A Gull on the Roof Read online

  The miners would make hopeful comments and Jack would shout up from the depths: ‘The rab here feels damp.’ By now the hole had become a talking point in the district and monotonously I would be asked, ‘Any luck yet?’ It became, too, the reason for a walk and in the evening or at the weekend neighbours and far neighbours would lope towards it and add their opinions as to its future. ‘Now I reckon you’ll have to go thirty feet before you strike water,’ said one. ‘My cousin Enoch found plenty at twenty,’ said another. ‘In Sancreed parish,’ said a third, ‘there are two wells within a mile of each other forty feet deep and never a drop of water from either.’ Tommy Williams would comment about these remarks with acid sharpness. ‘That fellow,’ said he about one who prophesied we were wasting our time, ‘is worried about his own water, he’s frightened we might drain his.’

  We were down twenty feet, then twenty-two, then twenty-five. By now, made frantic by the tortoise pace of the hand-drills, we had hired a compressor and the drills to drive into the rock. It speeded the blasting but there was still no sign of a thimbleful of water. Twenty-six feet. Our money was falling into that hole with the abandon of a backer doubling up on losing favourites; and sooner or later we would have to stop. But when? We now had planks across the top and a winch to pull up the debris after each blast; and back we brought old John Henry to stand on the planks so that we could see again the reaction of his hazel stick. Down it dipped, relentlessly, a powerful character staunch to its original opinion. ‘If you go another foot . . .’ said John.

  It was that evening I met the manager of the Newlyn Quarry to whom I described the nightmare in which we were involved. He was a young, Rugby-three-quarter-type of man who considered my story as a challenge to himself and his organisation. ‘I have some compressor equipment and some new drills I want to try out,’ he said with a light in his eye, ‘we’ll bring them out next weekend and we’ll have a helluva bang.’ The following Saturday a caravan from Newlyn wormed its way through gates and across fields to within a few yards of the hole. A shiny new compressor with a tractor to power it, the manager and his foreman, two quarry men in snow-white overalls and polished black helmets who moved speedily about arranging the equipment with the expectant air of conjurers before a children’s party. By Monday, I said to myself, we will have water. By Monday the hole was thirty feet deep and my friend had offered to return the following weekend.

  Down the hole the next Saturday went a quarry man, the compressor started up its whining roar, the drill spat like a machine-gun, and the dust began to rise, blanketing the bottom. I hung around with the others bemusedly chatting, dazed like a boxer after a fight. ‘When I was a child,’ I was saying to the foreman, ‘I started to dig my way to Australia . . .’

  Suddenly from the murk below us was a shout. ‘Water! I’ve struck water!’ We let out a cheer which may have been heard across Mount’s Bay and I ran around shaking everyone by the hand like a successful politician after an election. Water! It was as if I had won a football pool. I ran down to the cottage where Jeannie was patiently kneading dough on the kitchen table. ‘They’ve found it!’ I cried. ‘Water! . . . old John Henry was right!’

  But Jeannie was going to wait a year for her bath and her indoor wash-basin. For one thing our money had gone down the hole. For another, the water turned out to be a ‘weeper’ which seeped into the well at a gallon or two an hour. And the third reason was that the rains had come. The water butt was full.

  6

  Monty hated the proceedings of the well, and the bangs frightened him into remembering the bombs, flying bombs and rockets which were the companions of his youth; and into remembering the night when, the dust of the ceiling in his fur, he hid terrified in the airing cupboard at Mortlake while Jeannie and I frantically searched the neighbourhood believing he had bolted after a bomb had blown the roof off the house. Thus Jeannie, as soon as the miners shouted ‘Fire!’ always sat beside him, stroking him, until the bangs were over.

  But his contentment, these events apart, was a delight to watch and as the months went by he quietly eased himself into the comfortable ways of a country gentleman. He hunted, slept, ate; then hunted, slept, ate. He never roamed any distance from the cottage, but sometimes he would disappear for hours at a time and we would walk around calling for him in vain. He was, of course, curled up in some grassy haunt of his own and he would reappear wondering what all the fuss was about; and although the reason for our searches was mainly due to the simple curiosity of wanting to discover the whereabouts of his hiding places, we also possessed secret fears for his safety. He was, after all, a London cat and therefore could not be expected to have the intuition of a countryman; and we were prepared to appear thoroughly foolish in any efforts we made to protect him. Our concern was due to three reasons – the fact that the colour of his fur made him look, from a distance, like a fox; rabbit traps; and because we knew that sometimes foxes kill cats. And if, by our behaviour, it looked as if we possessed neurotic imaginations, the future proved our fears were justified.

  There was, for instance, the young man with an airgun whom I saw emerge from our wood and begin to stalk, the airgun at the ready, up the field at the top of which Monty was poised beside a hole in the hedge. ‘What are you doing?’ I yelled, running towards him; and the young man who, in any case, had no right to be there, halted for a moment, looking in my direction and began to make grimaces as if he were trying to tell me to shut up. Then crouching, he began to move forward again. ‘Stop!’ I shouted again, ‘what the hell are you up to?’

  I reached him panting, and he stared oafishly at me. ‘Have you any chickens?’ he said bellicosely.

  ‘I have . . . but what’s that got to do with it? You’ve no right to be here.’ He looked at me with disdain. ‘I was doing you a favour. I saw a cub at the top of this field and if it hadn’t been for you I could have shot it.’ At that moment Monty sauntered down the field towards me. ‘A cub?’ I said.

  The young man went red in the face. ‘It looked like a cub!’

  Monty was given the freedom of the window at night and paradoxically, though our fears for him were bright during the day, they were dulled at night. We were deluded, I suppose, by the convention that cats go out in the dark and that a kind of St Christopher guards them from danger. Then one day a neighbour told us he had found the skeletons of three cats outside a fox’s earth not half a mile from the cottage. ‘There’s a rogue fox about,’ he said, ‘so you’d better look out for your Monty.’ A rogue, by its definition being something which does not pursue normal habits, earns odium for its whole species. Badgers, for instance, are generally supposed to be chicken killers but there is unchallengeable evidence that they are not; it is the rogue badger who has brought them their bad name. So it is with foxes – only the rogues kill cats; but once a rogue gets a taste for cats a district will not be safe until the fox is killed. But even after this warning we did not interfere with Monty’s nocturnal wanderings. We were aware of the rebellion we would have to face if we tried to stop him, and so we preferred to take the easy way out and do nothing at all. He was agile, he could climb a tree if attacked and, as he never went far, he could always make a dash for the window.

  Then one night Jeannie was woken by a fox barking seemingly just a few yards from the cottage, and this was followed by a figure flying through the window and on to the bed. The following night we were determined he should stay indoors, and we gave him a cinder box and shut the bedroom door; and a battle of character began. He clawed, battered and cried at the door while Jeannie and I, trying to sleep, grimly held to our decision that he should not go out. At dawn we surrendered. ‘After all,’ argued Jeannie, as if cats cannot see in the dark, ‘it is light enough for him to see a fox if one is about.’ Our bed lay against the wall which contained the window, and the window was so placed that with my head on the pillow I could watch the lamps of the pilchard fleet as it operated in Mount’s Bay; while beyond, every few seconds, there was the wink of the Liz
ard light. Three feet below the window was the rockery garden and the patch of trodden earth on which Monty jumped when he went out on his adventures – one moment he could be on our bed, the next outside.

  On the night after our attempt to keep him indoors, he was curled asleep on the bed and the window was open. Jeannie too was asleep and I was dozing, when suddenly through my haziness I heard Monty growl like a dog. Instinctively I put out my hand but he was on the window sill before I grasped him. I fumbled for the torch and switched it on. ‘What’s the matter, Monty?’ I murmured, ‘what’s outside?’ I leant forward so that I was half out of the window with my torch shining downwards . . . on to the head of a fox. There he was so close to the wall that he was touching it, so large that in the first startled moment I thought he was an Alsatian dog. ‘Quick!’ I shouted irrationally, ‘a fox is after Monty!’

  But before Jeannie was aware of what was happening the fox was away, gliding down the lane like a ghost, only pausing a second to look back, its eyes meeting the beam of my torch like two phosphorescent pinpoints. Monty was still growling and struggled to free himself from my hold. ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ Jeannie called sleepily. ‘Only this,’ I replied, ‘Monty has seen for himself why he can never go out again at night.’ And he never did unless we accompanied him. As for our method of keeping him in, we had a carpenter make a frame of wire netting which we fixed to the open window at night. Thus we had our fresh air and Monty could continue to sleep on the bed. He was perfectly satisfied.

  A dividing line between a townsman and a countryman is the attitude to rabbit traps; a townsman abhors them and a countryman considers them a necessity. Today the gin trap is banned by law and only a specially designed trap can be used legally which fits in the entrance of a rabbit hole and kills the rabbit instantly as soon as it comes out. But since myxomatosis rabbits have changed their habits and instead of using the burrows they lie out in the undergrowth of the open ground; hence gin traps are still in use, illegal though they may be. Our district is still free of rabbits and we hope we may never see them again; but one day they probably will come back and we may live again the summer nights when, with the background of the murmuring sea, we would lie awake waiting, waiting, for the curdling screams that inevitably would pursue the hours until the trapper arrived to collect his harvest.

  And yet I found myself, possessing as I did the intellect of a townsman and the way of life of a countryman, in a quandary. The rabbits showed no appreciation of our efforts to be nice to them, and they ate our anemones, violets and lettuces with the same abandon as they ate those of our neighbours. We bought hundreds of yards of wire netting, but I found they used it as a rope ladder, climbing up it and into the meadow on the other side; or sometimes I would find a hole in the wire neatly made as if by wire cutters, and then I believed the story I had been told that cliff rabbits had teeth as hard as steel, and the intelligence of monkeys. As a townsman I admired their cleverness, but as a countryman I became infuriated by their destruction of my livelihood; and so I reluctantly began to trap.

  I used to set the traps at dusk, go round to see them with a torch at midnight, and again soon after dawn. The object of these tactics was, of course, to curtail the sufferings of my victims, but the result was hideous to witness; for the brief period of their pain had not sapped their strength, and when the light of the torch announced my coming they darted crazily this way and that within the circumference of the chain which joined the trap to its anchor in the ground. Each time they rushed to escape, winnowing their terror, the gin bit deeper, while I myself, the amateur executioner, fumbled in my attempts to take a firm hold so that with a jerk I could break their necks. Such incidents, etched into the grotesque by the shadows cast by my torch or turned into a Wagnerian Valhalla in the still soft scent of the dawn, gobbled the zest I had to protect our crops.

  Then one night I forgot to set my alarm clock and slept peacefully until within an hour of the time Tommy was due to arrive for his day’s work. I jumped with horror from my bed and hurried in my pyjamas to the eight traps I had set the night before. Five were undisturbed, in two others were full-grown rabbits each of which must have struggled hard through the night because their trapped feet were gouged red by the gin’s fangs, and in the eighth was a sight I will never forget. By some horrible chance two baby rabbits had been trapped together, and as I approached they were knocking each other as they tried to escape, giving the appearance – had I not known what had happened – that they were playing. I killed them and went silently back to the cottage. ‘Jeannie,’ I said, without telling her what I had seen, ‘Hell to the crops, I’m never going to set a trap again.’

  The incident was still vivid in my mind when a week later, as we were finishing supper, we heard the tap, tap, tap of the trapper’s hammer in John’s field above the cottage which ran towards the sea. It was a May evening and although John and I were still on speaking terms, there was a simmering friction between us that seemed certain sooner or later to erupt. ‘I do think he might have warned us,’ I grumbled, ‘we might easily have been out for the evening and then what would have happened to Monty?’

  The custom of a trapper was to ring a field with traps two or three days running, leaving them open during the day and setting them afresh in the late afternoon or early evening. Sometimes, however, a trapper was not so conscientious and I remember an occasion when traps on a neighbouring land were set at midday on Sunday and were not visited again until breakfast time on Monday. I was waiting when the trapper came down the lane in his car.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, and then without wasting any time: ‘I believe you went to Church yesterday evening.’ The man looked at me doubtfully. ‘I went to Chapel . . . I’m a Chapel man.’ ‘Well wherever you went,’ I replied, my voice rising, ‘your aim was to give thanks to God and yet . . . at that very time you were allowing His creatures to suffer agony at your hands.’ The man stared at the ground. ‘Come here,’ I ordered, and led him to a rabbit which was hanging head downwards from a trap set on top of a hedge. ‘That rabbit was caught at one o’clock yesterday afternoon,’ I said, ‘and had I not heard its cry it would have taken several hours to die in agony . . . and you were in Chapel!’ My anger, of course, made me pompous but it had an effect. A few months later I saw the man again. He had given up trapping.

  Passion, therefore, was always waiting to come to the surface when traps were set – that of Jeannie was born of imagination, mine of experience. And so when we heard the tap of the hammer in John’s field there was the growl of anger within us, the dread of the coming night with its screams, the nag of knowing Monty was in danger. On the second evening, a couple of hours before sunset, Monty was sitting in the front garden, sphinx-like, eyes half closed, his burnished fur glossy in the light of the ending day. There was no hint he aimed to wander. His white whiskers sprayed his lion cub head, his tail curled round his body so that its tip gently flicked his front paw. He was at peace, utterly secure in the small world we had found for him. Then I looked through the open door and he was not there.

  ‘Where’s Monty? He was outside five minutes ago.’ We had panicked often enough before, and been calmed, and made ourselves feel foolish that love should exaggerate fear; and yet the instant of warning repeated itself each time with the same spasm of fright. I ran up to the field and stood on a bank.

  The young green corn was brushing the soil, and far out to sea aslant to the Lizard a liner was making for Cherbourg. A raven grunted overhead, flying heavily westwards towards the sun, and a charm of goldfinches fluttered chirruping before me, then dived out of sight behind the hedge on my right. A buzzard lazily glided, and silent in the heavens a jet traced its plume. It was very still and only the sea whispered. Suddenly across the field a hundred yards away near the gap pencilled by barbed wire which led to John’s cliff, I saw Monty’s tail flapping in prisoned puzzlement, as if a hand at ground level was feebly motioning a welcome. ‘Jeannie,’ I shouted, ‘Monty is in
a trap!’

  I led the way across the field yelling: ‘Monty, we’re coming!’ . . . absurdly frightened, my mind racing with stories of trapped cats. ‘It’s easier to kill ’em,’ a trapper once told us, ‘than to get ’em out of a trap. That wild they be.’ And I felt enraged that a threat guarded against had yet materialised, that even with all our care Monty could still be trapped. Irrational thoughts, I know, but such are often the companions of distress.

  He was lying quietly on his side, his little front paw with the white smudge on it squeezed in the gin; and his yellow eyes gazing up at me as if my presence alone were enough to make him believe the trap would release him. Then, when in those first few seconds I did nothing, he uttered a little cry, a querulous cry as if he were cross.

  ‘You’ll hold him firmer than I can,’Jeannie said when she reached us, ‘I know how to open the trap.’ I grasped his soft body, limp as a fur stole, while Jeannie, her knees in the green corn, put her hands on the gin. It would not budge. ‘It’s rusty,’ I said, ‘look, it’s coated with rust.’

  It was as if Monty understood the significance of my remark because he began to cry and struggle and scratch, and try to bite his paw free. ‘Hold him! For goodness sake hold him or he’ll pull his paw apart!’ At that instant he slipped from my hands, lashed out with his three free legs, tugging at the trap with his fourth, claws like knives ready to rip anything within reach. There was blood on Jeannie’s wrist.