A Gull on the Roof Read online

  ‘You’re John,’ I said, and shook his hand in welcome. He was squat and powerfully built, like a miner. He had a round face with skin coarsened by the open air. His eyes were grey and they looked at me is if he were saying to himself: ‘I wonder how long these people are going to stick it here.’ He wore an old raincoat and a mottled brown cloth cap aslant on the back of his head, showing his black hair tinged with grey; a cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth and he fiddled a foot with an imaginary stone. And as I talked with him I suddenly became aware of a warning emotion within me for which my town conception of a country life had not prepared me. There was a hint of a challenge in his manner. It was as if I had had a punch on the nose to remind me we were amateurs who had a hazy, paradise notion of country life that had no relation to reality. We did not belong. We were as out of place in the kind of life we were intending to lead as John would have been in the Savoy Grill. I could see him wondering what mystery had brought us here. Why, because we possessed smooth ways, did we think we could exist in a land where skill was the product of generations of struggle? We were typical city dwellers who had the conceit to believe it would be easy. He had seen them come and go before, and we would be no exception. There would be the customary froth of enthusiasm as we put the cottage in order, the showing off to up-a-long friends, the token effort of manual work, the gradual boredom with discomfort. Anyhow she won’t last. Then, and I could sense the question revolving in his mind: ‘Who will get the cottage?’ His visit had a salutary effect on us for it promised the stimulus of battle, the realisation that we were going to be watched and judged and expected to fail. He was another pylon of the bridge.

  We led Tom Bailey to the little wood, a forest of blackthorn and elm tree saplings with grey boulders heaving up in groups between them. ‘Cut them down and dig up their roots,’ he said, ‘and by dodging them boulders you’ll have three, maybe four meadows out of here. They’ll be sheltered . . . be all right for daffodils.’ And all this time we were pestering him with elementary questions. What varieties of daffodils would be best for us? How do you grow them? What about violets . . . and anemones . . . and potatoes? We left the wood and took the path to the big field and the cliff, into the scrub, the wasteland smothered with gorse and brambles where one day, we hoped, the crops would grow which Tom described to us. ‘Mind,’ he said, ‘everyone will tell you different and no season is ever the same . . . but this is how I find it.’

  There are several thousand different varieties of daffodils and narcissi but only a comparative few are recognised in the markets as established commercial successes – such as the yellow trumpet King Alfred, Magnificence, Carlton, Rembrandt, and a hundred or so others. Some of these are early varieties, some middle season, some late, and the aim of the grower is to have a succession of blooms from the end of January to the end of March, usually ending up with the white narcissi such as Cheerfulness, a double white bloom with an exquisite scent. The normal custom is to buy bulbs by weight, which means the bulbs will be of different sizes – most will flower the first year but others will take a year or so to reach flowering size. If you buy by numbers you can expect all the bulbs to flower the first year but, quite apart from it being a much more expensive way of doing things, you run the risk of the bulbs taking a rest the following year with the result you pick few flowers. In any case bulbs are expensive. Cornish growers usually buy their bulbs from Holland or the Isles of Scilly and the price, of course, varies according to the variety; normally, standard types such as King Alfred, cost about £150 a ton. The big growers plant bulbs with a plough, placing them two or three inches apart within the rows; the small growers, in their cliff meadows, use a shovel and, when the time comes to dig them out, a special clawed digger. Seven tons average the acre and a good yield per ton is 28,000 flowers.

  When you have bought and planted your stock the hazards begin. A gale may blow up during the week the blooms are ready to be harvested, and although they are always picked in bud the damage incurred as the buds rub against each other in the wind may result in all your efforts ending up in the compost heap. Then there is eel-worm and the bulb fly, two pests which are as common as household flies and one of which is usually the answer to home gardeners who wonder why their bulbs have disappeared. Eel-worm, microscopic in size, wriggles through the soil attacking a plantation like an invincible army, burrowing into the bulbs and destroying them; and after such an attack, since eel-worm hangs around feeding on certain kinds of weeds, you have to leave the ground empty of bulbs for seven years. ‘In fact,’ said Tom, ‘once you have eel-worm in the soil you seldom get completely rid of it. You can only check it.’

  Yet if you have the luck not to have eel-worm there is nothing to stop the bulbs being attacked by the bulb-fly for it is on the wing every year. There is a small bulb-fly and a large one but they both look like any other flying insect of the spring. The fly lays its egg in the neck of the bulb and the larvae proceeds to mature within the bulb, feeding on its tissues until it is destroyed into a sticky mess. Hence bulbs should be dug up every three years and given hot water sterilisation treatment before being split from each other and replanted in September; an hour of this treatment will kill the larvae of the fly, three hours the eel-worm. If the bulbs are cared for in this way they will increase considerably in numbers; if they are left as they are generally left in a garden, they will gradually die away and the capital you have invested will be lost. ‘The trouble is,’ said Tom, ‘there always seems something more urgent to do than digging up bulbs and planting them again.’

  The flowers are picked when the buds have dropped at right angles to the stem, and they are brought into the packing shed and put into pails of water. If the weather is cold, there has to be a gentle heat in the shed to help burst the buds open. Then, when their petals are spread they are bunched and sent away to the markets. Every grower has a salesman in each of several markets and he is charged ten per cent on the sales plus a market charge for the handling of each box. Some growers have their own boxes, others hire boxes from the salesmen. In any case the grower pays the railway freight charges to whichever market he sends. In fact a grower has to pay twenty per cent in commission, boxes, market charges and freight, out of any price he receives for his flowers.

  Tom said that violets provided his bread and butter. They are a cheap crop to grow because each year’s stock consists of the runners pulled off the previous season’s plants. They are planted in May and June, fifteen inches apart and about the same distance between the rows. The plants have bushed out by September and have begun flowering by the end of the month, continuing to do so through the winter months to April. There is an average weekly picking of twelve dozen bunches for every thousand plants—twenty violets and two leaves making up a bunch. Up to fifteen thousand plants go to an acre but, Tom warned, such was the time and labour involved in picking and bunching, no small grower could manage such a number. He himself usually had four thousand plants, growing a variety called Governor Herrick, which, though it has very little scent, is prolific in flowering and lasts very well once picked. He had no use for the pale-coloured, sweet-scented Princess of Wales because it was difficult to grow, bloomed scantily, and fetched no higher price in the market.

  Anemones are more difficult to grow and more expensive, but they are as much part of a Cornish market garden as bacon in a grocer’s. The type most in demand in the markets is the De Caen variety, single blooms of multi-colours, and although some growers sow seed, the majority plant corms early in July. Seed is cheaper to buy but this economy is cancelled out by the extra labour involved. Good corms cost around fifteen shillings a thousand and eighty thousand go to an acre – the whole crop being ploughed into the ground at the end of the season. Their flowering period is the same as violets but they are liable to downy mildew which can devastate them, especially in a period of muggy weather when soft misty rain covers the Land’s End peninsula – and as the spores of this mildew stay in the soil, anemones must not
be grown in the same ground more than once in four years. ‘Last year,’ said Tom, ‘I lost the lot because it was so wet before Christmas.’ Frost, of course, sometimes damages them but as Tom explained, a frost hard enough to wipe out the plants seldom strikes West Cornwall. Anemones like a lot of lime in the ground and corms must be planted after the ground has been firmed, only a couple of inches deep and the same distance apart; and you must allow at least twenty inches between rows to enable the pickers to walk up and down without bruising the foliage. Mice sometimes do a great amount of damage. They nip off the buds as they break ground, then carry them off to the hedge where they tear off the petals and eat the heart of the flower. You can find little piles of these petals around every anemone field. The flowers are picked when the bud is just beginning to break. You must on no account send flowers to market which are ‘blown’ or full open, and this is very difficult to prevent in warm weather. If all goes well you should be able to send throughout the season an average of four dozen bunches a week for every five thousand corms you have planted.

  Tom tempered these details with caution. He told us not to accept them as the gospel of the expert because the problems of market gardening were as numerous as a football permutation. Every season provides a different set of circumstances, and there is always an element which no one has ever experienced before. You are at the mercy of gluts and the weather, and they can knock you for six just when you think the season is going to be a good one.

  We were now standing in the middle of our big field. It used to be called the cemetery field because at the bottom of it, the old cows and horses of neighbouring farms used to be buried. We were standing at the ridge halfway down – the top half sloped fairly gently, the bottom half suddenly dipped below the ridge until it levelled out just before the cliff. ‘That top piece,’ said Tom, looking at the upper half, ‘that wouldn’t take long to break if you had someone to help. Then you can hire a man with a plough and work up the land, then get a few potatoes in by March. Couldn’t expect much but it would clean the ground and be a start.’

  The growing of new potatoes held a fascination for us. There was past enjoyment of their flavour and the prospect of producing a crop so far ahead of the rest of the country that it had the merits of a delicacy; besides, stories had been told to us of small fortunes being made out of the pocket cliff meadows between Penzance and Land’s End – ‘the earliest potato land in England’ it was called. Potatoes appeared easy to grow. In fact they seemed to be the answer to the amateur’s prayers – hard manual work but no specialised skill, the warm climate and high prices ensuring a handsome profit. They would be the first cornerstone of our income, so we then thought, as soon as we had the cultivated land in which to grow them. Hence Tom’s suggestion suited us well.

  Seed potatoes are delivered in the early winter and the varieties have names like Sharpe’s Express, Home Guard, Arran Pilot, May Queen. When the seed arrives the potatoes are picked out and carefully placed eye-end up side by side in special wooden trays. They stay like this indoors until planting time, and by then they will have grown shoots a couple of inches long. The larger potatoes are then cut between the shoots so that there are two or even three sections which can grow on into plants. The planting is done in February and early March and, given good weather, the crop will be ready to draw at the beginning of May; and for every ton planted three or four tons should be harvested. The work, because the meadows are steep and small, has to be done by hand labour. Turning the ground in the autumn, planting the seed, digging out the crop – is all achieved by the use of the long-handled Cornish shovel. The seed potatoes are carried down the cliff, the harvest up. Thus every stage is identical to that in use a century ago; but we gladly accepted the prospect of what, in due course, would be our wearisome task, because of the anticipated financial returns. We were assured that whereas a ton of seed potatoes cost £20, the cliff early new potatoes sold at an average of £70 a ton. It seemed to us we had found an El Dorado.

  We looked expectantly at the land in which Tom proposed we should grow our first crop. It was late in the year to order the seed so there would not be time to ‘shoot’ them in the trays, and they would have to be planted ‘blind’; but the first step was to find someone to take charge, to prepare the land, plant the potatoes and then look after them. That evening we went up to St Buryan village to seek the advice of Jim Grenfell, a Pickwickian figure who presides at the inn with the slow measured courtesy of the days of coach and horse rather than of motor cars. Jim soon found Harry, a rabbit catcher; and Harry, over seventy, wiry with bright blue eyes and a drooping white moustache, promised that if we left our problems in his hands, all would be well.

  That spring as we toiled in London, we thought of our growing potatoes as one might think of a racehorse in training for a great race – and on each visit to Minack we dashed on arrival to stare at their progress. They developed so green and flourishing, five hundred weight had been planted and Home Guard was the variety, that we began contentedly estimating what our profit might be; and when Harry proclaimed the crop would be ready to draw the following week, I promised to come down and help. I left London at three in the morning and reached Penzance at ten – and on arrival I called at the wholesaler who had promised to market the crop.

  ‘I’ve just driven down from London,’ I said, with the rush of the journey still filling my ears, ‘and I’m going on now to start digging the crop. You can expect me back this afternoon with a load.’

  ‘Driven down specially from London?’

  The man glared at me, and threw the stub of his cigarette viciously on to the pavement outside his shop.

  ‘You must be mad . . . there’s a glut of potatoes. They’re not worth a penny a pound.’

  In August Tommy Williams entered our lives and became the last pylon of the bridge. I met him first striding down Market Jew Street in Penzance one Saturday afternoon, wearing a Harris tweed suit, a smart trilby, and smoking a cigar. He looked more like a wealthy farmer than a labourer who had spent his life around a cowshed, and I understood why I had been told I could not fail to recognise him if I saw him. He was very tall with a fine, thin-looking face and brown eyes which gazed gently at you except when, and this I later found often to be the case, he became roused; and then they would resemble those of an excited evangelist. He lived alone in a caravan near St Buryan and on the walls hung pictures which he had bought in local curiosity shops. ‘I have a Constable,’ he said proudly that first day I met him, ‘a genuine Constable . . . and a Stradivarius!’ His eyes gleamed. ‘It’s broken but it can be mended!’

  Shortly before my encounter with him – after a particularly rowdy argument with his employer – he made it known throughout the district that he would do no more regular work, only casual work and on days which suited him. This attitude admirably coincided with mine as I was looking for a man who would work two or three days a week at Minack throughout the winter so that, when in early spring we came down permanently to live, the foundations of our future endeavours would have been laid.

  He was undaunted by what he found he had to do. With eyes of knowledge instead of wishful thinking he mapped the whereabouts of meadows in the undergrowth. He was impatient to slash the saplings and the brambles which blocked the lane. He talked of rebuilding the old roofless buildings and rerouting the course of the stream. He rushed out his plans as if he were drawing zest from the prospect of showing others what he was capable of achieving when left on his own. And then, during the winter, he sent us progress reports:

  I am pleased to inform you that I have trimmed down all the hedges round top and bottom. I have burned the trimmings and been around the field hedges and put back all small stones. I have cut the trees back around the two home meadows and stacked branches around hedges to keep out cattle. The little potato house meadow will be a nice meadow when I’ve finished breaking it. I have the thorns around the hedges for fences and windbreaks. There is quite sunny weather at Minack between show
ers. Well, that is all for the present. Tommy Williams.

  Then came the final report at the end of March, a few days before we were due to arrive:

  I have moved the stones in the front garden so that there are four beds instead of two. I have borrowed wallflowers from my cousin. They are in flower and taken well. Also primrose plants from the cliff. Makes the garden cheerful and I hope you will be pleased.

  And we were pleased.

  3

  Jeannie’s friends looked out of their own personal windows and judged her decision according to the view they were accustomed to see.

  ‘My dear, what are you going to do all day?’

  ‘If only I had the same courage!’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not going to miss all the fun?’

  ‘I’ll take a bet you’re back in six months!’

  Those in the tight little world of parties, American Bars and gossipy sensations, disliked the idea of one of their number deserting – the justice of their lives was being questioned, an end had come into sight when they felt only safe in prolonged beginnings. Hence they interpreted her decision by complicated explanations, and gained satisfaction in their certainty she would soon be back.

  Those who had never tasted the flavour of mixing with celebrities found her decision incomprehensible. She led the life of a modern fairy princess yet she was giving it up. She must be out of her mind, and they looked at her as if she were an oddity in a zoo.

  There were others who envied her. These, captured by their own success, could only reason that she was showing the courage they believed they lacked themselves. Courage, in their view, was required if you are going to break the routine of butterfly pleasures – whereas Jeannie only saw in her choice a way of escape. We were both, in fact, taking the easy way out towards reaching our personal horizon of living time slowly.