A Gull on the Roof (15 page)

Each variety had arrived in the autumn with meticulous explanations from Gibson as to how they would look when the time came to bloom: Hospodar, for instance, coloured best when grown slowly in an open cool situation and would then have a deep orange-red centre – in a warm season the colour would be poor; Campernelle, according to Gibson, was a dainty yellow scented jonquil, a lot of which could be packed in a box; Bernardino was white with a heavily frilled cup edged with apricot; Croesus was a mid-season variety with an orange-red cup; Coverack Glory was a strong-growing scented daffodil with a yellow trumpet. We were bewitched by these descriptions. We forgave the failure of the Governor Herrick in anticipation of this harvest of daffodils.

The first to bloom were the Soleil d’Or in the wood, and the first Sol in any year is a breathtaking moment that lifts the soul on a pinnacle, leaving it there high in the air to contemplate in exultation the wonder of the coming spring. This particular Sol appeared on a late January day, after a harassing morning during which, in our ignorance, we thought we had lost both the Soleil d’Or and all the King Alfred. During the night there had been a hard frost and when we went into the wood after breakfast we found the leaves and the stems quite flat – as if a roller had been driven over the meadow. It was a bitter moment. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that looks like the end of our daffodil crop.’ But I was wrong and it took only a few hours for me to know it; for as the day brightened so did the leaves and stems recover, and then suddenly we saw among the beds of the Soleil d’Or that solitary bloom; a button of yellow too beautiful to pick, its delicate scent touching the cold air like a feather.

Sols, like the early scented Scilly Whites, do not bloom uniformly, so unless you grow a large quantity you can never at one time send away in great numbers; their season protracts over weeks. King Alfreds, on the other hand, once a few blooms have heralded the way, rush in together crowding the meadow with buds. That first year they took us by surprise.

One day at the end of February we had picked a handful, the next I was lugging two baskets back to the cottage. ‘Heavens,’ I said to Jeannie, ‘look at all these . . . and we haven’t done a bunch in our lives!’

The remedy was to fetch our old friend Tom Bailey from Lamorna; here was a man who would not laugh at our enthusiasm nor our innocence. ‘Tom,’ I said, ‘we’ve grown the flowers and now we haven’t the slightest idea how to send them away!’ I had found him bunching his own daffodils but he showed no irritation at the interruption. ‘We’ll soon put that right,’ he grinned, ‘come on, take me up to Minack and I’ll show you.’

He was a good teacher because he had a high standard. There are many daffodil growers who seem to have no standards at all, no pride in a beautifully packed box; who bunch blooms however badly marked, jamming them into old cardboard boxes and wrapping them in newspapers if paper at all; farmers, for instance, who during the war and afterwards cashed in on the shortage of daffodils, growing them as if they were a field of turnips.

I once called on a farmer who showed me an outhouse filled with a white variety of daffodil standing in jars on the shelves with the petals stained the colour of autumn leaves. ‘Caught the wind,’ I said sympathetically, knowing that if they were mine they would all be thrown away. ‘Damn nuisance,’ he replied, adding blandly, ‘I’m afraid it may affect the price.’

The reward for maintaining a high standard comes usually when the markets are glutted with daffodils; and then buyers will ignore the rag and bobtail senders and stick to those whose standards are known. Our own aim is to send every box away from Minack as if it were going to an exhibition; and it is an aim that can only be achieved by having, at times, to dump large quantities of daffodils on the compost heap.

We ran into no trouble with those first King Alfreds, the weather was brisk but there were no strong winds to break the barrage of the wood and hurt them: and we picked when the buds had dipped at right angles to the stems and had begun to open, the yellow just showing. We brought them into the spare bedroom which Jeannie and her typewriter now vacated, and stood them in galvanised flower pails, perhaps for two days, until the bud had formed its full beauty. Then we bunched them in twelves, finding the long firm stems easy to hold and arrange, boxed them in a bed of white paper a dozen bunches at a time, and then sent them off to Honor Bannerman, the head florist at the Savoy, who paid us a price far above anything we would have received in an ordinary market.

This, we said to each other, was a fine way of earning a living; and we had the further satisfaction of hearing of a man who so admired a bunch he bought at the stand in the Savoy’s front hall, that he enquired where they came from, then ordered ten dozen to be sent to his friends. Pride, therefore, was mingled with the pleasure of profit; for we had found that in a fortnight’s hectic activity we had earned enough to cover the capital outlay of the bulbs, and the bulbs were still there for many seasons to come. ‘Just think,’ I said to Jeannie with the gambler’s aptitude to tot up prospective wins, ‘we have taken £56 from 5 cwt. of bulbs . . . seven tons fill an acre, so if we could raise the capital to have that amount, we could earn over £1,500 a year!’

There was the beauty of the work as well. Tiredness, as known in other spheres, had no chance to conquer when the senses were being constantly refreshed by the tangible evidence of spring. Each morning we would enter the wood, then stop and marvel before we began to pick. Overnight buds had dropped, opened and were peering their golden yellow over the green foliage, each with a destiny to provide delight. It was like a ballroom of child dancers, innocent and exquisite, brimmed with an ethereal happiness, laughing, loving, blind to passing time; and yet, almost unnoticed, day by day the flowers were leaving, then gathering speed, until suddenly there was only a floor of green, flecked here and there by a bloom that had stayed behind. The dance was over.

Along the bank in the field the Campernelle were flowering and beside them the Hospodar were thick with buds. Campernelle, Hospodar, Coverack Glory, Bernardino, Croesus . . . they would flower in that order, the poor relations of the King Alfred. We would not dare to despatch them to the Savoy, and we would take the luck of the markets; and yet we still had the advantage of being so far west that each variety would flower early, earlier than Lamorna, earlier than Coverack, earlier than Falmouth.

We were well satisfied with the shilling a bunch the Campernelle were fetching as thirty-six bunches were packed in a box; and then followed the Hospodar, first an odd bloom or two and suddenly a rush, stems clawing the air with nodding buds, a concourse of faces crowding the bank; and no sooner had these appeared than the Coverack Glory a little further down the field nearer the sea began drooping their yellow heads, demanding the attention we were giving to the others.

Up to then – it was the second week of March – the weather had been soft and warm, so gentle the wind one could not believe the gales of winter had ever existed, or could ever come again. Our only concern was to pick, bunch and send away. We had no time to anticipate trouble. We listened to the weather forecast but day after day it was so monotonously the same that there came an evening when we did not bother to turn on the wireless. The sky was clear, the sea still, and there was a pleasant security in the quietness, lulling us early to bed and quickly to sleep.

Suddenly I was wakened by a crash, and in the dimness I saw the curtains billowing before the open window like a sail torn from the mast. I fumbled for my torch and at the same time Jeannie cried out: ‘My face cream! That was my new bottle of Dorothy Gray I left by the window!’

I had time neither to sympathise, laugh nor investigate the damage. It was the Lizard wind hissing through the trees, tearing into the daffodils that were scheduled to be picked in the morning.

‘Hurry,’ I said, ‘we must get down to the field . . .’ and we pulled on our clothes and in a few minutes were fighting, heads down, against a gale that was to roar across Mount’s Bay without pause for thirty-six hours. Our task was absurd, but ignorance at first made it appear feasible, the comfortable optimism at the beginning of a battle, the sheer stupidity of believing we could conquer the elements.

We had one torch which Jeannie held as I grabbed at the waving stems, and unable to stand in the screaming wind we crawled on our hands and knees up and down the paths between the beds. For ten minutes we fought with the Hospodar and then, only a handful picked, I yelled at Jeannie: ‘It’s hopeless here . . . let’s try the Coverack Glory!’ Down we staggered to the lower part of the field and the beam of the torch shone on a sight which resembled a herd of terrified miniature animals tethered to the ground. Spray was now sticking to our faces and our hands, and a sense of doom was enveloping our hearts. We could not win. Nothing we could do would save our harvest.

Fish boats call the Lizard wind the starving wind, for the fish hide from it on the bed of the sea and the boats return empty to port. Landsmen solemnly call it the gizzard wind as it bites into the body and leaves you tired when the day is still young. It is a hateful wind, no good to anybody, drying the soil into powdery dust, blackening the grass like a film of oil, punching the daffodils with the blows of a bully. It is seldom a savage wind as it was on the night it destroyed the Hospodar and Coverack Glory; if it were, if it spat its venom then recoiled into quiet, you could cry over the damage and forget. Instead it simmers its fury like a man with a grudge, moaning its grievance on and on, day after day, remorselessly wearying its victims into defeat.

The wasted stems of the Hospodar and the Coverack Glory were piled high on the compost heap and now the Bernardino and Croesus hastened to join them. Nothing dramatic in their destruction, no sudden obliteration to grieve over; the wind bit at each bud as it unfurled from the calex, flapping the edge of a petal until it turned brown; or it maliciously made the stems dance to its tune so that they swayed together hither and thither, the buds rubbing and chafing, bruising each other to an inevitable end.

We watched and did nothing. As strangers to the wind we bargained that any hour, any moment it might shift to another quarter – hence we refused to buy coconut netting. We considered moving that which surrounded the Governor Herrick, but peversely the plants were now hinting at signs of growth; and, having waited so long, surely it would be foolish to remove the protection that might at last ensure us a reward? Thus we dithered, and hoped, and grew edgy. Our income was blowing away before our eyes, and a little of our confidence too; and when at last the wind moved round to the south it was too late. The Bernardino and the Croesus had enriched the compost heap while the violets, having demanded our loyalty, proved in due course their promised growth was a mirage.

The flowers were behind us and the potatoes ahead, and spring comes to Minack when people begin to ask: ‘Are the taties covering the rows?’ Lobstermen were dropping their pots and I had excitedly told Jeannie I had seen the first swallow skimming the coastline from its landfall near Land’s End. The green woodpeckers were laughing again in the wood at hilarious jokes of their own and I would lie abed in the morning listening to the tap-tap-tap of one carving a hole in an elm. Sea pinks plumed from fat green cushions. A bat fluttered briefly as dusk fell. Robins pounced on worms and hurried off to an early brood. Foxes were bold, appearing casually in daylight in places where winter saw only a shadow. Wrens flighted with feathers bigger than themselves. A male mistlethrush wooed his lady by absurdly building a nest ten yards from our door. Monty looked gorgeous, his fur a glistening titian, as he stalked through the lush green grass. Bluebells abounded. Primroses lit the banks with their soft yellow beckoning you to bury your face in their fragrance. These were the regular signs repeated year after year, bringing centuries together and denying the passage of time, shining security in a brittle present, taunting the desperation of beehive cities. If a man could not be at peace among them his shadow must be the enemy.

John again was the first to draw his potatoes and as the cart lumbered up from his cliff, I saw the glint in Tommy’s eye. ‘Better try ours tomorrow,’ he grunted. The same old envy ricocheting down the coast – Tregifflan, Boscawen, St Loy, Penberth; all the way shovels were poised, eyes watching neighbours, silver-tongued salesmen angling for custom, neat little meadows falling down the cliffs grinning at the sea and green with hope.

‘Started drawing yet?’ . . . ‘Samples any good?’ . . . ‘Joe’s digging two hundredweight a lace’ . . . ‘Where are you sending?’ . . . ‘Manchester is strong, Birmingham is weak’ . . . ‘A shower won’t do any harm’ . . . ‘Farmers will be early this year.’

John’s meadows were round a shoulder of the cliff, facing due south and gaining an hour of sun over our meadows which fell into shadow in the late afternoon. That hour’s sun meant a week in earliness, and nothing Tommy could do would alter the fact. Thus the ceremony of trying out stems was doomed to failure.