if there is a picture of the operator, a broad grin on his face suggests his presence is only a formality. Perhaps it is when the ground is level, but at both Minack and Pentewan the meadows are steep and contracted; and an hour with the rotovator leaves the body pommelled and aching as if it had been stretched on the rack.
The rotovator works the ground downhill and in order to keep the tines deep in the soil, it is necessary to weight the body on the handlebars, at the same time being prepared to lift it if you get warning of an under-the-soil rock. When you return to the top of the meadow you disengage the rotovator, then pu
t the engine in reverse; but in order to control the machine, to prevent the handlebars shooting skywards, you have to do this job by pressing one foot on the cover of the rotovator while hopping backwards on the other; and at all times your arms are also having to force the handlebars downwards. The job is a punishment, a self-inflicted torture which awaits its compensation only when all the land is rotovated, and you rustle the sweet knowledge in your mind that you have achieved in a week what a labourer with a shovel would have done in eight. The pain was repeated twice a year, first in the autumn and then when the potatoes were being planted, the second occasion, of course, enabling the shoveller to dig through the soil at great speed; but it is a November afternoon that I am remembering in a garden that Joe once prized as one of his best. As I performed my routine, the engine roaring, my limbs craving for rest, I saw John in the distance with a pair of horses ploughing the field that edged Pentewan and his own.
At the time, he and I were not on speaking terms, and although he had to come Minack way almost every day to collect his horses or pass on down to his cliffs, he never spoke; and when sometimes in a flush of trying to be friends again I wished him good day, my wish was left to hang alone in the air. On this occasion I observed that when he and his horses reached the end of the field and were ready to turn, he would wait a moment or two, and stare across in my direction. His action irritated me, little realising how fortunate, in a few minutes, it would prove to be.
But I was irritated because I had an uncomfortable feeling that he was not wishing me well; he resented our presence at Minack because he did not consider that we belonged there, and he smouldered with vexation that the roughness of the life had not driven us away. Now we had the Pentewan meadows we had become entrenched. He himself would like to have had them. What right had we to move in and collect such a prize?
Physical effort that demands great strain, I have found, creates a pattern of twisted thoughts, the mind is a daytime nightmare, and while the body is being pounded with exhaustion the brain races with a kaleidoscopic jungle of ideas. Such was the course of my thinking as I grimly continued my labour and when, suddenly, while I was reversing, a wheel hit a rock and the machine lurched sideways.
At the same time the catch which disengaged the rotovator slipped out of position and the tines began circulating with great speed. The handlebars shot up skywards and in this instant of my loss of control, my left foot, which had been weighting the rotovator cover, was twisted under the cover and met the full force of the tines. The next thing I knew was that the machine had turned on its side, the engine had spluttered to a stop, and the tines ceased circulating because my foot and part of my leg were wrapped round the shaft under the cover.
Tommy, I knew, was in a meadow within shouting distance alongside the Pink Hut. I yelled and there was no answer. ‘Tommy!’ I shouted again. ‘Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!’ Heavens knows what he was doing, perhaps drowning my cries with some of his own. I lay there immovable, the weight of the tractor on my leg while my foot, I began to realise, was oozing wet in my rubber Wellington boot.
The shock of the accident was now replaced by panic. There was every reason to suppose that no one would hear me; Joe, I knew, was in one of his gardens close to the sea while Tommy, if in one of his moods, might well have his mind and ears in another world. I was beginning to have pain. ‘Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!’ I was reaching that hazy, never-never land which heralds a faint when suddenly I heard the beat of running footsteps to the left of me. I twisted my head around and through the grass which brushed my face I saw John.
‘All right, mate . . . lie still, I’ll get the tractor off you.’ He had the strength of a bull and he heaved up the tractor as if it had the weight of a wooden chair . . . but, as the tractor became upright, so it became clear that my foot was hooked on a tine like a joint on a butcher’s hook; the point had gone through one side of my foot and out of the other.
‘If you could find Tommy,’ I said, ‘he could go over and fetch Mrs Tangye and get bandages.’John gave me a cigarette, then disappeared; and a few minutes later returned with a scared Tommy who went off across the fields to Minack. I soon found that I could not begin to free my foot until the boot was cut away, and this John proceeded to do, sawing away with a blunt penknife at the rubber. It was several minutes before he was successful and by that time my principal anxiety was that Jeannie might arrive while I was still trapped. Unfortunately when the machine turned over and the engine stopped, the rotovator was stalled in gear; and because of the position of the tine that held my foot, it could not possibly be freed until the rotovator shaft had been turned several inches. It would not budge.
‘You’ll have to rock the machine, John,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing else for it.’
At any moment Jeannie would be appearing over the hedge, and I could not bear the thought of her seeing me.
‘Rock it to and fro,’ I said, ‘I often do it when it stalls after getting a stone jammed in the tines.’
He rocked it gently, my leg moving in rhythm, and suddenly the shaft was free. John’s cap was pushed on the back of his head, his face was red, the Woodbine dangled out of the corner of his mouth.
‘Now be careful, mate,’ he said, ‘take yer time with the foot.’
It was an occasion when you do not pause to think, for thinking would bring inaction. I noted the shape of the hook, the way it was pointing, the direction I would have to thrust my leg. It was easy. My foot freed itself at the very instant that a startled Jeannie arrived with water, basin, bandages and iodine.
‘John here,’ I said, looking at Jeannie and aware that he would not want me to show gratitude, ‘John got me out of this mess.’
11
I was in bed for a fortnight and on crutches or hobbling with a stick for a further six weeks.
Perhaps I should have taken the accident as an omen. What does a shipowner say to himself if a mishap occurs to a new vessel at the moment of launching? I was brought up on the comforting philosophy that singlemindedness, a dogged determination to succeed at some specific task inevitably led to conquest; and hence, I remember, I spent hour after hour, week after week, bowling by myself at the nets when I was at Harrow under the misapprehension that it was the road to the Eleven.
That I was laughed at was part of the test, and that I ignored this was part of the philosophy. It is a useful philosophy in the armoury of schoolmasters because boys without talent believe they can gain the same rewards as those who have, and those who have talent are lured to make the most use of it. As far as I am concerned the philosophy has lingered in its influence; and the result has been that, although I have often failed to gain the objectives which from the beginning I had no chance of gaining, my efforts have often brought unexpected but pleasurable rewards. Thus, although I am superstitious enough to be wary of Friday the thirteenth and of walking under ladders, and always feel happier if a black cat crosses my path, I consider omens as incidents to forget, however moodily I may greet them. Had I shied from Pentewan as a consequence of my accident Jeannie and I would have been spared countless laborious hours and, for that matter, considerable expense; but we would never have tasted the subleties of the reward for staying.
Obstinacy is, of course, both a virtue and a fault, and the art lies in identifying the dividing line; and in this tussle of identification you can be called courageous one moment, a fool the next, and brilliant the one after that – if your objective has been achieved.
Our particular obstinacy at Pentewan was to heave our energy and enthusiasm against the weather, and every time it knocked us out, to bob up again, roll up our shirtsleeves and defy it once more. You cannot treat the weather that way. It always wins. It obliterates a thousand hours of effort in a night, with the same abandoned power of a finger smudging a mosquito on a window-pane.
Should we have packed up after the first wail of defeat? We met a little barrel of an old man in a pub shortly after we had taken over the meadows who for many years had worked the
selfsame meadows himself. ‘Expect,’ he said, in a piping voice, ‘a bumper harvest once in every four years.’ He did not intend to be gloomy. He was giving the glad news that we would make so much money in one year that it would not matter what happened in the other three. Old men of the countryside appear to novices as oracles; as if the lines on their faces, the horizon look in their eyes, the slow motion of their movements harken a confidence within you that echoes your belief in the Prophets. Thus each time the weather struck we revived ourselves with the words of high promise: ‘Expect a bumper harvest in every four years . . .’
We needed, however, that good harvest the first year; and our optimism excited us to expect it. It was indeed vital that it should be a good one. The hazy honeymoon with escapism was being replaced by the conventional necessities of day-to-day existence; our commitments were increasing, our reserves dwindling. We took on Pentewan knowing it would vastly increase our expenses, but saying to ourselves that if we planned with vision, courage and care, all we would then require would be to have luck on our side; for endeavour, however painstakingly pursued, can rarely receive its accolade unless a magic bestows it.
Yet we were aware that there was something else at stake besides material victory; there was the continuing challenge to prove that we were not flirting with the tedium of manual labour, that our enthusiasm had not been checked by reverses or by the roughness of the life, that we possessed staying power which could earn respect. It was a simple ambition and some would call it a valueless one, but within it there was the prospect of peace of mind born of permanence. There is no permanence in the conventional ambitions that hasten you up the pyramid of power, each step killing one ambition and creating another, leading you by a noose to a pinnacle where, too late, you look back on the trampled path and find the yearning within you is the same as when you were young.
