A Gull on the Roof (6 page)

While I fetched the water Jeannie went up to the patch of ground where we had fixed up a wired run for the chickens. We had always kept chickens at Mortlake where they lived in a disused air-raid shelter and in a run that was messy with mud. Now they had a house of their own and, although the site was open to the four winds of heaven, they had grass to scratch, legions of succulent insects to peck, and farm chicken food to eat instead of the sticky mash which used to be their diet. There were ten of them (I had made a special trip in the Land Rover and they had laid six eggs on the way) and they were delighted with their new home. The eldest was called Queen Mary and although she was too old for egg laying, we had brought her to Minack because we did not have the heart to kill her. But the Cornish air, in due course, worked a miracle and she began laying again; and a year later we gave her a set of thirteen eggs to sit on, from which she proudly hatched one chick. Their devotion to each other was pretty to watch until the chick grew into a cockerel and to its duty of ruling the roost; and then Queen Mary, perhaps exhausted by motherhood, began to ail, and had to be put away.

I stood the jug of water on the table and lit the two Valor stoves. The coal stove, in place of the Cornish range, always went out overnight; and so breakfast was cooked with a kettle on one oil stove, a frying pan on the other. Then, while Jeannie got on with the breakfast I walked up to the farm for the milk.

It was not a pretty farm; indeed it was not a single farm but a collection of ancient buildings including three cottages which were allotted to three different farmers. The grey stone buildings were juggled together without any design of convenience for the farmers concerned. A cow-house of one was opposite the tool-shed of another. A barn alongside one cottage belonged to the one opposite. Decrepit buildings, cracked windows, mud and muck on the ground – yet they were a monument to centuries of humble endeavour and this, I found, gave pleasure.

I was looking around for John when an old woman, a battered grey felt hat pressed down over her ears, with a lined face like that of a Rembrandt portrait shouted: ‘He’s in the shelter, Mister!’ Mary Annie lived with her daughter in one of the cottages, and all her life had been spent among these buildings, working a man’s day on the land. She was kind, friendly and happy, and if anyone had suggested she would have been better off in an old people’s home she would have laughed in their face. The spirit of Mary Annie was as indestructible as the boulders in the moorland that she could see from her cottage.

I found John sitting on a stool milking a cow. Farmers are silent and solemn people when they are milking, and as they are likely to be performing this task for two hours every morning and evening they have plenty of time for contemplation. Doubtless their thoughts roam over the crops they are growing but I guess they are thinking of those of their neighbours as well. If they do not wish them ill, they at least derive comfort if the crops are not as good as their own. At any rate some of them do; and I confess I developed the habit myself, when our potatoes were ‘cut’ by frost, of hastening to look at other people’s to discover if they were as damaged as our own.

‘Lovely morning,’ I said cheerfully.

John replied with a nasal sound like ‘urr,’ but without any rolling of the r’s. It is a sound with which I have become very familiar. It is uttered by any farmer who does not want to make conversation or commit himself to an answer, and it is emitted on various notes of the scale. If, for instance, a tone of surprise is required, the note is high with a slight cadence. If agreement is to be signified but without it being overstressed the note is in the middle; and if it is necessary to make clear that any conversation is unwelcome, the ‘urr’ becomes a grunt.

‘How are your potatoes looking?’ I asked. This enquiry, during growing time, is the Cornishman’s substitute for enquiring after anyone’s health.

A low ‘urr.’

I hung about for half a minute, then asked if I could help myself to the milk and I would pay him at the end of the week. The ‘urr’ came out in the middle of the scale. Then, as I was going through the door, I heard him say, ‘Cubs are makin’ a mess of them taties down cliff and I be setting traps.’ Fearing for Monty, I was immediately on my guard. ‘Whereabouts?’ There was a pause. ‘They won’t harm yer cat,’ he answered without me having to explain what I was thinking.

In one direction stretched the lane to the main road, nearly a mile long with its surface straddled with cartmade craters; in the other the lane to Minack, rough like the dried-up bed of a river. Tommy Williams had cut away the undergrowth of the last one hundred yards and we could now drive up to the cottage in the Land Rover. Cars could reach the farm buildings but they could not get any further, and in time the lane became known as our chastity belt. We could not be surprised by visitors and, if tempted to go out, so bad was it even for a Land Rover, we usually had second thoughts about going.

I walked happily down the lane carrying the milk in a tin can, marvelling at the way the hedges on either side unfolded the view of the sea like a tape. First a pin point of blue, then stretched as if it were a few inches long, growing longer and longer as I went down the hill until I reached the bottom and the hedges fell away and I looked upon the vastness of Mount’s Bay.

I was singing when I came up to the cottage, breakfast ahead of me, and a lovely day at our mercy. Jeannie was waiting at the door, a jug in her hand.

‘You clot,’ she said, ‘when you filled this jug you filled it with tadpoles.’

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.

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.