A Gull on the Roof Read online

  We first met one evening at the Savoy in an air raid. I had written a travel book called Time Was Mine and my first words to her were abrupt: ‘You’re just the person I have been wanting to meet. Can you manage to get my book on the bookstall?’

  I had written in this book of a man called Jeffries, a weird mountain of a man, whom I had met on a Japanese boat sailing from Sydney to the Far East, and who, as it proved, was a link between me and Jeannie. I used to sit on deck till late at night listening to the stories of his nefarious life, leaning over the ship’s rail, the soft breeze in our faces, watching the passing shadows of the islands along the Barrier Reef. It was the spring of 1939 and he was on his way to a job in the shipyards of Hong Kong.

  ‘I once studied with Cheiro the astrologist and palmist,’ he said on one occasion. ‘He told me I would never be any good, but then I was never able to tell him his judgement was wrong . . . you see, I worked out on my own that he would die when he was sixty-eight. And he died on his sixty-eighth birthday.’

  As it turned out, many of the prophecies Jeffries made to me during the voyage were proved false by events. There would be no war. Chamberlain would be Prime Minister for a further five years and so on. But one evening he asked whether I would be prepared to have my own hand read. I was not very keen because I had always remembered the distress of my mother who, when she was thirty, was told by a palmist that my father would die when she was forty-one. She said it was the most agonising year of her life for she never could get the prophecy out of her mind. However, I agreed and we sat down in a corner of the deck lounge, glasses of saki on the table beside us, and I watched Jeffries study my palm in his ape-like hands. Later I wrote in my diary what he said – among other things that I would marry in 1943, that my wife would be smaller than myself and dark, and that her initials would be J.E. . . .

  Jeannie arranged for my book to be on the bookstall and in celebration I asked her out to dinner. The River Room, with its windows bricked up against bomb blast, was the Savoy restaurant in those days and we sat in a corner while the band of Carroll Gibbons played to a crowded dance floor in the background.

  I happened to ask her whether she had any other Christian names beside Jean. And she said: ‘The awful name of Everald.’ I looked at her across the table. ‘Do you mind saying that again?’ She appeared puzzled. ‘My full name is Jean Everald Nicol.’ Two years later in 1943, we were married.

  The American Look Magazine called Jeannie ‘the prettiest publicity girl in the world’; and when it was announced she was leaving the Savoy, the newspapers wrote about her as if they were saying goodbye to a star. A columnist in the Daily Mail described her as slim, colleen-like, with green eyes and dark hair,

  . . . who seems so young, innocent and delicately pretty that you couldn’t imagine her saying ‘Boo’ to the smallest and silliest goose. But Jean has said ‘Boo’ to all sorts of important people including tough American correspondents.

  For ten years she has been a key woman at that international rendezvous of film stars, politicians, maharajahs, financiers, business men and what have you – the Savoy Hotel.

  She is about to quit the post of publicity boss or public relations officer for the Savoy, Berkeley and Claridge’s. Her job consisted not only of keeping those hotels before the public but in stopping indiscreet stories from appearing in the newspapers and sometimes in protecting timid guests from the glare of publicity. Now that is a job requiring tact, intelligence and charm, and Jean has all three qualities.

  Who stopped the story about the colonel (with D.S.O.) who was working in the kitchens of the Savoy from getting into the papers?Jean Nicol. Who arranged Dior’s first interview in this country? The same girl. When Ernie Pyle the famous American war correspondent (they made a film about him) was going off to his death in the Pacific he had his last lunch in London with Jean. He told her sadly: ‘I’ll never see you again. There’s been too much luck in my life, and it’s exhausted.’

  Close friend of Danny Kaye, Tyrone Power, Gertrude Lawrence, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby . . . there isn’t a famous name in the past decade that doesn’t know Jean.

  Well, she is going to retire for she thinks that ten years is enough to spend in the glare of London’s West End. And she is right.

  We left Mortlake on a sunny April morning when the tide was pushing its way up the river, creeping into the inlets of the riverside like an octopus feeling with its tentacles. On the steps of the Ship, beer mugs in hand, a group stood ready to wave us goodbye. On their right loomed the Brewery, and on their left an empty space, an elm tree, and the house with the roof like a dunce’s cap which we were leaving. The act of departure spares only the light-hearted, and as I carried out our belongings, sticking them in the Land Rover, I found myself thinking of that ardour seven years before with which we came to this house; for it was with this ardour, dressed up in new clothes, that we were going away. I looked up at the windows and thought of our happiness, which would always live within the rooms; the unfinished sentences of gay conversations, raised glasses, sweet moments when endeavour had met its reward, affection like suffused sunlight warming the company of friends. I saw poised in my mind the fragments of other people’s lives, lost perhaps by them, for ever attached to me . . .

  Bob Capa, the wayward brilliant photographer, who was killed in Indo China, was there, leaning against the door, his sombre face brightened by a stick of bombs falling across Duke’s Meadows, cigarette drooping from his lips, quietly, with broken accent calling: ‘Coming nearer, coming nearer’ . . . a startled A. P. Herbert on a November night, whisky glass in hand, hearing the S.O.S. on the Water Gypsy’s hooter; the tide had gone out and the crew had awoken when she tilted on her side . . . George Slocombe on a winter’s afternoon standing with his back to the fire, red-bearded like an apostle, praising the virtues of France . . . Baron hitching a camera under his withered arm before photographing Monty; ‘Come on Monty, give us a smile’ . . . Gertrude Lawrence, a cockney again, boisterously shouting the Cambridge crew to victory . . . Carroll Gibbons drawling the song People will say we’re in love as he played at our small piano . . . Alec Waugh standing on the steps looking at the empty river: ‘Your last Boat Race party . . . it was the best.’ We had come to this house believing it would be our home for always, yet here we were setting off again, packing away past hopes and ambitions, disappointments and victories, buoyantly confident that we now knew better. ‘A chapter of my life was closed,’ wrote Somerset Maugham when he left Tahiti, ‘and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death.’

  We were aware, too, that departure meant a crack in the lives of those who cared for us. Jeannie would no longer be calling in to see her parents nor would I be able to have the almost daily, hour-long conversations with my mother. I was never unsettled by age difference with either of my parents. My father kept a perpetual eye on his own youth, and so never grew old in his approach to me and my two brothers. My mother’s philosophy had been to hold up a mirror to the happiness of the three of us, and gain her own in the reflection. When I was a schoolboy I said proudly to a small friend: ‘My mother would walk five miles with a heavy suitcase if it would help me or my brothers.’ The childish boast always remained true.

  The canvas hood of the Land Rover bulged like a kitbag . . . an armchair, suitcases, books, pots and pans, blankets, a camp bed, an ironing board. They piled high behind us as we sat ready to start . . . my mother whom we were taking to my aunt’s house on the way, Jeannie with Monty on her lap, and myself at the wheel. And as I let out the clutch and slowly moved away, we could only laugh with those who were waving us goodbye.

  ‘I hope you’ll get there!’ was the last I heard as I turned the corner.

  I was on the road to the West again, a road which from my childhood had been part of my life. I used to drive to Glendorgal, our family home, as casually as I drove from Victoria to Kensington. My father saying: ‘When in 1903 I drove a car to Cornwall for the first time, a donkey and cart actually passed
me on this hill.’ My mother: ‘Three weeks after my first driving lesson I set off for Glendorgal. We had a puncture at Honiton but there was no garage anywhere near and we had to send to Exeter to find someone to repair it.’ And myself: ‘Here at Amesbury we had a smash with a Baby Austin . . . on my twenty-first birthday weekend we drove through the night and had breakfast at that café . . . I bought an evening paper at this corner shop and learnt the Royal Oak had been sunk . . . the car broke down here and I spent the night in that gateway . . . I was gonged on this stretch . . .’ Scores of incidents so vivid in my mind that it seemed to me, as I travelled this road again, that I had ‘time regained’.

  The full moon was waiting to greet us at Minack, a soft breeze came from the sea and the Lizard light winked every few seconds across Mount’s Bay. An owl hooted in the wood and afar off I heard the wheezing bark, like a hyena, of a vixen. A fishing boat chugged by, a mile off shore, its starboard light bright on the mast. It was very still. The boulders, so massive in the day, had become gossamer in the moonlight, and the cottage, so squat and solid, seemed to be floating in the centuries of its past.

  I said to Jeannie: ‘Let’s see if Monty will come for a walk.’

  He came very slowly down the lane, peering suddenly at dangers in the shadows, sitting down and watching us, then softly stepping forward. His white shirt-front gleamed like a lamp. He sniffed the air, his little nose puzzling the source of the scents of water weeds, bluebells and the sea. He found a log and clawed it, arching his back. He heard the rustle of a mouse and he became tense, alert to pounce. I felt as I watched him that he was an adventurer prying his private unknown, relishing the prospect of surprise and of the dangers which would be of his own making. We paused by the little stream, waiting for him to join us; and when he did, he rubbed his head affectionately against my leg, until suddenly he saw the pebbles of moonlight on the water. He put out a paw as if to touch them.

  ‘I’ll pick him up and carry him over.’

  But when I bent down to do so he struggled free of my grasp – and with the spring of a panther he leapt across, and dashed into the shadows beyond.

  ‘Well done!’ we cried, ‘well done!’

  This little stream where it crosses the lane as if it were the moat of Minack, halting the arrival of strangers, greeting us on our returns, acting as the watch of our adventures, was given a name that night.

  Monty’s Leap.

  We awoke the following morning to the sun streaming through the curtainless windows, to the distant murmur of the sea, to a robin’s song hailing another day, and the delicious sensation that there was no frontier to our future. If our watches stopped what did it matter? An hour, a day, a week could pass . . . there was no barrier to which we were advancing, no date on a calendar which glared at us from a distance. No telephone to shiver us into expectation. No early morning noises, a far-off factory hooter, the first rumble of traffic, the relentless roar of a Tube . . . no man made alarms to jerk us into the beginning of another day. No newspaper shoved under the door. No clatter of milk bottles. Time to think, time to read. Go down to the rocks and stare vacantly at the sea. Perform insignificant, slowly achieved tasks – weeding the garden, mending a bolt on the door, sticking photographs in an album – /without conscience nagging us with guilt. Take idle walks, observe the flight of a raven, the shifting currents of the sea, the delicate shades of moss. Travel the hours on horseback. Timelessness, isolation and simplicity creating the space which would protect us from the past. The hazy happiness of the present guiding our future.

  I got up, collected a jug and went down to the stream. I had invited Monty to come with me but he would not budge. I picked him up and put him down in the garden, but within a second he had rushed indoors again. He behaved in this manner for several days, hating the daylight and only venturing out in the dark, and then if we accompanied him. It was difficult to understand his behaviour for on his previous brief visits, though he had never wandered far, he had always kept his nerve. A week later, however, he gained his self-confidence after meeting a baby rabbit face to face outside the front door. He seized it by the neck, brought it into the cottage while I was having breakfast, and deposited it at my feet – alive. Henceforth every tuft of grass was a potential rabbit and every capture brought to us for our admiration; and instead of having to lure him outside, we used to spend much of our time searching for his whereabouts.

  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 clea
r 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.’