A Gull on the Roof (11 page)

On the night after our attempt to keep him indoors, he was curled asleep on the bed and the window was open. Jeannie too was asleep and I was dozing, when suddenly through my haziness I heard Monty growl like a dog. Instinctively I put out my hand but he was on the window sill before I grasped him. I fumbled for the torch and switched it on. ‘What’s the matter, Monty?’ I murmured, ‘what’s outside?’ I leant forward so that I was half out of the window with my torch shining downwards . . . on to the head of a fox. There he was so close to the wall that he was touching it, so large that in the first startled moment I thought he was an Alsatian dog. ‘Quick!’ I shouted irrationally, ‘a fox is after Monty!’

But before Jeannie was aware of what was happening the fox was away, gliding down the lane like a ghost, only pausing a second to look back, its eyes meeting the beam of my torch like two phosphorescent pinpoints. Monty was still growling and struggled to free himself from my hold. ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ Jeannie called sleepily. ‘Only this,’ I replied, ‘Monty has seen for himself why he can never go out again at night.’ And he never did unless we accompanied him. As for our method of keeping him in, we had a carpenter make a frame of wire netting which we fixed to the open window at night. Thus we had our fresh air and Monty could continue to sleep on the bed. He was perfectly satisfied.

A dividing line between a townsman and a countryman is the attitude to rabbit traps; a townsman abhors them and a countryman considers them a necessity. Today the gin trap is banned by law and only a specially designed trap can be used legally which fits in the entrance of a rabbit hole and kills the rabbit instantly as soon as it comes out. But since myxomatosis rabbits have changed their habits and instead of using the burrows they lie out in the undergrowth of the open ground; hence gin traps are still in use, illegal though they may be. Our district is still free of rabbits and we hope we may never see them again; but one day they probably will come back and we may live again the summer nights when, with the background of the murmuring sea, we would lie awake waiting, waiting, for the curdling screams that inevitably would pursue the hours until the trapper arrived to collect his harvest.

And yet I found myself, possessing as I did the intellect of a townsman and the way of life of a countryman, in a quandary. The rabbits showed no appreciation of our efforts to be nice to them, and they ate our anemones, violets and lettuces with the same abandon as they ate those of our neighbours. We bought hundreds of yards of wire netting, but I found they used it as a rope ladder, climbing up it and into the meadow on the other side; or sometimes I would find a hole in the wire neatly made as if by wire cutters, and then I believed the story I had been told that cliff rabbits had teeth as hard as steel, and the intelligence of monkeys. As a townsman I admired their cleverness, but as a countryman I became infuriated by their destruction of my livelihood; and so I reluctantly began to trap.

I used to set the traps at dusk, go round to see them with a torch at midnight, and again soon after dawn. The object of these tactics was, of course, to curtail the sufferings of my victims, but the result was hideous to witness; for the brief period of their pain had not sapped their strength, and when the light of the torch announced my coming they darted crazily this way and that within the circumference of the chain which joined the trap to its anchor in the ground. Each time they rushed to escape, winnowing their terror, the gin bit deeper, while I myself, the amateur executioner, fumbled in my attempts to take a firm hold so that with a jerk I could break their necks. Such incidents, etched into the grotesque by the shadows cast by my torch or turned into a Wagnerian Valhalla in the still soft scent of the dawn, gobbled the zest I had to protect our crops.

Then one night I forgot to set my alarm clock and slept peacefully until within an hour of the time Tommy was due to arrive for his day’s work. I jumped with horror from my bed and hurried in my pyjamas to the eight traps I had set the night before. Five were undisturbed, in two others were full-grown rabbits each of which must have struggled hard through the night because their trapped feet were gouged red by the gin’s fangs, and in the eighth was a sight I will never forget. By some horrible chance two baby rabbits had been trapped together, and as I approached they were knocking each other as they tried to escape, giving the appearance – had I not known what had happened – that they were playing. I killed them and went silently back to the cottage. ‘Jeannie,’ I said, without telling her what I had seen, ‘Hell to the crops, I’m never going to set a trap again.’

The incident was still vivid in my mind when a week later, as we were finishing supper, we heard the tap, tap, tap of the trapper’s hammer in John’s field above the cottage which ran towards the sea. It was a May evening and although John and I were still on speaking terms, there was a simmering friction between us that seemed certain sooner or later to erupt. ‘I do think he might have warned us,’ I grumbled, ‘we might easily have been out for the evening and then what would have happened to Monty?’

The custom of a trapper was to ring a field with traps two or three days running, leaving them open during the day and setting them afresh in the late afternoon or early evening. Sometimes, however, a trapper was not so conscientious and I remember an occasion when traps on a neighbouring land were set at midday on Sunday and were not visited again until breakfast time on Monday. I was waiting when the trapper came down the lane in his car.

‘Good morning,’ I said, and then without wasting any time: ‘I believe you went to Church yesterday evening.’ The man looked at me doubtfully. ‘I went to Chapel . . . I’m a Chapel man.’ ‘Well wherever you went,’ I replied, my voice rising, ‘your aim was to give thanks to God and yet . . . at that very time you were allowing His creatures to suffer agony at your hands.’ The man stared at the ground. ‘Come here,’ I ordered, and led him to a rabbit which was hanging head downwards from a trap set on top of a hedge. ‘That rabbit was caught at one o’clock yesterday afternoon,’ I said, ‘and had I not heard its cry it would have taken several hours to die in agony . . . and you were in Chapel!’ My anger, of course, made me pompous but it had an effect. A few months later I saw the man again. He had given up trapping.

Passion, therefore, was always waiting to come to the surface when traps were set – that of Jeannie was born of imagination, mine of experience. And so when we heard the tap of the hammer in John’s field there was the growl of anger within us, the dread of the coming night with its screams, the nag of knowing Monty was in danger. On the second evening, a couple of hours before sunset, Monty was sitting in the front garden, sphinx-like, eyes half closed, his burnished fur glossy in the light of the ending day. There was no hint he aimed to wander. His white whiskers sprayed his lion cub head, his tail curled round his body so that its tip gently flicked his front paw. He was at peace, utterly secure in the small world we had found for him. Then I looked through the open door and he was not there.

‘Where’s Monty? He was outside five minutes ago.’ We had panicked often enough before, and been calmed, and made ourselves feel foolish that love should exaggerate fear; and yet the instant of warning repeated itself each time with the same spasm of fright. I ran up to the field and stood on a bank.

The young green corn was brushing the soil, and far out to sea aslant to the Lizard a liner was making for Cherbourg. A raven grunted overhead, flying heavily westwards towards the sun, and a charm of goldfinches fluttered chirruping before me, then dived out of sight behind the hedge on my right. A buzzard lazily glided, and silent in the heavens a jet traced its plume. It was very still and only the sea whispered. Suddenly across the field a hundred yards away near the gap pencilled by barbed wire which led to John’s cliff, I saw Monty’s tail flapping in prisoned puzzlement, as if a hand at ground level was feebly motioning a welcome. ‘Jeannie,’ I shouted, ‘Monty is in a trap!’

I led the way across the field yelling: ‘Monty, we’re coming!’ . . . absurdly frightened, my mind racing with stories of trapped cats. ‘It’s easier to kill ’em,’ a trapper once told us, ‘than to get ’em out of a trap. That wild they be.’ And I felt enraged that a threat guarded against had yet materialised, that even with all our care Monty could still be trapped. Irrational thoughts, I know, but such are often the companions of distress.

He was lying quietly on his side, his little front paw with the white smudge on it squeezed in the gin; and his yellow eyes gazing up at me as if my presence alone were enough to make him believe the trap would release him. Then, when in those first few seconds I did nothing, he uttered a little cry, a querulous cry as if he were cross.

‘You’ll hold him firmer than I can,’Jeannie said when she reached us, ‘I know how to open the trap.’ I grasped his soft body, limp as a fur stole, while Jeannie, her knees in the green corn, put her hands on the gin. It would not budge. ‘It’s rusty,’ I said, ‘look, it’s coated with rust.’

It was as if Monty understood the significance of my remark because he began to cry and struggle and scratch, and try to bite his paw free. ‘Hold him! For goodness sake hold him or he’ll pull his paw apart!’ At that instant he slipped from my hands, lashed out with his three free legs, tugging at the trap with his fourth, claws like knives ready to rip anything within reach. There was blood on Jeannie’s wrist.

‘Something’s wrong with the trap and we’d better get him back to the cottage.’ I had the crazy idea that once there I could rush up to the farm for help. ‘Pull the peg out of the ground,’ I said, ‘then take the weight of the trap with the chain while I hold him.’ He had become exhausted and was still again, except for his panting which made his body heave like bellows.

We began to walk, a miserable trio, across the field . . . Jeannie with the chain, I holding him in front of me like a tray, the paw and the gin between us.

‘What about your wrist?’

‘It’s only a scratch. Nothing deep.’

We were nearly there. The lump of the chimney bulged at eye level, the height of the field parallel with the roof, the open door now below us waiting. Suddenly Monty gave a twist with such vicious strength that he caught me unawares. He slipped from my hold, and like a macabre juggler I went this way and that in an effort to regain him. ‘Keep the chain up!’ Miraculously Jeannie succeeded so that the weight of the gin went along with his paw. He had his terror and pain but she saved him from the awful wrench of the weight, and in those few seconds of success I had grasped him firmly again and he was still and limp in my hands.

‘I’m going to put him on the ground.’ His little pink tongue frothed as he panted and sweat damped his fur, and he lay on his side so quietly that he might have been asleep. The next instant I seized the trap, gave it the wrench of a maniac – and it opened. He stretched in the green corn for a minute shuddering with exhaustion; and then Jeannie picked him up and gently carried him home.

Our sweet relief very soon turned into unreasonable anger. Unreasonable because it was nothing to do with us what people did on land under their control. Unreasonable because we had learnt to our cost that rabbits steal with the same effect as a thief putting his hand in the till. Unreasonable because trapping, however much we might disapprove, was the main method of checking the rabbit plague. Our tempers, however, were flaring and only action could bring abatement.

‘I’m going to throw that horrible trap in the sea!’ Jeannie had bandaged her arm and Monty was still lying exhausted on the sofa.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘and I’m going to find John.’ I tramped up across the fields to the farm and the breeze cooled me and told me to be calm – Monty was safe and there was no point in adding to distress. And then I thought of the scratch on Jeannie’s arm, and Monty’s panting little body and the sound of the screams of the rabbits at night – and when I reached the farmhouse door I was angry again.

Only John’s wife was there, peeling potatoes in the kitchen, and his small son, who eyed me silently, suspiciously, from a chair by the window as I told my story. ‘I know nothing about it, Mr Tangye,’ said John’s wife, ‘nothing at all. You speak to John about it.’

I returned to the cottage to find Jeannie had completed her mission. ‘I didn’t throw it in the sea,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I threw it over the hedge into the brush . . . we can always get it back if we
have
to.’ My own interview had damped my temper, and I was now wishing it had never taken place. I had fired a shot without the compensation of seeing it land on the target – and John was warned. I was now in any case not sure of my ground; and it seemed to me on reflection that inner forces were at work within us to use the incident as a tilt at John and the attitude he represented. If we were desiring a peaceful life and to be left on our own, this was not the way to go about it. I awaited John’s coming.

He came thundering up the lane soon after breakfast the following morning. Cap askew, his face red as a beetroot, squat and powerful as a gorilla, he advanced on me with arms swinging as if his intention were to knock me down. ‘What right had the cat to be on my land?’ he shouted at me when he was still twenty yards off. ‘What right had you to trespass on my land to let him out?’

He was now ten yards away.

‘What right had Mrs Tangye to throw my trap away?’

He was now five yards away and he had scored a point.

‘I tell you what, mate,’ and he had now stopped, thrusting his face at mine, ‘from now on you go your way, I go mine. When I come down here I won’t speak to you.’

He swung round and stamped away.