A Gull on the Roof Read online

  Derek Tangye (1912–1996) was the author of the much-loved books that collectively became known as The Minack Chronicles. They told the story of how he and his wife Jean left behind their cosmopolitan lifestyle in London to relocate to a clifftop daffodil farm in Cornwall. There they lived in a simple cottage surrounded by their beloved animals, which featured regularly in his books. In their later years, the Tangyes bought the fields next to their cottage, which are now preserved as the Minack Chronicles Nature Reserve.

  Also by Derek Tangye

  A Donkey in the Meadow

  A Drake at the Door

  A Cat in the Window

  A Gull on the Roof

  Derek Tangye

  SKETCHES BY JEAN TANGYE

  Constable • London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Michael Joseph Ltd., 1961

  This edition published by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2014

  Copyright © Derek Tangye, 1961

  Sketches copyright © Jean Tangye, 1961

  The right of Derek Tangye to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-990-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47211-023-7 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Cover design by Simon Levy

  Introduction

  I sat down in our house overlooking the Thames at Mortlake and felt a soft, caressing rub against my ankle. Monty was saying in his feline fashion that he sympathised with me over the apprehension that was in my mind.

  The humble earth must ever fly (wrote A. P. Herbert)

  Round that great orange in the sky;

  But, Monty, with devotion due

  The home of Tangye turns round you.

  An animal, as one grows older, plays the role of the teddy bear in childhood. He stirs those qualities which are best in one’s character and is one’s patient confessor in periods of distress. So it was with Monty. He was, for both Jeannie and myself, the repository of our secret thoughts.

  My apprehension that evening was in reality an ally of the caution I had discarded; for in the morning we had set in motion our decision to leave London in favour of the bath-less, paraffin-lit two-roomed cottage called Minack and six acres of uncultivated land on the coast between Penzance and Land’s End. I had completed the settlement of my own affairs and Jeannie had handed in her resignation to the Chairman of the Savoy Hotel. Our livelihood now depended upon the creation of a flower farm from this desolate, beautiful country, aided not by any practical experience, but only by our ignorance as to what lay ahead.

  Jeannie’s position at the Savoy was the epitome of a career girl’s ambition, but it was because she was not career minded that she performed her duties so well. As Public Relations Officer of the Savoy, Claridges, Berkeley and Simpsons, she had a high salary, a large expense account and a multitude of friends. Her salient task had been to promote goodwill, and that was achieved not only by organising efficiently the daily routine of an office, but also by endearing herself to the great variety of people who pass through an international hotel.

  ‘Absolute nonsense!’ said the Chairman when she saw him, ‘you’re obviously tired and want a rest. Take six months holiday with pay’. . . then added: ‘When you come back you will want to stay with us for ever.’

  I could understand his scepticism, for he had no knowledge of the months of reasoning which had brought us to this moment. He could only comprehend the fact she was throwing away a career of distinction in favour of a wild adventure which, after a short while, might appear as a misplaced enthusiasm.

  He could not be expected to appreciate the sense of futility which perforce invades the kind of life we had been leading. The glamour and hospitality act as a narcotic, doping the finer instincts of living, and in the grey hours of early morning you lie awake painfully aware that you live in a flashy world where truth and integrity for the most part are despised, where slickness reigns supreme.

  We found the pace too fast and any material rewards poor substitutes for the peace of mind that was sacrificed. The world of politics, journalism and entertainment in which we moved requires a ruthless zest for professional survival if you are to do so, and this neither of us now possessed. It is a world in which you cannot live on prestige alone for it is only the present that counts. We had come to distrust both the importance of the objectives and the methods used to achieve them; for it is a world in which acclaim, however transitory and gained at whatever moral cost, is valued in the same currency as the conquest of Everest.

  The atmosphere corrodes the individual and it had been corroding Jeannie and me. The moment of self-criticism, the shame we felt for our arid minds, slipped into oblivion as soon as we were in the splash of another party, in a cuckoo land of mutual admiration and sudden rip-roaring friendships.

  There was no decisive occasion when we decided to leave. It was a host of occasions mingled into one, so that one day we suddenly realised our life was a spinning top, dizzily circling on one spot. We saw our fate, if we remained, in the men and women around us who had taken no heed of the barrier between youth and middle age, braying prejudiced views, dependent on values that toppled upside down, propping against a future which repeats endlessly the present, resembling worn playing cards. We could either drift on, or start again. We could either suffer the illusion our life was a contented one, remain within the environment we knew too well, or seek a freedom in a strange one.

  We had been playing the game of looking for somewhere to settle whenever we had taken our holidays in Cornwall. We wanted a cottage with a wood nearby and fields that went down to the sea, distant from any other habitation and remote from a countrified imitation of the life we were wishing to leave. Somewhere where we could earn a living and yet relish the isolation of a South Sea island, be able to think without being told what to think, to have the leisure to study the past, to live the present without interference.

  It is a game which is perfectly harmless so long as no place you see fits your ideal. Once the two coincide the moment of decision arrives and it is no longer a game. This is what happened when Jeannie and I found Minack.

  1

  We had set out, one May morning, from the inn in the Valley of Lamorna to walk westwards along the coast. We were on a week’s holiday and as usual the carrot dangling before us on the walk was our imaginary home.

  Lamorna was once the centre of quarrying and its beauty was incidental. The great blocks of granite were blasted from the cliff face beside the little harbour, transported in long wooden wagons pulled by teams of horses up and down the hills to Penzance where they were cut into the required shapes and shipped for building purposes all over Britain.

  The name means valley by the sea, and it is now a sleepy wooded valley possessing the ethereal beauty, the lush vegetation and shimmering colours, the away from it all atmosphere that tempts people to believe that here is their earthly Nirvana. In the summer, of course, it erupts with a lava of holidaymakers yet, and this is the charm of Lamorna, there is no strid
ent attempt to exploit these visitors. There is the inn, a small hotel, Ernie Walter’s filling station and café, Daniel’s place down in the cove; and though a few cottages advertise bed and breakfast in their windows, one feels this is done out of courtesy rather than a desire to earn a living. Lamorna, then, is a pilgrimage of the day tripper and though the narrow road on a summer afternoon is choked with cars, charabancs and dust, the evening comes and the valley is silent again. In winter it is always silent except for the wind in the trees and the echo of the surf in the cove, and it becomes a valley to cure a cynic. The air is sweet with the scent of the violet plants which climb up the hillsides in neat cultivated rows, and as you walk along you will meet a picker, a basket of violets or anemones in either hand, taking them home to bunch. Or in the early spring when cities are still shivering, you find the valley a factory of flowers with every inhabitant a picker or a buncher, sharing in the hectic race to harvest the daffodils before those ‘up along’ come into bloom. During the war growers had to surrender a large part of their daffodil ground to the growing of vegetables, and so they threw their bulbs at random in the woods. The effect in spring is as if the constellations had left their places in the sky for Lamorna woods, a myriad yellow lights peeping from the undergrowth, edging the sparkling stream beside moss-covered boulders, struggling through twining, unfriendly brambles.

  The path we walked along was only a shadow of a path, more like the trodden run of badgers. Here, because there was no sign of habitation, because the land and the boulders and the rocks embraced the sea without interference, we could sense we were part of the beginning of time, the centuries of unceasing waves, the unseen pattern of the wild generations of foxes and badgers, the ageless gales that had lashed the desolate land, exultant and roaring, a giant harbour of sunken ships in their wake. And we came to a point, after a steep climb, where a great Carn stood balanced on a smaller one, upright like a huge man standing on a stool, as if it were a sentinel waiting to hail the ghosts of lost sailors. The track, on the other side, had tired of the undergrowth which blocked its way along the head of the cliff, for it sheered seawards, tumbling in a zigzag course to the scarred grey rocks below. We stood on the pinnacle . . . the curve of Mount’s Bay leading to the Lizard Point on the left, the Wolf Rock lighthouse a speck in the distance, a French crabber a mile offshore, pale blue hull and small green sail aft, chugging through the white speckled sea towards Newlyn, and high above us a buzzard, its wings spread motionless, soaring effortlessly into the sky.

  Jeannie suddenly pointed inland. ‘Look!’ she said, ‘there it is!’

  There was never any doubt in either of our minds. The small grey cottage a mile away, squat in the lonely landscape, surrounded by trees and edged into the side of a hill, became as if by magic the present and the future. It was as if a magician beside this ancient Carn had cast a spell upon us, so that we could touch the future as we could, at that moment, touch the Carn. There in the distance we could see our figures moving about our daily tasks, a thousand, thousand figures criss-crossing the untamed land, dissolving into each other, leaving a mist of excitement of our times to come.

  We stood outside the cottage and stared; a Hans Andersen cottage with the primitive beauty of a crofter’s home, sad and neglected as if it were one of the grey boulders in the wild land around. The walls seemed to grow out of the ground, great rocks fingering up the sides until they met the man-placed stones, roughfaced granite slabs bound together by clay. Once upon a time, it appeared to us, there might have been upstairs rooms and perhaps a roof of thatch; but now the roof was an uncouth corrugated iron jagged with holes, tilting so steeply that it resembled a man’s cap pulled over his eyes; and prodding defiantly into the sky above it, as if ashamed of being associated with such ugliness, was a massive lichen-covered chimney. The poky windows peered from the darkness within, three facing the moorland and the sea, and two either side of the battered door which looked upon the unkempt once-loved tiny garden. We pushed the door and it was unlocked. Wooden boards peppered with holes gnawed by rats covered the floor, and putting my hand through one of them I touched the wet earth. The walls were mustard yellow with old paper and though the area of the cottage was that of an old-fashioned drawing room it was divided into four rooms, matchbox thick divisions yielding the effect of privacy. At right angles to the door in a cavity of the wall beneath the chimney, an ancient Cornish range seared with rust, droppings of rats dirtying the oven, brandished the memories of forgotten meals. Above, the sagging thin boards of the ceiling drooped in curves, rimmed grey in patches from rain dripping through the roof. A cupboard faced the door and inside broken crockery lay on the shelves, a brown kettle without a lid, and a mug imprinted with a coloured picture of King George V and Queen Mary side by side. Musty with long absence of an inhabitant, lugubrious with the crush of the toy-sized rooms, the cottage seemed yet to shine with welcome; and we felt as if we had entered Aladdin’s Cave.

  Outside we stood by the corner of the cottage, the battered door facing climbing ground behind us, and looked down upon a shadow of a valley, gentle slopes, heading for the sea. Beyond was the Carn where we had stood, cascading below it a formation of rocks resembling an ancient castle, and in the distance across the blue carpet of sea the thin white line of breakers dashing against the shores of Prah Sands, Porthleven and Mullion. A lane drifted away from the cottage. On its right was a barn with feet-thick walls in which were open slits instead of windows and on its left was a tumbled-down stone hedge, holding back the woods we had seen and the jungle-like undergrowth, as policemen try to hold back a bursting throng. The lane led down to a stream, dammed into a pool by the density of the weeds which blocked its outflow, and then, a few yards on, petered out in a tangle of brushwood and gorse bushes. We could see that the cottage was only connected with civilisation by a track through a field.

  There was another track which led towards the sea and, as it broke away from the environment of the cottage, we found roofless outbuildings, bramble-covered stone walls, with blackthorn growing where once stood men and cattle sheltering from the weather. The track broke into a huge field, or what we could see by the hedges was once a field but now had grown into part of the desolate moorland, then fell downwards to the top of the cliff. It was no ordinary cliff. It did not fall fearsomely sheer to the sea below but dropped, a jungle of thorns, gorse, elderberry trees and waist-high cooch grass, in a series of leaps to a rugged teaspoon of a bay; and as we stood there, somnolent gulls sitting on the rocks far below, we saw in our minds a giant knife slicing pocket meadows out of the rampaging vegetation, refashioning the cliff so that it resembled the neat pattern of daffodil and potato gardens that were grouped like hillside Italian vineyards at intervals along the coast. We saw in our minds not only a way of life, but also the means by which to earn a living. It was the sweet moment when the wings of enthusiasm take flight, when victory is untarnished by endeavour, the intoxicating instant when the urge for conquest obliterates the reality of obstacles, dissolving common sense, blanketing the possibilities of failure. We had found our imaginary home. If we were able to possess it the way stretched clear to our contentment.

  Details about the cottage were told to us back at the inn. Mrs Emily Bailey, who was then the innkeeper, and Tom her son, who nursed the adjoining market garden but who now has taken her place – these two listened patiently to our excitement. It was the habit of holidaymakers to lean over the bar expounding their hopes of packing up jobs, seeking an answer as to where they could escape; and these words of good intentions were as familiar to Tom and Mrs Bailey as the goodbyes at the end of holidays, as much a part of the holiday as splits and Cornish cream, a game of make-believe that was played for a fortnight, then forgotten for another year.

  The cottage was on the land of a farm which belonged to one of the great Cornish estates. This Estate rented the farm to a large farmer who lived a few miles from Land’s End who, in turn, sublet it out on a dairyman’s lease. This lease was a r
elic of those days when Estates had difficulty in finding tenants for their farms. An established farmer would rent an unwanted farm, stock it with cattle and hire out each cow to a man of his own choosing who would occupy the farmhouse and farm the land. Hence this man, or dairyman as he was called, had no responsibility to the Estate, for he was only a cowman. The responsibility of upkeep lay in the hands of the absentee farmer who, in this case, was a man called Harry Laity. As I lay awake that night he loomed like an ogre and, determined to call on him on the morrow, I experienced the same queasiness as I had felt before the interview for my first job.

  We took the bus to a hamlet called Poljigga and found ourselves deposited at the end of a drive a mile long; a dusty, pot-ridden drive with the farmhouse eyeing us in the distance. We were absurdly nervous. Jeannie whose success was born from her ease with spangled names, and I whose duty it had been to have a weekly solitary interview with the Secretary of the Cabinet, walked along that drive, nervous as children visiting the headmaster. An over-sophisticated approach, a crude remark, sincerity sounding shallow because of lack of confidence, could batter our hopes for ever.

  ‘What on earth do I say?’ I said to Jeannie.

  My passport, I thought, could be that I was a Cornishman. My ancestors had come from Brittany at the beginning of the fifteenth century, being descended from the Breton family of Tannegui du Chatel whose ruined castle still exists in the north-west corner of Finisterre. The Tangyes lived in obscurity in various parishes of West Cornwall until my grandfather, Richard, was born at Illogan near Redruth. His parents kept the village shop, and farmed a few acres near by where my great-grandfather followed the plough in Quaker dress and broad-brimmed hat. Richard and his brothers became engineers, and breasting the waves of the industrial revolution their inventiveness quickly brought them fame and fortune. Their success, they used to say, dated from the occasion when Isambard Brunel’s huge vessel the Great Eastern obstinately refused to be launched from the dock at Millwall where it was built. Its length was nearly seven hundred feet, its breadth more than eighty, the height of the hull sixty, whilst its five funnels were a hundred feet high and six feet in diameter. It was intended to carry four thousand passengers, a crew of four hundred besides a mighty cargo – but there it was wedged high and dry on the stocks. It was then that the Tangye brothers produced their new invention, the hydraulic jack, and to the excitement of the watching crowd, the vessel slid into the water. ‘We launched the Great Eastern,’ said Richard, ‘and the Great Eastern launched us.’