A Gull on the Roof (23 page)

‘Where’s Tim?’ I would ask Jeannie.

‘He was up on the top shelf among the King Alfreds a moment ago.’

We missed him when February came and daffodils began filling the flower house again. We would be silently bunching when one of us would break the silence; ‘I wonder what
did
happen to Tim?’ We knew we would never see him again.

But we were wrong. One afternoon in the last week of February we had gone into the cottage for tea and left the door of the flower house open. Twenty minutes later we returned and quietly continued to bunch. You get in a daze doing the job, picking the daffodils out of the jars, building them three at a time into a bunch, stacking the bunches into galvanised pails where they will stay overnight before they are packed. Your hands move automatically. You only pause to count the number you have done. I had turned to pick out three blooms for the first layer of a bunch when I happened to look up at the beam which crossed the house.

‘Jeannie!’ I said, ‘look on the beam!’

Gazing down at us, serenely confident, head on one side and in best spring plumage, was Tim.

Hubert up there on the roof looks down on greenhouses now at Minack. First a small one thirty feet long and twelve feet wide; then another, one hundred feet long and twenty-two feet wide; then two mobiles, dutch light type glasshouses which are pushed on rails covering two sites and two separate crops in a year, each seventy feet long and eighteen feet wide; and two more the same length but twenty feet wide.

We now work some of the land which John used to have, for John has left the district to go to a farm of his own. Walter and Jack have taken his place; and these two, and Bill who has the other farm which pivots from the collection of buildings, are neighbours who are always ready to help.

We have changed our pattern of growing. Our hands no longer grovel after potatoes in the soil, and we have returned Pentewan to its owner. We have learnt to hate potatoes. Once they promised to be the crop of our prosperity, and instead they have absorbed money, patience and countless aching hours of our labour. ‘Once in four years you can expect a bumper harvest,’ said the old man with the piping voice when we took over Pentewan. We waited and it never came.

The weather was too dry or too cold or too windy. The weather was always exceptional. ‘Never known an April so dry’ – and the potatoes, instead of swelling, would remain the size of golf balls. ‘Never known such bad weather in February’ – and instead of getting on with our planting we had to wait, knowing the farmers in their fields would catch us up. ‘Never known a spring so cold’ . . . Every year the old men in the pubs would drag out from their memories their gloomy comparisons. At first it was comforting to know the season was exceptional, then irritating, then a threat to enthusiasm.

As the cost of production has risen so have the prices fallen. Foreign potatoes flood the markets during the period when those of the Cornish cliff used to reign by themselves. Palates are jaded, and size rather than flavour is the arbiter of purchase. The Cornish cliff new potato is no longer a desirable delicacy; the shovels in the tiny meadows beside the sea, the tedious walks up the cliffs with a chip in each hand, the neatly packed chips being loaded at Penzance station . . . these are the actions of another age. Thus along with the remarks about exceptional weather, there are those about exceptional prices. ‘Down to £30 already? I’ve never known anything like it.’

We were the first to break with tradition. Others have followed us, and Joe no longer haunts the cliffs that have known him for seventeen years. It is sad when hopes are slowly battered, and events burrow reality into your mind. It is sad, even, when the cause is the humble potato.

Flowers, tomatoes and lettuces are the crops we grow at Minack. We plant every year an acre of winter flowering wallflowers, one hundred thousand anemone corms, a half-acre of calendulas and four thousand violet plants. We have fifteen tons of daffodil bulbs. The greenhouses have forget-me-nots, freesias, iris, polyanthus and stocks during the winter; and three thousand tomato plants during the summer. We aim to sell forty thousand lettuces between April and October.

Such is the blueprint of our annual output. Unfortunately, a market garden for the most part is like a factory with workshops open to the sky. The sky is the ceiling. There are production problems as in a factory, selling problems as in any business; but however clever you may be in overcoming these, it is always the weather which dictates your prosperity. Thus I may pay staff for several months of preparatory labour – preparing land, planting, weeding – but lose everything in a hard frost, a few gales, or as in the case of some crops, a period of wet muggy weather.

Or it may be a hot spell at the wrong time which has hit us. An excessively warm March defeated our Wedgewood iris gamble. The thirty-six thousand which we had planted in one of the greenhouses were scheduled to be marketed before the outside Wedgewood in the Channel Islands came into bloom. But a March resembling midsummer brought both indoor and outdoor iris into the markets together, deluging the salesmen and bringing despair to the growers. ‘Well,’ I said to Jeannie, ‘we’ll never grow iris again.’ But we did. The best course a grower can take is to follow one year’s bad market with the same crop the next.

Frost, gales, muggy weather, unseasonable heatwaves . . . sometimes Jeannie and I wonder whether we should ever expect normality. Of these frost is the least of our worries, for it is very seldom indeed that there is a persistent hard frost in West Cornwall. Gales, however, will chase us to the end of our days though sometimes they seem to take a rest and leave us in comparative peace. They blow but lack viciousness, or they launch an attack at a time when there are no crops to harm. Such a period lulls us into forgetfulness, and we deceive ourselves into thinking that optimism is a substitute for realism; and so we plant a crop in a meadow which is doomed as soon as a frenzied gale blows again.

The first time we grew anemones in any great number was following a winter that was as gentle as a continuous spring, when our flowers had bloomed in steady profusion and we were happy in the confidence born of success. So confident indeed that we proceeded to act as if gales were no longer an enemy.

We decided that the Dairyman’s Meadow at Pentewan would be ideal for the anemone crop, and that another meadow over there would be suitable for the cloches we had recently bought. The Dairyman’s meadow, so called because the use of it was once the perk of the man who looked after the cows on the farm, sloped south, dipping downwards from a high bank to the crest of the cliff. The other meadow, known as the thirty lace meadow because of its size, was more exposed, but being flat it was exactly what we required for the cloches. We were going to use them as a cover for winter-growing lettuces.

By October the anemones were in full bloom, long stems and brilliant colours; and we congratulated ourselves on our good fortune. ‘There you are,’ I said to Jeannie, ‘it just proves we
do
sometimes know more than the old hands.’ For the old hands, in the person of Joe, had warned us that nobody had ever succeeded in growing anemones on the cliff.

That year we had advertised a private box service, sending flowers direct to the home; and the anemones proved such a success that time and again they were specially asked for in repeat orders. We were particularly delighted when one lady ordered twenty dozen . . . to decorate a house for a wedding reception; and she carefully instructed us to be certain they arrived the day before, December the first.

We never sent them, nor did we send any more anemones away that season. The gales had returned, blasting away the illusions that we could grow anemones on the cliff. A monster had roared in from the sea during the night of November the twenty-ninth, and when we reached the meadow in the morning it was as if a khaki-coloured carpet had been spread across it. Not an anemone, not a green leaf was to be seen. The meadow was a desert.

It was another monster, three months later, that sent the cloches skidding across the thirty lace meadow. Never before or since have I known a gale which blew so hard as on that March morning, so hard that I had to crawl on my hands and knees in order to make any progress against it. Glass seemed to be flying like swallows skimming the cliff, and there was nothing for me to do except watch and curse and wait.

And as I waited, sheltered a little by a hedge, I suddenly saw Jeannie fighting her way towards me. It was her birthday and I was miserable that it should have begun so disastrously. There was no reason why she should have joined me. I had not asked her nor expected her. She was joining me because it was in her nature that trouble should be shared.

‘Here,’ she said as she reached me, ‘I’ve brought you a flask of tea . . . I thought you might need it.’ I most certainly did. ‘And I’ve put Glucose in it to help you keep warm.’ I poured out a cup, spilling some of it in the wind, then took a gulp. It was awful. It tasted like quince. ‘You’ve poisoned me, Jeannie!’ I shouted jokingly into the gale, ‘what on earth did you put in it?’

When we returned to the cottage we found the lid was firmly pressed down on the Glucose tin; that of the Epsom salts lay loose on the table.

Gales, then, will always be our enemy, but they are an enemy that attacks without guile; and it is easier to deal with a man who boasts his hate rather than with one who hides it. Muggy weather, warm wet sticky sea fog that covers the fields like a dirty stream, achieves its destruction by stealth.

It creeps into the greenhouses, sponging the tomato plants with botrytis and mildew, or blearing the freesias with tiny brown smudges making them useless for sale. Outside, it browns the tips of the anemone blooms, and sometimes it does this so slyly that the damage is revealed only after the flowers have been picked and have remained in their jars overnight.

But it is at daffodil time that muggy weather can gain its great victories. A gale can beat at a wall but on the other side you can rest in its shelter. Muggy weather gives no chance of such rest. It envelops the daffodils in a damp cocoon and brushes the petals, either in bud or in bloom, with the smear of its evil. There is no defence. You have to put up your hands in surrender.

There was one year when we lost eighty per cent of our daffodils in this way, and the compost heaps were piled high with their stems. The previous year had been a bumper one. We had bought ten tons of bulbs and in two months had earned their capital outlay. Thus our expectations were high when the new season began; but instead, basket after basket brought in from the meadows had blooms which were unworthy of being despatched to market.

This dismal experience had a curious feature, a feature that only affected those daffodils within a half mile or so of the sea. First there was a brown mark on the petal, the next day it had turned green, and the third day there was a tiny hole in the same place as if it had been burnt by a red-hot pin. The experts were evasive. They could give us no exact explanation. ‘Looks like daffodil flu,’ was all they murmured.

Nor could they explain the unhappy events that followed. For two years the affected bulbs were sterile, scarcely a bloom to be found among them; and those of us who lived on the coast, as well as the Scilly Islanders, disconsolately stared at our meadows of green foliage while growers inland were rushing their blooms to market.

Jeannie had her own interpretation of what happened. Shortly before the daffodils were attacked, canisters of atomic waste were dumped off Land’s End; and one of the canisters, it was reported, burst during the dumping. Jeannie blames our misfortunes on its contents being blown back on to the coast mingled in spray. It is as good an explanation as any provided by the experts.

Few people pass Minack at any time of the year, and even at the height of the summer when conventional places are awash with humanity, a figure on the landscape cries out for our comment. ‘Somebody’s on the Carn!’ I’ll call to Jeannie . . . Or we will shout the absurd alarm of Alan Herbert: ‘White men! White men!’

The occasional hikers plod by, some delighting in the untamed nature of their walk, some indignant that a highway through the undergrowth along the coast is not maintained for their benefit; some stimulated by the need for initiative, some at a loss. ‘I’ve never had my legs so scratched in all my years of walking,’ said one furious lady . . . then, as if it were my fault, flinging the threat at me, ‘I’m going to write to
The Times!’

Sometimes we have seen strangers who have had a menacing air about them, as if belonging to the mechanism of progress from which we sought to remain free. Men who have come to survey the district, men walking by who were too well dressed to be hikers, two or three who have spent their days hammering holes in the rocks; and there was one threatening week when an aeroplane flew up and down each section of the coast towing a box-like contraption behind it. On such occasions we bristled with suspicion. Others in beautiful, lonely places have watched such activities, waited and wondered, then found themselves faced with the roar of a motorway, or on the site of some other monument to progress.