A Drake at the Door 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 Gull on the Roof

  A Donkey in the Meadow

  A Cat in the Window

  A Drake at the Door

  Derek 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., 1963

  This edition published by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2014

  Copyright © Derek Tangye, 1963

  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: 978-1-47210-992-7 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47211-025-1 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Cover design by Simon Levy

  Illustrations

  Boris, the Muscovy drake, during daffodil season at Minack

  Shelagh, Jane and Jeannie in a Minack daffodil meadow

  Hubert when he was king of the roof

  Sammy returns to the wild

  Derek, Jeannie and Lama

  Shelagh’s photograph of Lama

  Boris and Lama

  Shelagh and Bingo outside her caravan

  Knocker, successor to Hubert

  Jane, after winning a First Prize at Penzance Flower Show

  Boris, the Muscovy drake, during daffodil season at Minack

  1

  I heard one day that my neighbour was leaving. We had been neighbours for seven years and, in view of the manner of our coming, conflict between us was perhaps inevitable. The neighbour represented the hard-working peasant, Jeannie and I the up-country interlopers.

  Minack and our six acres of land belonged to his farm, although in reality it was not his farm. In the years before the last war, farms in West Cornwall were difficult to let and landowners were thankful to dispose of them under any conditions; and the conditions were sometimes these:

  A prosperous farmer would rent an unwanted farm, stock it with cows, put a man of his own choosing called a dairyman into the farmhouse, charge him rent for each cow, and then let him run the farm as he wished. My neighbour was a dairyman.

  Both of us, then, paid rent to the same absentee farmer; my neighbour for twelve cows, myself for the primitive cottage and the derelict land I was allowed to have with it.

  On a practical basis I had the worst of the bargain. It was a whim that led us to Minack; an emotion that made us believe the broken-down cottage edged by a wood and looking out on Mount’s Bay between Penzance and Land’s End, could become our personal paradise. And after seven years I still did not possess a scrap of paper which proved our legal right to the tenancy.

  The reason for this dilatoriness was fear on our part. When in the beginning we pleaded for Minack, the absentee farmer clearly did not mind whether we had it or not. We had to nudge our way into his good humour. We had to be as careful as a ship in a minefield. One false move, a word too thrusting, a suggestion too bold, and we would have been retreating from his presence without a hope of return.

  This was an occasion, we both felt, when logic or the legal mind would be a hindrance. It was not the moment to bargain or be too meticulous in wrapping the deal in legal language. We wanted Minack and in order to secure it we had to appear foolish. The result was no lease, all repairs and improvements without prospect of compensation, and six acres of scrubland which most people considered unsuitable for cultivation.

  And there were other snags. There was the barn, for instance, within a few yards of the cottage, which belonged to my neighbour and not to Minack. Here he used to stable his horses, collecting them in the morning and returning them in the evening; and in wet weather when no outside work could be done he would clear the muck from the floor and pile it beside the lane which led up to his farmhouse a quarter of a mile away.

  We had made this lane ourselves, opening up again an ancient one by first cutting away the brush which smothered it; for when we first came to Minack the only means of reaching the cottage and the barn was by crossing two fields, waterlogged in winter.

  In the autumn my neighbour used to spend days at a time in the other half of the barn ‘shooting’ his potatoes for January planting in his section of the cliff; and if it were a period when we were not on speaking terms Jeannie and I found it irksome.

  ‘Did he say anything this morning?’ I would ask Jeannie if she had seen him first.

  ‘Not a word.’

  Of course, there are some who say that the Cornish resent any ‘foreigner’ who comes to live among them. I am Cornish myself and I do not believe that such resentment, if it exists, is confined to the Cornish alone. Most countrymen if they live far from an urban area are on guard when a stranger appears in their midst. Strangers represent the threat of change, and change is the last thing the true countryman wants. He views the city from afar and is not impressed by its standards; and when in the summer the inhabitants disgorge over the countryside, a leavening of them always confirm the countryman’s worst suspicions. The Cornish for the most part heave a sigh of relief when the holiday season is over and Cornwall belongs to them again.

  As for individuals, the Cornish have the same basic ingredients as everyone else, the same kindliness or meanness, good humour or jealousy. It is only in obstinacy that the Cornish excel. If a Cornishman senses that he is being driven into taking a step against his freewill nothing, not even a bulldozer, will make him budge.

  So our neighbour was leaving. He was forsaking his job as a dairyman to take over a farm of his own. He had won promotion by his hard work, while we now had the chance to take over not only the barn, but also those fields and cliff meadows adjacent to our own which were essential for certain expansionist plans we had in mind. We were delighted. Here was the opportunity to put sense into our life at Minack, to regularise our position by securing a lease, to act indeed in a practical fashion. It was not, however, a question of expressing a desire, and the desire materialising without more ado. We soon discovered there were complications.

  The news of my neighbour’s coming departure speedily spread through the neighbourhood, and young men began tumbling over each other in efforts to gain the vacant dairymanship for themselves.

  The lure, in particular, lay in the cliff meadows which were renowned for the earliness of their potatoes and daffodils. Most of these were as steep as those we had cut in our own cliff, and I did not fancy them very much myself . . . we had enough hand labour already, turning the ground in the autumn, carrying down the seed potatoes, shovelling them in, shovelling them out, carrying the harvest hundredweight after hundredweight up the cliff again. And in any case I sensed the golde
n days of Cornish new potatoes from the cliff were over.

  But there were other meadows cresting my neighbour’s cliff that were ideal for our needs, large enough for a small tractor, and accessible to the Land Rover when it was necessary to use it. This was reason enough why we wanted them, but there was another.

  These meadows were reached by passing in front of the cottage and taking the track towards the sea which led also to Minack meadows. We had watched our neighbour for seven years using this thoroughfare and we did not want to see anyone else doing the same. Minack, in substance, was remote from any habitation, breathing peace in its solitude, and we wanted to eliminate any prospect of enduring again the grit of friction.

  And there were the fields around us. Had we been able to wave a magic wand we still could not have made use of all of them; but there were four surrounding Minack which, if we possessed them, would provide the twin advantage of isolation with the practical one of giving us the elbow-room vital for development.

  In particular we needed flat ground for greenhouses. We already had one small greenhouse tucked in a clearing of the wood and another, a splendid one a hundred feet long and twenty-one feet wide, stretching down in front of the cottage on land that was swamp when we arrived. We felt sure that our future security lay in such factory-like protection; the only way possible to demolish the omnipotence of the weather.

  We were aware, then, that we were at a crucial moment of our life at Minack. Here we were poised between stagnation and progress, an irritant and solace; and the success or failure of the action I was about to take would dominate the years to come. I had decided to be bold.

  The absentee landlord had by now become a good friend of ours.

  ‘Harry,’ I said to him one day, ‘how about your giving up the lease and letting me have it instead?’

  I knew quite well that by making this overture I was heading for a period of bargaining. He belonged to the breed who prefer this period of bargaining to its culmination; and should it be a horse he was buying, or a motorcar or a load of hay, his ultimate pleasure lay in the skill with which he had conducted the negotiations. I, on the other hand, like to get a deal over as quickly as possible. I have not the nerve of a dealer. If I know what I want, I find no pleasure in protracting negotiations provided the sum is reasonably within the figure I have decided to pay.

  Nor had I, as far as these negotiations were concerned, any cards up my sleeve. I was living again the time when I first asked Harry for Minack. I had to have it, and he knew it. I was naked. I was at his mercy.

  Inevitably he began to dally; and, as if I were a fish on a hook, he set out to give me plenty of line and himself plenty of play before he landed me neatly on the bank. Out came the excuses . . . he had promised the farm to Mr X . . . it had been for so long in his family that for sentimental reasons he did not wish to give it up . . . if Mr X did not have it, he would use the fields for young cattle . . . and so on. All these proposals were told with such conviction and friendliness that I would come back to Jeannie in despair.

  ‘He won’t let us have it,’ I would say to Jeannie disconsolately.

  It was the mood that Harry wanted to create. He knew that, keen as I was to do a deal, he could titillate me to be still keener. I had to buy the lease from him, and each fruitless interview only made me more frantic; a cigarette dangling from his lips, he watched me betraying my anxiety.

  Meanwhile a corner of my mind was occupied by another problem. When, and if, Harry and I came to terms I would find myself a tenant not only of Minack but also of the hundred-acre farm to which it belonged.

  This was absurd. I had been consumed to such an extent by the desire for self-preservation that I had ignored the implications the success of my endeavour might entail. And anyhow, would the landlord accept me as a tenant?

  The landlord was a remote person who owned large estates in Cornwall and who, as is customary, employed a land agent as a buffer between himself and his tenants. He was an enlightened landowner and he possessed a zeal to preserve the countryside, not to exploit it; in particular he felt a special trust for the wild, desolate coastline where Minack was situated. His tenants were, of course, carefully chosen and his farms well managed but, and this was the key to the situation as far as I was concerned, the Minack farm was the only one on his estates which was now leased to an absentee farmer.

  I now found myself in the process of conducting two negotiations instead of one, and in both I was sure to be the financial loser. I did not care. I had the same irrational, dynamic instinct which pushes a man up a mountain, the urge for conquest without a material value, to reach a halo which rewards the individual but never the onlooker. Security at Minack meant to us a way of life we loved. How do you price such an acquisition?

  I outlined the situation to the land agent who needed no persuading to appreciate the chance I was giving him. I was offering, in fact, to buy the lease of a farm, and return it without charge to the landlord. It had never happened before in the land agent’s experience; and yet, fortunately, he had enough subtlety of mind to realise there was guile behind my offer.

  I was expecting payment, but the payment was not to be made in pounds, shillings and pence. I was asking for the fulfilment of my plan to secure a direct lease for Minack together with the extra land I required; and I was also asking to propose my own nominee for the farm proper.

  Such an arrangement would enable the landlord once again to have direct control of Minack and the farm; and we would have the peace we sought. A secure lease for ourselves, a co-operative neighbour of our own choosing.

  As it happened I already knew whom I wanted to have the farm. I had stopped the Land Rover by the milk stand which corners our long lane and the main road a week or two previously when a young farm worker called Jack Cockram came up to me. He had heard the farm was vacant and could I put in a good word for him?

  At the time, of course, I could be of no help. I had neither the ear of Harry nor of the land agent, and so there was nothing I could do. But I knew the occasion was important. I had always liked Jack. He had been a wartime evacuee on the farm where he was now a skilled farmworker. He had married Alice Grenfell, niece of Jim Grenfell who kept the inn at St Buryan, and they lived in a council house in the village with their one little girl and were soon to have another.

  He was plainly a type who could become a good farmer and yet, because of lack of opportunity, he would be more likely to remain a farmworker for the rest of his life. Both Jeannie and I now began to experience great pleasure that not only was there the prospect of benefiting ourselves but also the possibility of launching this couple into a new life. And so, as soon as the land agent had given tacit approval to my suggestions, I determined to complete my negotiations with Harry.

  I had no need to force the issue. The evening I saw him he too had decided the time of dithering was over. I thought his proposals were perfectly fair, and I promptly accepted them. He had gained from the sale of the lease the amount he would, in any case, have received in due course from the rents of myself and my neighbour. But there was one aspect of the deal from which he could claim a victory. It was indeed a handsome victory; and when I returned from the meeting to Jeannie my elation was tempered by this subsidiary problem which now faced us.

  ‘Jeannie,’ I said, ‘we are now the owners of twelve useless cows.’

  My concern was due to these particular cows being classified as reactors, which meant they had failed to pass the tubercular test examination. Up to a year or so before this would not have mattered as there were scores of farms in Cornwall with reactor cows. But there had now been a Government edict ordering all cows to be tested, and those which failed had to be destroyed and sold only for meat consumption. The deadline for this edict was at the end of this particular year.

  The result had been that the value of such cows had nose-dived; yet I had contracted with Harry to pay him the price of eight years before, the same valuation of the twelve cows with which he
had stocked Minack when my neighbour, the dairyman, was installed.

  I was further hampered by my inability to set about selling the cows until Michaelmas Day when my neighbour departed. The only thing I could do was to study the cattle markets of various centres in Cornwall, and to stare at the cows themselves as they munched in the fields around us.

  As they were now entities in my life, I inevitably began to feel sorry for them; but I also discovered the streak of the businessman was becoming alive in me. I was paying £35 for each of these cows and according to the markets they were not worth £15 a piece; and already the flush of my triumph in securing the lease had started to dissolve into an unhappy feeling that I was wasting a great deal of money. I waited for Michaelmas Day.

  At midday the cows became ours. Twelve cows peacefully grazing in a meadow – £420 worth. They looked so content and handsome chewing the grass, the Guernsey buff against the green, the dark Minack wood behind them and in the distance the sea, that Jeannie and I found ourselves marvelling at the toughness of people who can deal in animals as merchandise. The first and last time we were ever to sell an animal. And the sooner it was done the better.

  Jack Cockram, now installed at the farm, had agreed to look after them, but he too urged speed although for a different reason. The cows might get ill and then I would be worse off than ever; Thursday was market day at Penzance and the best thing I could do would be to arrange for a haulier to collect them. But I had observed that the prices at this market had been lower than anywhere else. It was Monday and I had two days to decide.

  Meanwhile I had a most unexpected piece of good fortune. As the new owner I received the cow dossier, a document containing the history of each cow, and to my delight I found that one of them was not a reactor after all. It had passed the test. It was the equivalent of a thoroughbred. In a matter of seconds this particular cow had shot up in value from £15 to over £70. And there was more good fortune soon to come.