A Gull on the Roof (19 page)

At the time, he and I were not on speaking terms, and although he had to come Minack way almost every day to collect his horses or pass on down to his cliffs, he never spoke; and when sometimes in a flush of trying to be friends again I wished him good day, my wish was left to hang alone in the air. On this occasion I observed that when he and his horses reached the end of the field and were ready to turn, he would wait a moment or two, and stare across in my direction. His action irritated me, little realising how fortunate, in a few minutes, it would prove to be.

But I was irritated because I had an uncomfortable feeling that he was not wishing me well; he resented our presence at Minack because he did not consider that we belonged there, and he smouldered with vexation that the roughness of the life had not driven us away. Now we had the Pentewan meadows we had become entrenched. He himself would like to have had them. What right had we to move in and collect such a prize?

Physical effort that demands great strain, I have found, creates a pattern of twisted thoughts, the mind is a daytime nightmare, and while the body is being pounded with exhaustion the brain races with a kaleidoscopic jungle of ideas. Such was the course of my thinking as I grimly continued my labour and when, suddenly, while I was reversing, a wheel hit a rock and the machine lurched sideways.

At the same time the catch which disengaged the rotovator slipped out of position and the tines began circulating with great speed. The handlebars shot up skywards and in this instant of my loss of control, my left foot, which had been weighting the rotovator cover, was twisted under the cover and met the full force of the tines. The next thing I knew was that the machine had turned on its side, the engine had spluttered to a stop, and the tines ceased circulating because my foot and part of my leg were wrapped round the shaft under the cover.

Tommy, I knew, was in a meadow within shouting distance alongside the Pink Hut. I yelled and there was no answer. ‘Tommy!’ I shouted again. ‘Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!’ Heavens knows what he was doing, perhaps drowning my cries with some of his own. I lay there immovable, the weight of the tractor on my leg while my foot, I began to realise, was oozing wet in my rubber Wellington boot.

The shock of the accident was now replaced by panic. There was every reason to suppose that no one would hear me; Joe, I knew, was in one of his gardens close to the sea while Tommy, if in one of his moods, might well have his mind and ears in another world. I was beginning to have pain. ‘Tommy! Tommy!
Tommy!’
I was reaching that hazy, never-never land which heralds a faint when suddenly I heard the beat of running footsteps to the left of me. I twisted my head around and through the grass which brushed my face I saw John.

‘All right, mate . . . lie still, I’ll get the tractor off you.’ He had the strength of a bull and he heaved up the tractor as if it had the weight of a wooden chair . . . but, as the tractor became upright, so it became clear that my foot was hooked on a tine like a joint on a butcher’s hook; the point had gone through one side of my foot and out of the other.

‘If you could find Tommy,’ I said, ‘he could go over and fetch Mrs Tangye and get bandages.’John gave me a cigarette, then disappeared; and a few minutes later returned with a scared Tommy who went off across the fields to Minack. I soon found that I could not begin to free my foot until the boot was cut away, and this John proceeded to do, sawing away with a blunt penknife at the rubber. It was several minutes before he was successful and by that time my principal anxiety was that Jeannie might arrive while I was still trapped. Unfortunately when the machine turned over and the engine stopped, the rotovator was stalled in gear; and because of the position of the tine that held my foot, it could not possibly be freed until the rotovator shaft had been turned several inches. It would not budge.

‘You’ll have to rock the machine, John,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing else for it.’

At any moment Jeannie would be appearing over the hedge, and I could not bear the thought of her seeing me.

‘Rock it to and fro,’ I said, ‘I often do it when it stalls after getting a stone jammed in the tines.’

He rocked it gently, my leg moving in rhythm, and suddenly the shaft was free. John’s cap was pushed on the back of his head, his face was red, the Woodbine dangled out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Now be careful, mate,’ he said, ‘take yer time with the foot.’

It was an occasion when you do not pause to think, for thinking would bring inaction. I noted the shape of the hook, the way it was pointing, the direction I would have to thrust my leg. It was easy. My foot freed itself at the very instant that a startled Jeannie arrived with water, basin, bandages and iodine.

‘John here,’ I said, looking at Jeannie and aware that he would not want me to show gratitude, ‘John got me out of this mess.’

I was in bed for a fortnight and on crutches or hobbling with a stick for a further six weeks.

Perhaps I should have taken the accident as an omen. What does a shipowner say to himself if a mishap occurs to a new vessel at the moment of launching? I was brought up on the comforting philosophy that singlemindedness, a dogged determination to succeed at some specific task inevitably led to conquest; and hence, I remember, I spent hour after hour, week after week, bowling by myself at the nets when I was at Harrow under the misapprehension that it was the road to the Eleven.

That I was laughed at was part of the test, and that I ignored this was part of the philosophy. It is a useful philosophy in the armoury of schoolmasters because boys without talent believe they can gain the same rewards as those who have, and those who have talent are lured to make the most use of it. As far as I am concerned the philosophy has lingered in its influence; and the result has been that, although I have often failed to gain the objectives which from the beginning I had no chance of gaining, my efforts have often brought unexpected but pleasurable rewards. Thus, although I am superstitious enough to be wary of Friday the thirteenth and of walking under ladders, and always feel happier if a black cat crosses my path, I consider omens as incidents to forget, however moodily I may greet them. Had I shied from Pentewan as a consequence of my accident Jeannie and I would have been spared countless laborious hours and, for that matter, considerable expense; but we would never have tasted the subleties of the reward for staying.

Obstinacy is, of course, both a virtue and a fault, and the art lies in identifying the dividing line; and in this tussle of identification you can be called courageous one moment, a fool the next, and brilliant the one after that – if your objective has been achieved.

Our particular obstinacy at Pentewan was to heave our energy and enthusiasm against the weather, and every time it knocked us out, to bob up again, roll up our shirtsleeves and defy it once more. You cannot treat the weather that way. It always wins. It obliterates a thousand hours of effort in a night, with the same abandoned power of a finger smudging a mosquito on a window-pane.

Should we have packed up after the first wail of defeat? We met a little barrel of an old man in a pub shortly after we had taken over the meadows who for many years had worked the selfsame meadows himself. ‘Expect,’ he said, in a piping voice, ‘a bumper harvest once in every four years.’ He did not intend to be gloomy. He was giving the glad news that we would make so much money in one year that it would not matter what happened in the other three. Old men of the countryside appear to novices as oracles; as if the lines on their faces, the horizon look in their eyes, the slow motion of their movements harken a confidence within you that echoes your belief in the Prophets. Thus each time the weather struck we revived ourselves with the words of high promise: ‘Expect a bumper harvest in every four years . . .’

We needed, however, that good harvest the first year; and our optimism excited us to expect it. It was indeed vital that it should be a good one. The hazy honeymoon with escapism was being replaced by the conventional necessities of day-to-day existence; our commitments were increasing, our reserves dwindling. We took on Pentewan knowing it would vastly increase our expenses, but saying to ourselves that if we planned with vision, courage and care, all we would then require would be to have luck on our side; for endeavour, however painstakingly pursued, can rarely receive its accolade unless a magic bestows it.

Yet we were aware that there was something else at stake besides material victory; there was the continuing challenge to prove that we were not flirting with the tedium of manual labour, that our enthusiasm had not been checked by reverses or by the roughness of the life, that we possessed staying power which could earn respect. It was a simple ambition and some would call it a valueless one, but within it there was the prospect of peace of mind born of permanence. There is no permanence in the conventional ambitions that hasten you up the pyramid of power, each step killing one ambition and creating another, leading you by a noose to a pinnacle where, too late, you look back on the trampled path and find the yearning within you is the same as when you were young.

We knew, therefore, that we could not impose ourselves on the countryside but had to be absorbed by it, creating by our efforts an intangible strength that became an element of the beauty, of the wildness, and of the peace around us; and we would then begin to feel and to see the gossamer secrets that are for ever hidden from the casual passer-by. I was about twelve when my father took me to see an old man who lived in a cottage in the woods near Bodmin; why we went or who he was I do not remember; but I remember the untamed setting and how, when we went inside, what seemed to be a cluster of birds flew out of the window. I was disappointed because I had never known birds in a house before, and I wanted to see them flying around.

‘Will they come back?’ I asked. ‘Not till you have gone, I’m afraid,’ said the old man, ‘you see I’ve been here a long time and I am accepted like that old fir tree out there.’ The incident has always been to me a lesson in living.

My foot had recovered when the time came for planting the potatoes . . . eight tons of them. It had been a mammoth task in the first place, when they arrived at the end of October, to put them away ends up; partly in the Pink Hut and partly at Minack, and as I for most of the time was out of action, the tedious job was shared between Jeannie and Tommy. They were an incongruous couple to be together and I awaited expectantly at home her report on their latest conversation.

‘Tommy is in one of his silent moods,’ she would say, ‘hasn’t said a word all morning.’ Or: ‘Tommy’s bought a camera and he’s spent the afternoon telling me how he’s going to take pictures through his telescope.’ Or: ‘Tommy’s in a terrible state. The police called on him yesterday evening. The camera he bought was a stolen one!’ Or: ‘Tommy wants us to get a portable tent which he can take along with him as he goes on working in the rain!’

Tommy was undismayed by the quantity of potatoes we were planting, and on one occasion as he was silently putting them away he suddenly roared with laughter.

‘What’s funny?’ asked Jeannie. ‘Just you think,’ he answered, ‘what they are going to say when they see all these going off to the station!’ He was foreseeing the harvest, and ‘they’ were John and any of his previous bosses. ‘They won’t like it,’ he added, ‘won’t like it at all!’

Tommy was sensitive to the cost of the venture as I had warned him that we would have to take at least £500 before we showed any profit, and that the profit would have to be large enough to pay for our keep and his, for another six months in any case. As a result he became very concerned with the rats which penetrated through the floorboards of the Pink Hut and of the mice which entered the Minack potato hut. ‘Every potato they damage,’ he said earnestly, ‘means a halfcrown thrown away next summer . . . we must have poison down all the time.’

Sometimes, mild as the climate may generally be, we have bitter cold snaps which catch us unawares and the frost bites inside the potato huts; as a result some of the potatoes are either squashed into uselessness or are ‘chilled’, which means they will never grow a full crop. One night Jeannie and I had gone to bed when we heard a knock at the door, followed by Tommy’s stentorian voice. ‘I’ve come to tell you it’s freezing!’ He had walked a mile from his caravan to warn us, and to help us carry the paraffin heaters to the potato huts.

It was, however, a comparatively mild winter and we were able to start planting early in January and carry on, except when it was wet, for day after day until all eight tons were in the ground by the first week in March. We had prepared the soil according to advice from the experts; heavily liming the Pentewan soil in the autumn because the analysis showed it had not been given any lime in years; and dressing each meadow as we came to plant it with a compound chemical fertiliser. Our allotted tasks were for Jeannie to cut the potatoes and fill the baskets, Tommy to shovel them in, while I rotovated a piece of ground ahead of Tommy, carried the baskets from the hut to the meadow concerned, and dropped the potatoes in the drill Tommy had opened up.