A Gull on the Roof (14 page)

Gertie had a passionate love for England and during the war she was the driving force behind a transatlantic parcels service; then later, before and after the Normandy landings, she served in ENSA. One evening, after she had said goodbye at Drury Lane, ENSA headquarters, before returning to America, Jeannie and I were sitting with her in the Grill Bar of the Savoy. ‘You know,’ she said firmly, ‘I have one ambition I am absolutely determined to fulfil.’ Gertie was always able to wrap her ambitions in a rich canopy of sentiment, and this was no exception. Her voice changed, a hint of drama.

‘That wonderful old theatre,’ she went on, ‘with all its traditions and glamour and triumphs . . . just think of the emotions it holds within its walls. I was thinking as I walked over here . . . I
must
play there!’

A few years later there was a memorable first night on Broadway at which Gertie triumphed as Anna in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘The King and I’; and soon afterwards she wrote us a letter in which there was this line: ‘Anna’s staying two years on Broadway . . . and then
THE
first night at Drury Lane!’ She was not to be there at that first night, for she died a few months after writing to us; but when the night came, Jeannie and I, far away at Minack, thought of the gay audience making their way to their seats, the lights going down, the orchestra beginning to lilt the melodies she loved so much, and of the secret wish she never saw fulfilled.

We spent our last New Year’s Eve in London with her and her husband Richard Aldrich, and I remember the gusto with which she led the Conga that threaded through the Savoy, boisterously enjoying herself; and I remember the toast she gave us that night after the trumpeters had blared their welcome to the New Year. ‘Good luck to you escapists from the rat-race!’

Alas, the Princess of Wales violets in Gee’s meadow did not prosper. Our wish to grow the particular variety had been dominated by the whim that we preferred it to any other, and that, of course, is no way to run a commercial flower farm; and the reason we liked it was because, unlike any other commercial variety, the blooms had an exquisite scent. We had been warned it was difficult to grow, that it bloomed sparsely, that the price obtained for the bunches did not recompense these disadvantages – and yet we had obstinately clung to the supreme confidence that in our case the results would be different. The runners bushed into plants and for a few brief weeks we thought our green fingers were going to succeed where others had failed – and then the plants collapsed. We hastily sought advice and the adviser diagnosed the microscopic red spider as the cause of the sickness, but here was a puzzle – red spiders thrive in dry conditions and yet the weather at the time was rain day after day, so wet that it was useless to spray the plants with the concoction which was recommended. Tommy too, was at a loss. ‘I’ve always heard,’ he said solemnly, ‘that red spiders were bad sailors – yet here they be awash and living.’

Whatever the sickness the plants died and we have never grown Princess of Wales again; but we do now grow a few scented violets of a variety called Ascania. We found it by chance growing wild in a hedgerow, a pale green leaf with a tiny bloom a soft purple in colour and with a scent so sweet and strong that a single small bunch perfumes a room. It is, I believe, the original Cornish violet which was discarded by growers long ago when the hybrid commercial varieties were introduced. It is still useless for sale on its own, but when we have time we add a bloom or two to the bunches we are sending to market and imagine the delight of those who receive them.

While Jeannie worked at her book, I picked the Governor Herrick in the big field. We have now at Minack certain jobs we call lady’s jobs and others called gentleman’s jobs; and of these, violet picking and bunching are clearly a lady’s job. They are fiddling tasks requiring the deft fingers of a seamstress rather than the clumsy hand of a man; and whereas I plod along picking perhaps three dozen bunches an hour, Jeannie picks twice that number. A market bunch consists usually of twenty blooms and two leaves, so when we are picking we count the blooms until we have sixty odd, then collect the six leaves and slip a rubber band over the stalks of the lot; this in violet jargon is a field bunch, a bunch which is not too big to hold and a bunch that, at the end of the day’s picking, enables you to know exactly the number of market bunches available.

The stalks are brittle and can easily be snapped off too short; and the blooms, if the plants are big ones, hide among the foliage so that unless you are painstakingly careful you can easily leave a bloom or two behind. You have to examine every bloom to see if it is marked – for there is nothing so irritating to a buncher as having to pick and choose between good and bad blooms; and the secret of speedy bunching is to be free of the responsibility of bloom choice. Normally the marked blooms you have to watch for are those whose petals have been nipped by tiny slugs and snails, insignificant holes but enough to spoil the whole bunch. But there are also the occasions when wind or frost or hail sweep through the plants leaving no bloom undamaged; and then you have the nightmare task of picking not for market, but just to have the useless blooms off the plant.

Leaves are equally liable to damage and there is also a period during the season when they are often in short supply, and then we use ivy leaves in their place. This shortage, except when frost has done its harm, is due to a natural pause in the life of the plant, and it will occur once, or perhaps twice, during the October to April flowering season; the leaves go small like buttons, and yellow, and the crown of the plant is bared to the sky and for a week or two it seems as if the plant is dead; and then miraculously, little green shoots thrust upwards followed by the pinpoints of the buds, and soon the plants are in bloom again.

In the beginning I used to help Jeannie with the bunching, but my laborious efforts, my groans as I fumbled with the stalks which swivelled this way and that in my fingers, became a handicap to her enthusiasm. She was so fast and I was so slow that I was like a runner who is lapped several times in a race; and her bunches were so much better than mine. I have seen professional violet bunchers who work at great speed show no regard as to the final look of the bunches; they gather the required number of blooms, add the leaves, slip on the rubber bands, and that, as far as they are concerned, is another bunch ready for market. Jeannie works as fast but she arranges every bloom to face the same way, so that when you hold up the bunch all the violets are looking at you, wide open like miniature pansies.

There is an art, too, in packing them in the flower boxes. First, however, after being bunched, their heads are dipped in water and the bunches are left overnight in jars filled to the brim with water; violets revel in wet and, as they drink through their petals, they will survive for days if they are dipped regularly. The bunches are packed tightly in the boxes but the number depends on whether they have short or long stalks, which in turn depends on whether it is cold or mild weather; when they are short Jeannie packs forty-two bunches, when long, thirty bunches; and she lays them on white tissue paper, the ends of which are folded over to cover the blooms before putting on the top. Then off the boxes go in the Land Rover to Penzance station and from there on the flower train to whichever market we have decided on; and in two or three days the price returns arrive through the post and we open the envelope in excitement. ‘Sixpence!’ I shout with delight. Or gloomily I murmur: ‘Only threepence.’

It is a depressing experience, an experience which sets the mood for the day, when a box of flowers we have admired, which has caused Jeannie to shout from the flower house: ‘You
must
come and see these before I put the top on . . . they’re so beautiful!’ – when such a box fetches a poor price. We feel cheated and angry, and we curse the salesman, and I scribble a note of complaint. Or we say stoutly: ‘We won’t send to
that
market again.’ Just like the potatoes, just like anything else a market gardener grows . . . once a product is away from the packing shed it becomes a ticket in a lottery. Yet, as there is no alternative, as it is far too complicated a business to sell direct to retailers, one has to learn, like growing old, to accept the situation. We now accept it by sending our flowers regularly to the same salesman season after season. We send to Clifford Cowling at Leeds, the Dan Wuille Group, a firm in Birmingham and to Carlo Naef, the Italian-born doyen of Covent Garden salesmen. They receive between them the whole range of our present-day output—violets, anemones, daffodils, freesias, wallflowers, forget-me-nots, calendulas, polyanthus, Christmas flowering stocks; and if sometimes their price returns disappoint, enraging us, we have to admit to ourselves that they too are at the mercy of the same flighty mistress; the mysterious, intangible, elusive ‘supply and demand’.

The first winter I cared not a rap for such economic factors because my imagination did not wish to grasp the prospect that they would ever beset me. I was doped by the sheer pleasure of being a peasant; by the plodding work that did not require mental activity; by day-end exhaustion that did not repay with worried, sleepless nights; by the pleasure of achievement after I had defeated the wind and the rain, and the baskets were filled with violets.

Physical effort is so much more gentle than that of the mind and, being new to it, I found it more rewarding. Mine was the pleasure of the mountaineer, the Channel swimmer or the marathon runner – enthusiasm allied with determination that brought victory which is sweet to the senses and provided tangible conquest in a personal battle. I was blessed at the time by the simple belief that flower growing was determined by obeying certain well-defined rules, and success was automatic for him who did so; manure the ground, for instance, see there is enough lime, stick the plants in at the right time, and so on. I had, of course, to work hard and be ready to accept advice from experienced growers whenever I was in doubt, and pick their brains whenever I had the chance. I had, in fact, to behave like any intelligent man with initiative, and my reward would be flowers in abundance. I had not the slightest conception of the savage surprises ahead of me, nor of the bewildering contradictions that growing provides. Quite early on, during that first winter, however, my education was to begin.

The Princess of Wales had already disappeared and now the Governor Herrick started to look anaemic; and instead of lush green plants cascading violet blooms like those of my neighbours, they resembled row upon row of pale-faced schoolboys in need of a holiday. The stalks were short, the length of my thumb; the blooms were like pinpoints and the petals unwilling to open; and the leaves were grey-green and crinkly.

I am giving the wrong impression. They never at any time looked bursting with life, but a philosophy of wishful thinking convinced me they were certain to improve; and only the departure of autumn forced me to admit that something was radically wrong. My best week’s picking had been twenty-four dozen bunches; and in view of the number of plants we had it should have been three times that number. ‘What’s wrong with the violets?’ I said at last to Tommy. I was often to be amazed how Tommy, who was so intelligent on many subjects, was so ignorant on matters that directly concerned his profession; or perhaps his profession was to make use of his strength, leaving questions of skill to his bosses. ‘They look sick,’ was all the answer he could give me.

I had, I now realise, a childlike faith in the wisdom of those who lived close to the soil; and it never seemed possible to me that nature often defeated them. However, it never occurred to me, until experience proved it, that growers, like all experts, frequently offered advice that was diametrically opposite in its content. There was another occasion in another year when our violet runners failed from the beginning to take a grip with their roots; and I travelled the district, samples of dead runners in my hand, seeking an answer to the mystery.

Surely, I said to myself, these people who have been growing violets all their lives will be able to give me the answer; and yet each advanced a different theory none of which, as I learnt later, was the right one. I found out on my own that the damage had been inflicted by myself; in an effort to provide special food for each runner, I had dropped a handful of blood and bone mixture in each hole as I planted them, and this had burnt and killed the fibre roots.

As for the Governor Herrick, one man said the runners must have come from stock which had become exhausted, another that I could not have put any manure in the ground (I had put plenty of fish manure), and another that the wind had stunted the plants. Jeannie and I came to the conclusion that the latter explanation was the most likely one and we decided, after much discussion, to invest £30 in coconut netting and posts. The gesture, however, had a feeble result. It was too late. If a winter flowering plant of any kind has not become firmly established by early autumn, there is nothing you can do afterwards to bring it to life.

I have learnt now – and how costly the lessons have been – that you must anticipate trouble if you are to be a successful grower; you must be an optimist in the long term, a pessimist in the short, and you must be perpetually on guard against sudden attack by the elements, insects and diseases that are always in waiting to catch you off your guard.

Along the bank above the Governor Herrick we had planted an assortment of daffodils which had come from Gordon Gibson, a famous grower in the Scilly Islands who was an old friend of Jeannie’s family. It was not an ideal position for they faced the full blast of a Lizard wind, but we were short of space and the prize position in the wood had been given to 5 cwt. of King Alfred and 2 cwt. of Soleil d’Or. Nor for that matter were they fashionable daffodils; for daffodils like everything else can outlive popularity. We were, however, only too pleased to have them because we could not afford a stock of up-to-date bulbs, and any bulbs were better than none.