A Gull on the Roof Read online

  My father was trained as a lawyer and he belonged to that group of men and women who, though without personal ambition, perpetually give their services to the community in unpaid but responsible jobs. He was, among other appointments, Joint Chairman of the Cornwall Quarter Sessions, a Deputy Lieutenant of the County, and organiser of the Cornwall Special Constabulary until he died in 1944. He was easy among people and they could always endear themselves to him by enthusing over the loveliness of Glendorgal. Glendorgal, now a hotel kept by my brother Nigel, was our home on the north coast of Cornwall near Newquay and it has the most beautiful position imaginable; the house is low and rambling and stares up the wild north coast past Watergate Bay and Bedruthan Steps to Trevose Head in the far distance. Below the house, so close that you can throw a stone into it from the dining room, is a sandy cove which is itself a dent in Porth Beach. Across this beach is Trevelgue Island, historic for its ancient burial grounds, though it is an island only by the length of the footbridge which connects it to the mainland. My father had a great love for this island but just before the war circumstances forced him to sell it. The buyers were the local Town Council and I remember the wrangling which went on during the negotiations. It centred round a public convenience. My father was aware of the Cornish habit of erecting ugly cement blockhouses in the most prominent situations without any regard to the visual effect on the beauty spot concerned. The island had always been open to the public but the Town Council, now that they were buying it, believed they could improve its amenities. They intended to erect a blockhouse on the island which would remain for ever a silhouetted sore against the view beyond. My father was adamant that this should not be done, and though in the end he won his point, it was only by sacrificing a large amount from the sum the Council had been prepared to pay.

  My father delighted in affectionate surprises. When I was returning to London by train he would see me off at Newquay station, then race in his old Wolseley car the three miles to Quintrell Downs where he would stand at the railway crossing waving his pipe as the train rushed by. I remember another time, after my twenty-first birthday weekend, I and my friends had said goodbye to him at Glendorgal before returning to London by car and then found him, one hour and a half later, nonchalantly strolling on the Tamar Bridge at Launceston accompanied by Lance, his old English sheepdog; by a roundabout route he had raced to the bridge to say goodbye again.

  We walked apprehensively along the Laity drive, happily unaware that this was the first of our many visits on the same errand. We were nervous, as actors are before a performance, but in our hearts we did not think we could fail. Our zest would smother the awkwardness of the introduction and, because we were accustomed to meeting strange people, we would soon be at our ease. We were wrong.

  Harry Laity, whose robust enjoyment of life we were later to appreciate, eyed us as if we had escaped out of Broadmoor. We saw him first in the yard outside the farmhouse watching the cows being brought in to milk; and I began to explain our mission while he stared at the cattle as they passed. I soon became aware that our presence was a nuisance and my confidence ebbed. This was not a situation that either of us had foreseen, and was not one that smooth manners could dissolve. We were out of our depth. The gambits on which we were accustomed to rely were as ineffective as a saddle on a wild pony; and as I stood there awkwardly beside him our plans, which to us seemed so important, became deformed, diminished by their reception into a scatterbrained foolishness.

  The cattle disappeared to their milking, and he led us into the house and to the dining room. Jeannie and I sat down with Harry Laity opposite, the bare dining table like a frozen lake between us. I sat there and began to describe – defensively, falsely jovial – my Cornish background, our longing for a Cornish home, our plans for Minack. He stared at us, his eyes giving no clue to his thoughts, puffing a cigarette, replying to my leading questions with grunts and monosyllables. His attitude was unnerving. I began to overstress our case. The more unresponsive he was, the more talkative I became. I slithered into sounding like Uriah Heep. I felt myself acting like a gold prospector who, having found gold, was cunningly pretending he needed the land for another purpose. Handsome Harry as he was known in the neighbourhood was suspicious. He could not be expected to understand why I pleaded as if our lives depended upon his decision. It was beyond his comprehension why two people should wish to leave London for such a derelict, isolated, unwanted place as Minack.

  We went away and waited, and visited him again. We wrote carefully worded letters. We enlisted the help of mutual friends to put our case. We sat in our Mortlake home endlessly discussing the tactics which might penetrate the obstinacy of this man who held our future in his hands. We were at the door as soon as the postman knocked. Nothing. The weeks dragged into months. Silence.

  And then, one November morning, we had a message to call on Harry Laity the next time we were in Cornwall.Jeannie was in bed with flu, but it was she who proposed we should take the night train to Penzance.

  2

  The blessing of enthusiasm is its ability to deceive pleasantly. When Harry Laity told us we could live at Minack, it seemed that now the major obstacle had been overcome, our other problems would be solved without effort. And yet, the victory achieved, doubts soon began to enter my mind.

  ‘We’re intending to live in a wilderness,’ I said to Jeannie, ‘we have little in the bank and we haven’t a clue as to how to grow anything. The world is littered with people who would like to do what we are wanting to do. Common sense stops them.’

  We were, for instance, brushing aside the fact that we would have no legal security at Minack. The cottage, and a vaguely defined area of land, had been offered us at a low rent by the tenant of the farm but not by the Estate which owned it; hence we had no lease, yet in our zest to secure occupancy we had promised that all improvements would be at our expense. We convinced ourselves that once we had moved in, no one was likely to turn us out; and that conventional legal niceties, if pursued, might scare Harry Laity away from having anything to do with us. Long afterwards he told us we were right in our guesswork. He let us have Minack because he expected we would stay six months, then creep back to London, leaving a redecorated cottage behind.

  The cottage, then, was now nominally ours though it was eighteen months before we were able to set off along the Great West Road to live there; but during this interval, as we continued our rackety life in London, there remained in our minds the picture of Minack, snug, untamed, remote, giving us the same sense of protection as a deep shelter in an air raid. Whenever we had the time we dashed to its safety.

  Our first visit was a weekend in November when we introduced Monty to his new home. When I first met Monty I was allergic to cats, or rather, as we had never kept cats in our family and knew nothing about them, I pretended to be. He had been found, the last of a litter from a tortoiseshell, by Jeannie’s mother in a hairdresser’s in St Albans, and brought to Jeannie at the Savoy not long after we had been married. One day I walked unsuspectingly into her office and there on the floor, like a miniature foal trying to control its legs, was Monty. It was a few months after the battle of El Alamein.

  I feigned my displeasure and as it was to be my task to take him back to our house overlooking the finishing post at Mortlake, I insisted I would drop him over Hammersmith Bridge. But we passed the bridge and he was still in the basket, and though I swore he would only be a kitchen cat, he slept that night on our bed. From that day he shared with us doodle-bugs, rockets, a bomb on the house, wore a light blue ribbon each Boat-race day, sat for hours at night on the window sill waiting for our returns, made many hours happy with his purrs, and was always universally admired.

  To call him a ginger cat would be a mundane description. The postman at Minack, when he first saw him, called him red – after the red cats of Zennor. There is a legend that a woman many years ago came to the village of Zennor, on the North coast of the Land’s End peninsular, and announced she was going to br
eed tigers. The local authorities, not unnaturally, stepped in and forbade her to do so. The woman thereupon declared that if she could not breed tigers she would breed a red cat as fierce as a tiger; and now if you go from St Ives to Zennor it is the strangest fact that nearly every cat has a tinge of red. But Monty was not red. He had a snow-white shirt front, magnificent whiskers, white paws except for a front one which had a puddle of orange on it, while the rest of his person was covered with a semi-Persian fur the colour of bracken in autumn. ‘Like a fox,’ a farmer said, ‘and you’ll have to be careful when the hounds are around.’

  We had left London after lunch on a Friday and in the back of the car were a mattress and blankets, a Valor Stove, other camping equipment, and Monty in a wicker basket specially bought for the occasion. The basket was my idea. I had visions of Monty escaping from the car and disappearing into the countryside; but by the time we reached Andover he was clearly losing his temper, miaowing his head off and clawing at the sides of the basket in fury. ‘Perhaps he wants a walk,’ I said. We found a quiet spot off the main road, carefully lifted the lid, and fitted him with a blue harness and lead which had also been bought for the occasion. His fury swept the quiet spot like a storm and he would not budge as I pulled at the lead. ‘Let him be,’ said Jeannie, ‘let’s get back in the car and let him sit on my lap.’ In a few minutes he was purring contentedly and staring with interest out of the window at the passing scene; and the wicker basket and the lead and the harness have now been for years in the attic as a discarded monument to my foolishness in treating him as a cat who did not know how to travel. He came several times by car before staying at Minack for ever, and once by first-class sleeper. I was at Minack on my own and was expecting Jeannie down for the weekend. I was on the platform at Penzance when the night train drew in, and I saw her waving excitedly from a window. I went up to the door of her carriage and she said: ‘Come and look what I’ve got in my sleeper!’ I opened the sliding door, and there on the bunk was Monty. She had been dining at the Savoy when she suddenly had the whim of bringing Monty with her. She rushed back to Mortlake, found him by torchlight walking along the garden wall, wrapped him in a rug and carried him to a taxi. At Paddington he behaved like any prudent conspirator as he was smuggled into the train, and Jeannie awoke every now and then during the night to find him purring peacefully beside her. He stayed on with me for a few days after Jeannie returned; then we drove back together to Mortlake.

  It was nearly midnight, on that first visit, when the three of us reached Penzance. A gale was blowing in from the sea and as we drove along the front cascades of spray drenched the car as if coming from a giant hose. We crossed Newlyn Bridge, then up steep Paul Hill and along the winding road past the turn to Lamorna Valley; then up another hill, Boleigh Hill, where King Athelstan fought the Cornish ten centuries ago. Rain was whipping the windscreen when we turned off the road along a lane, through the dark shadows of a farm, until it petered out close to the cliff’s edge. I got out and opened a gate, then drove bumpily across a field with the headlights swathing a way through a carpet of escaping rabbits. This, the back entrance to Minack, was the way we had to use until the bramble-covered lane was opened up again; and after I pulled up beside a stone hedge, we still had two fields to scramble across in the darkness and the rain and the gale before we reached the cottage.

  I lit a candle and the light quivered on the peeling, yellow-papered walls. Everything was the same as the day we first pushed open the door; the ancient Cornish range, the pint-sized rooms with their matchbox-thick divisions, the wooden floor peppered with holes – only it was raining now and above the howl of the gale was the steady drip, drip of water from the leaking roof.

  We didn’t care. The adventure had begun.

  The phase in which daydreams had to be turned into facts had also begun. The romantic, escape-from-it-all atmosphere in which we had battled for the possession of Minack was now dissolving into the uncanny realism of victory. I had the same sense of living in the third dimension as the day when I enlisted in the Army and exchanged emotional patriotism for the discipline of the unknown. We could no longer talk of what we were going to do, we had to act; and the actions increasingly enmeshed us in a condition of living from which there was no turning back. As our first visit was succeeded by others, individuals entered our lives who pushed us forward linking our future with their present, as if they were pylons of a bridge. First we had looked for a bolt-hole from the kind of life we were leading, then we relished the emotion of its discovery, now we met the responsibilities of success. We found ourselves faced with a challenge that defeated our brittle egos, that was only to be accepted by the selves within us who found tranquillity in integrity.

  Ashley Thomas was the carpenter in our village of St Buryan. Tubby, with twinkling eyes, always wearing a peaked cloth cap to cover his bald head, he reminded Jeannie of Happy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His family had been carpenters in St Buryan for over two hundred years and craftsmanship was his second nature. And along with his tradition of skill was a quixotic nature akin to the carpenter of a neighbouring village who, after years of never sending out a bill, piled them all in his yard a few weeks before he died – and set them alight. Ashley Thomas never sent out an account within three years of the work being completed; then he would present it most courteously in person, while the account itself was a masterpiece of script, a scroll it should be called, in which every nut, nail and inch of wood was meticulously tabulated.

  Ashley Thomas looked around the debris of the cottage, notebook in hand, with a pencil behind his ear, and promptly provided the assurance that order could soon be created. Our plans were not ambitious. A new roof, that was essential; the thin boards of the ceiling could remain but the matchbox-thick divisions had to be ripped away providing us with one large room in which to live and a small one that would be our bedroom. The Cornish range was useless so a modern stove that both cooked and gave warmth would be its substitute. The rat-gnawed planks covering the floor would be torn up and in their place a damp-resisting cement flooring would layer the earth. The mustard-yellow paper would be peeled off the walls, and the crater-pitted slabs lime-washed white. The battered front door would be removed, replaced by one divided in half, like that of a stable. There would be no sink or bath and the lavatory would remain an Elsan, posted in a hut like a sentry box thirty yards from the cottage. Water, until we could sink a well, was going to be a tricky affair. We would have to collect the rain from the roof into a water-butt or fill a jug from the stream; but in the summer the stream dried up, and if the waterbutt was empty as well, we would have to go three miles to the village tap in St Buryan square. ‘Never mind,’ said Ashley Thomas looking at Jeannie, ‘it’s lovely at Minack in summer and lack of water won’t worry you . . . but how you’ll stand it in winter I just don’t know.’

  While Ashley Thomas provided the guiding hand within, Tom Bailey from the inn at Lamorna, acted as adviser without. He arrived at the cottage on a drenching afternoon when the sky seemed to have changed places with the sea. Clad in oilskins and sou’wester he looked as if he had come from a lifeboat. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s walk round’ – and he said it as if the sun were shining. Tall and spare, Tom was the man the villagers called on first in times of trouble. He had the dark cadaverous Cornish good looks with a watch in his eyes like that of a sailor, as if much of his life had been spent staring at the signs of the weather in the skies. He had been head gardener of a neighbouring estate before he began his own market garden, and his lifetime experience of growing was at the disposal of anyone who sought it. He was gentle in his manner and never dogmatic, and the advice he gave came hesitantly as if he considered it an insult to correct, however ignorant might be his listener. And he had the gift, despite his knowledge of technical difficulties, of fanning enthusiasm instead of blighting it with past evidence of personal failure.

  ‘That’ll make a nice meadow,’ he said, looking at the bog which sided the w
ood below the cottage. It was the second of our brief visits and, despite the rain, we had spent the morning in this bog channelling an escape route for the water using a broken cup and a trowel. I do not know what we expected to achieve except to re-experience the pleasure of bucket and spade on a seashore. The task ahead was enormous and though Tom was right, and it did in the end make a nice meadow, it took two years of experimenting and two hundred yards of underground drain pipes before it was dry enough to grow a crop. Then we grew violets and sent away to market five hundred bunches in six months.

  ‘That’s yours?’ He was looking at the ancient building bordering the lane, half of which was a stable, half a general-purpose shed. It was not ours, only the roofless, age-stricken buildings came within our agreement. ‘It’s John’s,’ I replied.

  John also was a new arrival – as Harry Laity’s dairyman he had come to live at the farm at the top of the hill and was our nearest neighbour. The land he worked dovetailed into ours. We, of course, had accepted the uncultivated land. His consisted of the weirdly shaped, beautiful meadows that bordered the cliff and ran down to the sea’s edge, and the green fields which lipped the pocket garden of the cottage. He had called one morning when we were cooking breakfast on the oil stove.