A Gull on the Roof (20 page)

These tasks may seem straightforward, but they caused arguments. We were so anxious now that we had suddenly become big potato growers to perform the planting according to the best advice available that we confused ourselves with a plethora of advisers. We were soon told, for instance, that we should be using fish manure and not the compound fertiliser of which we had bought two tons.

‘You want body in this ground, not chemicals,’ said one esteemed farmer of the neighbourhood. This worry, however, had come too late to concern us; and we consoled ourselves with remembering the opposite view of the agricultural adviser who told us that chemicals were the only fertiliser for the early crop as they acted so much more quickly. Next came the pros and cons about cutting the potatoes. Then the question of space intervals in planting, and how much soil should cover the potatoes. As in other more important matters, the experts contradicted each other. Cut each potato in as many pieces as there are shoots, was the advice of one old farmer who had grown potatoes in the district for thirty years. His neighbour, on the other hand, asserted with equal confidence that potatoes should not on any account be cut, unless the planting was in March. Plant them seven inches apart and fifteen inches between the rows said one; plant them twelve inches apart and eighteen inches between the rows said another. Cover them with plenty of soil, cover them so there is only a shallow layer above the shoots. The opposites briskly met each other and left us bewildered referees.

It is easy to understand that the more you cut the potatoes, the more plants you will have as a result; and thus greed encouraged us to cut them. But the anticutters maintained that a cut potato produced a vulnerable plant, a plant that had no reserve to fall back on if it were pulverised by a frost or lambasted by a gale . . . and Pentewan, its meadows lying facing the threatening sweep of the sea, suffered constantly the prospect of obliteration.

‘Ah,’ said an old pro-cutter appearing to be wise, ‘it all depends on weather.’

This wisdom also applied to the advantages and disadvantages of shallow planting. A potato likes to be near the surface of the ground to bask in the warmth of an early spring sun and, in times of dry weather to drink the benefits of dews and light showers.

‘But,’ said a saturnine farmer, ‘I’ve known all shallow planted potatoes be rotted because of a freeze-up.’

Thus, it seemed, the gods had to be on your side if you engaged in cutting or shallow planting, and Jeannie and I were not prepared to trust them. We would play for safety. We would cut only the biggest of potatoes, and we would cover them liberally with soil; but there was still the question of space intervals in planting.

We were, in any case, concerned as to whether we had enough cultivated land for our eight tons; and so the variation between the theories of space intervals in planting were important to us. The difference, for instance, between a seven-inch space interval and a twelve-inch, would mean that the latter would require nearly twice as much land; and then there was still the difference of fifteen or eighteen inches between rows to worry about. Such closeness of planting is a joke to the normal potato grower who expects to have two feet between the rows and perhaps eighteen inches between each potato; but on the cliff it is different. The pundits declare that the more closely the potatoes are planted, the more likely they are to protect each other because the green tops sway in a solid phalanx in a gale, instead of each green top being whipped on its own; and that in a period of drought, the shadow of the leaves hides the sun from the moisture which is in the soil.

Jeannie and I listened to the profusion of advice like foreign students at an English lecture; we made notes, held discussions, but in the end felt lost because experience could be the only interpreter. Nobody seemed to know what were the best methods. There was no standard law. Each season had different growing conditions. Every section of the cliff had a special character of its own; and even the meadows had individual personalities.

‘It takes a bit of time to get to know them,’ said Joe glumly to me one day, ‘and half a meadow is sometimes different to the other half.’

Thus, it appeared, old meadows were as temperamental as human beings; and ours at Pentewan, time seemed to prove, were like overworked clerks in need of a holiday. They were exhausted. After a hundred years of hard labour in producing potatoes, they chose to rebel when Jeannie and I arrived as their masters. The soil was sick of potatoes and wanted a rest; but we in our innocence believed they were the mirror of our future prosperity, and when I dropped the last potato of the eight tons behind Tommy’s shovel I celebrated. I was now a big grower, probably the largest grower of cliff potatoes west of Penzance, and I mused happily over my succulent objective – the Cornish new potatoes which would surprise the townsmen like the advent of fresh garden peas, bringing us the cash which would ensure security.

Jeannie holds the view that the pleasantest part of the growing season is when the land has just been ploughed, or a crop just planted. Then there is nothing to worry about, the soil looks clean and rich and the mind is full of comfortable calculations of the prosperity to come. It was in this mood that we surveyed our handywork of the past two months and each day, wresting time from daffodil bunching, we toured the meadows with Monty trotting along with us. Gradually we began to notice the green buttons bursting out of the soil, and we started to use the language of potato growers: ‘The meadow below the gate is in rows’ or ‘The meadow above the Pink Hut looks backward.’

The Minack meadows had been the first to be planted and thus the first to be peppered with green, but the Pentewan meadows, aided by the extra hour of the sun they received as they stared south towards the Wolf Rock, were quick to catch up. Soon, in the ideal mild weather, the plants were growing so fast that the pundits were talking of the earliest potato season on record; and Jeannie and I rejoiced that it seemed we were scheduled for beginner’s luck. John was happy enough to smile and volunteer good mornings, and Joe’s boss – the farmer who rented us Pentewan – forgot his quiet self and made jokes. There was a pleasant camaraderie on the cliffs, and confidence that all would share unenviously in the prosperity ahead.

One afternoon, it was Thursday March 27th, we heard a chiffchaff making its monotonous call, the first of the year, the wonder of its African journey transferred to Minack woods; and it gave us the cool pleasure of confidence in ourselves and our surroundings. The cry followed us: ‘Chiff Chaff! Chiff Chaff!’ – and the sound of its limited note, amid trees pinking with buds, moss brightening with growth on old rocks, primroses a secret ecstasy unless unexpectedly discovered, pools of ragged robin and bluebells . . . the sound of its limited note derided the tyranny of the automaton age and the warped values that advance the putrid aims of the dodgers of truth, the cynical commentators of the passing scene, the purveyors of mass inertia. The dull two notes of the tiny bird trumpeted defiance of the fake and the slick, bringing to the shadows in the woods the expanse of its own achievement; until the sound gently entered the evening, and as night fell, hid among the trees.

It was suddenly cold, and as I came back from shutting up the chickens a sudden breeze hit the branches above my head, a sharp thrust from the east. Indoors Jeannie was stirring soup on the stove while Monty was behaving as if scissors were after his tail and dinosaurs awaiting his pounce.

‘What on earth’s wrong with Monty tonight?’ And I bent down and tried to pick him up. He darted to the door and when I moved to open it, rushed to the sofa, forking his claws in the side, raking the material, and earning a ‘Shut up, Monty!’ from Jeannie. There was a sound outside as if a car were driving up to the cottage. ‘Listen,’ I said, and we paused, tense. ‘It’s a plane,’ said Jeannie, relieved. There it was again, a rushing, moaning sound. ‘It isn’t,’ I answered knowledgeably, ‘it’s the wind.’

It was the sound of the scouts, the fingers of the wind, stretching ahead, probing the hills and woods, the rocks and hedges, the old cottages, the lonely trees acting as sentinels of the land. They probe and jab, searching for flying leaves, decaying branches ready to fall, for flowers youthfully in bloom, for the green swath of the potato tops; and finding, they rush on searching for more, magnificently confident that the majesty of the gale which follows will crush and pound and obliterate. And when they have gone there is an instant of stillness to remind you of a quiet evening, the passing assurance of a safe world, and you wait; you wait and wonder if you were wrong and the wind is innocent; you listen, your mind peeling across the green meadows whose defences are impotent; then suddenly the slap of the face and the braying hounds of hell and the heaving mountain of maniacal power.

The gale roared without pause till the afternoon of March 29th, vicious, friendless and with frost in its scream; here was man as helpless as the foam on the rocks, centuries of rising conceit contemptuously humbled, the joke of the tempest. Action was masochistic. We struggled heads down as if fighting a way through invisible jungle grass, buffeted, pushed back, soundless in our shouting, kneeling to the ground to gape at a meadow in its progress towards obliteration, then hustled home as if our coats were kites, running without effort, feathers in air.

We sat and waited. The vapid wait, droning the hours away with our fears, calculating losses, listening to the ships’ waveband as vessels neared Land’s End (‘I don’t fancy going round the corner’), unknown voices sharing our company, leaping to the window when the noise for a second abated, hearing the sea hissing like a coastline of cobras, sleeping with demons in our dreams. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And when it was over, when our ears were still humming with the beating drums of fury and the sea still heaved in mud-grey valleys, we went out into an afternoon that had suddenly become as caressing as a summer’s day; as if a lost temper had been replaced by shame and the cost of havoc was being guiltily assessed.

The Minack meadows were a pattern of black stumps; in pocket-size havens the wind had entered like a tornado, and there were gaps where not even stumps were to be seen. At Pentewan the army of green, the plants the size of cabbages had become a foot-high petrified forest drooping in the sunshine like melting black candles. Black also was the grass on the banks, filmed as if with tar, and the stinging nettles which once taunted us to scythe them down; and here and there wild daffodils stared forlornly with petals shredded into tea-stained strips; or with necks broken, their heads drooped against the stems like victims of the gallows. The desolation looked up at the blue sky and the fleck of a lark singing. A magpie flew by coarsely chattering, and for a second I saw a fox silhouetted on a rock above the quarry. A boat chugged by outward bound to the fishing grounds beyond the Isles of Scilly, and we looked down at the men on deck as if we were on a hill and they in a valley. Normality was returning even if the thrash of the whip was still in our ears; ideas began to form, the warm challenge born of disaster quickened our minds, the sense of comradeship which frays in tedious defeat but sharpens in sudden defeat, became exhilarated, and I greeted Joe as if victory were our companion.

He was standing gloomily by the Pink Hut at the head of the path that corkscrewed steeply downwards to the sea, wearing his mildewed green trilby, an unlit pipe in his mouth and incongruously an old telescope slung from his shoulder. Bish was at his feet and she wagged white body and tail as I approached, whimpering a greeting.

‘Does a gale like this often happen?’ I asked with mock humour. Joe, after all, had been part of this cliff for seventeen years and he would have the answer to the permutation of emergencies.

‘I’ve known nothing like it,’ he said glumly, then grinned as if this might be a shield against the consequences, and went on: ‘Coming so late with taties up like that they’ll never recover . . . I don’t think so, not in time at any rate.’

The tone in which he spoke sent a chill through me. Up to then my instincts had been charging me to get to grips with retrieving the disaster by discovering what wise old farmers would do and by energetically putting their proposals into effect. As simple as that. It was a setback, not a finality, and means were available, if I could learn about them, which would put things right. But Joe had talked about time, and time had not entered into my calculations.

Now I suddenly saw that time was the vital factor in any recovery. The cliff no longer held the advantage over the inland potato growers stretching up the country to the great potato areas of Lincolnshire. The cliff potatoes would have to pause, summon strength to send out new shoots, push out into a second cluster of leaves . . . and all this before there could be any question of making actual potatoes. Instead of being ahead they would be behind in the race. The inland potatoes would be still underground or just breaking through, and thus they would continue to grow with the speed which comes of normality; and the avalanche of their harvest would crush the markets while the cliff was still being jabbed with shovels. The prospect scared me.